Sir Salman Rushdie, the renowned and controversial author of “Midnight’s Children” and “The Satanic Verses,” addressed a packed Kresge Auditorium last night in the second-to-last ASSU Speakers Bureau for the academic year.

Rushdie addressed his experiences dealing with religious groups and national governments that opposed the content of his novels. Rushdie famously received a “fatwa” — which has come to be interpreted as a religiously mandated death sentence — from Ayatollah Khomeini in 1988 for “The Satanic Verses.” Both Indian and Pakistani governments have also criticized unfavorable historical details included in his other works.

“One of the things I learned was that memory can be public, if the official memory clashes with the truth of what you remember,” Rushdie said. “Simply the act of saying, ‘I remember this happened’ is a political statement, when those in power say, ‘No, it didn’t.’”

“That kind of conflict of being at odds with the official truth is what happened to ‘The Satanic Verses,’” he added. “It became a conflict about who can tell which stories.”

Rushdie emphasized that freedom of speech goes beyond questions of political rights and addresses fundamental human concerns.

“Human beings, of all the creatures on the earth, are the only creatures who tell stories,” Rushdie said. “We are the species that has developed this curious habit of telling our stories to learn what kind of creatures we are.”

“The attempt to limit or deny or obstruct speech is not just a literature question; it’s an existential question,” he added. “It denies the right to do something natural to ourselves.”

Rushdie also emphasized the need for continued literary engagement in the modern era.

“Literature used to bring the news to people,” Rushdie said. “People would read about things they weren’t aware of, and, if they were, it would heighten their awareness.”

“When you confront the inadequacy of what passes today for news, you begin to feel literature has a place,” he added. “You feel like there might be some more information left to cover.”

Rushdie further assessed the state of modern society, labeling it “surrealistic.”

“The world seems to be going through a particularly surrealistic phase. Through the surface of ordinary life there emerge these outcroppings. I guess you could call them bushes,” he said to laughter from the audience.

Rushdie said that transformations in politics and technology have had great effects upon the perspectives of citizens.

“The great difference between the world in which we live and other times is that the distance between public and private life has shrunk,” Rushdie said. “Public events impinge on our private lives on a daily basis. Actions occur in places we are not, and decisions are made in rooms whose existence we do not suspect.”

In Rushdie’s view, these transformations have significant implications for literature.

“What this does is create a problem for literature,” he said. “At the heart of the novel has always been the idea that our characters are our fates. What I’m suggesting is that more and more, perhaps more than ever before, our lives are shaped by things outside our control.”

“There is a thing in the novel that wants to be provincial and wants to be small, to be intimate,” he added. “It wants to never lose sight of the human scale, but novelists in our time have been forced to do that.”

Rushdie closed his lecture with his conception of the place for literature in a changing world.

“Great art tries to open the universe a little more,” Rushdie said. “Great art increases, by some small amount, what it’s possible to know, do, say and, therefore, to be. And we can’t do that sitting in the middle.

“At a time when politics invades so much the boundaries of ordinary life, going to the frontiers and pushing back is the job,” he added.