Starting with his Midnight's Children, which in its time (in 1980) stirred unanimous admiration, no one in the English-language literary world has denied that Rushdie is one of the most gifted novelists of our day. The Satanic Verses, appearing in English in September 1988, was greeted with the attention due a major writer. The book received these tributes with no anticipation of the storm that was to burst some months later, when the Imam Khomeini, the master of Iran, condemned Rushdie to death for blasphemy and sent killers after him on a chase whose end no one can predict.

That happened before the text could be translated. Thus everywhere except in the English-language world, the scandal arrived before the book. In France, the press immediately printed excerpts from the still unpublished novel to show the reasons for the condemnation. Completely normal behavior, but fatal for a novel. Represented exclusively by its incriminated passages, it was, from the beginning, transformed from a work of art into a simple corpus delicti.

We should not denigrate literary criticism. Nothing is worse for a writer than to come up against its absence. I am speaking of literary criticism as meditation, as analysis; literary criticism that involves several readings of the book it means to discuss (like great pieces of music we can listen to time and again, great novels too are made for repeated readings); literary criticism that, deaf to the implacable clock of topicality, will readily discuss works a year, thirty years, three hundred years old; literary criticism that tries to apprehend the originality of a work in order thus to inscribe it on historical memory. If such meditation did not accompany the history of the novel, we would know nothing today of Dostoyevsky, or Joyce, or Proust. For without it a work is surrendered to completely arbitrary judgments and swift oblivion. Now, the Rushdie case shows (if proof is still needed) that such meditation is no longer practiced. Imperceptibly, innocently, under the pressure of events, through changes in society and in the press, literary criticism has become a mere (often intelligent, always hasty) literary news bulletin.