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Salman Rushdie, Biography, and Autobiography

Pavan Kumar Malreddy

In a moment of insufferable encounter with his own disjointed self, the

protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton () loathes what he sees
in the mirror:
His habitual daily attire was tracksuit trousers and a sweatshirt. The trousers
were often green and the sweatshirt maroon. His hair was too long and his
beard too shaggy. To dress like this was to say, I am letting myself go. I am
not a person to take seriously. I am just some slob. [. . .] He should have sat
at his desk like Scott Fitzgerald in his Brooks Brothers suit, or Borges,
nattily turned out in a stiff collar and cuff-linked shirt. [. . .] It was time to
take himself in hand. He was going into battle and his armour needed to
shine.
This passage is a befitting opening to any life narrative on Salman Rushdie
not only because it captures the most essential tropes of the autobiograph-
ical genre, but also for the effect it aims to achieve on the reader by way of
executing these tropes. To begin with, the narrator, the author, the mirror,
Joseph Anton–the memoir, and Joseph Anton–the subject are all deflec-
tions of one and the same autobiographical persona who bears the name
Salman Rushdie. And as if complicating this cascading gaze upon the
presumed singularity of the autobiographical subject, the protagonist in
Joseph Anton reveals a core biographical element of his much-celebrated
novel: ‘the original opening sentence of Midnight’s Children had been
“Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence”’. In such
a formulation, the autobiographical subject abruptly breaks asunder into
presence and absence, or as Rushdie describes in his preface to Joseph
Anton, into the demonized Rushdie that the world has come to know in
the wake of the fatwa – the death sentence issued by Iranian leader
Ayatollah Khomeini in response to the perceived abuse of Islam in The
Satanic Verses () – and the private Salman whose life presumably took
place in the former’s absence. The central aim of Joseph Anton, as it were, is


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to reveal this private Salman to the world, thereby tapering off the publicly
debased image of Rushdie. In that sense, Rushdie’s autobiography does not
fundamentally deviate from the formative aspects of traditional autobiog-
raphy. The clothing metaphor cited above serves as an allegorical confes-
sion: Joseph Anton does not like the way his bodily self is dressed, therefore
he indulges in imaginary re-fashioning by re-dressing himself in the way he
wishes to be seen in the world. This implied makeover of one and the same
self – the fictive corporeal entity called Joseph Anton – expounds the auto/
biographical pact by threading the text into textiles to uncover a version of
the self hidden from the public gaze: ‘Maybe his sentences would have
been better if he had taken more care of his appearance.’ If ‘sentences’
were no more than ‘appearances’ of a given subject, then dressing, undres-
sing, and re-dressing the self through text, as Paul de Man holds in his
influential essay, is a central tenet of the autobiographical genre.
This chapter is an attempt at unravelling the rhetorical guises that
unhinge the literary formulations of the mind and the body, the evident
and the absent, text and subject in Rushdie’s Joseph Anton. In particular, it
focuses on four formative aspects of narrating life that merit closer atten-
tion, namely the autobiographical Bildungsroman, the intersections of
biography and autobiography and their implications for objectivity, cor-
rective and empathic narration through recuperation of an absent self, and
finally, self-canonization. Although marketed as a ‘memoir’, Joseph Anton
unfolds in the tradition of the Bildungsroman, with a strong emphasis on
his childhood struggles to his ‘coming of age’ as a writer and secular
thinker. Curiously, Rushdie repeatedly refused to authorize an official
biography as ‘he didn’t want his private life exposed [. . .] if the time came
when the story was ready to be told, he wanted to be the one to do it’.
This says as much about the biographical thrust in his memoir – that his
life could be best narrated by him – as his desire to reveal his private life to
the world as the life of his absent self. The use of third-person narration in
Joseph Anton not only encroaches upon the biographical genre, but in
doing so, it lends both authority and legitimacy to its author to issue a
corrective narrative of his misrepresented self. As part of such corrective
narration, Rushdie indulges in self-canonization by positioning himself in
the literary fraternity of his times.
