Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 - Hardcover

Rushdie, Salman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679463348 ISBN 13: 9780679463344

Publisher: Random House, 2002

Synopsis

To cross a frontier is to be transformed....The frontier is a wake-up call. At the frontier, we can’t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world’s harsher realities, are stripped away and, wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier’s windowless halls, we see things as they are.

In Salman Rushdie’s latest collection of nonfiction, he crosses over the frontier and sees and tells things as they are, inviting readers to “step across this line” with him.

The essays, speeches, and opinion pieces assembled in Step Across This Line, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects. The collection chronicles Rushdie’s intellectual odyssey and is also an especially personal look into the writer’s psyche. With the same fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, and very strong opinions that distinguish his fiction, Rushdie writes about his fascination with The Wizard of Oz, his obsession with soccer, and the state of the novel, among many other topics. Most notably, delving into his unique personal experience fighting the Iranian fatwa, he addresses the subject of militant Islam in a series of challenging and deeply felt responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The book ends with the eponymous “Step Across This Line,” a lecture Rushdie delivered at Yale in the spring of 2002, which has never been published before and is sure to prompt discussion.

Rushdie’s first collection of nonfiction, Imaginary Homelands, offered a unique vision of politics, literature, and culture for the 1980s. Step Across This Line does the same and more for the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first.

About this title

About the Author

Salman Rushdie is the author of eight novels—Grimus, Midnight’s Children (for which he won the Booker Prize and the “Booker of Bookers”), Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury—and one work of short stories, East, West. He has also published four previous works of nonfiction: The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz, and Mirrorwork.

Reviews

Roughly one-fourth of these essays deals with the response of the media, various governments and Rushdie himself to what he calls the "unfunny Valentine" he received on February 14, 1989, from the Ayatollah Khomeini: the fatwa calling for his death. Everyone, it seems, had a script for Rushdie to follow, though none of these fantasies resembled the rather simple one the author fancied (and which seems to have been realized), which is that his problems gradually disappear and he be allowed to resume a more or less normal writerly life. To paraphrase an idea that appears in several of these essays, the problem is that frontiers cross us rather than the other way around: we are going about our business when our country is divided (as happened to Rushdie's native India in 1947) or we encounter a shocking work of art or our enemies declare they will kill us. Many respond to unnerving changes by embracing religion, but, says Rushdie, "ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses"; in place of sectarian fervor, he recommends intellectual freedom, a simple concept yet a rigorous practice, as this book proves. These essays range over literature, politics and religion, as well as Rushdie's two private passions, rock music and soccer. They are united by a play of sparkling intelligence seasoned with sly wit, qualities that would serve the world at any time in its long, flawed history. After all, says Rushdie, the story he loved first and still loves best, perhaps the story of all humanity, is The Wizard of Oz, a fable that tells us the grown-up world doesn't really work, that adults can be good people and still be bad wizards.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Condemned to death by Iranian Islamic extremists for his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie was essentially hijacked from his life and held hostage. Driven by conscience and circumstance to speak out for freedom of expression and intellectual liberty, and compelled by his artist's soul to write imaginatively, he has managed to continue writing exciting fiction while developing a potent nonfiction voice in which he gracefully parses politics and art with equal vigor, knowledge, and, most remarkably, irrepressible joy. A world-class writer and perceptive witness to international politics, personal valor, religious intolerance, and artistic transcendence, he has written stirring and significant essays about his harrowing, often surreal life in the wake of the fatwa, and sharp editorials on Kashmir, northern Ireland, Kosovo, and Islam and the West before and after September 11. But he has also composed an enrapturing essay about the film that made him a writer, The Wizard of Oz, and incisive looks at rock and roll, reading, artistic influence, photography, and commercial hype, as well as inspiring discussions of why literature and freedom of speech matter. Rushdie's literary mind is vibrant and generous, his heart stalwart, his pen mighty. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Thanks to some Iranian ayatollahs, Rushdie is probably the most famous writer still alive. Although he remains under partial protection, he has continued to write since 1989, producing several novels and many articles. This first collection of short nonfiction includes material about his life under the fatwa ("Messages from the Plague Years") but ranges from discussions of The Wizard of Oz and rock music to his February 2002 lectures on human values at Yale. The title is well chosen; Rushdie tends to be confrontational, and the white-hot publicity has not mellowed him-a 1999 piece debates whether Charlton Heston or Austrian writer Peter Handke, a supporter of Slobodan Milosevic, should be dubbed "Moron of the Year." Although some of the pieces themselves are a bit dated, Rushdie has added updates in footnotes, and in any case he always makes his point. For large collections or journalism special collections.
Shelley Cox, Special Collections, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Part I: Essays

