Interview with Salman Rusdie

SS: You’re going to be burned.

SR: Exactly. So the same people who are kind of adoring you as a miracle-working saint one day, can come burn you as a witch the next.

SS: Are the women or the men more powerful in this book?

SR: Well, there are different kinds of power. Men have the kind of obvious power - money and politics and so on. But I think one of the things you realize when you travel in even contemporary eastern culture is that women have a different kind of power. I think that sense of women finding another way of coming at the subject of power has always been the case, particularly in very male-dominated societies. For instance in Florence, the phenomenon of the courtesan was at its peak. And the great courtesans were actually something much higher than just prostitutes. I mean, they were usually the mistress of this or that nobleperson, who would maintain them in a very splendid mansion. And their salons would become not just cultural centers, but actually political centers. The people of this or that party would group at this or that courtesan’s house, and she was very much at the center of the kind of power elite, even though actually she’d started life as a whore. A very similar phenomenon was going on in India. Who would have thought that the phenomenon of high-class prostitution should have been one of the uniting features in the culture of sixteenth century India and Europe? And yet it was.

SS: And that seems to also be a theme in the novel, that at the human level, we’re not very different. One thing that you said twice was that, “This may be the curse of the human race, not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.”

SR: Yeah, to be fair, it’s a character in the book saying it, but I think it’s clearly repeated because it’s an important line. And it’s also kind of a joke, to call it a curse. But I do think that human nature is constant, and that we are much more like each other than we think we are, even when we appear to be very unlike each other. It was a kind of discovery of mine, writing the book, the extent of the similarity between the worlds I was describing. I mean what a surprise to me. I suppose if you’d asked me, when I set out to write the book, ‘What’s your idea?’ I would have said, ‘Well, here are these two very very different worlds, that actually in this period didn’t know each other, hardly at all, were barely aware of each other, and if I can find a story that somehow makes them aware of each other, that would be interesting – and it would be interesting because they’re so different.’

And then when I was writing the book, I discovered all these echoes and mirrorings and similarities, and so really having started out to write a book about difference, I ended up writing a book about similarity. And that’s why that line is there. It’s partly because I sometimes think that the kind of quarrels of the human race are like family quarrels. If we actually were alien from each other, we’d just look at each other as weirdos. We wouldn’t feel the need to fight so much. The fights inside a family are always the most vicious fights. And that’s kind of the atmosphere I was trying to create in the book, that this is like one family, which happens to fall out a lot.

SS: These are not lightweight characters; they move around like regular people, but they think like your smartest friends.

SR: It’s difficult to write intelligent people in books. There’s a particular problem about rendering really thinking people; first of all, it can make them seem just like effigies of the author. The hard thing is to make them be themselves, and think in the way that they would think, but which isn’t necessarily how you yourself would think. And this is one of the things I wanted to write about in this book. I think the Renaissance’s greatest gift to us is the idea of humanism, the idea of the importance of the individual human self, and is something which was basically created by the Florentine philosophers of this period.

SS: And that we’re still wrestling with now.

SR: And in many ways all of our ideas of who we are as human beings in the world are indebted to those thinkers in that time.

SS: Someone started it.

SR: Someone started it – and these are the people who started it. And you want to treat that seriously; it’s a serious thing.

SS: One of your main characters has a dream, and she says that she realizes that all the characters are her in the dream; obviously all the characters can’t be you, but they do come from you. Is there a character in this novel that you identify with more than the others, or that you think is more you?

SR: Well she’s a survivor. The thing that I wanted to show was that that idea of a woman surviving, and in some ways being adored, because she is believed to have both physical beauty and magical powers, that’s dangerous. On the one hand it gets you adored, extra, perhaps more than if you were just beautiful - and this is, remember, an age when people really believed in magic – but at the same time, it can easily turn to the dark side, if you like. Because the accusation of witchcraft has always led to the death of women.

SR: No, I think that there’s a couple, though. I don’t think there’s any one; I mean certainly the Emperor Akbar’s view of the world is one that I find very sympathetic. Not his dictatorial view, but you know his philosophy of the world. I actually feel a considerable affinity to the character of Qara Köz, who is somebody who has been ripped away from her world and bounced across the planet.

SS: And not always by your choice.

SR: And not always by your choice, but sometimes by your choice. But the fact is that to have your life shaped and defined by a journey or a series of journeys you’ve made, is a very particular way of living a life. And as I say the character of Machiavelli, in a different way, I’ve always felt a sort of closeness to. I don’t know that I’m nearly as devious as him.

SS: You once wrote an essay about the movie The Wizard of Oz.

SR: A long time ago, yeah.