If biography is a set genre, then autobiography is, as Tobias Döring puts
it, a ‘threshold genre’. Hermione Lee likens biography to a ‘forensic
process’. Despite its commitment to tracing, investigating, and corrobo-
rating facts on a biographical subject’s life events, biography’s penchant for
‘truthful transmission of personality’ is perhaps as vexatious as
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autobiography’s claim to disambiguate the split or splintered self. Writing
life on the basis of facts alone is certainly limiting, given that facts are
extraneous to inner life, and they do not do justice to the lived experi-
ences – be they affective, aesthetic, intellectual, or reflective – of the
biographical subject. Hence, the biographer’s two-fold task, as stipulated
by Lytton Strachey, is to maintain ‘brevity’ and a ‘point of view’ that is
unique to biography, as they face the same representational impasses that
are endemic to the fictionality of autobiography: the process of selecting,
editing, processing, and troping life, which is often coloured by the
author’s own artistic and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as their sociocultural
habitus. In W. J. Weatherby’s biography Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to
Death, for instance, an otherwise mundane detail of its subject’s life
becomes a matter of cultural judgment:
If he had been deliberately looking for a woman who was easily recognizable
as English and represented many popular English characters, he could have
hardly done better. Tall, slim, articulate and attractive, Clarissa Luard was
one of those upper-class English women.. . . It was not long before Salman
and Clarissa were carrying on a secret affair, and finally they moved in
together and were married in . They both wanted children and soon a
son was born. They named him Zafar.
Despite the ‘brevity’ of the biographical information conveyed in this
remark, by reducing the decade-long history (from Rushdie’s first meeting
with Clarissa Luard in  to the birth of Zafar in ) to the temporal
adverb ‘soon’, the ‘biographer’s point of view’ misses the mark by a mile.
Instead of achieving ‘a truthful transmission of personality’, the biogra-
pher’s own cultural sensibilities – being a product of British class society –
colour the accentuation of the racial difference between Salman Rushdie
and Clarissa Luard. The seemingly vaunted, if not predictable move of the
migrant non-English writer desiring a woman akin to ‘the most popular of
English characters’ barely registers any attention in Rushdie’s own account
of the events in Joseph Anton. Instead, the autobiographical version focuses
solely on the familial tragedy, the suicide of Luard’s father and the
alcoholism of her mother, which he further rhetorizes through tropes that
showcase the author’s literary cultural capital: ‘She bore the name of
Samuel Richardson’s tragic heroine and had been educated, in part, at
Harlow Tech. Clarissa from Harlow, strange echo of Clarissa Harlowe,
another suicide in her ambit, this one fictional; another echo to be feared
and blotted out by the dazzle of her smile.’ A similar collision of
perspectives can be found between the semi/biographical documentaries
based on the fatwa. Premiered at the onset of Joseph Anton’s publication,
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BBC Imagine’s semi-biographical documentary ‘The Fatwa – Salman’s
Story’ () closely follows the script of the memoir, charting Rushdie’s
trials and tribulations during the fatwa years, and his ultimate victory in
the fight for secularism and freedom of speech. Its complicity with Joseph
Anton is made all the more evident by featuring Rushdie and his family as
the narrators of the documentary, which, among others, also includes
commentaries by his inner circle – Ian McEwan, Paul Auster, and
Andrew Wylie. Another biographical film, The Satanic Verses  Years
On (), offers a significantly altered perspective of the events.
Directed and produced by Steven Grandison, featuring Mobeen Azhar –
a British Pakistani citizen – as the lead presenter, the documentary goes to
the heart of the Muslim community in Bradford, which had allegedly been
involved in the infamous public burning of The Satanic Verses on a cross,
some thirty years earlier. Unlike Joseph Anton and the Imagine series
documentary, Grandison’s documentary places at its heart Rushdie’s
antagonists, the leaders of the Bradford Council of Mosques, who see
the book neither as a contender nor defender of secularism, but as playing
into the existing Islamophobia of the s and further exacerbating the
anti-Muslim sentiments in Britain. The documentary reveals that, like
Rushdie’s championing of the freedom of speech and secular values,
Bradford Muslims, too, rose up to protect the freedom of religious faith,
championing the secularization of blasphemy laws – as only Christian
blasphemy laws were recognized in England up until that point – and
restoration of dignity for an already marginalized community whose status
was further maligned by the arrival of a book that perceivably depicts their
religion as a collection of demonic utterances. A productive outcome of
this para-biographical documentary has been the perspective of a commu-
nity that seemingly hijacked the affair to draw attention to their margin-
alization rather than a poisonous hatred for Rushdie’s book, as its author
repeatedly proclaims in Joseph Anton.
