Sir Salman spoke for
about one hour and then took audience questions. As expected, he was an
entertaining, thought-provoking and engaging speaker, and extremely
gracious in responding to audience questions.

He noted that he
had been in Brooklyn and passed St. Francis College many times but had
never been inside. I took a lot of notes and
wanted to share a great lecture.

His topics included:

A
favorite thought-games, which he termed extremely addictive, thinking
of titles of books that would never have made it: "The Big Gatsby",
"Two Days in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," "The Old Man and the Lake."

About the Ayatollah and the fatwa,
he noted "One of us is dead." Therefore, "Don't mess with novelists."
Ostensibly the fatwa was listed, although I believe I have read that
this is in dispute. There appeared to be substantial non-uniformed
security at the event. Nevertheless, Sir Salman is an amusing,
brilliant, and relaxed speaker.

He explored what it means for
the novel, and to the role of the novelist, when the world has become
fictitious, strange, non-realistic; when the incredible rush of extreme
events and occurrences in society and the world today, take 9/11 as an
example, are difficult to render in a naturalistic literary style. "The
gulf between public and private has shrunk." Sir Salman mentioned
Heraclitus's remark that "Character is fate – destiny–" may no longer
be the case in the current world, since so many issues that occur,
violence, social and economic dislocations, etc., are not necessarily
the individual's fault. "Today, character is not necessarily destiny.
How do you write about the meaning of life when character is not
destiny?"

Humans are storytellers. "We are storytelling
animals" he observed. When people say "How is the family?" "Oh, the
family is fine" he laughed and remarked, " Is it really? Not really. It
is hell in there."

We tell stories to understand ourselves,
our families,our society and our world. Not just fictional stories, as
I understood him to say, but also humans tend to use a storytelling
form when giving explanations. "Since the world is so complex, and we
are inundated with media and information, so much of which is without
real meaning and does not promote understanding," then "Using stories
to understand ourselves is the way human beings try to understand their
world. Therefore, the storytelling act is incredibly important" to
helping us understand ourselves and our world. But there are forces
—political, religious, personal– that wish to preserve a social
order and clamp down on storytelling which is a mechanism for
understanding and conveying the truth about human experience.

Therefore,
once the "Simple act of remembering becomes a political act"
storytelling becomes dangerous. Rushdie passionately observed that
"preventing people from telling stories is a crime against humanity–an
existential crime. We live inside stories."

Rushdie also
observed how many people who protested against the book The Satanic
Verses had never read it or any of his other work. That is why it is so
important to maintain and protect the open society. People who find
stories troubling should just learn to "deal with it."

Rushdie
commented about a section of Saul Bellow's The Dean's December that
describes a dog that would not stop barking. To Saul Bellow, a scene
like that is imbued with deep meaning. Rushdie said that the dog's
barking was a "protest against limits of his experience as a
dog"–therefore, the dog's barking is a plea or demand to "open the
universe a little more. And that is as good a description of what great
art can accomplish: To open up the universe a little more."

The
risk to artists especially writers is that when you seek to push
boundaries outward, "you can't do it from the middle of the room; you
need to go to the edge." However, in doing so, there is always the risk
that you will "fall off the edge, or that someone will push back,"
which can be very dangerous.