Earlier this month, we talked live with the novelist, essayist, and memoirist Salman Rushdie, about his new collection of short stories, The Eleventh Hour — his first work of fiction since his recovery from the 2022 attack that nearly killed him — and about freedom of expression, the future of the book, authoritarianism, and more.
We talked with Rushdie about the irreverent, questioning spirit and its enemies, how billionaires became the new threat to free speech, why his near-death experience didn’t turn him spiritual, how he still shows up every day and writes, why his work is more about listening than inventing, why Donald Trump would be so hard to write as a literary character, and why books remain the most sophisticated information technology, with the power to change the world, even if only slowly and in secret.
Below, for our supporting subscribers, we present a full transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.
I am delighted to have a very special guest with us, the novelist, essayist, and memoirist Salman Rushdie, a personal hero of mine and a remarkable champion, not just a remarkable writer, but a remarkable champion of something we talk about a lot here, which is free expression and the right to write, the right to create. The right to imagine. I don’t need to go in depth over Salman’s incredible biography and accomplishments, but Booker Prize winner for Midnight’s Children, president of PEN America for a long time, won more literary awards than you can mention,
and someone who has suffered very personally from the war on free expression that we see around the world. In 1989, after the publication of his book, The Satanic Verses, Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran called for his murder, which sent Salman into hiding. And in 2022, in what we’d probably now call an act of stochastic terrorism, this term that we’re unfortunately all learning. An assailant inspired by the original fatwa attacked him on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York as he began a talk about the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers.
He has since recovered, not just recovered, but recovered through writing and by writing, with a fantastic memoir called Knife, which I truly love and encourage you all to read. And the book we’re going to talk a little bit about today, a collection of stories, is The Eleventh Hour.
Salman, it’s an honor to have you here, an honor to see you here. Thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you. My first-ever Substack Live.
As I was reading this book — and you and I got to spend a little bit of time together in England a few months ago — I had the same impression spending time with you and then reading the book, and as I have always reading your books, that you have a certain kind of spirit in person and on the page that that I wanted to name. I think it’s a spirit, you’re not just a defender of free expression as a legal principle. I think you embody a spirit of irreverence, of critique, of taking the piss, of having a laugh about serious things, of looking at things a million ways, and being free to do so. And I think when I read you, as well as follow the things that have happened to you in your life, it feels like we are up against now in the world, as powerfully as ever, an opposite spirit of reverence instead of irreverence, of awe for authority, of fealty to, whether it’s ayatollahs or presidents. I wonder if you could talk about your spirit and that liberal spirit and what you have learned over these years, sometimes all too painfully, about what makes people like you and what pushes people into that other column of that other spirit.
Well, first of all, thank you for having me and for your kind words. But I think in a way, this division, this opposition that you describe has always been there. There have always been conservative voices seeking to limit the conversation. Not just to limit the conversation, but to say what the conversation should be about. In other words, to control the narrative. And there have always been creative voices, artistic voices, challenging that and saying, no, you don’t get to set the rules because actually there are no rules.
One of my precious possessions is the copy of Voltaire’s Candide that I read when I was at school in England at the age of 16. And I still have that original copy with all my little notes in it of what the words mean and so on. And I think I’ve been kind of living with Voltaire’s Candide all my life, really, because that’s one of the classic texts about irreverence, about using satire and comedy and intellectual humor and so on in order to challenge orthodoxy.
And I don’t think it’s even as direct as saying, “I want to challenge orthodoxy.” It’s just that you don’t accept that the orthodoxy has power. And so you just do your thing.
And I think creative artists have always had that feeling that if you don’t assume freedom, then you are not free. You have to make the assumption of freedom. Otherwise, if you’re worrying if it’s okay to say something, then you’re not free. You’re inhibited. So freedom is a thing that is a natural, a necessary assumption for the creation of works of art — not just literature, you know, it’s true about, it’s true about music. It’s true about painting. It’s true about all the arts.
And so I’m just the inheritor of that tradition, I guess, as a reader, I don’t like books that don’t have a sense of humor, by which I don’t mean that they should be full of jokes. I just mean that there’s some kind of note of irreverence and free-spiritedness and comedy bound up in the writing. And that’s the kind of stuff I like to read.
Toni Morrison once said that she wrote the books that she wanted to read. And I think that’s true of me as well.
In the book, you talk in the book about Bombay as a place where this irreverent spirit, a kind of pluralistic spirit, thrives in India. And I wonder how much you — obviously, you grew up there — but Bombay is, as you’re describing, Bombay is an irreverent city surrounded by a very orthodox country in many ways. A country where the instinct is often to do the old thing the old way. And I’m often struck — I was in India last week — I’m often just struck in the kind of normal drawing room in India, living room, the conversation is designed to prevent the explosions of your kinds of thoughts and thinking, right? Can you talk about... coming from a Bombay that encourages that irreverence, but a larger country that really, in many ways, is the opposite of that tendency.
Places change. And I’m not sure that the Mumbai of today is exactly the same as the Bombay of yesterday. But I can remember as a young person watching my parents In the garden in the evening, they would sit around on chairs with friends, and they would talk about everything completely openly. They would discuss the existence of God. They would talk about this politics or that politics. They would recite poetry to each other. They would have an absolutely free conversation. And I thought, okay, well, that seemed to me to feel that’s natural.