Seen through the conflicting perspectives of biography’s putative objec-
tivity and its quest for ‘truthful narration’ of the subject’s life, it becomes
evident that the biographer’s ‘point of view’ cannot resolve the complex-
ities and contradictions arising from narrating life as such. Each ‘point of
view’, as the above examples demonstrate, is predisposed to a perceived
version of the ‘truth’ of the events that occurred during the fatwa years,
and the sources the authors chose to consult, and the characters they
selected to focus on in the process of biographical assemblage. The genre
of autobiography, too, is subject to the same challenges of tropological
substitutions and representational limits. As Paul de Man writes, while the
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authors of autobiography are insistent upon naming and framing the
events of their life as part of a reality, and are fully aware of ‘the tropolog-
ical’ constitution of the latter, ‘they are equally eager to escape from the
coercions of this system. Writers of autobiographies as well as writers on
autobiography are obsessed by the need to move from cognition to
resolution and to action, from speculative to political and legal author-
ity.’ It is this very obsession with factual and active authority that brings
the relationship between biography and autobiography to an anti-climactic
end, blurring the perceived generic distinction between cognition and
resolution, speculation and action. This becomes all the more evident
when the autobiographies employ biographical devices, such as the third-
person heterodiegetic narration of Joseph Anton.
Corresponding to this binary logic of cognition and resolution, specu-
lation and action, autobiography is generically characterized by a Cartesian
split between body and mind, private and public, evident and absent. It is
also further characterized by Platonic traits of self-knowledge – an indi-
viduality that is assertive and complete, fully knowable by means of
speculation, reflection, and confession. The latter has indeed been the
genesis of the autobiographical genre, with its beginnings in St Augustine’s
Confessions (c. – ), to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions
(), which sought to redeem the buried, private, absent, or even
suppressed self as a set of cathartic confessions to God or, respectively, to
the autobiographical subject itself. In Joseph Anton, the protagonist
indulges in a meta-autobiographical moment by invoking Rousseau’s
treatise in order to legitimize his own autobiography as an honest and
‘truthful’ account, as if the factual ‘objectivity’ vested in biography bars
human fallibility:
Doris Lessing was writing her memoirs and called to discuss them.
Rousseau’s way, she said, was the only way; you just had to tell the truth,
to tell as much truth as possible. ‘But scruples and hesitations were
inevitable.’ [. . .] ‘I do think of Rousseau,’ she added, ‘and I hope this book
is an emotionally honest work, but is it fair to be honest about other
people’s emotions?’
As if heeding Lessing’s caveat on the integrity of protecting other people’s
emotions, Rushdie goes on to naturalize ‘scruples and hesitations’ as
‘inevitable’ parts of autobiography, so long as they tell ‘as much truth as
possible’. Such trite formulations of truth, or a rhetorical commitment to
truth in autobiography, as Shari Benstock observes, lead to the reinforcing
of ego, and the construction of ‘unity and identity across time’ at the
expense of the split subject – that is, the subject privy to the private,
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autobiographical self and the public, socially constructed subject. Against
the possibility of disintegration, the autobiographical subject ‘denies the
very effects of having internalized the alienating world order’. This,
according to Martin Danahay, results in ‘monologism’ and ‘the repression
of social construction of subjectivity’, as typically manifested in the
Victorian autobiographies that toy with the idea of a double but fail to
concede ‘the image is another “myself”, a double of my being but more
fragile and vulnerable, invested with a sacred character that makes it at
once fascinating and frightening’. In Rushdie’s case, the fascination and
fright become evident in his repeated engagement with the social and
public perception of his persona, his appearance, and his character, that he
is ugly, arrogant, ungrateful, and unlikable. On every occasion that he
invokes negative public perceptions of himself, the narrator of Joseph Anton
unfailingly provides a defence: ‘Suddenly the paper understood that his
“aloof, arrogant, sinister hoodlum’s gaze” was just the product of a dete-
riorating eyelid condition. He looked “revitalized, reborn,” said the article.
“How the eyes deceive.”’
