A Faustian Contract in Reverse

1. A Faustian Contract in Reverse Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir

2. To write a book is to make a Faustian Contract in Reverse. To gain immortality, or at least posterity, you lose, or at least ruin, your actual daily life.

3. Who is Salman Rushdie? The Man in the Media

9. What is ‘Joseph Anton: A Memoir’? The Motive of the Autobiography

10. The Bitter Rants of a Damaged Man? Martin Rubin of The Washington Times writes “Mr. Rushdie seems to have used this book as an opportunity to rail against anyone — public figures, writers, politicians — he thinks did not give him sufficient support. (To be fair, he also is unequivocal in his praise for those who were staunch.) More unattractively, he is unrelenting in settling scores with ex-wives, publishers and others who let him down. His self-centeredness is astounding”

11. The Bitter Rants of a Damaged Man?

12. A Journalistic Inside Story? • The first of its kind inside scoop of the Tale of the Fatwa. • Based on the daily journals of the man himself. • An omniscient God’s-eye-view of the life of the exiled author. • A Page 3 version of his love-life, perhaps?

13. A Cinematically Styled Literary Noir? • Starting with the imagery of the “Blackbird, Harbinger of Death”. • A Man who has to be hidden away, who has to wear a “whiteface mask”. • An internal disconnect that shows his “picture of the world” as “cracked”. • A “cloak and dagger” lifestyle. • A Story of overwhelming pain, and pain in literature. • A Story of Redemption. • literary equivalent of a director’s commentary track

14. All of the above. And more. • The story of a History’s Patsy • An exercise in drawing meaning from the tumultuous events of an extraordinary life. • It’s about Fundamental Freedoms of a just and humane society. • It’s about the most precious ideas that make us what we are, or can make us what we must be. “Human life was rarely shapely, only intermittently meaningful, its clumsiness the inevitable consequence of the victory of content over form, of what and when over how and why.”

15. The Question of Truth Depicting the Unrealism of Reality

16. The storyteller’s freedom • Autobiographical Pact • However in the case of Joseph Anton, things do not seem that clear. • Rushdie’s various musings on the nature of truth, the role of storytelling in the lives of human beings, and the constructed nature of human identity suggest that this memoir is perhaps not intended to be an entirely straightforward recounting of the truth

17. Storyteller’s freedom "To grow up steeped in these tellings was to learn two unforgettable lessons: first, that stories were not true (there were no “real” genies in bottles or flying carpets or wonderful lamps), but by being untrue they could make him feel and know truths that the truth could not tell him, and second, that they all belonged to him, just as they belonged to his father, Anis, and to everyone else, they were all his, as they were his father’s, bright stories and dark stories, sacred stories and profane, his to alter and renew and discard and pick up again as and when he pleased, his to laugh at and rejoice in and live in and with and by, to give the stories life by loving them and to be given life in return. Man was the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away."

18. Storyteller’s freedom "Enough of invisibility, silence, timidity, defensiveness, guilt! An invisible, silenced man was an empty space into which others could pour their prejudices, their agendas, their wrath. The fight against fanaticism needed visible faces, audible voices. He would be quiet no longer. He would try to become a loud and visible man." • The blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality becomes increasingly intricate when living authors are referred to by name. • Ian McEwan, for example, is cited as one of Rushdie’s literary contemporaries who was part of the unwavering circle of support that helped sustain him throughout his continuing period of “imprisonment”. • Rushdie writes not of his own interactions with these literary men, but of Joseph Anton’s interaction with them.

19. Discovering the self The Others

20. The third person Rushdie told the New York Times in an interview that the first person was too close for a story so personal: “I had always thought that I don’t want this to be a diary or a confessional or a rant […] I realized that one of the things I was really disliking was the first person, this endless ‘I,’ things happening to ‘me,’ and ‘I felt’ and ‘I did’ and ‘people said about me’ and ‘I worried.’ It was just absurdly narcissistic.” Joseph Anton is a novel of overwhelming pain, and pain in literature — more specifically the kind of pain on display here, both excruciating and unconventional — always poses a problem. The best way to display it in a particularly stressful time was to be joined by “a disembodied voice which calmly narrated everything he did in the third person”.

