"The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins"
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Rushdie starts with a demolition job: the world that pretends to be sturdy, self-evident, and morally pre-sorted is already dissolving. By borrowing the famous modernity line "all that is solid melts into air", he plugs fiction into a bigger historical mood - post-empire, post-certainty, post-grand narratives - where identities, borders, and truths feel less like bedrock than like agreements that can be revoked. That’s not just philosophy; it’s a lived political condition, especially for a writer whose career has been shaped by migration, hybridity, and the brutal consequences of contested belief.
The intent is slyly polemical. Rushdie isn’t defending fiction as escapism; he’s framing it as the most honest response to a world built on human-made stories that masquerade as nature. "Reality and morality are not givens" lands as both liberation and warning: if values are constructed, they can be reconstructed, weaponized, or erased. Fiction, then, doesn’t begin in fantasy but in skepticism - the refusal to treat any official version of events as final.
The subtext is also a writer’s manifesto. Rushdie positions the novelist as an expert in instability, someone trained to hold contradictions without resolving them into propaganda. In that light, fiction becomes a civic tool: it rehearses the uncomfortable idea that certainty is often just power speaking in the voice of inevitability.
The intent is slyly polemical. Rushdie isn’t defending fiction as escapism; he’s framing it as the most honest response to a world built on human-made stories that masquerade as nature. "Reality and morality are not givens" lands as both liberation and warning: if values are constructed, they can be reconstructed, weaponized, or erased. Fiction, then, doesn’t begin in fantasy but in skepticism - the refusal to treat any official version of events as final.
The subtext is also a writer’s manifesto. Rushdie positions the novelist as an expert in instability, someone trained to hold contradictions without resolving them into propaganda. In that light, fiction becomes a civic tool: it rehearses the uncomfortable idea that certainty is often just power speaking in the voice of inevitability.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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