The shift from the public perception to the physical condition may well
be symbolic of the split subjectivity of the autobiographical persona, but
the effect is – at least in the case of Joseph Anton – always ‘monological’,
one that is aimed at flattening out the negative public perception by virtue
of the author’s intellectual prowess to traverse, if not transcend, the very
split. Given these unresolved tensions between narrating the socially con-
structed self and a buried, private ‘second-self’, it is befitting to conclude
that Joseph Anton is part of a generically transgressive genre. As Tobias
Döring writes in a reading of Edward Said’s work, autobiography ‘traces
and crosses boundaries between fact and fiction, memory and history,
selves and others, images and texts sometimes drawing these distinctions,
but more often blurring them’. How an author furnishes factual and
fictional properties clothed in rhetorical devices is contingent upon the
autobiographer’s inclination to reposition himself with a specific reader-
ship in mind. Equally, the ground between biography and autobiography
becomes a blurry turf, especially when Rushdie has decisively thwarted all
approaches and attempts at writing his official biography.
There exists a symbiotic relationship between autobiography and
Bildungsroman as both genres deal with a certain achieved selfhood from,
or a celebratory moment of, a life from which something leaks out into the
world as a value, a moral resolution, or a lesson to be learned. As
Summerfield and Downward note, the ‘typical Bildungsroman traces the
progress of a young person towards a self-understanding as well as a sense
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of social responsibility’. There are, however, noticeable differences
between the two: ‘Bildungsroman has universality, which autobiography
does not, in that, as it follows a representative youth, this individual
becomes type and his experiences become symbols.’ Joseph Anton is
characterized by a seamless blend of both these generic traits wherein
Rushdie’s use of the third person mimics the Bildungsroman’s rhetorical
separation of the author from the protagonist. In tune with
Bildungsroman’s quest for self-education and understanding, the opening
chapters of Joseph Anton follow a chronological progression – as does W. J.
Weatherby’s biography – of the yet-to-be birth of ‘Joseph Anton’ into a
liberal Muslim family in Mumbai, his ‘coming of age’ in the larger social
milieu, his intellectual tutelage under his alcoholic father, his inability to
find his feet at Rugby School in Warwickshire, his ‘pleasant’ years at
Cambridge where he finds his call for storytelling, the birth of The
Satanic Verses, the pronouncement of the fatwa, and finally, his life
underground. The opening page of Joseph Anton itself anticipates this
Bildungsroman moment, which fittingly attributes his curiosity for stories
to his father’s bedtime stories: ‘THE GREAT wonder tales of the East
[. . .] the stories of Scheherazade from the Thousand and One Nights, stories
told against death to prove the ability of stories to civilise and overcome
even the most murderous of tyrants; and the animal fables of the
Panchatantra; and the marvels that poured like a waterfall from the
Kathasaritsagara’. This autobiographical moment is commensurate with
Bildungsroman’s penchant for symbolic enunciation of universal experi-
ence, as summed up in the narrator’s follow-up remark: ‘Man was the
storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to
understand what kind of creature it was.’
Chiming with Bildungsroman’s tradition wherein a ‘“buried” self is
being excavated and established against the adverse circumstances of a life
imposed on him by parents, social convention and history’, Joseph Anton
sums up his early youth as triply displaced. This migrant metaphor, as
Beatriz Penas-Ibáñez observes, becomes an expression of ‘frontier crossing’
in Rushdie’s autobiography. Correspondingly, the generic transgression
from first- to third-person narration in Joseph Anton could be best
described as just another ‘frontier crossing’ which produces a ‘perspectival
positional shift . . . casting the clandestine part of his existence aside and
surfacing in order to recover his writer’s name and reputation in a renewed
form’.
According to Philippe Lejeune, the use of the third person may even
have an enunciating effect in the text as if the author is ‘merely speaking of
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himself as if he were another’. However, such enunciation ‘slips easily
from quoting the discourse of the interested party to miming a biograph-
ical discourse. There is in any event a broad overlapping zone, the
autobiographical text itself often already being a translation of biography
into the first person.’ Against his own aesthetic instinct about the illusion
of objectivity in autobiography – as expressed, for instance, through
Saleem Sinai’s concession in Midnight’s Children () that ‘what actually
happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade
his audience to believe’ – Rushdie nonetheless takes his own make-
believe attempt at truth-telling via a third-person narrative rather seriously.
