IbnRushd
10-12-06, 16:22
Rushdie en de literaire neocons
zaterdag 9 december 2006 door juurd eijsvoogel
De Britse schrijvers Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie en Ian McEwan gebruiken hun status als beroemdheid om hun neoconservatieve ideeën uit te dragen, stelt de schrijver Ziauddin Sardar in een fel stuk in The Guardian. In hun literaire werk (fictie) is dat geen probleem, vindt Sardar, dat is hun specialiteit. Maar zijn zij werkelijk geschikt om over de hele wereld op te treden als wijze mannen ,,shaping our opinions on everything from art, life and politics to civilisation as we know it'’? Sardar verwijt ze een oppervlakkig conservatisme en noemt ze ,,British literary neoconservatives - or, if you like, the Blitcons.'’ De Blitcons stellen de Amerikaanse cultur boven alles, ze zien de islam als de grootste bedreiging van onze beschaving, en vrijheid en democratie volgens het Amerikaanse recept moeten opgelegd worden aan de rest van de wereld. Onder het artikel staat een vloed van reacties. Een langere versie van het artikel, die ook te beluisteren is, staat in de New Statesman.
nrc.nl
The Blitcon supremacists
Amis, Rushdie and McEwan are using their celebrity status to push a neocon agenda
Ziauddin Sardar
Saturday December 9, 2006
The Guardian
The names of the most famous contemporary writers have become international brands. When they speak, the world listens. And increasingly, they speak not just through their fiction, but also via newspaper opinion pages, influential magazines, television chat shows and literary festivals. Novelists are no longer just novelists - they are also global pundits shaping our opinions on everything from art, life and politics to civilisation as we know it.
What we want from them is clear: insight into the human condition. From the most favourable conditions in human history we have generated terror, war and a proliferation of tensions grounded in mutual fear and hatred. Humanity is unquestionably in need of help. But is it amenable to literary soundbites? Do literary pundits provide us with the best insight into our conundrums or serve as useful guides to the future?
The British literary landscape is dominated by three writers: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. All three have considered the central dilemma of our time: terror. Indeed, Amis has issued something of a manifesto on the subject he terms "horrorism". In their different styles, their approach and opinions define a coherent position. They are the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives - or, if you like, the "Blitcons".
Blitcons come with a ready-made nostrum for the human condition. They use their celebrity status to advance a clear global political agenda.
The Blitcon project is based on three one-dimensional conceits. The first is the absolute supremacy of American culture. Blitcon fiction is orientalism for the 21st century, shifting the emphasis from the supremacy of the west in general to the supremacy of American ideas of freedom.
If we are to read McEwan's beliefs and intentions through his fiction, the western canon is the very essence of humanity. His novel Saturday is set on 15 February 2003, when almost two million people marched in London to protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Its neurosurgeon protagonist, Henry Perowne, is a "professional reductionist" who cannot appreciate great literature. In order to cure him, his daughter Daisy spoonfeeds him Flaubert, Tolstoy and other "great writers". We are supposed to see this as a joke. But the joke evaporates as soon as we realise that Saturday really assigns a mystical dimension to western literature: the poetry of Matthew Arnold not only serves as an antidote to brutish violence, but literally saves the day at the end of the novel. As a corollary, we are forced to conclude, those who have never read War and Peace, for example, are not fully human.
The second Blitcon conceit is that Islam is the greatest threat to this idea of civilisation. Rushdie's suspicion of and distaste for Islam is obvious in his novels Midnight's Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses. In Shame, Rushdie describes Islam as a mythology that cannot survive close examination, but in The Satanic Verses it becomes an abomination. The novel imagines a rival life of the Prophet Muhammad, complete with historical details and every orientalist stereotype imaginable. As the product of the paranoid delusions of a violent, sexually perverted businessman, The Satanic Verses suggests, Islam runs contrary to every decent value known to man.
The third Blitcon conceit is that American ideas of freedom and democracy are not only right, but should be imposed on the rest of the world.
There is an exercise beyond the reach of any of the Blitcons. There are exotic creatures they cannot imagine in their fictions and diatribes: the generality of Muslims, people who believe in something other than the Blitcons' understanding of Islam; people who live humdrum lives on the streets of Bradford, Karachi or Jakarta; people far removed from the festering imagination of the Blitcon. Amis has never even met an ordinary Muslim in his life.
But I lie. He has met one. In The Age of Horrorism, Amis tells us that in Jerusalem he came face to face with the "maximum malevolence" of an Islamist, the gatekeeper at the Dome of the Rock. Amis writes that he wanted to enter the mosque in contravention of some "calendric prohibition" - there are none, actually - which led to a transformation in the gatekeeper: "His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant." By the simple observation of facial expression, Amis was able to divine the entire plot. But might it not be that the humble gatekeeper had never encountered such an obnoxious, arrogant and ignorant tourist?
The real world is not a fiction. The ideology of mass murder has a history and a context in all its perversity and evil. But the wild imaginings of the Blitcons are not an appropriate guide to the eradication of this horror. Turned to this end, the manipulative power of literary imagination is nothing but spin. And such spin is simply hatred answering, mirroring and matching hatred. Like minds reach across intervening swaths of the world and, in their hatred, embrace each other. That is all Blitcons tell us. But it is hardly enlightening for those of us desperate to find a sustainable path from destruction and slaughter.
· Ziauddin Sardar has been appointed a commissioner of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights.
