We live in the age of explanation and yet we understand each other less well every day. Open a newspaper, turn on the broadcast news, and an avalanche of explainers buries you under verbiage, telling you how to think about what you think you know. Science explains seven things a minute while religion claims to have explained everything already, anyway. The days pass to the sound of the powerful explaining away their mistakes, distortions and lies. “Reality instructors,” to use Saul Bellow’s term, are all around; reality instruction may be the biggest growth industry of our time. The bookstores are filled with nonfiction because we are losing faith in our dreams and believe that only the facts can tell the truth, but the most popular books of all are still fictions, most of them filled with the purest drivel. In our private lives we pay fortunes to sit in rooms with wiser men and women, seeking explanations for our weaknesses, our inner turbulence, our grief. We pay nobody, however, to help us understand our joys. These we can readily explain; or, rather, we know that happiness needs no explanation. It is misery that demands a confessor.

The relationship between works of art and their explainers has always been edgily ambiguous. It has been said that great writers need great critics, and there are instances – William Faulkner and Malcolm Cowley come to mind – when the explainer’s contribution to the work explained has been essential. And where would Surrealism be without André Breton. However, there is something in the act of creation that resists explanation, something in the make-up of creative artists that makes them not want to be excessively explained. Several years ago I was at a literary seminary in Germany at which a group of well known British authors including Ian McEwan, James Fenton and Caryl Phillips shocked an audience of eminent European scholars by claiming that the scholarly work done on their creative work was neither interesting to them, nor helpful.

I wondered at the time if we writers were telling the truth, or simply being defensive. Now, however, I confess to having more and more difficulty with this whole business of being explained, rather than simply, and I hope happily, read.

Like many writers, my desire is to offer up my tale and allow others to engage with it: to be invisible while the work is visible. But publishing today insists that the writer become the explainer-in-chief of his work. Every writer, these days, comes to dread the sound of his own voice, repeating his explanations, over and over again, to different journalists in different countries. The effect, if the process goes on long enough, is to alienate one from one’s own creation.

In my own case, these anti-explanatory instincts were greatly intensified by the strange hubbub that followed the publication ofThe Satanic Verses. Rarely, if ever, can any author have been called upon to answer for his book so frequently, in such detail, and often in the face of entrenched and hostile attitudes towards it that were based on not reading it, or reading a few bits of it (sentences carefully selected and decontextualized to create a “meaning” that bore no relationship to the “real” meaning of the book as a whole), or vindictively misreading it, or reading it through the transforming lenses of assumptions about religion, and its “truths” and supposed privileges, and about “culture,” that much-abused word, and its “sensitivities,” and of course about me. In the opinion of many readers – and not only Muslim readers – these assumptions and prejudices turned the book, and its author, into entities entirely unworthy of serious consideration. You didn’t need to read The Satanic Verses to hold an opinion about it, because the clamor of the angry explanations on offer assured you that reading the book wasn’t worth the trouble. “I don’t need to walk in the gutter,” said one such nonreader-critic, “to know that it contains filth.” You didn’t need to concern yourself about the author, either, because the same clamorous voices – and, again, these were by no means only Muslim voices – told you how unpleasant a person this author was.

To fight back against this assault it has been necessary to say, one thousand and one times, what I think my book is about, and to explain why I wrote it in the way I wrote it and not in some other, less problematical way; to explain, indeed, why I wrote it at all, when not writing it would plainly have been so much less troublesome to everyone. I often felt that I was required to offer up a parallel exegesis of “Salman Rushdie.” Instead of discussing themes, ideas, characters, feelings, language, form, and tone, I had to justify my right to write at all. “He knew what he was doing,” people said. “He did it on purpose.” But nobody actually cared what that it was, or what I knew that inspired what I did. So I had to spell it out, again and again and again. None of this was pleasant. All of it felt necessary.

I have been obliged by extraordinary circumstances to do what I believe a writer should not do: to try and impose my own reading of my work upon the world, to prescribe its meanings, to say clearly what was intended by each contested paragraph, each controversial image; to try and establish the work as proper, justifiable, legitimate, moral, and perhaps even good – and to do this in the face of a global assault that insisted it was improper, unjustifiable, illegitimate, immoral, and bad. In general it has always been and still is my view that one of the great joys of literature is that the reader completes the book – that each reading of a text will be different because of what that reader brings to the experience. And yet there I have been, in essay after essay, interview after interview, trying to rescue my novel from its detractors, and saying, in effect, “This is what this passage means,” and “Read this part like this.”

Even today, twenty-five years after I began to write The Satanic Verses, I am still asked for detailed accounts of the day-to-day motivations of writing its many sentences. The truthful answer – “I don’t remember” – is, of course, unsatisfactory. So I have come up with my little bunch of answers, which satisfy some questioners – not, evidently, the ones who will never be satisfied – but which increasingly trouble me. I, too, am a reality instructor now. How readily, these days, I fall into the trap of explaining my characters, my motives; how willingly I talk about ideas and controversies, attacks and defences! What book, what body of work could retain the slightest aura of mystery when the author himself shines such a bright light on its origins and meanings, on its darkest places? Why won’t that garrulous author be quiet and let his books speak for themselves?

Well: maybe, at long last, I can. As the storm around The Satanic Verses recedes, it can perhaps, at long last, have the ordinary life of a book, that life which it was denied for so long. Now, at last, people can perhaps read it as a book, and then, I’m sure, some people will hate it, others won’t like it very much, still others will be indifferent to it, while some people may like it a little, or a lot, and some will love it. This is how books live in the world, and if my book can finally manage to live in that way, that will have been well worth fighting for.

© Salman Rushdie, July 2009