For instance, in defence of the accusations made by one of his security
team members, Rushdie’s narrator testifies:
The driver was not the only liar. Perhaps the most unfair of the defamations
levelled against him was that he was ‘ungrateful’ for what was being done
for him [. . .]. The fact was that of course he was grateful, he was grateful
every day for nine years, and he said so repeatedly to anyone who would
listen. The men who guarded him and became his friends, and those of his
friends who were ‘inside the circle’, all knew the truth.
While the third-person narration above enables the rhetorical distancing
necessary for the objective claims of a biography, such claims are further
legitimized, if not vouched for, by the author/narrator/protagonist in
question and by the supply of information in the autobiographical
domain. In other words, the reader is made well aware of the fact that
Joseph Anton and Salman Rushdie are one and the same person prior to
any such truth claims made, largely because the omission of autobiograph-
ical details – if not in the first person but in the second person – becomes
impossible in a treatise as complex and transgressive as Joseph Anton: ‘The
demonstrators carried signs saying RUSHDIE, YOU ARE DEAD.’
This ‘overlapping zone’ of biography and autobiography, second person
and third person, and intradiegetic and extradiegetic narration is a signa-
ture theme of Joseph Anton that, according to critics, colours the text with a
layer of ‘emotional’ and ‘empathic’ elements, resulting in a cumulative
effect of incontrovertible truths. According to Penas-Ibáñez, this very
hybrid configuration turns the third-person ‘narrator of Joseph Anton [into]
the role of the parrhèsiastes by telling the truth’.
In effect, the third-person narration in Joseph Anton unfolds itself as a
powerful fictional device to recuperate the buried self, which, in conjunc-
tion with the public perception of the author, produces a monological
discourse of truth by seamlessly merging his two selves – the private and
the public. For instance, soon after Joseph Anton’s attempts to redeem
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himself from the ‘tragic misunderstanding’ in front of a jury of six Muslim
judges in London on Christmas Eve of , where he had consented to
sign a document stating that he was part of a ‘Muslim intelligentsia’, the
narrator introspects:
He had survived this long because he could put his hand on his heart and
defend every word he had written or said. He had written seriously and with
integrity and everything he had said about that had been the truth. Now he
had torn his tongue out of his own mouth, had denied himself the ability to
use the language and ideas that were natural to him. Until this moment he had
been accused of a crime against the beliefs of others. Now he accused himself,
and found himself guilty, of having committed a crime against himself.
Again, the persistent urge to correct the public perception of him through
a recovery of the private self in the third person invites ‘the reader in to
commiserate on the function and effect of this act of concealment’. At
the same time, it ‘represents the struggle against Rushdie’s desire to uphold
his reputation as a respected author without falling into the trap of
egocentrism’.
However, other critics have reacted rather strongly to the egocentrism of
Rushdie in Joseph Anton, particularly to his attempts to ennoble his literary
persona by naming, name-dropping, or frequently invoking his association
with the literary fraternity of his era, including Harold Pinter, Günter
Grass, Nadine Gordimer, Angela Carter, among others. But a better part
of Rushdie’s self-canonization takes place through a careful self-fashioning
of his persona as the harbinger of liberal secular thought, or in the tradition
of Marxist humanist poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whom Rushdie invokes, ‘to be
both public and private, an arbiter both of society and of the human
heart’. Rushdie persistently compares his own exilic condition with
Voltaire and Galileo, among other figures, and positions himself and his
life in exile in the league of the radical European canon.
This filial narration assumes greater value in autobiography than in
biography, as biographers are ill-equipped to draw on affective associations
and affiliations privy to their subjects’ inner lives. As Charlie Wesley
observes, the third-person narration here finds a renewed purpose: ‘The
distance implied in the use of the third person singular throughout the text
suggests a distance from this person from the perspective of the present,
and yet it also suggests a self-fashioning narrative drive to emphasize this
self over all others.’ Such narrative drive to superimpose oneself over all
others fulfils the construction of a singular and monological self that is
formulaic to the biographical project. In doing so, Joseph Anton thwarts the
possibility of a biography outside the autobiographer’s purview.
