felled

I have been felled by a prawn, laid low by the devastating damage that a bad prawn can do, weakened.

Nevertheless, I plod on. Have managed to finish Step Across the Line by Salman Rushdie, in between bouts of wracking pain where my stomach tried to eat itself, and between hours spent in the stalls. So it may have coloured my perception of this work, but let it be said that he attempts (unsuccessfully I think) to eviscerate Naipaul and Coetzee (both Nobel laureates, which of course Rushdie is not) saying that Coetzee's characters lack humanity (which is their strength, in that they are human, and express emotion through action and not through diarrhea) and that Naipaul is a bigot (which to be fair, many Indian writers have in not-so-many-words accused him of being). Which is somewhat beside the point really. Naipaul in turn, eviscerates India, in two of his nonfiction books, India: A Wounded Civilization and India: An Area of Darkness , cf. titles being descriptive of content in this case. However Rushdie does manage to hit a few highlights of his own, particularly in his specialty of 'cultural commingling', of the writer as traveller, as migrant.

Particularly Rushdie is most insightful when he writes about Frontier. The existence of the frontier, whether it is America expanding West, India rebelling against her Raj, whether it is Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations most forcibly expressed in the war between Islam and modernity, changes the imagination. The perception in itself, of there being an as-yet-unseen frontier, changes the perception of what is possible. The frontier exists between what is known and what is not. In that sense, quite obviously, crossing the frontier, stepping across that line, creates an increase in the sense of self, (as Rushdie says). Whether that increase in dimension is good or bad is not yet immediately known, but more is capable. Of course there have been attempted frontier-crossings that have failed, and not everyone can cross it, but for those who do, it represents an increase in human possibility and for that, everyone should be encouraged to step across the line.