Salman Rushdie’s self-importance is entirely forgivable

I have the habit, when reading a collection of essays, of not reading them in order. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this. So, as it happened, I had read nearly all of Languages of Truth before I arrived at the second piece in the book, ‘Proteus’, and came across the Salman Rushdie I had been looking forward to: the worst Rushdie, the infuriating, humble-bragging, know-all, preposterous and tone-deaf Rushdie. Up until then I had been going through the book, pencilling marginal notes which were saying, essentially, ‘oh, this is rather good’, ‘excellent point’, or ‘very well put’. It was all getting a bit too chummy between Salman and me. So here is the passage I seized on with glee:

(I myself have a brass door knocker in the shape of a bust of Shakespeare on my study door, so that every day when I go in to work, I can knock on my door and tell myself to come in and know that I’m entering not my domain but his, whom no door can limit or contain, who leaps off the door knocker and takes possession of the room behind the door, ruling it as he rules all the rooms in literature’s poor, rich house.)

(I think the fact that this is in brackets is significant. It’s the ‘humble’ part of thehumblebrag.) Of course, in the magical- realist tradition with which Rushdie the novelist is deeply associated, one should not necessarily take the words on the page at face value. I mean, Shakespeare doesn’t really leap off the door. But does Rushdie really knock every time he goes to work? It is quite horribly plausible.

It is important, though, to pay homage to Shakespeare, or to say that one does (this, like ten other pieces in this book, was actually a speech delivered to university students, which is why you will occasionally come across little speed-bumps in the text such as ‘the great French novelist, Flaubert’).