Out of Kansas
I wrote my first short story in Bombay at the age of ten. Its title was “Over the Rainbow.” It amounted to a dozen or so pages, was dutifully typed up by my father’s secretary on flimsy paper, and was eventually lost somewhere along my family’s mazy journeyings between India, England, and Pakistan. Shortly before my father’s death in 1987, he claimed to have found a copy moldering in an old file, but despite my pleadings he never produced it. I’ve often wondered about this incident. Maybe he never really found the story, in which case he had succumbed to the lure of fantasy, and this was the last of the many fairy tales he told me. Or else he did find it, and hugged it to himself as a talisman and a reminder of simpler times, thinking of it as his treasure, not mine—his pot of nostalgic, parental gold.

I don’t remember much about the story. It was about a ten-year-old Bombay boy who one day happens upon the beginning of a rainbow, a place as elusive as any pot-of-gold end zone, and as rich in promise. The rainbow is broad, as wide as the sidewalk, and constructed like a grand staircase. Naturally, the boy begins to climb. I have forgotten almost everything about his adventures, except for an encounter with a talking pianola whose personality is an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, and the “playback singers” of the Hindi movies, many of which made The Wizard of Oz look like kitchen-sink realism.

My bad memory—what my mother would call a “forgettery”—is probably a blessing. Anyway, I remember what matters. I remember that The Wizard of Oz (the film, not the book, which I didn’t read as a child) was my very first literary influence. More than that: I remember that when the possibility of my going to school in England was mentioned, it felt as exciting as any voyage over rainbows. England felt as wonderful a prospect as Oz.

The wizard, however, was right there in Bombay. My father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a magical parent of young children, but he was also prone to explosions, thunderous rages, bolts of emotional lightning, puffs of dragon smoke, and other menaces of the type also practiced by Oz, the great and terrible, the first Wizard Deluxe. And when the curtain fell away and we, his growing offspring, discovered (like Dorothy) the truth about adult humbug, it was easy for us to think, as she did, that our wizard must be a very bad man indeed. It took me half a lifetime to discover that the Great Oz’s apologia pro vita sua fitted my father equally well; that he too was a good man but a very bad wizard.

I have begun with these personal reminiscences because The Wizard of Oz is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults. At its beginning, the weaknesses of grown-ups force a child to take control of her own destiny (and her dog’s). Thus, ironically, she begins the process of becoming a grown-up herself. The journey from Kansas to Oz is a rite of passage from a world in which Dorothy’s parent-substitutes, Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, are powerless to help her save her dog, Toto, from the marauding Miss Gulch, into a world where the people are her own size, and in which she is never treated as a child but always treated as a heroine. She gains this status by accident, it’s true, having played no part in her house’s decision to squash the Wicked Witch of the East; but by the end of her adventure she has certainly grown to fill those shoes—or, rather, those famous ruby slippers. “Who’d have thought a girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness?” laments the Wicked Witch of the West as she melts—an adult becoming smaller than, and giving way to, a child. As the Wicked Witch of the West “grows down,” so Dorothy is seen to have grown up. In my view, this is a much more satisfactory explanation for Dorothy’s newfound power over the ruby slippers than the sentimental reasons offered by the ineffably soppy Good Witch Glinda, and then by Dorothy herself, in a cloying ending that I find untrue to the film’s anarchic spirit. (More about this later.)

The helplessness of Auntie Em and Uncle Henry in the face of Miss Gulch’s desire to annihilate Toto the dog leads Dorothy to think, childishly, of running away from home—of escape. And that’s why, when the tornado hits, she isn’t with the others in the storm shelter, and as a result is whirled away to an escape beyond her wildest dreams. Later, however, when she is confronted by the weakness of the Wizard of Oz, she doesn’t run away but goes into battle—first against the Witch and then against the Wizard himself. The Wizard’s ineffectuality is one of the film’s many symmetries, rhyming with the feebleness of Dorothy’s folks; but the difference in the way Dorothy reacts is the point.

