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Monday 22 September 2014

Salman Rushdie case shows importance of book festivals

After this week’s Salman Rushdie controversy, Hay director Peter Florence asks: who should literary festivals give a voice to?

Television drama has taken the place of film or even the novel as the best way to communicate ideas, Sir Salman Rushdie has said.
Sir Salman Rushdie has been told he is the target of Mumbai assassins Photo: GETTY

There are two sides to what happened in Rajasthan last week, when Salman Rushdie pulled out of the Jaipur literary festival, after death threats that turned out to be dubious – and both sides are true. On the one hand, almost everything everybody did made an ugly situation worse. The nadir was reached when the decision was made that Rushdie could not appear even onscreen as a moving image. The next logical step would be to ban cartoons of him.

The flipside is that everyone involved won something. Nobody died, and in a country of extreme volatility the police will regard this as a blessed relief. Rushdie is now much more famous in India than he was this time last week. The government can say that they respect the values of the Muslim community in an electoral battleground where they need to win. And festival organiser Sanjoy Roy’s team can enjoy the notion that people across the world have now heard of a literary festival in Jaipur. Even the Imam and his extremist followers can claim they prevented a writer from visiting his homeland...

So is this the end of freedom of speech in the world’s largest democracy? Should India hang its head in shame? Follow the hashtags. The overwhelming response from the wry, unbullyable and free-thinking Indian tweeters is, more or less: It’s about time I got round to reading The Satanic Verses – if it gets people so engaged, it must be worth looking at.

Banning books doesn’t work. Not if you want people not to read them. It has never worked. Lady Chatterley, Madame Bovary, Harry Potter, The Golden Compass, Animal Farm, The Lorax, The Da Vinci Code, Catcher in the Rye… There’s a pattern here, and it’s a mystery that politicians are too stupid to see it.

Would it have been different at the Hay festival? Maybe. I hope so. We have the luxury in Britain, fought for over hundreds of years of hard-won democracy, of being able to tool up in defence of Freedom of Speech. When we’ve had to provide security for an event here, we’ve done so to protect the rights of people whose opinions I deplore – the former Pakistani president and general, Pervez Musharraf and George W Bush’s mastiff, John Bolton.

They managed to offend plenty of people. But that’s partly the point. It’s not just that it’s vital to try to listen to other kinds of intelligence and to understand people who disagree with you. It’s vital to challenge every accepted idea, every certainty. That’s what festivals are for. They mix art and science and politics and comedy in ways that are supposed to look at old ideas afresh. They’re an exercise in experiment, free from political responsibility, and the whole point is to inform policy and society with new imagination about what people’s lives are actually like.

Hay aspires to be that space for totally free debate and conversation that Rushdie talked about so eloquently in relation to the novel in his 1990 Herbert Read Memorial Lecture, “Is Nothing Sacred?” (which was read on his behalf by Harold Pinter, because Rushdie was in hiding). As Rushdie suggested then: “Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.”

The great juggle for a festival organiser is not so much personal safety versus freedom of speech. It’s: What is your relationship with any government, because the act of writing is essentially dissident. That’s what distinguishes literature, and the public act of a literary festival, from buying a Guggenheim museum or a symphony orchestra: it’s not just something rich people do. It’s a place for extending the conversation, and you have to subscribe to the idea that people can contradict you.

We have a Hay festival opening in Budapest this spring, at a time when there is an urgent need for Hungarians to discuss the huge social and political upheavals in their country. We’re invited there by the writers. China is a different scenario: they have banned their own Nobel Laureate, Gao Xingjian, and the Chinese writers we talk to would prefer to bring the discussion of their country outside those borders. Festivals are highly visible and very public: you have to think carefully about who you give a voice to.

The fact that a huge row about censorship and the novel has kicked off while Lord Leveson is sitting in Westminster listening to journalists arguing against regulation of the press is an interesting twist. If there’s a difference it’s a tricky one that explores the nature of truth in fact and fiction. In part, it’s about authority, which is the single biggest challenge of the new social media world of anonymous bloggers, of instant reaction and of ranting, splenetic comment threads. Whose word do we trust? Experience of any news cycle tells us that almost everything we’re told is wrong, or partial, or “mediated”. Do we get closer to recognisable reality when the pretence of fact is abandoned entirely? The beauty of fiction is that it aspires to truths about personal decisions and universal predicaments. Novelists don’t deal in perfectability. They explore the rougher, lustful, violent human condition. That’s why they matter.

Over the past 25 years, the Hay festival has brought countless electric exchanges to the public. Highlights include:

* Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who has read at Hay since its very first year.

* Arthur Miller, who came all the way from Connecticut in the festival’s second year, despite thinking Hay-on-Wye must be some kind of sandwich.

* Jane Fonda, the actress and sometime anti-Vietnam activist, who came out of the green room at Hay and bumped into former US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

* Christopher Hitchens, a Hay regular, who in 1999 gave a striking offstage performance by heckling Van Morrison.

* Desmond Tutu, who gave a lecture in 2009.

* Jimmy Carter, the world’s most successful post-president.

* Ted Hughes, who read throughout a thunderstorm.

* Norman Mailer, who spoke to Bob Geldof about boxing over dinner.

* Bill Clinton, who used the children’s loos and gave the festival its immortal epithet, “the Woodstock of the mind”.

* Sting, who turned up in Kerala unannounced, and joined Geldof on stage.

* VS Naipaul, who, in another green-room encounter, made up with his arch-enemy Paul Theroux after 15 years.

* The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who discussed Shakespeare’s ideas about religion with the actor Simon Russell Beale.

* Simon Schama, a Hay favourite, who dazzled audiences last year with an off-the-cuff alphabetical autobiography and a spot of dancing in his socks.

* Julian Assange, who arrived last year by helicopter, to regale the likes of Vanessa Redgrave and Ralph Fiennes with tales of WikiLeaks.

The Telegraph Hay Festival 2012 runs from May 31 to June 10. Go to www.hayfestival.com

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