Salman Rushdie Vs Jonathan Franzen: Twitter wars of the literary kind

Poor Jonathan Franzen, using an antiquated literary weapon like an essay to fight a modern battle! The American novelist and critic of many things, in his 140-page (ok, not quite that but overly long) essay in the Guardian last week, titled What’s Wrong With the Modern World, took a swipe at, among many other things, the Twitter-happy Salman Rushdie claiming, “I confess to feeling some version of his disappointment when a novelist who I believe ought to have known better, Salman Rushdie, succumbs to Twitter.”

add_main_imageNow, through the ages literary heavyweights have taken a swipe at each other from time to time just to keep everyone interested. Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, whose initial box office successes came through comedies like Every Man In His Humour, which featured Shakespeare in the cast, dismissed his more popular and populist contemporary as having “small Latin and less Greek”. This, despite the fact that the Bard might have been the first to champion Jonson as a writer of any note. There have been other battles: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis sparred on matters of religion, Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre over matters of the heart, and Ernest Hemingway and Wallace Stevens over who could break whose jaw first. But between the delivering of one insult and the response from the other, there has always been a gap—of time and distance.

Not any more though. This is new age warfare where the disparagement is immediate and the response swift. Twitter is the new age battleground and the 140-character tweet the principal weapon of this war. NextMAds

Which is why in response Rushdie promptly turned to Twitter where he advised the American novelist: “Dear #Franzen: @MargaretAtwood @JoyceCarolOates @nycnovel @NathanEnglander @Shteyngart and I are fine with Twitter. Enjoy your ivory tower.” The comment was promptly retweeted by 559 and favourited by 352 of his faithfuls.

As put-downs go that may not be a patch on the sting of “Oh gull, O dolt, As ignorant as dirt”, “lump of foul deformity”, “Thou art a boil, a plague sore” that the Bard pieced into his work. But it will have to do and with Franzen not a Twitter neophyte, Rushdie will have the last laugh. For now.

Meanwhile the owners of this new Kurukshetra are laughing all the way to the bank. Pre-IPO, Twitter is being valued at $10 billion. That’s $10 billion for providing a forum where mature men and women can hurl 140-character invectives, replete with #@!!, at each other!