Fame & Folly (31 page)

Bottomless and sinister; apostasy and treason; the howling mob in the street. It is all familiar and instantly contemporary. The determination of the anti-Dreyfusards in France, and their fellow travelers all over Europe, to destroy an innocent and consummately patriotic Frenchman by conspiracy and forgery, and especially by the incitement of mobs, reminds one that the concept of
fatwa
is not held exclusively by mullahs. And Rushdie too has been conspired against by a kind of forgery: having written a fable, he is represented as having issued a curse; he is charged with betraying
Islam. Dreyfus was charged with betraying France. Millions were avid to believe it, until his champion Zola turned the tables on the persecutors.

It is now clearer than ever that Rushdie is resolved to become, however obliquely, his own champion. Though ringed always by his ferocious security apparatus, he ventures more and more into the hot zone of political suasion. His meeting with President Clinton at the White House in November of 1993 may have constituted, for Rushdie, the hottest—the most influential—zone of all. The mullahs, whose denunciations followed immediately, hardly disagreed, and the White House visit triggered instant State Department warnings to Americans overseas about possible retaliation. No one forgets the murder of that translator; as the anonymity of Rushdie’s paperback publishers shows, it is not easy for others to speak up for him. Even among writers’ organizations, Rushdie’s cause is sometimes reduced to a half-yawning obligatory gesture; after a while even a celebrated crisis grows humdrum and loses the glamor that writers notoriously enjoy. Wole Soyinka (himself in difficulties with an undemocratic regime in Nigeria) points out that standing up for Rushdie is currently out of fashion and looked down on among certain “multicultural” academics: it is considered an intellectual offense to the mores and sensibilities of another culture—very much in the spirit of the Congress on Human Rights in Vienna not long ago, where the idea of the universalism of human rights was initially resisted either as prejudicial to national sovereignty, or else as an objectionable parochial contrivance being foisted on societies that are satisfied with their own standards and values. The danger in defending Rushdie’s right to exist is no longer the simple business of turning oneself into one more lightning rod to attract the assassins. Nowadays, standing up for Rushdie brings another sort of risk: it places one among the stereotypers and the “Orientalists,” as they are often called, who are accused of denigrating whole peoples. To stand up for Rushdie is to display a colonialist mentality. A man’s right to exist is mired in the politics of anti-colonialism—and never mind the irony of this, given Rushdie’s origins as a Muslim born in India.

Though Iran responded to Rushdie’s White House appearance by labeling the President “the most hated man before all the Muslims of the world,” and though the majority of other Muslim governments have shown official indifference to Rushdie’s situation, not all Muslims have been silent, even in the face of personal endangerment. One hundred Muslim and Arab writers and intellectuals have contributed to
For Rushdie
, a volume of poems and essays protesting the
fatwa
—among them the Egyptian Nobel winner Naguib Mahfouz, later attacked and seriously injured by a Muslim extremist in Cairo, and for the same reasons cited by the mullahs of Iran. “Without freedom,” one of the essayists in
For Rushdie
wrote, “there is no creation, no life, no beauty.”

In the Academy’s afternoon plenary session, André Miquel, the president of the Collège de France and a distinguished specialist in Arabic literature, proposes a resolution condemning the systematic assassination of Algerian intellectuals by fundamentalist extremists. The language of the resolution is plain: “A terrible thing is happening in Algeria—people are being killed simply because they think.” This action comes under the heading of Intervention, the Academy’s chosen topic for its first year of life—a philosophic theme, but spurred on by the urgencies of Bosnia and Somalia. (Marc Kravetz, editor-in-chief of the French newspaper
Libération
, a visiting lecturer at this session, counts forty separate conflicts ongoing in the world. How many are cause for intervention, and by whom, and for whom?) Rushdie, who had earlier quietly remarked that he “hoped to speak of something besides myself,” keeps to his word. Without directly offering himself in illustration, he argues against “the specific thrust of the motion,” and suggests that the particular case of Algeria is “typical, part of a larger phenomenon, not just an isolated thing”—that “there is a concentrated program to oppress intellectuals in many countries.” Yashar Kemal, of Turkey (currently in trouble with his own government), mentions the killings in southern Turkey by Hezbollah, the Party of God, and the murder of Turkish intellectuals “fighting for lay principles.” The resolution is altered. “In many countries, and recently in Algeria,” it now begins, “a terrible thing is happening.” Someone raises a question of credibility: is it appropriate for
an Academy as newly formed as this one to be sending out resolutions? Don’t we first have to settle down a little, and acquire a recognizable character? To which Rushdie replies: “We should issue motions even if the Academy is newborn.
We
are not newborn.”

Luc Ferry, a professor of philosophy at the University of Caen, and another visitor to the plenary, had described Muslim societies, insofar as they fail to separate religion from matters like human rights, as “premodern.” Rushdie, scribbling away as Ferry develops this idea, disputes the term. Moral fundamentalism, Rushdie argues, is not premodern but postmodern—in short, decidedly contemporary. Secular ideals, though they may be taken for granted in Europe, are very seriously under threat elsewhere. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, modernity has been declared to be against religion, and its practitioners denounced as heretical. The concept of human rights is regarded by fundamentalists as an expression of modernity, and is rejected and despised. Moreover, not only are there conflicts between opposing cultures—between, say, fundamentalism and the secularizing West—but the same kind of conflict can occur
within
a culture, and on its own ground. Finally, if intervention means that you set out from home to supply assistance to another people, then what of terror, which leaves its place of origin to seek you out and destroy you in your own country? “Terror,” Rushdie finishes, “is a reverse form of intervention.”

