Transcript A Faustian Contract in Reverse

A
FAUSTIAN CONTRACT
IN REVERSE
Salman Rushdie’s
Joseph Anton: A Memoir
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.
WHO IS SALMAN RUSHDIE?
The Man in the Media
WHAT IS
‘JOSEPH ANTON: A MEMOIR’?
The Motive of the
Autobiography
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”
THE BITTER RANTS OF A DAMAGED MAN?
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?
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
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.”
THE QUESTION OF TRUTH
Depicting the
Unrealism of Reality
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
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."
STORYTELLER’S FREEDOM
• 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.
"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."
DISCOVERING THE SELF
The Others
THE THIRD PERSON
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”.
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.”
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.”
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 steppingback, 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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
THE LANGUAGE OF THE STORY
The Literary Grammar
and Style of the Text
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.”
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.
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."
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.
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.”
EXPLORING THE THEME
Love, Shame,
Loyalty, Religion.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
“Marianne was a liar who
jeopardized his security, while
his relationship with Padma
Lakshmi was like a
disillusioned youthful dreams.”
On the other hand, he
portrays the other two wives
as villains.
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.”
LOYALTY
‘Elective Affinities are as
important as family as they
are the family we choose not
to inherit’.
Coming to friends and
foes, Salman Rushdie was
neither ‘Forgetful’ nor
‘Forgiving’.
PROTECTION TEAM
“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.”
“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.”
RELIGION.
THE TREATMENT OF TIME
Relativistic Dilation
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.
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.
MAGIC REALISM
The Genius of
the Storyteller
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
Salman
Rushdie’s fiction celebrates levity, a
encounters the darkest of
evils and
discovers for himself andtantalisation
all else whoof existing reality or the
deconstruction
of reality. ‘Joseph Anton’ is an
will hear his story a shield
of
attemptappears
at ground zero rooted to gravity, of a
protection. The entire episode
phase ofa stark reality in his life. But the entire
fantastical to a reader leading
episode
fantastical to a reader
mundane, routine life. Therein
liesappears
the
magic realism of Josephleading
Anton! a mundane, routine life. Therein lies the
magic realism of Joseph Anton!
THANK YOU
Vikram Kumar Goyal
(09010167)
Nipun Sareen
(09010334)
Doshi Param Jayesh
(09010415)
Minakhi Prasad Misra
(09010435)
Abhinanda Dilip
(09010457)
Voleti Sai Rashmi
(09010640)
Sintu Rongpipi
(09010743)
Shreyas Nangalia
(09012227)
REFERENCES
1.
Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 2012
2.
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 1981
3.
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 1988
4.
Salman Rushdie, Luka and the Fire of Life, 2010
5.
Henry Giardana, “Joseph Anton”: Memoir as Noir, 2012
6.
Jonathan Yardley, ‘Joseph Anton: A Memoir’ by Salman Rushdie,
2012
7.
Martin Rubin, BOOK REVIEW: Joseph Anton, 2012
8.
BBC Imagine, The Fatwa: Salman’s Story, 2012