To recoup life while it’s still throbbing
In August 2022, Salman Rushdie was almost killed for being “disingenuous”. That was one of the reasons put forth by the writer’s would-be assassin, who confessed to having read only two pages of ‘The Satanic Verses’. Rushdie’s fourth novel was also his most controversial. Published in 1988, it had sparked a fatwa, launched a thousand protests, triggered numerous killings (including that of the Japanese translator of the book) and compelled Rushdie to live under the shadow of death. Though he had anticipated an attack in the decade after the fatwa, it had somewhat receded until the murderous attack on his “last innocent evening” in upstate New York, where Rushdie was to ironically give a talk on the safety of writers. Death, or rather the nearness of it, is what Rushdie reflects on in his new book ‘Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder’.
How do writers under the shadow of death confront it, grapple with it every day, and yet make meaning out of it and use it as material? Is death a battle to be fought and won, an inevitability to be made peace with, or a fear that haunts till the last living breath? Poet John Donne throws a gauntlet of irreverence at “proud” death, when he says, “Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so/ For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow/ Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”
If death made several failed encounters with Rushdie, it was an “imposing itinerant visitor” for Paul Kalanithi, the young neurosurgeon who faced it with equanimity and courage. Diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer at the age of 36, Kalanithi writes in his memoir ‘When Breath Becomes Air’, “I began to realise that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything.” Nothing, because he knew someday he would have to die though he didn’t know when. Everything, because now he knew it more acutely. There was also the more profound realisation that “even when I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living”.
In the case of both Rushdie and Kalanithi, it is love and language that illuminate their lives in their darkest phases. Both harness the power of literature to recoup life while it’s still throbbing. “Language was my knife,” Rushdie ruminates in ‘Knife’, “the knife I could use to fight back” and a tool to reclaim his world, while Kalanithi, “searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death”, found it in writing. “Words,” he writes, “have a longevity I do not.”
Christopher Hitchens, the literary world’s best known contrarian, too, became that “finalist in the race for life” when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and recollects how he had been in denial for long.
“But I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me,” Hitchens writes in his memoir ‘Mortality’ that documents a very public dying.
“I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death” is how Hitchens begins the book. He details his diagnosis as “a very gentle and firm deportation” into the land of malady, a land that he says is quite welcoming, where “everybody smiles encouragingly and there appears to be absolutely no racism” though the humour in this new country is “a touch feeble and repetitive” and the cuisine the worst of any destination. Then comes the rather numbing realisation that “I don’t have a body, I am a body”.
More pervasive though is the wry Hitchensian humour, when he describes how “the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off… even to become banal. One can become quite used to the spectre of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word”.
Are life and death therefore two mutually exclusive or mutually constitutive binaries? Philosopher Jacques Derrida, mining for some understanding of this quandary from science, philosophy and psychoanalysis, argued that death must be considered neither as the opposite of life, nor as the truth or fulfilment of it, but rather as that which both limits life and makes it possible. As Kalanithi words it beautifully: “The fact of death may be unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.”