So, for me, I imbibed that as the natural way of being. And I think the spirit of the city, to some extent, is still like that. But Bombay has also fallen under the spell of sectarian politics. And then there’s much more of that than there used to be. There’s much more friction between communities than there used to be. And that’s a shame.
I wanted to ask you about that, actually. It seems to me you have been on team pluralism your whole life. You’ve been trying to spread what was happening in your parents’ garden to the world in some ways your whole life. And you’ve done that not just as a writer, but as an advocate for other writers. And team pluralism is not doing well around the world right now. And I would argue it’s not just struggling because of authoritarians.
I think in some ways the vision that you and I would share is not necessarily as popular on the street in the United States, in India. You see, in both these two countries, which we have spent time in, there’s a real... The other vision, the smaller vision, the narrower vision, the one kind of person as citizen vision is ascendant. I wonder what you think those of us on team pluralism... got wrong, uh, where we fell short in not bringing enough people along, not, not persuading enough people of wanting to live in the kind of society you’ve always wanted to live in.
I don’t know. I don’t particularly want to talk about our failure. It seems to me what’s happened is the rise of what I guess one can call identity politics has encouraged people to see themselves and their being in the world in a narrow spectrum, as if you should define yourself kind of by one thing, that you are one thing. You can be conservative or gay or a woman or an Indian, but you call yourself by very narrow definitions.
But one of the things that literature knows is that people are not like that. If you write a character in a story or a novel who is one-dimensional, that character has no life. What we know is that we are pluralistic people in our nature. And that we’re, as Walt Whitman said, do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. And human beings are contradictory. And our behavior is different in different circumstances. The way in which we behave with our employers is not the way in which we behave with our children. And so on. So we are all, as the novel knows, we are all this pluralistic entity. We are not simple creatures, we are complicated creatures.
And so actually literature has the ability to remind people of complexity and how our true nature is to be complicated and contradictory and changeable and all those things that make us human. And that narrow definition of a single identity is the falsehood. That is actually not what we’re like. And to try and force us into those narrow boxes is, well, it won’t work in the end.
One of the things I know, having been around for quite a while, is that in ideas, in literature, in politics, in all things, there is such a thing as fashion. Things go in and out of fashion. And right now, what you describe as this conservative idea has had a moment of ascendancy. But I don’t believe that means that we lost the war. I just think we need to fight harder to get the initiative back.
I want to read a striking passage in one of the stories in this book, The Eleventh Hour. The story is called “The Musician of Kahani.” And I love this passage that speaks to so many central issues of the book and our time. You write:
The present decay of ethical society around the world is a matter of some concern. Words such as “good” and “bad” or “right” and “wrong” are losing their effect, emptying of meaning, and failing, anymore, to shape society. Other words, such as “power,” “weakness,” et cetera, are replacing them. Also, “knowledge” is being replaced by “ignorance,” “memory” is being replaced by “forgetting,” and nothing, no shameful action, however atrocious, remains in the public mind for long. These are days in which “shamelessness” is king.
What did you have in mind when you were writing that?
Well, just the kind of amorality of the age. Years and years ago, back in 1983, I wrote a novel called Shame, in which I suggested that one of the moral axes on which society turns is not just the Christian idea of sin and redemption, but actually the Eastern idea of honor and shame.
Shamelessness is very powerful when it’s let loose, because it breaks the moral equilibrium. And suddenly, everything becomes possible. Lies become the truth. And we see that. We see that every day in America. We see it in other countries too.
You write, there’s a passage where you talk about lies and truth, and you say, I want to make sure I get this correct. You say in narrative, something about narrative, it is untrue, therefore it’s true, right? That it gets at these deeper truths, which is what fiction is.
And without sullying the name of fiction, it made me think honestly of Donald Trump, who often speaks in formal lies that tap into a sense of collective fear. truths, or at least things that a lot of people feel, but often things that are true. For example, that trade has not been organized in a way that benefits most people. That is a truth that is maybe not sufficiently aired by people in power. And so he comes along and spews lies, but in a way that invokes truth. I guess I wanted to ask you, is Donald Trump a frustrated novelist?
But he’s a very bad one if he is. I mean, I wouldn’t publish his work. One of the questions that writers like me get asked in this age of untruth is, “Why do you write fiction?” Why are you adding to the pile of untruth when there’s already so many lies around?
And I think the best answer to this is that while literature and political utterances may seem to have something in common, they’re actually in some ways opposites. Because the purpose of literature, whatever its techniques, whether they’re realistic or fantastic or whatever it might be, the purpose is to aim at some kind of human truth.
It’s to try and explain to the reader, or to engage the reader in the conversation about what we’re like, and why we’re like it, and why we behave towards each other in the way in which we behave, and where do we come from, and where are we going to. And these great questions, which are all questions aiming at the truth, are the questions of literature. So the purpose of literature is to, in some way, to some degree, reveal or move towards the truth. Whereas the purpose of the lie is to obscure the truth. So while they seem to have similarities, they’re actually adversaries. And that’s my best argument in return.
Trump, if you were to imagine him as a literary figure, as a kind of, you’ve written of kings, you’ve written about emperors, you’ve written about people, ayatollahs, to be sure. How would you understand him if he wasn’t someone you had to live under, but someone you were trying to imagine in a fictive world?
Well, it’s very difficult because it seems there’s a level at which he has no character.
