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Sunday 8 November 2009

‘We have been wimpish about defending our ideas’

Salman Rushdie tells Matthew d’Ancona that the idea at the heart of his new novel set in 16th-century Florence and India is that universal values exist and require robust champions

Rushdie agrees with Akbar: ‘Of course, the novel enormously heightens and increases that porosity — but actually the border between the world of dreams and the waking world is porous. We all dream things into being, you imagine yourself having a child and then you have a child. An inventor will think of something in his mind and then make it actual. So things are often passing from the imagined realm into the real world. It is much harder to do it the other way round!’

The staple Rushdie theme of multiple identities is here, too. The Emperor reflects that we are ‘bags of selves, bursting with plurality’. Yet the deeper preoccupation in the book is the emergence of humanism and of the self as distinct from the group, not only in Renaissance Florence, but in Akbar’s musings. ‘Were there such naked, solitary “I’s” buried beneath the overcrowded “we’s” of the earth?’ the Emperor asks himself.

‘The reason it’s there,’ explains Rushdie, ‘is because we know about the Renaissance as the moment of the birth of Western Humanism — but it was interesting to me, reading about Akbar, to see in his reflections the beginnings also of a kind of humanistic self-awareness. Not that he ever thought quite like this, but I wanted to show that these ideas — the sovereign individual self, the plurality of the self — are not exclusively Western ideas. How interesting it is that two apparently separate cultures should, within half a century of each other, have been coming up with the same notions without conferring.’

Though he shies away from ‘author’s messages’, he agrees that this humanistic thread in the novel is full of contemporary resonance in an age of murderous fundamentalism on the one hand and fearful relativism on the other.

‘The part of this book that deals with ideas — I suppose there is an unsaid subtext here, which is that there are such things as universals. There are ideas which grew up in the West, and in a slightly different form they grew up as well in the East — the idea of freedom, of open discourse, of tolerance, of sexual freedom even to the level of hedonism, these are things which human beings have come up with as important ideas everywhere that there have been human beings. So to say that that we must now consider them to be culturally specific... is a denial of human nature. If there is an author’s message in this book, it was actually the discovery that I made that the worlds of the book were more like each other, than unlike.’

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