Rushdie, James Joyce & Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett started out as James Joyce's stenographer, literally writing down Finnegan's Wake as Joyce dictated. Joyce's eyesight was failing, and having determined that far too many people had an opinion on Ulysses, Joyce set out to write what he must have thought nobody would have a hope in hell of ever understanding. Think of those old photos of Joyce with the coke bottle thick glasses, dazzling poor young Beckett with his god like intellect.


Well Joyce succeeded well enough. While Ulysses is dazzling, especially in the fifty page auto-erotic sentence that ends the story with that famous affirmation, the Wake is just flat out unreadable, unless you are a professor emeritus, and even then you are probably lying. Joyce believed in rewriting his work by throwing it in the fireplace, in the tradition of unhappy genius, like Wilde and Stevenson.


From Waiting for Godot, thru plays and novels narrated by dead guys about the ambiguously dead and doomed, Samuel Beckett called his last effort Worstword Ho. It begins, chanting, 'Forward. No, back. No, Forward.' He could never make up his mind either.


Salman Rushdie's fourth book, The Satanic Verses was another one of those books that almost nobody read, yet became famous, and infamous. It was like a coffee table book, the sort that certain people displayed, but never opened. It was hard to read, but brilliant and a testament to Rushdie's rightful claim as a mental giant.

Certainly very few of the Islamic rage boys that got all lathered up ever had a look at it, especially considering that the transgender ciphers at the UN have that statistic - that more books are translated into Spanish in one year than have ever been printed in Arabic. Then factor that some estimates put Arabic illiteracy at the 90% level.

The ire of Islam is based on what the great unwashed (yet meticulously shaved) masses were told to believe by their imans. The offending part of the Verses, that which directly resulted in the fatwa, was a dream sequence, more of a paranoid nightmare actually, in which the wives of mohammed became the demimondaine of a brothel. It lasts for about two thirds of a page.


The dreamer was the original man who fell to earth. He was an actor by trade, an Indian like Rushie himself. One day he found himself aboard an airplane that was blown out of the air, and only he and another passenger, an actor also, survived, drifting unharmed down to the ground. The experienced drove him crazy, hence the paranoid nightmare. In the book he was horrified by the dream, and took it as a sure sign that he was going directly to hell.

And that was it. Fifteen years later, they are still apoplectic about it.