21. Instinct; Not Choice. “He” is what suits him best, as a character that lay claim to nothing more specific or constant than the description provided by that most generic of pronouns. Rushdie’s narrator sits in a privileged position, high above the story and reasonably detached from its unfolding events, describing a character both Rushdie and not, an “invisible man” who, one senses, is too depleted to be able to exist in the first person voice. “He didn’t exist,” Rushdie writes. “Only Joseph Anton existed; and he could not be seen.”

22. The adequate distance, a panoramic scope, an ever-widening field of vision incorporated in the story of Joseph Anton pans out and shows us the whole truth of a scene without making us doubt that truth’s objectivity. Perhaps this grammatical stepping-back, removing himself from the position of the first-person narrator, is the only way for Rushdie to understand and make sense of what happened to him.

23. RUSHDIE “He was the person in the eye of the storm, no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the author of Satanic Verses.”

24. SALMAN “He was a migrant. He was one of those who had ended up in a place that was not the place where he began. Migration tore up all the traditional roots of the self.”

25. JOSEPH “Conrad, the trans-lingual creator of wanderers, lost and not lost, of voyagers into the heart of darkness, of secret agents in a world of killers and bombs, and of at least one immortal coward, hiding from his shame.”

26. ANTON “Chekhov, the master of loneliness and melancholy, of the beauty of an old world destroyed, like the trees in the cherry orchard, by the brutality of the new.”

27. The Language of the story The Literary Grammar and Style of the Text

28. The birth of the language “If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.”  —Songs Don't Know the Score About the Language of Midnight’s Children: “India was not cool. It was hot. It was hot and overcrowded and vulgar and loud and it needed a language to match that and he would try to find that language.”

29. The Language of Rushdie the man, not the novelist “Afterward, when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin.” In Joseph Anton, Rushdie abandons the fanciful, quasi-poetic style that characterizes most of his previous works and writes, instead, in a plain, sober-minded prose that by its severity makes his ordeal more palpable. It is a mixture of internal narration and external description. The memoir is a very calm, almost clinical, sane retelling of a series of insane events, written third person mainly devoted to recounting the events as they happened.

30. Abandoning richness for Frankness The text is almost self-explanatory. The length of the book, and its wealth of quotidian detail, draw the reader into the life that Rushdie was forced to lead, to make his isolation and fear visible. By deliberately removing the richness from his characteristic language, he has allowed the richness of his life to come forth and populate the pages. No linguistic trickery here, no wordplay jugglery of the sort that made The Satanic Verses impenetrable to many readers. "...don't hide behind your fiction. Did it matter if a writer was denuded in this way, stripped of the richness of language? Yes, it did, because beauty struck chords deep within the human heart, beauty opened doors in the spirit. Beauty mattered because beauty was joy and joy was the reason he did what he did, his joy in words and in using them to tell tales, to create worlds, to sing. And beauty, for now, was being treated as a luxury he should do without; as a luxury; as a lie. Ugliness was truth."

31. The Language of Metaphor “He could feel the gremlin of fear stalking him, the bat winged fear monster sitting on his shoulder nibbling eagerly at his neck. He imagined himself trapping the gremlins in a small box and putting the locked box in a corner of the room. Once that was done, and sometimes it had to be done more than once a day, it was possible to proceed.” Rushdie follows Anton with a tightness native to fiction, but the language used is the language of documentary: it is the language of metaphor.

32. memoirist’s tools Rushdie uses a memoirist’s tools: scene and exposition, seamlessly in the dramatized bits, and in the purely expository, smooth summary and reflection. “ The night in Lonsdale Square was cold, dark, and clear. There were two policemen in the square. When he got out of his car, they pretended not to notice him. They were on short patrol, watching the street near the flat for a hundred yards in each direction, and he could hear their footsteps even when he was indoors. He realized, in that footstep-haunted space, that he no longer understood his life, or what it might become, and he thought, for the second time that day, that there might not be very much more of life to understand.”

33. Exploring the Theme Love, Shame, Loyalty, Religion.

34. Shame “At the poles of the Muslim culture’s moral axis were honor and shame, very different from the Christian narrative of guilt and redemption. He came from that culture even though he was not religious, and had been raised to care deeply about questions of pride.”

