The Rushdie Knighthood
Over at the Kenyon Review blog Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky has written a provocative post reflecting on the implications of Salman Rushdie's knighthood and the revival of the fatwah. The reluctance of British conservatives to defend Rushdie is, he thinks, in part a reflection of the desire to make challenging literature safe:
It’s always been my feeling that the most important literature is that which challenges those “home truths,” and in so doing forces us to step outside the ideology of a particular cultural moment to see what lies beyond those self-imposed boundaries of belief and literary form that the theorist Hans Robert Jauss has termed our “horizon of expectation.” It’s hard to imagine a writer who has done that more successfully than Rushdie, particularly in a novel like The Satanic Verses, which recasts the opening scene of Milton’s Paradise Lost – that beautiful line about Satan “hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky” – with his illegal immigrant angel, Gibreel, and “buttony, pursed” devil, Saladin Chamcha, an East-Englishman whose soul is a monstrous hybrid of Indian memory and English aspirations, as shattered by its conflicting desires as the airplane from which he tumbles to earth after a terrorist bombing.
Here's the link.
Share
Related Articles

Storybarn Book of the Month: Saving the Butterfly
This month, as part of Refugee Week (16-22 June), we've been taking a look back at one of our favourites…

June’s Stories and Poems
This month we are celebrating the natural world, and especially the many wonderful creatures that live within it, with June’s…

April’s Monthly Stories and Poems
Our year of Wonder with The Reader Bookshelf 2024-25 is coming to a close – though we won’t be putting…