British author Sir Salman Rushdie opened the Chancellor’s Lecture Series at Memorial Gymnasium on Friday with a talk on the role of the author in the 21st century. A reception preceded the talk, giving attendees the opportunity to meet Rushdie. Many admirers took the opportunity to get their favorite Rushdie books autographed.

Rushdie is probably best known for his book The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, which received no small notoriety for its treatment of Islam. The Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa, or death sentence, on Rushdie, which obliged Rushdie to live in hiding for 9 years. Rushdie noted in his talk that The Tennessean had referred to him as a “literary outlaw,” a designation he found agreeable, because it meant he kept company with the likes of Billy the Kid.

The role of the writer in any century, Rushdie said, was to bring the news and speak the truth of a society, even if (or especially if) that truth was at odds with an official truth promoted by the powerful. He cited Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an example.

He went on to talk about the role of the writer in these current, turbulent times. Literature, Rushdie said, seems to function as a way to preserve the small intimacies of human nature when public events like war and terrorism intrude violently and chronically into everyday life. He found it important to provide frivolity during serious times, and said it was important to note that two of the three most important books written about World War II were comedies: Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five.

Writers, he said, should try to look at both the familiar and the unfamiliar, and show how they fit together, and thereby create order in a chaotic world. Likewise, the challenge of the 21st-century writer will be to do this in a world where new things come along so rapidly, everything is unfamiliar. But literature, Rushdie proposed, was a protest against limited experience, and that the writer should always push the boundaries of the easily understood and, returning to his original idea, the “official” truths promoted by the powerful.

Rushdie was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children and again in 2005 for Shalimar the Clown, and was awarded the Whitbread Prize for The Satanic Verses in 1988. He was knighted in 2007 for his contribution to British literature. In the question-and-answer period following his talk, Rushdie acknowledged that these accolades didn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things, but were very nice to have anyway.

Contact: Liz Entman, (615)343-3206
liz.entman@vanderbilt.edu