35. shame “To skulk and hide was to lead a dishonorable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. And it was ‘Shame’ that he felt when he had to hide himself as a coward and a clown, hiding from a sheep farmer behind a kitchen dresser in Wales, shutting himself into bathrooms in north London to avoid a plumber or a cleaner and it was ‘shame’ that turned him shabby and overweight, and made him go smoking, at times drinking too much and quarrelling with his wives.”

36. Love “He would make his life as far away from his father as he could, that he would put oceans between them and keep them there.” “They were loving days, a kind of return to innocence. He had agreed with himself to un-know all the bad things, the overheard parental quarrels and the drunken abuse.”

37. Loves of his life • Salman Rushdie portrays two of his wives as angelic: Clarissa and Elizabeth are portrayed as kind and sympathetic who supported him during his hiding. “Marianne was a liar who jeopardized his security, while his relationship with Padma Lakshmi was like a disillusioned youthful dreams.”  Clarissa, ‘the first woman he had ever loved’ and he describes Elizabeth as the one who “was giving him so much and he could give her very little.” On the other hand, he portrays the other two wives as villains.

38. The apple of his eye • “The agony of simply being unable to rush to your son even when you fear his life is in danger.” • “At first the book was called Zafar and the Sea of Stories, but he soon felt the need to place a little distance between the boy in the book and the one in the bath.”

39. LOYALTY • Coming to friends and foes, Salman Rushdie was neither ‘Forgetful’ nor ‘Forgiving’. ‘Elective Affinities are as important as family as they are the family we choose not to inherit’.

40. Protection Team “There a re high-level negotiations taking place on your behalf . And then there are the Lebanon hostages to consider and Mr. Roger Cooper in jail in Tehran. Their situation is worse than yours.” “Threatening a British citizen. It’s not on. It’ll get sorted. You just need to lie low for a couple of days and let the politicians sort it out.”

41. Religion.

44. The treatment of Time Relativistic Dilation

45. Relativistic dilation of time • Rushing through the early days of being a writer, painfully slow during the years of exile and renew pace after return to normalcy. • The treatment with time forces the reader to appreciate how these ten years have proven to be longer for the man than all the other 45 years put together. • But for the occasional flashbacks, flash-forwards, vignettes of interactions, half-forgotten memories of another times, the narration remains fairly linear. After completing “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” he promised himself “no more 250,000-word monsters. Shorter books, more often,” but “then he got to work on his memoir, and realized that he had fallen off the wagon.” Sometimes longer is better, and this is one of those times.

46. Relativistic dilation of time • His imprisonment is not comfortable, his life fails to retain any semblance of normality, and he continues to be haunted by the proximity of his execution. • He has not succumbed to his death sentence and yet he is confined to a reality that his peers, friends, and family cannot enter: an experience that they cannot understand. • He is caught between the past and the future.

47. Magic Realism The Genius of the Storyteller

48. Salman Rushdie’s fiction celebrates levity, a tantalisation of existing reality or the deconstruction of reality. ‘Joseph Anton’ is an attempt at ground zero rooted to gravity, of a phase of stark reality in his life. A phase where he encounters the darkest of evils and discovers for himself and all else who will hear his story a shield of protection. The entire episode appears fantastical to a reader leading a mundane, routine life. Therein lies the magic realism of Joseph Anton! Salman Rushdie’s fiction celebrates levity, a tantalisation of existing reality or the deconstruction of reality. ‘Joseph Anton’ is an attempt at ground zero rooted to gravity, of a phase of stark reality in his life. But the entire episode appears fantastical to a reader leading a mundane, routine life. Therein lies the magic realism of Joseph Anton!

49. Thank You • Vikram Kumar Goyal (09010167) • NipunSareen (09010334) • DoshiParamJayesh (09010415) • Minakhi Prasad Misra (09010435) • AbhinandaDilip (09010457) • VoletiSaiRashmi (09010640) • SintuRongpipi (09010743) • ShreyasNangalia (09012227)

50. References • Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 2012 • Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 1981 • Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 1988 • Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life, 2010 • Henry Giardana, “Joseph Anton”: Memoir as Noir, 2012 • Jonathan Yardley, ‘Joseph Anton: A Memoir’ by Salman Rushdie, 2012 • Martin Rubin, BOOK REVIEW: Joseph Anton, 2012 • BBC Imagine, The Fatwa: Salman’s Story, 2012