You may have learned from reports in some newspapers that Salman Rushdie was in Dublin last week to become an honorary patron of the TCD Philosophical Society, writes John Waters.
I had the great privilege to chair the proceedings, and to interview Rushdie before an audience spellbound by his presence and address. I have not been as nervous since my confirmation, but, after some introductory mumbling, a technical hitch and a bad joke, managed to pull myself together to do a passable job.
I hope Salman Rushdie will forgive my saying that there is something godlike about him. He is not, for understandable reasons, keen on gods. He also brushed aside my suggestion that he stands with Vaclav Havel and Arthur Miller as a moral icon of the modern world, but this modesty is ill-founded. What I meant was that he not only perceives literature as a moral mission, but has, through the circumstances of his life, had occasion to carry that mission beyond his books and the eyeline of his reader.
The fatwa imposed on Rushdie in 1989 by the Ayatollah Khomeini seemed for a while to give him a significance that would ultimately be greater than his works, but such a settled view of the matter would be greatly in error. For what the name of Salman Rushdie has come to signify - courage in the face of censorship, determination in the face of homicidal theocracy - future generations will rightly praise that name. His importance, however, has moved on from that.
If such a thing had happened to a minor writer, it would have been both appalling and interesting. That it happened to a great writer is a hint of something deeper. Rushdie touched on this deeper truth last Tuesday night, when he spoke of how the function of the novel had necessarily been altered by the nature of modern society.
We live in a world that refuses to make connections. This is "news"; there is "the arts"; over here is "entertainment", and, on page 12, a little bit of religion. Following the collapse of traditional forms of authority, we lack a central locus of moral leadership, a governing conscience. And paradoxically, given the increasing compartmentalisation of everything, it is simultaneously true that the public, the political world, becomes increasingly enmeshed in the private and personal.
This, as Rushdie outlined, means that the novelist and his art become more and more, to paraphrase him, connected to reality. This becomes truer even as some of the form's European greybeards wring their hands about its future.
Rushdie, a European writer by adoption, has latterly moved to America, from where his recent fiction, while forging a new direction, has consolidated his reputation among the greatest living writers in English. His last novel, Fury, though the object of hostile reviews, groped for a new harmony with the blur of the modern moment.
Unlike other latter-day European writers, Rushdie has never tended to hold his nose in the vicinity of popular culture, or cover his ears to the din of reality. His vision of the novel resides not in the creation of exhibits of literary cleverality but in reaching a truth about the actually existing world with no other means of expression.
In Fury, he declares lost "the language of the heart", which loss one feels to be at the core of the "fury", depicted as a kind of inarticulacy: "the speed of life outstrips the heart's ability to respond".
The writer's job is to replenish this language, but the list of those who genuinely do so is a great deal shorter than a Booker shortlist.
And, as the artist fears to tread, the air becomes thick with plausible explanations for everything: from the psychoanalyst, the psychologist, the sociologist, the lawyer. The novel exists, as Milan Kundera observed, to say: "Things are not as simple as you think".
In 1990, at the depths of his "Plague Years", Salman Rushdie made a remarkable statement about his spiritual outlook, in which he referred to the "God-shaped hole" in modern societies. And yet, an essay in his recent collection of non-fiction, Step Across This Line, concludes most starkly: "The problem's name is God."
This may be neither revision nor contradiction, for Rushdie is, as well as courageous, brilliant, charming and funny, a graceful man in every sense. There's a line in Fury about the paradox of life: "its creator was fictional, but life itself was a fact". This paradox afflicts also the writer of fiction, who manipulates the material of reality to create perhaps the most viable means of transcendence available to us now.
In this sense, thinking of Salman Rushdie, I'm reminded of Heinrich Boll's observation about Vaclav Havel: "what we are dealing with here is the manifestation of a new form of religiousness, which out of courtesy no longer addresses God with the name which has been trampled underfoot by politicians."