Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 8, 2002Volume 30, Number 21



After one of his Tanner Lectures on Human Values in Battell Chapel, noted author Salman Rushdie signed copies of his books for students.



Writer Salman Rushdie ponders the effect
of fear on free societies in this 'frontier time'

Writer Salman Rushdie was an eight-week-old baby in Bombay when a new frontier was born -- the line of demarcation between India and Pakistan.

The creation of that border not only sparked the bloody confrontations known as the Partition Wars, Rushdie told a Yale audience, it divided the members of his family into Indians and Pakistanis, a gulf that only grew wider with the passage of time.

"None of us are who we would have been if that line had not stepped across our land," the author asserted.

Rushdie came to campus Feb. 25 and 26 to deliver the annual Tanner Lectures in Human Values, this year titled "Step Across This Line." In two talks before capacity crowds, the author -- who is perhaps best known for incurring the wrath of fundamentalist Muslims with his novel "The Satanic Verses" -- considered the changing nature of frontiers and the implications of crossing borders.

"The first frontier was the water's edge," said Rushdie. "And there was a first moment -- because how could there not have been such a moment? -- when a living thing came up from the ocean, crossed that boundary and found that it could breathe."

There was, however "no heroism, no adventurous, transgressive spirit involved in that early frontier-crossing," he contended. Those adventurers "were just fish, who by chance, learned how to crawl," said Rushdie.

"But so, in a way, are we," he continued. "Our own births mirror that first crossing of the frontier between the elements. As we emerge from amniotic fluid, from the liquid universe of the womb, we too discover that we can breathe. We too leave behind a kind of water world to become denizens of earth and air."

In their "deepest natures," Rushdie asserted, humans are "frontier-crossing beings." He pointed, as an example, to the popularity of "the quest" as a common theme among the world's literatures.

"In all quests, the voyager is confronted by terrifying guardians of territory -- an ogre here, a dragon there," Rushdie said. "'So far and no further,' the guardian commands. But the voyager must refuse the other's definition of the boundary, must transgress against the limits of what fear prescribes. ...

"The idea of overcoming, of breaking down the boundaries that hold us in and surpassing the limits of our own natures, is essential to all stories of the quest," he said, noting, "To cross a frontier is to be transformed."

Yet, it is also human nature to build and guard borders, Rushdie told his audience. "The frontier is the physical proof of the human race's divided self ... Even the free-est of free societies are un-free at the edge, where things and people go out and other people and things come in, where only the right things and people must go in and out."

Yet, despite increasing vigilance at these borders, the world's boundaries are becoming more "permeable," he said. "Across the frontier, the world's secret truths move unhindered every day."

Terrorism, he noted at one point, "is the most appalling consequence of the permeable frontier."

In the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, in fact, fear of terrorism is prompting many people "to accept the need for a border gulag world of sky towers and manhunters," contended Rushdie. "'Freedom is indivisible,' we used to say. We are all thinking about dividing it now. ...

"Here's the worst case scenario of the frontier of the future," he continued. "The Iron Curtain was designed to keep people in. Now, in the aftermath of its fall, we who live in the wealthiest and most desirable corners of the world are building walls to keep people out. ...

"As the gulf between the world's haves and have-nots increases -- and it is increasing all the time -- and as the supply of even essentials like clean drinking water becomes scarcer -- and it is getting scarcer all the time -- the pressure on that wall will build," he said.

Sept. 11, asserted the writer, has become "something like a border line, not only because the attacks were a kind of invasion, but because we all crossed a frontier that day, an invisible boundary between the imaginable and the unimaginable, and it turned out to be the unimaginable that was real."

The day's events continue to affect our world view, Rushdie said: "In dreams begin responsibilities. The way we see the world affects the world we see. ... Daily life in the real world is also an imagined life. The creatures of our imagination crawl out from our heads, cross the frontier between dream and reality, between shadow and act, and become actual. Imagination's monsters, as we've all recently found, do the same thing. The attack on the World Trade Center was essentially a monstrous act of imagination, intended to act upon all our imaginations to shape our own imaginings of the future."

Rushdie likened the terrorists who executed and planned the Sept. 11 attacks to "brilliantly transgressive performance artists -- hideously innovative, shockingly successful ...

"In dreams begin irresponsibilities, too," he added.

Even artists have struggled over how to describe the world in the wake of Sept. 11, Rushdie stated. Artists have "always scorned the limitations that frontiers represent," he pointed out, noting that his own works are at heart about "the crossing of borders." Now, however, he said, "The problem of limits is made awkward for artists and writers, including myself, by our own adherence to and insistence upon a no-limits position in our own work. ...

"Once the new was shocking, not because it set out to shock, but because it set out to be new. Now, all too often, the shock is the new. And shock, in our jaded culture, wears off easily," he noted. "So the artist who seeks to shock must try harder and harder, must go further and further, and this escalation may now have become the worst kind of artistic self-indulgence."

Nevertheless, Rushdie warned against the growing trend in recent years toward censorship of artists. "If it was important to resist this cultural closing-in before Sept. 11, it's twice as important now," he argued. "The freedoms of art and the intellect are closely related to the general freedoms of society and the home. The struggle for artistic freedom serves to crystallize the larger questions which we all asked when the planes hit the buildings: 'How should we live now?' 'How uncivilized are we going to allow our own world to become in response to so barbaric an assault?' ...

"We are living, I believe, in a frontier time, one of the great hinge periods of human history in which great changes are coming about at great speed," Rushdie told his audience.

"We will all be judged by how well we handle ourselves in this time," he said. "What will be the spirit of this frontier? Will we give the enemy the satisfaction of changing ourselves into something like his hate-filled illiberal mirror image? Or will we -- as the guardians of the modern world, as the custodians of freedom and the occupants of the privileged land of plenty -- go on trying to increase freedom and decrease injustice?

"Will we become the suits of armor our fear makes us put on?" he said in his conclusion. "Or will we continue to be ourselves?"

-- By LuAnn Bishop


T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Alumna is new director of Yale Center for British Art

Writer Salman Rushdie ponders the effect of fear . . .

Former U.N. official calls for international effort . . .

Professor Kazdin will head Yale Child Study Center

Funding renewed for program to attract students to sciences

In Focus: Project Assert

Psychologist examines the making of 'memories'

D.C. mayor heralds dawning of the 'century of the city'

International meeting will assess status of women in physics

Women's Health Research wins grant for community outreach

Commemorating the Birth of a Nation

Benjamin Clark Jr., former manager in Yale's Dining Halls, dies in Texas

Yale Books in Brief

Campus Notes



Bulletin Home|Visiting on Campus|Calendar of Events|In the News|Bulletin Board

Yale Scoreboard|Classified Ads|Search Archives|Deadlines

Bulletin Staff|Public Affairs Home|News Releases| E-Mail Us|Yale Home Page