The ten-year-old boy who watched The Wizard of Oz in Bombay’s Metro cinema knew very little about foreign parts and even less about growing up. He did, however, know a great deal more about the cinema of the fantastic than any Western child of the same age. In the West, The Wizard of Oz was an oddball, an attempt to make a live-action version of a Disney cartoon feature despite the industry’s received wisdom (how times change!) that fantasy movies usually flopped. There’s little doubt that the excitement engendered by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs accounts for MGM’s decision to give the full, all-stops-out treatment to a thirty-nine-year-old book. This was not, however, the first screen version. I haven’t seen the silent film of 1925, but its reputation is poor. It did, however, star Oliver Hardy as the Tin Man.

The Wizard of Oz never really made money until it became a television standard years after its original theatrical release, though it should be said in mitigation that coming out two weeks before the start of World War II can’t have helped its chances. In India, however, it fitted into what was then, and remains today, one of the mainstreams of “Bollywood” film production.

It’s easy to satirize the Indian commercial cinema industry. In James Ivory’s film Bombay Talkie, a journalist (the touching Jennifer Kendal, who died in 1984) visits a studio soundstage and watches an amazing dance number featuring scantily clad nautch girls prancing on the keys of a giant typewriter. The director explains that this is no less than the Typewriter of Life, and we are all dancing out “the story of our Fate” upon that mighty machine. “It’s very symbolic,” the journalist suggests. The director, simpering, replies: “Thank you.”

Typewriters of Life, sex goddesses in wet saris (the Indian equivalent of wet T-shirts), gods descending from the heavens to meddle in human affairs, magic potions, superheroes, demonic villains, and so on have always been the staple diet of the Indian filmgoer. Blond Glinda arriving in Munchkinland in her magic bubble might cause Dorothy to comment on the high speed and oddity of local transport operating in Oz, but to an Indian audience Glinda was arriving exactly as a god should arrive: ex machina, out of her divine machine. The Wicked Witch of the West’s orange puffs of smoke were equally appropriate to her super-bad status. But in spite of all the similarities, there are important differences between the Bombay cinema and a film like The Wizard of Oz. Good fairies and bad witches might superficially resemble the deities and demons of the Hindu pantheon, but in reality one of the most striking aspects of the worldview of The Wizard of Oz is its joy- ful and almost complete secularism. Religion is mentioned only once in the film. Auntie Em, sputtering with anger at the gruesome Miss Gulch, reveals that she’s waited years to tell her what she thinks of her, “and now, because I’m a good Christian woman, I can’t do so.” Apart from this moment, in which Christian charity prevents some old-fashioned plain speaking, the film is breezily godless. There’s not a trace of religion in Oz itself. Bad witches are feared, good ones liked, but none are sanctified; and while the Wizard of Oz is thought to be something very close to all-powerful, nobody thinks to worship him. This absence of higher values greatly increases the film’s charm and is an important aspect of its success in creating a world in which nothing is deemed more important than the loves, cares, and needs of human beings (and, of course, tin beings, straw beings, lions, and dogs).

The other major difference is harder to define, because it is, finally, a matter of quality. Most Hindi movies were then and are now what can only be called trashy. The pleasure to be had from such films (and some of them are extremely enjoyable) is something like the fun of eating junk food. The classic Bombay talkie uses scripts of dreadful corniness, looks tawdry and garish, and relies on the mass appeal of its star performers and musical numbers to provide a little zing. The Wizard of Oz also has movie stars and musical numbers, but it is also very definitely a Good Film. It takes the fantasy of Bombay and adds high production values and something more. Call it imaginative truth. Call it (reach for your revolvers now) art.

But if The Wizard of Oz is a work of art, it’s extremely difficult to say who the artist was. The birth of Oz itself has already passed into legend: the author, L. Frank Baum, named his magic world after the letters O–Z on the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. Baum had an odd, roller-coaster life. Born rich, he inherited a string of little theaters from his father and lost them all through mismanagement. He wrote one successful play and several flops. The Oz books made him one of the leading children’s writers of his day, but all his other fantasy novels bombed. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0679463348
• ISBN 13: 9780679463344
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416