Salman Rushdie: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)
Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie's subject: "worlds in collision."
In his novels, Rushdie articulates this collision not simply through the juxtaposition of different places, times, and characters in his novels. His very notion of "character" derives from it. No longer are we able to be Jane Austin, who doesn't mention the Napoleonic Wars. "The function of the British army in the novels of Jane Austin is to look cute at parties," Rushdie says. "It's not because she's ducking something, it's that she can fully and profoundly explain the lives of her characters without a reference to the public sphere. That's no longer possible."
The interview goes into the different worlds of his personal life and the colliding worlds in his books. I find myself most interested in how he sees characters forming out of these impacts and blows. His view of character is not the classical take:
It's because the events of the world have great bearing on our daily lives. Do we have a job or not? How much is our money worth? This is all determined by things outside of our control. It challenges Heraclitus's idea that character is destiny. Sometimes your character is not your destiny. Sometimes a plane flying into a building is your destiny. The larger world gets into the story not because I want to write about politics, but because I want to write about people.
Rushdie acknowledges this is a position outside the norm in America, where he now lives. Fiction is politically irrelevant in the United States. He (like Peter Carey) instead occupies the tenuous space of a relatively newly born country and a multitude of chosen, international homes. In America, character is largely still considered destiny. He explains:
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers. Maybe there's an echo of that now, when America is the global superpower. Outside the country, America means power. That's not true in the United States itself. There are still writers here who take on politics -- Don DeLillo, Robert Stone, Joan Didion, and so on. But I think many American writers are relatively uninterested in the way American is perceived abroad. As a result there's relatively little written about the power of America.
This dialogue stopped me in my tracks. If we think too much through the typical concept of characters (character is destiny), can we writers powerfully and convincingly portray colliding worlds or explore the power structures of our worlds? Another question: Would the hope of doing so even fit within the American political, personal, and publishing landscape?
It is at this moment that the Paris Review Interviews stymie me. They present the greats of our century. This also means profiling writers of a different generation than myself by and large. I wonder how writers closer to my age would respond. Because the third-to-last interview in this volume doesn't help me process this question (not that it is supposed to). It seems to make the situation, the dichotomy, rigid. Martin Amis, born in 1949 in Oxford, states crisply:
I think character is destiny within the novel as well as outside the novel . . . that characters you invent will contribute vitally to the kind of novel you're going to write. I feel that if they are alive in your mind, they're going to have ideas of their own and take you places wouldn't perhaps have gone.
Rushdie acknowledges -- he doesn't have a patch of earth he knows intimately and can excavate all his life. Not like Faulkner or Welty. It doesn't come up, so I don't know if Amis feels he has that. When he talks of writing and the writing life, it seems that house in which his father worked on his books echoes like that patch of land. Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Which comes first: character or place?
Share on Facebook
January 6th, 2010 - 17:43
I’ve actually been thinking about this question quite a bit lately. I come at it as a reader, though, and not a writer.
I am drawn to books in which the characters reveal their inner lives, whether through dialogue, inner monologue, or action. I want to feel that the characters are three dimensional, that they could exist in real time and space.
Just as in “real life,” our place and time influence who we are, but they do not determine who we are. For me, the most successfully drawn characters reflect this. They have free will and don’t live in a historically deterministic universe. In other words, they may be affected by history, but history does not consign them to their fate.
I have read many a fine book in which the author was successful without providing much information about political, historical, or economic milieu. Conversely, I’ve read too many books in which the author layers on historical and political background, but the characters are essentially hollow, no more than puppets on history’s stage. (This was the cause of my disappointment with “The Glass Room.)
Among my favorite authors are those who can evoke a time and place and present us with three dimensional characters who inhabit that space and have personal agency (for example, Cheever, Peter Taylor, and Flannery O’Connor).
January 8th, 2010 - 12:59
Nancy, place is one of the most important things for me as a reader when I decide to pick up a book at the library or the bookstore. I believe I privilege it over character (although not over a favored author). There are many ways of producing place in a novel soundly and effectively, so long as it’s rich! Significant detail–I lust for it. But rich isn’t just quantity–like you say. I’m not the biggest fan of novels that give me extensive historical research, yet present (for example) female historical figures like they come from 20th/21st century romance novels. (I have wiped from my memory the names of books about female artists, muses, and courtesans that *should* be up my alley given my art historical interests but end up making me scream. Roiphe’s friend can throw down Philip Roth (see article from earlier this week), but I’ll throw down something completely else.) I think place can be window dressing for a pretty clichéd view of characters and their problems. Give me a real history, in that case. Indeed, often I find myself more excited by art and history books than, say, historical fiction. I wonder if that’s the case for a lot of people–and therefore why it’s so hard to sell a historical novel in this day and age.