January 13, 2009
hitch likes salman
At a dinner party that will forever be green in the memory of those who attended it, somebody was complaining not just about the epic badness of the novels of Robert Ludlum but also about the badness of their titles. (You know the sort of pretentiousness: The Bourne Supremacy, The Aquitaine Progression, The Ludlum Impersonation, and so forth.) Then it happily occurred to another guest to wonder aloud what a Shakespeare play might be called if named in the Ludlum manner. At which point Salman Rushdie perked up and started to sniff the air like a retriever. “O.K. then, Salman, what would Hamlet’s title be if submitted to the Ludlum treatment?” “The Elsinore Vacillation,” he replied—and I find I must stress this—in no more time than I have given you. Think it was a fluke? Macbeth? “The Dunsinane Reforestation.” To persist and to come up with The Rialto Sanction and The Kerchief Implication was the work of not too many more moments. This is the way, when discussing Rushdie and his work, that I like to start. He is sublimely funny, and his humor is based on a relationship with language that is more like a musical than a literary one. (I here admit to my own worst plagiarism: invited to write the introduction to Vanity Fair’s “Black & White Issue” some years ago, I took advantage of Salman’s presence in my house to ask him to riff on the two keywords for a bit. He free-associated about everything from photogravure to the Taj Mahal, without a prompt, for about 30 minutes, and my piece was essentially done.) And this is a man whose first language was Urdu!more from Vanity Fair here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:55 AM | Permalink
Comments
Blah blah, Muslims are bad unless they denounce the other bad Muslims (i.e. the ones who live on top of all that oil); crawl back in your bottle, Hitch.
Tangential to the piece, however, is this fascinating passage:
'Salman Rushdie, raised a Muslim, concluded that the Koran was a book made by the hands of men and was thus a fit subject for literary criticism and fictional borrowing. (Almost every historic battle for free expression, from Socrates to Galileo, has begun as a struggle over what is and is not “blasphemy.”)'
Hitchens has unintentionally pointed out here that the current state of copyright law (in the US and internationally) has in fact inverted this system of values: under the law of copyright, I am free to "borrow" anything I want from a text that was written by a divine being; the only holy, sacred, untouchable text from which "borrowing" is forbidden on pain of severe punishment by the state is that text which has been written by other humans, whose individual genius in bringing that text into the world is celebrated in the embarrassingly overblown language of copyright scholarship and jurisprudence from southern California to Paris.
One might try to tie this back to what Hitchens is actually blathering about by making some point about the cult of the individual artist vs. the humility of a tradition that recognizes human endeavor as simply channeling the rich cultural tradition gifted to us by the world we were born into, and what all of this means for the definition of "blasphemy" Hitchens brings up, but I think the point is more interesting on its own without bringing an old boot-licking drunk into it.
Posted by: Matt Norwood | Jan 13, 2009 5:29:47 PM
the last paragraph is revealing of hitchens' approach -- “No, nothing is sacred," he says. viola! that solves it! he (and his ilk) treat the sacred and religion itself as an intellectual argument to be brought down. sadly, it is not. it is an experience. an experience which is central to all religious experience.
and then they pass on verdicts on religion and what it constitutes.
i ditto matt's verdict: crawl back into your bottle, hitch -- and stay there!
Posted by: bilal | Jan 13, 2009 9:23:27 PM
This is the f***ing 5000th time Hitchens has written this essay.
He's actually plagiarizing himself, and at this point, we can be sure he doesn't notice.
Posted by: Mehta | Jan 13, 2009 10:18:19 PM
bilal says:
----"the last paragraph is revealing of hitchens' approach -- “No, nothing is sacred," he says. viola!"-----
But bilal, the approach of the religious, and of yourself, it seems, is 'Yes, something is sacred' and voila! End of story.
Kill, maim, intimidate, violate and murder whoever 'transgresses' against what I / we deem to be sacred.
That's the real discussion here.
Posted by: Jay | Jan 14, 2009 9:09:11 AM
"But bilal, the approach of the religious, and of yourself, it seems, is 'Yes, something is sacred' and voila! End of story."
I can't speak for bilal, but I'm not "religious" myself, and of course I largely agree with Hitchens and Rushdie as far as the politics of blasphemy goes. Rushdie is, in this sense, an impious scamp and a lovable rascal, and I admire him for it; he comes by his blasphemy honest.
Unfortunately, Hitchens thinks of himself as the same, when in fact he (unlike Rushdie) is instead a sycophant to the imperial powers of the day, a pathetic, irrelevant toady and propagandist licking the boots of fascists in return for a steady supply of liquor from the officers' mess.
Posted by: Matt Norwood | Jan 14, 2009 11:12:38 AM
Hitchens doesn’t in fact say that nothing is sacred. He says that nothing is sacred, except free expression: “the only thing that should be upheld at all costs and without qualification is the right of free expression.” Then he moves on to scaremongering and nearly advocating war against Iran for threatening that sacred right (“And, by the way, the next time that Khomeini’s lovely children want to make themselves felt, they will be armed not just with fatwas but with nuclear weapons”). I fail to see how this is significantly different from doing the same because you believe God is on your side.
Posted by: Ross K. | Jan 14, 2009 9:48:44 PM
Didn't know about Susan Sontag's role in the Satanic Verses mess. Makes her all the more admirable
Posted by: D | Jan 15, 2009 7:49:52 AM
"Hitchens doesn’t in fact say that nothing is sacred. He says that nothing is sacred, except free expression"
The real irony is that if he actually believed this, I'd be willing to welcome him into the circle of those actively working to defend liberal democracy from those who threaten it. But he doesn't actually care about defending liberal values from the barbarians who would reinstate medieval feudalism or inaugurate state authoritarianism -- a club that includes Ahmedinejad and Osama bin Laden, but also Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama. Instead, he simply adopts this pose in order to carry out a propaganda war against the east on behalf of his patrons: the western barbarians.
Hitchens, pickled as he is, is still too intelligent to believe the transparent propaganda that paints Islam as a more fundamental threat to liberal democracy than American imperialism (especially when one considers how much of this propaganda originated from his own pen). But criticizing the ruling class butters no parsnips (or fills up no tumblers of gin, as the case may be). So instead he phones in another column in which he repeats the absurd lie that both Obama and Clinton have voiced on television in the last week -- a lie directly contradicted by the entire US intelligence community in the 2007 NIE -- about Iran having a nuclear weapons program. Hey, it beats working for a living.
Posted by: Matt Norwood | Jan 15, 2009 1:50:37 PM
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