20 months after a 33-year-old fatwa issued against him by Ayatollah Khomeini in February 1989, accusing him of blasphemy against Islam in his novel The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie is back. Stronger and more alive than ever. And, good news, he has lost none of his legendary sense of humour.

From the knife attack that narrowly missed taking his life, the author of “Victory City” tells a thrilling tale of life, humour and irreverent reflections on life and death (see opposite), on violence – that ‘‘malignity without reason” – ingrained in human nature, and on art as a weapon to resist terror.

Despite the horror he has suffered, there no mention of hatred or resentment in ‘‘Knife – Meditations After an Attempted Murder’’, Salman Rushdie’s narrative of what he sarcastically calls his “near-death experience”: “Thirty-three and a half years had passed since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeyni’s infamous death sentence against me and all those involved in the publication of the Satanic Verses, and during those years, I confess, I sometimes imagined my assassin standing up from some public meeting or other and coming at me exactly like that. So, my first thought when I saw that murderous figure rushing towards me was: So, it’s you. There you are […] Why now? Is it? So much time has passed. Why now, after all these years?”.

When he thinks of his “aspiring assassin”, whom he nicknames “the A.”, he feels neither hatred nor anger, but rather the need to understand, to imagine “the state of mind of the person ready to plunge a blade into the neck of an old man, an eminent old man, whose work was appreciated by many people”, he writes, referring to another great novelist, the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who was also the victim of a knife attack in October 1994. And he adds, about his own “A”: “I really wonder what’s going on in his head now that he’s had time to think. Did he hesitate? Or is he proud of himself? Is he ready to start again?”

In the first months after his “encounter with the knife”, Salman Rushdie dreamt of having his “Beckett moment”:  in January 1938, Samuel Beckett was walking home along the Avenue de la Porte d’Orléans in Paris when he was attacked with a knife by a thug called Prudent. Having survived, the author of ‘‘Waiting for Godot’’ had the opportunity to confront his attacker in court and ask him why he had acted as he did. Prudent replied: ‘‘I don’t know, sir. I do apologise”. The author of ‘‘The Satanic Verses’’ plans to do the same: ‘‘It wasn’t really an answer, but when I read it, it made me want to look my attacker in the face, as Beckett did, and address him directly”.

He later gave up the idea, preferring fiction to real encounters. In ‘‘Knife’’ he devotes some forty pages to an imaginary exchange with his “aspiring assassin”. A long dialogue in which he forces himself to think against himself, by entering the head of his “A.”, in an attempt to understand the motivations for violence and the mechanisms of hatred and intolerance that lie at its root.

This imaginary exchange, both captivating and disconcerting, ends with a surprising thought: “There’s one thing I liked to say in the old days, when disaster struck ‘‘The Satanic Verses’’ and its author. That the only way to understand the controversy surrounding this book was to see it as a quarrel between those with a sense of humour and those without. I understand you well now, my failed assassin, hypocritical assassin, my fellow man, my brother. You could contemplate murder because you couldn’t laugh”.

Humour, the author of “Shalimar the Clown” has it in spades. Even in the most appalling moments, he uses it as a well-honed weapon to sublimate the pain and face up to the horror: A few moments after his assassination attempt, half-conscious, he hears someone shout: “Cut off his clothes so we can see his wounds” and he can’t help whispering: “Oh, my beautiful Ralph Lauren suit!” And when, convalescent, he learns that the Chautauqua Institution has announced that major security protocols are to be put in place, he chooses to laugh it off: ‘‘We close the stable doors after the horse has escaped!”

However, Salman Rushdie’s humour is anything but a way of sidestepping the fight against terror. Faced with the “daily ugliness of the world”, he advocates reacting through art: “How can we think about the future when the present is crying out for our attention? And what can we do usefully and effectively if, turning our attention away from posterity, we focus on the horror of the present? A poem can’t stop a bullet. A novel can’t defuse a bomb. Not all comic actors are heroes. But we are not powerless. Even after Orpheus was cut into pieces, his severed head, floating on the river, continued to sing, reminding us that song is stronger than death”.

VERBATIM

The ‘‘Knife’’ versus ‘‘The ghost in the machine’’

In his latest book, ‘‘Knife – Meditations After an Attempted Murder’’ (Random House, April 2024), Salman Rushdie gives a detailed and poignant description of his “experience of eminent death”, following the knife attack he suffered on 12 August 2022 at a conference in Chautauqua, New York. Extracts:     

I remember lying on the floor, watching the pool of my blood spreading outward from my body. « That’s a lot of blood », I thought. And then I thought, « I’m dying ». It didn’t feel dramatic or particularly awful. It just felt probable. Yes, that was very likely what was happening. It’s a matter of fact.

It’s rare for anyone to be able to describe a near-death experience. Let me say first what did not happen. There was nothing supernatural about it. No « tunnel of light », no feeling of rising out of my body. In fact, I’ve rarely felt so strongly connected to my body. My body was dying, and it was taking me with it. It was an intensely physical sensation.

Later, when I was out of danger, I would ask myself who or what did I think the « me » was the « self » that was in the body but was not the body. The thing that the philosopher Gilbert Ryle once called the « ghost in the machine ».

I have never believed in the immortality of the soul, and my experience in Chautauqua seemed to confirm that the « me », whatever, or whoever it was, was certainly on the edge of death, along with the body that contained it. I had sometimes said, half humorously, that our sense of a non corporeal « me » or « I » might mean that we possessed a mortal soul, an entity or consciousness that ended along with our physical existence.

I now think that maybe that isn’t entirely a joke.

© Random House, April 2024.