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The self-canonization of Rushdie is not solely confined to his compar-
isons, or his own positioning in the milieu of the canonical writers of his
era, but there is also something distinctly autobiographical as well as
Bildungsroman-like about it, for it goes to the core of the subject’s
childhood, familial values, and his name. He reflects, for instance, on
how his father invented the family name Rushdie after the secular
Islamic thinker Ibn Rushd:
From beyond the grave his father had given him the flag under which he
was ready to fight, the flag of Ibn Rushd, which stood for intellect,
argument, analysis and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning
from the shackles of theology [. . .] if you were going to fight it, be called
‘Rushdie’ and stand where your father had placed you.
The seeds of secularism sowed in an Indian Muslim family – which
Rushdie regards as his father’s ‘second great gift to his children: that of
an apparently fearless scepticism, accompanied by an almost total freedom
from religion’ – would reap their fruits, as it were, in his adulthood.
From his humble beginnings in a secular Muslim family, which Rushdie
attributes to the influence of canonical figures like ‘the grand Aristotelian,
Averroës, Abdul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd’, the narrator
of Joseph Anton takes the reader to his student days at Cambridge, as if
invoking the authority vested in a canonical secular institution. In his
biography, Weatherby attributes Rushdie’s ‘heretical’ influence to a paper
he took on ‘Muhammad, the rise of Islam and the early caliphate’ as part of
his honours exam at Cambridge. As if correcting Weatherby’s framing of
his radical secularist learnings at Cambridge as ‘heresy’, in the BBC
Imagine documentary Rushdie revisits the Cambridge polymath figure
Arthur Hibbert, who had evidently planted not just the idea but the
method for writing The Satanic Verses in his mind, some forty years ago.
In Joseph Anton, Rushdie recounts this incident almost identically, that
the idea for The Satanic Verses was born out of his tutelage under Arthur
Hibbert from whom he got
a piece of advice he never forgot. ‘You must never write history,’ Hibbert
said, ‘until you can hear the people speak.’ He thought about that for years,
and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as
well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them
well enough, and so you couldn’t – you shouldn’t – tell their story.
Here, Rushdie’s equation of fictional writing with historiographical
methods takes its authority from a prominent secular scholar with a
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Salman Rushdie, Biography, and Autobiography 

pedigree in ‘ecclesiastical history, and the Enlightenment’. During his
revisit to Cambridge, Rushdie enters the house of Hibbert and ruminates
on the priceless advice he got from him in , to which a seemingly
delighted Hibbert responds, ‘I recognize that.’
Not only does Rushdie present Hibbert’s remark as a testimony to the
secular origins of The Satanic Verses, but in doing so, Rushdie writes
himself into the pantheon of Cambridge’s intellectual canon. Given that
the Cambridge encounter is central to all the three auto/biographical
narratives – W. J. Weatherby’s biography, the BBC’s Imagine documen-
tary, and post-facto ruminations on the same set of events in Joseph
Anton – Rushdie’s account merely adds an affective dimension to the
convergence of facts in the two other narratives.
Although Joseph Anton is variedly characterized as memoir, autobiogra-
phy, or testimony, the convergence of various generic devices within
Rushdie’s text – not least of which are the arrogation and appropriation
of biographical devices, its tactful deployments of affective tropes, ebullient
prose, and adornment of facts with anecdotes privy to the author –
culminates in a narrative that exerts greater authority over truth claims
than a putatively objective biography. In a sense, by encroaching upon
biographical literary properties such as narrative mode, fact-checking,
correcting, corroborating, and producing an empathetic ensemble of
‘real-life’ events, Rushdie both forecloses his biographical narrative and
forestalls the possibility of another biographical narrative. This leads to
what Charlie Wesley has remarked as the enfashioning of a ‘narrative that
emphasizes particular parts of the writer’s personality and life story while
minimizing others’. It thus delegitimizes any biographical narrative that
falls outside Rushdie’s autobiographical frame, as, for instance, Steven
Grandison’s semi-biographical documentary, which goes to the core of
the Muslim communities’ literal interpretations of Islam and the events
fictionalized in The Satanic Verses. This has led critics to accuse Rushdie of
intellectual elitism, which shuns literal worlds within which communities
of faith develop their own literary readings. Commenting on this aporia in
Joseph Anton, Stephen Morton has charged Rushdie with failing to heed
the advice of his Cambridge mentor Arthur Hibbert – ‘to hear the people
speak’ – as he repeatedly valorizes, dismisses, and pathologizes the voices of
Muslims as anti-secular. Joseph Anton, in that sense, is a redesigned self in
which Rushdie ‘hears’, as it were, only what other people say about him –
be that about his appearance, character, or intentions – such as in the
 Pakistani film International Gorillay:
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   

Rushdie was dressed exclusively in a series of hideously coloured safari
suits – vermilion safari suits, aubergine safari suits, cerise safari suits – and
the camera, whenever it fell upon the figure of this vile personage, invariably
started at his feet and then panned with slow menace up to his face. So the
safari suits got a lot of screen time, and when he saw a videotape of the film
the fashion insult wounded him deeply.
