Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie

is emerging, a post-colonial novel, a de-centered, transnational, interlingual, cross-cultural novel; and that in this new world order, or disorder, we find a better explanation of the contemporary novel’s health than Professor Steiner’s somewhat patronizingly Hegelian view that the reason for the creativity of the “far rim” is that these are areas “which are in an earlier stage of the bourgeois culture, which are in an earlier, rougher, more problematic form.”
    It was, after all, the Franco regime’s success in stifling decade after decade of Spanish literature that shifted the spotlight to the fine writers working in Latin America. The so-called Latin American boom was, accordingly, as much the result of the corruption of the old bourgeois world as of the allegedly primitive creativity of the new. And the description of India’s ancient, sophisticated culture as existing in an “earlier, rougher” state than the West is bizarre. India, with its great mercantile classes, its sprawling bureaucracies, its exploding economy, possesses one of the largest and most dynamic bourgeoisies in the world, and has done so for at least as long as Europe. Great literature and a class of literate readers are nothing new in India. What is new is the emergence of a gifted generation of Indian writers
working in English.
What is new is that the “center” has deigned to notice the “rim,” because the “rim” has begun to speak in its myriad versions of a language the West can more easily understand.
    Even Professor Steiner’s portrait of an exhausted Europe is, in my view, simply and demonstrably false. The last fifty years have given us the oeuvres of, to name just a few, Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, Samuel Beckett, Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante, Vladimir Nabokov, Günter Grass, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kis, Thomas Bernhard, Marguerite Yourcenar. We can all make our own lists. If we include writers from beyond the frontiers of Europe, it becomes clear that the world has rarely seen so rich a crop of great novelists living and working at the same time—that the easy gloom of the Steiner-Naipaul position is not just depressing but unjustified. If V. S. Naipaul no longer wishes, or is no longer able, to write novels, it is our loss. But the art of the novel will undoubtedly survive without him.
    There is, in my view, no crisis in the art of the novel. The novel is precisely that “hybrid form” for which Professor Steiner yearns. It is part social inquiry, part fantasy, part confessional. It crosses frontiers of knowledge as well as topographical boundaries. He is right, however, that many good writers have blurred the boundaries between fact and fiction. Ryszard Kapuscinski’s magnificent book about Haile Selassie,
The Emperor,
is an example of this creative blurring. The so-called New Journalism developed in America by Tom Wolfe and others was a straightforward attempt to steal the novel’s clothes, and in the case of Wolfe’s own
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,
or
The Right Stuff,
the attempt was persuasively successful. The category of “travel writing” has expanded to include works of profound cultural meditation: Claudio Magris’s
Danube,
say, or Neal Ascherson’s
Black Sea.
And in the face of a brilliant non-fictional tour de force such as Roberto Calasso’s
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,
in which a re-examination of the Greek myths achieves all the tension and intellectual excitement of the best fiction, one can only applaud the arrival of a new kind of imaginative essay writing—or, better, the return of the encyclopedic playfulness of Diderot or Montaigne. The novel can welcome these developments without feeling threatened. There’s room for all of us in here.
    A few years ago the British novelist Will Self published a funny short story called “The Quantity Theory of Insanity,” which suggested that the sum total of sanity available to the human