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Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, Penguin Random House, 2024. 224 pgs.
"Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers, and how one remembers it in order to recount it."
—Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez
Salman Rushdie's Knife is a searing testimony of today's paralysing times where the human condition, pitted against the falsification of reality, is in tenuous balance. Empirically crafted to a cathartic intent, Knife is a trope for the dangers and values of artistic truth. While it challenges the blind fury of xenophobia against the integrity of free speech, it is also a glorious affirmation of love, compassion, fortitude, solidarity, and custodianship to unearth the inevitability of a perpetual in-betweenness in a climate of ideological extremism.
Knife is meditative in making readers personalise what it means to be in a "migrant condition," to borrow Rushdie's phrase. Perceptive readers will recall Knife as a testament to Rushdie's style of writing where an act of narrative, polemic or personal, becomes "a sharp way of perceiving the world" (Rushdie's interview with J.F. Galvรกn Reula). The vividness of Rushdie's narrative in Knife conjures up his strategic words in "Imaginary Homelands" where he mentions his "Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time", where the past is "unaffected by the distortions of memory."
Knife, combining an achingly poignant personal trauma narrative with the polemical contentions of an artist's cosmopolitan ethics, reminds readers of Balzac whose words about the truth of an artist's vocation ring true here in the context of Rushdie's fecundity: "Constant labour is the law of art as well as the law of life, for art is the creative activity of the mind… And there results a habit of toil, a perpetual consciousness of the difficulties, that keeps them in a state of marriage with the Muse, and her creative forces." How true of the indefatigable Rushdie. Knife is a graceful ode to a traumatising personal memory against the tyranny of cultural terrorism and the ossification of cultural identity. The luminous prose of Rushdie transcends the personal tragedy with a view to striking a universal tone of cosmopolitanism.
Knife is also an enduring affirmation of love. Does suffering not reveal to the sufferer the potency of love and its transformative power? Rushdie returns to his deeply fulfilling love of Eliza to overcome the suffering that constrains his soul. This all-embracing love opens to him the truth of happiness in his personal life and the truth of moral rectitude that sustains literature. The ending of the book testifies to the truth of their conjugal love as Rushdie feels convinced of the grace of conjugal love in surmounting the ordeal of unprecedented depth he went through. The book's conclusion is his transition from self-doubt, "Could our happiness survive such a blow?" to a resounding self-affirmation "yes" with agonising clarity, truthfulness, and a feeling of lightness by alluding to Milan Kundera. Love sets Rushdie free from suffering. It is the love's emancipatory value as manifested in Tagore's Gitanjali: "My incense does not give scent until it is burnt, my lamp does not give light till it is lit."
Knife is a compelling empirical power. The confessional nature of the work, its spiritual intent in the evocation of death, and the quest for the perennial source of artistic imagination in the face of deterrence recalls Coleridge and his brilliant portrayal of death in one of his odes in Epode II: "And my thick and struggling breath/Imitates the toil of Death!"Each moment of suffering becomes a representation of unmediated knowledge about self and life's vagaries. What is unknowable yields access to knowing. Nowhere does Rushdie lapse into sensational anecdotes. He does take a cynical dig at his assailant A as he unfolds his explicit narrative in mapping out the terrain of his tortuous thoughts and his unrelenting indeterminacy between life and death.
The imaginary conversation, a series of four sessions, between Rushdie and his assailant A is brilliant in not only internalising the dual role of a clinical interlocutor and an interpreter in reading the psyche of a barbaric outsider who has no qualms about his act of savagery. Rushdie's Socratic questioning puts the act of violence or the assailant on trial. The questions appeal to irrational choices, bigoted ideas, and moral integrity in a fractured world. The questions aim at cultivating reflective citizenship by self-examination, rational justification, and empathetic imagination on the part of the assailant. This chapter offers the Socratic capacity to awaken the aggressor to reason about premeditated beliefs. It is also replete with pithy aphorisms like—"The gift of life is a deed of God."
Each session is an immersion in seeking clarity amidst the confusion of the assailant's mind. In this breathing landscape of barbarism, each session is an attempt to make the perpetrator surrender to his evil self indoctrinated by the garbled version of religious faith. The explicit use of "silence" in the sessions creates a curative pause in readers. Moreover, the sessions are significant enough where Salman rises like a Christ figure who not only peers into the pathos of his suffering self but also the cognitive process of a traumatic mind. Each session is inscribed with the marks of anticipation, anguish, regret, change, hope for redemption, and eventual pessimism.
The imaginary conversation is reminiscent of Wilfred Owen's poem "Strange Meeting." However, unlike a sense of reconciliation in "Strange Meeting" that ends on a note of affirmation with the prophetic ellipsis in "Let us sleep now…", Rushdie's conversation, alluding to Bertrand Russell, ends on a note of outright rejection of any chance of redemption possible for his assailant: "You don't know me. You'll never know me." The assailant A, unlike Owen's poet-persona, subjects himself to the slings and arrows of hellish damnation. A feeling of unease and incompleteness lingers as the conversation captures the sense of rupture, the collapse of values, and the edifying power of art in challenging ideological bearings that make human life morally and spiritually sterile. Rushdie juxtaposes the world of catholicity with the world of cowardice, while the former breaks boundaries, the latter clings to the futility of false beliefs with an annoying sense of snobbery and arrogance. The imaginary conversation recalls Tolkien's idea of fantasy in making readers "clean (their) windows" and free themselves from the blur of "possessiveness."
From an academic point of view, Knife lends itself to scholarly discourses on memory studies. It provokes discussion of trauma, to be specific, the enlightenment version of lay trauma theory exemplified by Arthur G. Neal in his study National Trauma and Collective Memory. With hindsight, Knife is Rushdie's ironic put-down of doctrinaire thinking that breeds rabid anti-humanist outbursts, cultural intolerance, and mindless violence. Knife serves as a measure of influence to foreground the need for truthfulness, dissent, and cosmopolitan ethics. Each aspect of this global-minded urgency merits extended conversations. Knife takes readers into an atmosphere of eerie uncertainty. However, love is the crystallising factor in a milieu of pain and suffering. Knife signals the start of a philosophical trajectory, defined by contemplation, compassion, and cosmopolitanism.
How to cite: Ghosh, Sudeep. "An Achingly Poignant Personal Trauma Narrative: Salman Rushdie's Knife." Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Jul. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/07/02/knife.
Sudeep Ghosh is an academic based in Hyderabad, India. His pedagogical articles, poems, research papers, translations and art criticisms have appeared in national and international journals, including Aesthetica Magazine (UK), Le Dame Art Gallery (UK), Canadian Literature (University of British Columbia, Canada), Wasafiri (Open University, London), Teacher Plus (Azim Premji University), Apurva (BHU, Varanasi), The Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Penguin India, Mentor, Knowledge Review, to name a few. He can be reached at doors2deep@gmail.com.
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