And if text and sentences were indeed no more than ‘appearances’ of one’s
real self, Rushdie’s autobiographical text could be best described as a self-
fashioning textile that threads into the literary canvas of his era.

Notes
 Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (; London: Vintage, ), .
 The undercover name was drawn from the first names of Joseph Conrad and
Anton Chekov.
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Ibid., .
 Paul de Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, MLN (): –, –.
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Tobias Döring, ‘Edward Said and the Fiction of Autobiography’, Wasafiri ,
no.  (): –, .
 Hermione Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, ), .
 Sidney Lee cited in Ray Monk, ‘Life Without Theory: Biography as an
Exemplar of Philosophical Understanding’, Poetics Today , no.  ():
–, .
 Lytton Strachey cited in ibid., .
 W. J. Weatherby, Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death (New York: Carroll and
Graf, ), .
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 See ibid., .
 De Man, ‘Autobiography as De-facement’, .
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Shari Benstock, ‘Authorizing the Autobiographical’, in The Private Self:
Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari
Benstock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ), –, .
 Ibid.
 Martin A. Danahay, Community of One: A Masculine Autobiography and
Autonomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Albany: State University of New
York Press, ), .
 Georges Gusdorf cited in ibid.
 See Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Ibid., .
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Salman Rushdie, Biography, and Autobiography 

 Döring, ‘Edward Said’, .
 Giovanna Summerfield and Lisa Downward, New Perspectives on the European
Bildungsroman (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, ), .
 Ibid.
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Ibid.
 Döring, ‘Edward Said’, .
 Beatriz Penas-Ibáñez, ‘Empathy as Migration in Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman
Rushdie’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies , no.  (): –, .
 Philippe Lejeune, ‘Autobiography in the Third Person’, New Literary History
, no.  (): –, .
 Ibid. (italics added).
 Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (; London: Vintage, ), .
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton,  (italics added).
 Ibid., .
 See Grzegorz Szpila, ‘Betrayed Sentiments: Joseph Anton and the Phraseology
of Emotional Representation’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature , no. 
(): –; Anna Maria Tomczak, ‘Rushdie Affair Revisited’, Crossroads:
A Journal of English Studies , no.  (): –.
 Penas-Ibáñez, ‘Empathy as Migration’, .
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Jaclyn Partyka, ‘Joseph Anton’s Digital Doppelgänger: Salman Rushdie and the
Rhetoric of Self-Fashioning’, Contemporary Literature , no.  ():
–, .
 Ibid.
 See Charlie Wesley, ‘Salman Rushdie’s Authorial Self-Fashioning in Joseph Anton’,
Journal of Commonwealth Literature , no.  (): –; Daniel O’Gorman,
‘“Dark Newnesses”: The Failures of Joseph Anton’, Journal of Commonwealth
Literature , no.  (): –.
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Ibid., .
 Wesley, ‘Authorial Self-Fashioning’, .
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Ibid., .
 Ibid., .
 Weatherby, Salman Rushdie, ; see also Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .
 Ibid., .
 Steven Grandison (dir.), The Satanic Verses  Years On (BBC Two, ),
m:s.
 Wesley, ‘Authorial Self-Fashioning’, .
 Stephen Morton, ‘Secularism and the Death and Return of the Author:
Rereading the Rushdie Affair after Joseph Anton’, Journal of Commonwealth
Literature , no.  (): –, .
 Rushdie, Joseph Anton, .