Free Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie Page B

novel has outlived its historical moment, no longer fulfills any useful role, and will be replaced by factual writing. Mr. Naipaul, it will surprise no one to learn, is presently to be found at the leading edge of history, creating this new post-fictional literature. *6
    Another major British writer has this to say. “It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment the prestige of the novel is extremely low, so low that the words ‘I never read novels,’ which even a dozen years ago were generally uttered with a hint of apology, are now
always
uttered in a tone of pride . . . the novel is likely, if the best literary brains cannot be induced to return to it, to survive in some perfunctory, despised, and hopelessly degenerate form, like modern tomb-stones, or the Punch and Judy Show.”
    That is George Orwell, writing in 1936. It would appear—as Professor Steiner in fact concedes—that literature has never had a future. Even the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
received bad early reviews. Good writing has always been attacked, notably by other good writers. The most cursory glance at literary history reveals that no masterpiece has been safe from assault at the time of its publication, no writer’s reputation unassailed by his contemporaries: Aristophanes called Euripides “a cliché anthologist . . . and maker of ragamuffin manikins”; Samuel Pepys thought
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
“insipid and ridiculous”; Charlotte Brontë dismissed the work of Jane Austen; Zola pooh-poohed
Les Fleurs du Mal;
Henry James trashed
Middlemarch, Wuthering Heights,
and
Our Mutual Friend.
Everybody sneered at
Moby-Dick. Le Figaro
announced, when
Madame Bovary
was published, that “M. Flaubert is not a writer”; Virginia Woolf called
Ulysses
“underbred”; and the
Odessa Courier
wrote of
Anna Karenina,
“Sentimental rubbish. . . . Show me one page that contains an idea.”
    So, when today’s German critics attack Günter Grass, when today’s Italian literati are “surprised,” as the French novelist and critic Guy Scarpetta tells us, to learn of Italo Calvino’s and Leonardo Scascia’s high international reputations, when the cannons of American political correctness are turned on Saul Bellow, when Anthony Burgess belittles Graham Greene moments after Greene’s death, and when Professor Steiner, ambitious as ever, takes on not just a few individual writers but the whole literary output of post-war Europe, they may all be suffering from culturally endemic golden-ageism: that recurring, bilious nostalgia for a literary past which never, at the time, seemed that much better than the present does now.
    Professor Steiner says, “It is almost axiomatic that today the great novels are coming from the far rim, from India, from the Caribbean, from Latin America,” and some will find it surprising that I should take issue with this vision of an exhausted center and vital periphery. If I do so, it is in part because it is such a very Eurocentric lament. Only a Western European intellectual would compose a lament for an entire art form on the basis that the literatures of, say, England, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy were no longer the most interesting on earth. (It is unclear whether Professor Steiner considers the United States to be in the center or on the far rim; the geography of this flat-earther vision of literature is a little hard to follow. From where I sit, American literature looks to be in good shape.) What does it matter where the great novels come from, as long as they keep coming? What is this flat earth on which the good professor lives, with jaded Romans at the center and frightfully gifted Hottentots and Anthropophagi lurking at the edges? The map in Professor Steiner’s head is an imperial map, and Europe’s empires are long gone. The half century whose literary output proves, for Steiner and Naipaul, the novel’s decline is also the first half century of the post-colonial period. Might it not simply be that a new novel