CONCLUSIONS
The amount of accusations and criticism his fiction has provoked, attempting not only against his style
- << endless licence of Magic Realism (...) ; absurd and incompetent (...) ; vitiated by self-indulgence (...); threatened by verbosity (...); swallowed in rhetorical obscurity(...) ; too ambitious : the dispute in favour of freedom silenced any argument about its literary qualities >> ( Massied 54-55 )
- << the techniques remain fundamentally the same, the same surprises sprung, the same ambiguous passages are opened up ; ... his work become less interesting >>
( Dodsworth 343 )
- << imitative literature of Günter Grass, García Marquez, etc.>> ( Wallia )
against his political ideas
- << a mockery of freedom >>
- << use of cunning artifices >> ( Wallia ) :
offence and attack
grotesque exoticism of the Indian-English language for the
amusement of his Western readers
ridiculing of India's ethos
assuming the voice of a people that does not corresponds to him
and also against his life with the proclamation of the fatwah...
makes clear that the principles he was defending (Tolerance, Pluralism and Freedom) are impossible ; that the existence of an absolute and unique Truth imposed by political power is evident ; that Literature is not so powerful as to fight against reality ; that the writer is not the magician he thought to be and he cannot change reality with his ABRACADABRA ; and that what finally remains is a deformed and grotesque reality.
In spite of these hopeless conclusions, Freedom of Speech goes on being a precious objective for which keep on fighting with teeth and nails. STORY-TELLING as an effective tool to avoid the SILENCE every tyranny aspires, has always been present, and the existence of involved Literature and Art, as that of Rushdie´s, guarantees to us a kind of protection ; as this author has said : << I had always believed that Art happens at the edge, not in the middle, and that any serious artist goes towards those edges to try and push out the boundaries>> (the Rushdie Tapes).
