Life in the Third Person; or What’s Going On with Salman
Rushdie’s New Book?
I was
confused by Salman Rushdie’s new book when it came in to the bookstore, and
made the literary faux pas of shelving it in the fiction section. Sure, it said
“a memoir” right there on the cover next to the improbable title Joseph Anton but, thumbing through it, I
immediately ascertained that it was a third person narrative. At the same time,
it did not resemble any of his novels, always filled with playful language, and
colorful, some might even say allegorical characters. No, this looked
ponderous, with long paragraphs unbroken by dialogue. If it was a story what
was the story about?
Now,
thanks to a generous loan policy. It is indeed about the author, referred to so
far as “the writer” and “he” and “him.” Am I the only one to think this is an odd
way to write about yourself? The book details his life leading up to and
including the time he spent under the “fatwa” pronounced by the Ayatollah
Khomeini in 1989, a death sentence for supposedly blaspheming the prophet
Muhammad in his book The Satanic Verses.
This is all well and good—many people would like to hear how one survives such
a thing, and whether or not literature can also be blasphemy is an interesting
literary subject, but I’m more than 75 pages in, and I still have no idea why
he has chosen to write about himself in the third person.
So what
does the third person do for a writer? It seems to me that it sacrifices the
power of a personal story for the ability to describe or explain more than one
narrator could reasonable know or find out. As a form in memoir, it reduces the
author’s personal experiences to the level of literary gossip, and you know how
I feel about that. At the same time, there are some heartbreakingly personal
portrayals, such as being frightened out of his mind on the day his son misses
a planned phone call.
Joseph
Anton is Rushdie’s chosen code name, taken from the first names of Conrad and
Chekov, and used to hide his identity while in hiding. And that false name leads
to possibly the conceptual reasoning behind the third-person conceit. The book,
at its best, is about authorial identity, who you are when you are in hiding,
forced to see your own face in protest posters, your body burned in effigy. Who
are you when bombs begin to appear in book stores that carry your book, when
people are murdered or maimed for being you translator or editor? That would
have been a good story—how an author can more than just a guy that writes books
and becomes an international cause celebre instead.
Of course, his cause was just.
Freedom of speech must be absolute to be real. But I, like most artists I’ve
talk to, hope that understanding that freedom would lead to saying something
meaningful. Instead, we are treated to the story, freely expressed, of how he
dumped his second wife shortly after the birth of his second son, married a
beautiful model and started hanging out with movie stars in Hollywood. Not a
very attractive story, in my opinion, but surely I defend his right to tell it.
But really, is that’s all ya got? The
Satanic Verses was at least interesting.
