Salman Rushdie walks under the shadow of death every day, and he knows it. This does not make him a saint. This does not make him an intercultural expert. This does not make him a reasonable political advisor. But this does make him an expert on the role of the novel. Other authors may speak about what role the novel occupies, what it’s supposed to do, or what subjects the author should cover, but we tend to pay more credence to a man who has spent nearly a decade in hiding for doing what he preaches – namely, changing the world with his words.
If I were to rewrite his entire speech for you, this would be an extremely long article. I’ll spare you the pain. Instead, I’ll write about my favorite roles of literature he described: a way to change history and a way to help humans understand the big picture.
How do we know history? People rarely read primary documents; peace treaties, telegrams, and official statements bore most of us. We need someone to piece it together and make it personal, to give us something we can relate to and understand. It’s hard to conceptualize the miles soldiers traveled, the reasons they came to Europe, or the ways they died. But read the way Salinger describes Seymour Glass’s death, and everything becomes clearer somehow. You may forget the facts and the figures, but you will never forget the image of veteran getting into bed with his wife, putting a gun to his mouth, and calmly pulling the trigger. The story forces you to see what the world is like for a veteran. It’s a work of fiction, but for many people it describes World War II better than the newspaper accounts.
This brings us to our second point – literature’s role in helping humans see the big picture. The big picture, for most people, is extremely difficult to see. There are so many unexplained emotions, thoughts, and forgotten memories that it’s extremely difficult for a person to make sense of life. Novels break everything down for us. Rather than a cloud of emotion, a novel will give you distinct characters and relationships, a way to condense reality into something we can feel and understand. Few people who read Lolita are pedophiles, but this doesn’t mean we do not empathize with poor Humbert’s struggles. For me, The Kite Runner describes Afghanistan better than any news report or presidential debrief. Novels make the big picture personal.
The news cannot do this for us. Different media bombard us with more news than we can integrate into our minds. “Twelve dead in Iraq,” every single day for a year, will degrade your thought-process to that of a hyperactive 12-year old.
“Oh my God!” you’ll scream, “people are dying – we have to get out, right now!” You spend all day fervently hoping the bad news doesn’t appear again, but it does – “Thirteen dead in Iraq.”
“Thirteen!” you’ll say, “This is even worse than before.” Eventually, you spend your days watching the news, tallying up deaths and dollars, until it becomes a number count in front of you. What’s the big picture? Why did we go in? What are we trying to change at this moment? It becomes all too easy to lose sight of the big picture and live your life day-to-day. The Iraq example may be a bit controversial to some, so let me list a few other favorite media items that work the same way: the stock market, kidnapped white women, the exchange rate, the presidential race, and Ahmadinejad. People spend their days watching the tickers go up and down, but they miss the trends that will shape our world twenty years from now.
What are we supposed to do about this? I would say (and I’m pretty sure Rushdie would agree) that we need to read more novels. I will challenge myself over the next few months to spend more time reading novels than newspapers, and I encourage you to do the same. Alone, raw information only bewilders people. We need practice piecing things together and separating the good from the rubbish – only then will we see something true, whether or not it’s real at the moment. So read a novel. It has more truth in it than anything you’ll see on the television.
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