He had, as he had promised, not spoken of himself or of his condition. Though composed and eloquent, he had not spoken much at all. When he was neither speaking nor writing, he sat very still, as immobile as a Buddha statue. One got the impression (but impressions can violate) that he had learned to be still; that he had taught himself to be
that
still. He was, in fact, a magnet of stillness—it was as if that great splendid room were shrinking to a single point of awareness: Rushdie sitting there in his shirtsleeves.

Come back now to Henry James, and the glyphs he has left behind. In another part of the Louvre on this day, past turnings of corridors, is the darkened Gallery of Apollo, empty but for its portraits and carvings and accretions of gold—as deserted as it was in
James’s hot imagining, when the appalling pursuer scrabbled after him over those polished floors. The ghosts of the Louvre are many—kings, cardinals, emperors. Add to these the generations of museum-goers; remember also that Emerson walked here when America itself was almost new—Emerson, whose mind James once described as a “ripe unconsciousness of evil.” In this fanciful place it is today not possible to escape the fullest, ripest consciousness of evil; Rushdie’s hunted presence draws it out. He is poet, fabulist, ironist; he is the one they want to kill because his intelligence is at play. But these ancient galleries, these tremendous, glorious halls, reverberate with a memory of the tables being turned, the pursuer diminished and in flight. Dream? Hallucination? Rushdie in Paris calls up that old nightmare of panic in the Louvre, and how the stalker was driven to retreat. And Paris itself calls up Dreyfus, who was no dream, and the heroic Zola, who routed evil with reason. Still, there is a difference. The terror of our time is stone deaf to reason, and it is not enough for the Dreyfus of our time to suffer being Dreyfus. Against all the odds, he must take on being Zola too.

OF CHRISTIAN HEROISM
 

O
F THE GREAT
European murder of six million Jews, and the murderers themselves, there is little to say. The barbaric years when Jews were hunted down for sport in the middle of the twentieth century have their hellish immortality, their ineradicable infamy, and will inflame the nightmares—and (perhaps) harrow the conscience—of the human race until the sun burns out and takes our poor earth-speck with it. Of the murder and the murderers everything is known that needs to be known: how it was done, who did it, who helped, where it was done, and when, and why. Especially why: the hatred of a civilization that teaches us to say No to hatred.

Three “participant” categories of the Holocaust are commonly named: murderers, victims, bystanders.
^*
Imagination demands a choosing. Which, of this entangled trio, are we? Which are we most likely to have become? Probably it is hardest of all to imagine ourselves victims. After all, we were here and not there. Or we
were Gentiles and not Jews or Gypsies. Or we were not yet born. But if we had already been born, if we were there and not here, if we were Jews and not Gentiles …

“If” is the travail of historians and philosophers, not of the ordinary human article. What we can be sure of without contradiction—we can be sure of it because we
are
the ordinary human article—is that, difficult as it might be to imagine ourselves among the victims, it is not in us even to begin to think of ourselves as likely murderers. The “banality of evil” is a catchword of our generation; but no, it is an unusual, an exceptional, thing to volunteer for the S.S.; to force aged Jews to their knees to scrub the gutter with their beards; to empty Zyklon B canisters into the hole in the roof of the gas chamber; to enact those thousand atrocities that lead to the obliteration of a people and a culture.

The victims take our pity and our horror, and whatever else we can, in our shame, cede to their memory. But they do not puzzle us. It does not puzzle us that the blood of the innocent cries up from the ground—how could it be otherwise? Even if humanity refuses to go on remembering, the voices crushed in the woods and under the fresh pavements of Europe press upward. The new plants that cover the places where corpses were buried in mass pits carry blood in their dew. Basement-whispers trouble the new blocks of flats that cover the streets where the flaming Warsaw Ghetto fell. The heavy old sideboards of the Thirties that once stood in Jewish dining rooms in certain neighborhoods of Berlin and Vienna are in Catholic and Protestant dining rooms now, in neighborhoods where there are no longer any Jews; the great carved legs of these increasingly valued antiques groan and remember the looting. The books that were thrown onto bonfires in the central squares of every German city still send up their flocks of quivering phantom letters.

All that—the looting, the shooting, the herding, the forced marches, the gassing, the torching of synagogues, the cynicism, the mendacity, the shamelessness, the truncheons, the bloodthirstiness, the fanaticism, the opportunism, the Jews of Europe as prey, their dehumanization, the death factories, the obliteration of a civilization, the annihilation of a people—all that it is possible to
study, if not to assimilate. Pious Jews, poor Jews, secular Jews, universalist Jews, baptized Jews, Jews who were storekeepers, or doctors, or carpenters, or professors, or teamsters, Jewish infants and children—all annihilated. Thousands upon thousands of Jewish libraries and schools looted and destroyed. Atrocity spawns an aftermath—perhaps an afterlife. In the last four decades the documents and the testimonies have been heaped higher and higher—yet a gash has been cut in the world’s brain that cannot be healed by memorial conferences or monuments. Lamentation for the martyred belongs now to the history of cruelty and to the earth. There is no paucity of the means to remember; there may be a paucity of the will to remember. Still, we know what we think of the murders and the murderers. We are not at a loss to know how to regard them.