Free Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie Page A

had—more than once—to discard his worldviews. Coming from a family of profit-minded men, and discovering Marxism at sixteen, he learned that “the true condition of men was the complete opposite of the competitive system I had assumed was normal, with all its mutual hatreds and conniving. Life could be a comradely embrace, people helping one another rather than looking for ways to trip each other up.” Later, Marxism came to seem less idealistic. “Deep down in the comradely world of the Marxist promise is parricide,” he wrote, and, when he and Lillian Hellman were faced with a Yugoslav man’s testimony of the horrors of Soviet domination, he says, unsparingly: “We seemed history’s fools.”
    But he has not remained history’s fool. Through his stand against McCarthyism, in his presidency of PEN, his fight against censorship, and his defense of persecuted writers around the world, he has grown into the giant figure we are gathered here to honor. When I needed help, I am proud that Arthur Miller’s was one of the first and loudest voices raised on my behalf, and it is a privilege to be able to speak here and thank him tonight.
    When Arthur Miller says, “We must re-imagine liberty in every generation, especially since a certain number of people are always afraid of it,” his words carry the weight of lived experience, of his own profound re-imaginings. Most of all, however, they carry the weight of his genius. Arthur, we celebrate the genius, and the man. Happy birthday.
    October 1995
     

In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again
    At the centenary conference of the British Publishers’ Association recently, Professor George Steiner said a mouthful:
    We are getting very tired in our novels. . . . Genres rise, genres fall, the epic, the verse epic, the formal verse tragedy. Great moments, then they ebb. Novels will continue to be written for quite a while but, increasingly, the search is on for hybrid forms, what we will call rather crassly fact/fiction. . . . What novel can today quite compete with the best of reportage, with the very best of immediate narrative? . . .
    Pindar [was] the first man on record to say,
this poem will be sung when the city which commissioned it has ceased to exist.
Literature’s immense boast against death. To say this today even the greatest poet, I dare venture, would be profoundly embarrassed. . . . The great classical vainglory—but what a wonderful vainglory—of literature.
“I am stronger than death. I can speak about death in poetry, drama, the novel, because I have overcome it, because I am more or less permanent.”
That is no longer available.
    So here it is once more, wrapped up in the finest, shiniest rhetoric: I mean, of course, that tasty old chestnut, the death of the Novel. To which Professor Steiner adds, for good measure, the death (or at least the radical transformation) of the Reader, into some sort of computer whiz-kid, some sort of super-nerd; and the death (or at least the radical transformation, into electronic form) of the Book itself. The death of the Author having been announced several years ago in France—and the death of Tragedy by Professor Steiner himself in an earlier obituary—that leaves the stage strewn with more bodies than the end of
Hamlet.
    Still standing in the midst of the carnage, however, is a lone, commanding figure, a veritable Fortinbras, before whom all of us, writers of authorless texts, post-literate readers, the House of Usher that is the publishing industry—the
Denmark,
with something rotten in it, that is the publishing industry—and indeed books themselves, must bow our heads: viz., naturally, the Critic.
    One prominent writer has also in recent weeks announced the demise of the form of which he has been so celebrated a practitioner. Not only has V. S. Naipaul ceased to write novels: the word “novel” itself, he tells us, now makes him feel ill. Like Professor Steiner, the author of
A House for Mr. Biswas
feels that the