Rushdie discusses impact of urban life on literature

Award-winning writer Salman Rushdie drew a capacity audience in McCosh Hall Thursday afternoon for a lecture titled "The Novel and the City," part of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies' Urban Reflections Lecture Series.

Rushdie spoke for an-hour-and-a-half, discussing his native Bombay and its influence on his writing.

The author of eight novels, Rushdie attracted worldwide attention in 1989 when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeni condemned his novel "The Satanic Verses" as sacrilegious and issued a fatwa — a legal Islamic opinion on matters of religious belief — against him.

However, at the beginning of his talk, Rushdie cast the episode in a wryly humorous light. "In regards to my little dispute with the Ayatollah Khomeni, let me point out that one of us is now dead," he said. "The moral is, don't mess with novelists."

He went on to discuss his love for the urban environment and its significance to his philosophy and work.

"I almost have an ideology of dirt," he said. "Whenever anybody wants to 'clean things up' — ethnic cleansing, for example — people start dying. What we need is a little dirt. Cities are more dirty, and therefore more democratic and freer."

Rushdie said that growing up in Bombay's lively, diverse environment greatly affected his work. He said that the unique slang spoken — a result of the multicultural environment — was particularly influential.

"People spoke five languages, [sometimes] all at once," he said. "It was this playful, witty way of speaking. Growing up in that world gives you a sense of playfulness about language."

Rushdie added that the crowded nature of cities and his desire to convey that dynamic in his writing has also influenced his narrative style.

"How does one write down 'crowd'?" he said. "What is the literary equivalent of 'crowd'? It's not a linear narrative. You need to tell stories as a crowd . . . you need so much narrative going on that the story you're trying to tell has to force its way to the front and push its way through that crowd."

Students at the lecture said they were entertained and impressed.

"There are very few people who can keep me awake for an hour and a half in a lecture hall, and [Rushdie] is one of them," said Laura Feiveson, a graduate student in the economics department. "I admire and envy his storytelling abilities."