Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie Page A

race might be fixed, might be a constant; so that the attempt to cure the insane was useless, as the effect of one individual regaining his sanity would inevitably be that someone somewhere else would lose theirs, as if we were all sleeping in a bed covered by a blanket—of sanity—that wasn’t quite big enough to cover us all. One of us pulls the blanket toward us; another’s toes are instantly exposed. It is a richly comic idea, and it recurs in Professor Steiner’s zaniest argument, which he offers with a perfectly straight face—that at any given moment, there exists a total quantum of creative talent, and at present the lure of the cinema, television, and even of advertising is pulling the blanket of genius away from the novel, which consequently lies exposed, shivering in its pajamas in the depths of our cultural winter.
    The trouble with the theory is that it supposes all creative talent to be of the same kind. Apply this notion to athletics and its absurdity becomes apparent. The supply of marathon runners is not diminished by the popularity of sprint events. The quality of high jumpers is unrelated to the number of great exponents of the pole vault.
    It is more likely that the advent of new art forms allows new groups of people to enter the creative arena. I know of very few great filmmakers who might have been good novelists—Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Jean Renoir, and that’s about it. How many pages of Quentin Tarantino’s snappy material, his gangsters’ riffs about eating Big Macs in Paris, could you read if you didn’t have Samuel Jackson or John Travolta speaking them for you? The best screenwriters are the best precisely because they think not novelistically but pictorially.
    I am, in short, much less worried than Steiner about the threat posed to the novel by these newer, high-tech forms. It is perhaps the low-tech nature of the act of writing that will save it. Means of artistic expression that require large quantities of finance and sophisticated technology—films, plays, records—become, by virtue of that dependence, easy to censor and to control. But what one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
    I agree with Professor Steiner’s celebration of modern science—“today that is where the joy is, that is where the hope is, the energy, the formidable sense of world upon world opening up,” but this burst of scientific creativity is, ironically, the best riposte to his “quantity theory of creativity.” The idea that potential great novelists have been lost to the study of sub-atomic physics or black holes is as implausible as its opposite: that the great writers of history—Jane Austen, say, or James Joyce—might easily, had they but taken a different turning, have been the Newtons and Einsteins of their day.
    In questioning the quality of creativity to be found in the modern novel, Professor Steiner points us in the wrong direction. If there is a crisis in present-day literature, it is of a somewhat different kind.
    The novelist Paul Auster recently told me that all American writers had to accept that they were involved in an activity which was, in the United States, no more than a minority interest, like, say, soccer. This observation chimes with Milan Kundera’s complaint, in his new volume of essays,
Testaments Betrayed,
of “Europe’s incapacity to defend and explain (explain patiently to itself and to others) that most European of arts, the art of the novel; in other words, to explain and defend its own culture. The ‘children of the novel,’ ” Kundera argues, “have abandoned the art that shaped them. Europe, the society of the novel, has abandoned its own self.” Auster is talking about the death of the American reader’s interest in this kind of reading matter; Kundera, about the death of the European reader’s sense of cultural connection with this kind of cultural product. Add these to Steiner’s