This is an edited version of an article in the current issue of the New Statesman.
guardian.co.uk
zaterdag 9 december 2006 door juurd eijsvoogel
De Britse schrijvers Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie en Ian McEwan gebruiken hun status als beroemdheid om hun neoconservatieve ideeën uit te dragen, stelt de schrijver Ziauddin Sardar in een fel stuk in The Guardian. In hun literaire werk (fictie) is dat geen probleem, vindt Sardar, dat is hun specialiteit. Maar zijn zij werkelijk geschikt om over de hele wereld op te treden als wijze mannen ,,shaping our opinions on everything from art, life and politics to civilisation as we know it'’? Sardar verwijt ze een oppervlakkig conservatisme en noemt ze ,,British literary neoconservatives - or, if you like, the Blitcons.'’ De Blitcons stellen de Amerikaanse cultur boven alles, ze zien de islam als de grootste bedreiging van onze beschaving, en vrijheid en democratie volgens het Amerikaanse recept moeten opgelegd worden aan de rest van de wereld. Onder het artikel staat een vloed van reacties. Een langere versie van het artikel, die ook te beluisteren is, staat in de New Statesman.
nrc.nl
The Blitcon supremacists
Amis, Rushdie and McEwan are using their celebrity status to push a neocon agenda
Ziauddin Sardar
Saturday December 9, 2006
The Guardian
The names of the most famous contemporary writers have become international brands. When they speak, the world listens. And increasingly, they speak not just through their fiction, but also via newspaper opinion pages, influential magazines, television chat shows and literary festivals. Novelists are no longer just novelists - they are also global pundits shaping our opinions on everything from art, life and politics to civilisation as we know it.
What we want from them is clear: insight into the human condition. From the most favourable conditions in human history we have generated terror, war and a proliferation of tensions grounded in mutual fear and hatred. Humanity is unquestionably in need of help. But is it amenable to literary soundbites? Do literary pundits provide us with the best insight into our conundrums or serve as useful guides to the future?
The British literary landscape is dominated by three writers: Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan. All three have considered the central dilemma of our time: terror. Indeed, Amis has issued something of a manifesto on the subject he terms "horrorism". In their different styles, their approach and opinions define a coherent position. They are the vanguard of British literary neoconservatives - or, if you like, the "Blitcons".
Blitcons come with a ready-made nostrum for the human condition. They use their celebrity status to advance a clear global political agenda.
The Blitcon project is based on three one-dimensional conceits. The first is the absolute supremacy of American culture. Blitcon fiction is orientalism for the 21st century, shifting the emphasis from the supremacy of the west in general to the supremacy of American ideas of freedom.
If we are to read McEwan's beliefs and intentions through his fiction, the western canon is the very essence of humanity. His novel Saturday is set on 15 February 2003, when almost two million people marched in London to protest against the imminent invasion of Iraq. Its neurosurgeon protagonist, Henry Perowne, is a "professional reductionist" who cannot appreciate great literature. In order to cure him, his daughter Daisy spoonfeeds him Flaubert, Tolstoy and other "great writers". We are supposed to see this as a joke. But the joke evaporates as soon as we realise that Saturday really assigns a mystical dimension to western literature: the poetry of Matthew Arnold not only serves as an antidote to brutish violence, but literally saves the day at the end of the novel. As a corollary, we are forced to conclude, those who have never read War and Peace, for example, are not fully human.
The second Blitcon conceit is that Islam is the greatest threat to this idea of civilisation. Rushdie's suspicion of and distaste for Islam is obvious in his novels Midnight's Children, Shame and The Satanic Verses. In Shame, Rushdie describes Islam as a mythology that cannot survive close examination, but in The Satanic Verses it becomes an abomination. The novel imagines a rival life of the Prophet Muhammad, complete with historical details and every orientalist stereotype imaginable. As the product of the paranoid delusions of a violent, sexually perverted businessman, The Satanic Verses suggests, Islam runs contrary to every decent value known to man.
The third Blitcon conceit is that American ideas of freedom and democracy are not only right, but should be imposed on the rest of the world.
There is an exercise beyond the reach of any of the Blitcons. There are exotic creatures they cannot imagine in their fictions and diatribes: the generality of Muslims, people who believe in something other than the Blitcons' understanding of Islam; people who live humdrum lives on the streets of Bradford, Karachi or Jakarta; people far removed from the festering imagination of the Blitcon. Amis has never even met an ordinary Muslim in his life.
But I lie. He has met one. In The Age of Horrorism, Amis tells us that in Jerusalem he came face to face with the "maximum malevolence" of an Islamist, the gatekeeper at the Dome of the Rock. Amis writes that he wanted to enter the mosque in contravention of some "calendric prohibition" - there are none, actually - which led to a transformation in the gatekeeper: "His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant." By the simple observation of facial expression, Amis was able to divine the entire plot. But might it not be that the humble gatekeeper had never encountered such an obnoxious, arrogant and ignorant tourist?
The real world is not a fiction. The ideology of mass murder has a history and a context in all its perversity and evil. But the wild imaginings of the Blitcons are not an appropriate guide to the eradication of this horror. Turned to this end, the manipulative power of literary imagination is nothing but spin. And such spin is simply hatred answering, mirroring and matching hatred. Like minds reach across intervening swaths of the world and, in their hatred, embrace each other. That is all Blitcons tell us. But it is hardly enlightening for those of us desperate to find a sustainable path from destruction and slaughter.
· Ziauddin Sardar has been appointed a commissioner of the Commission for Equality and Human Rights.
This is an edited version of an article in the current issue of the New Statesman.
guardian.co.uk