In early 1989,
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini becomes the poster boy for Islamic fundamentalism by
proclaiming a fatwa (religious edict)
calling for the death of the author of The
Satanic Verses. For nearly a decade until its lifting in 1998, Rushdie becomes
a virtual prisoner, existing in a half-light of constantly enforced vigilance
and relentless oversight. Initial effects include a numbing sense
of helplessness coupled with a heightened sense of vulnerability. Not
just Rushdie personally, but those around him—immediate family, his publishers,
literary networks, friends and sympathizers—are viable targets.
Randomness and chance, previously benign features of everyday life, are
recast in sinister shades. Case in point: having established a regular
call-in time with his son, Rushdie is driven wild with anguish after repeated
failure to reach him at the appointed hour. His paranoia triggered,
Rushdie’s distress and anxiety grow to the point where police are dispatched to
his ex-wife’s house. Initial reports of an open door and house lights on
goad Rushdie’s worst fears. The result is an unfortunate series of
coincidences— school play runs overtime, explanatory phone call gets missed,
cops mistake one house for another—that cohere into anguish. No one
of these events in themselves is particularly remarkable or even especially
sinister; but in the overheated atmosphere of murderous intent, nothing can be
left to chance.
And so it
goes for Rushdie for many more years. Nearly ten years, far longer than
officialdom ever expects, never mind the unwitting fugitive at its centre.
How does
Rushdie survive his prison without walls? Does he find a way through
everyday wretchedness and inevitable betrayals? Enduring—eventually
outliving the fatwa’s dead
hand—becomes its own act of heroic defiance, even as Rushdie experiences shame
at having to duck and hide, of conspiring in his own erasure.
The
practical necessity of an alias comes as a lifeline. He needs an alter ego to
be able to conduct ordinary transactions, as much as his protectors need a safe
handle for their shape shifter. Trying on different combinations of
favorite authors, Rushdie settles on Joseph Anton, pairing the chronicler of
outsider shame with the observer of hapless despair.
The “end” of
the fatwa may have come in 1998, but its effects—the righteous rage and hatred
it focused and sanctioned—do not magically evaporate. By this time Rushdie
is used to warily testing liberty by degrees. Though not entirely
silenced by its ordeal, Rushdie’s output as a novelist is unquestionably
curtailed. The simple—or elaborate—habits and routines a writer develops
in order to write, the necessary twitches and flights of fancy (or foot)
going wherever and whenever they lead—are blown away,
reduced to a singular imperative: safety.
The threat of
danger as everyday possibility—not literary mood or polarity to be
engaged with—changes the game of fiction. Taking on the guise of Joseph
Anton might at first have seemed a quixotic gesture in the face of humorless
gravity. But over time, living through fiction—and more
important—recounting its twists and turns as creative nonfiction—must have
offered Rushdie some consolations of irony and absurdity. He would have
been able to exert—at least in retrospect, by arrangement and design—control
over the narrative. Through his fictional counterpart, he could approach
once again speaking in his own voice.
Small
comfort, maybe. But therein lies a tale. And a writer after all must
write—a storyteller must speak a tale into being. And Joseph Anton's
tale of literary hijacking by means of fatwa
is no less absorbing for being "based on a true story" than any
fictional thriller. Yet often his account—like all such necessary expiations,
however expertly conjured and stylishly rendered—feels just this side of
narcissistic. The conceit of Joseph Anton as fictional anti-hero never
develops beyond simple alias. Rushdie recounts events at a third person
remove to sate his confessional need and desire for justification. But
the character of Joseph Anton, for all the narrator’s confidences and humbling
admissions, doesn’t fly. It's a
tricky feat to pull off: writing a memoir in the guise of fiction to tell a
true story where the facts are both known and subjectively
recalled.
(David Carr,
a writer with a different backstory of oblivion, draws on fact-checking
journalistic tics to construct his memoir of crack-induced abasement and
recovery, The Night of the Gun.
Unlike Rushdie, his ordeal was lived out in relative obscurity, at his own
expense.)
Perhaps it
is too much to ask Rushdie—the "I" of the storm (of his own making if
not design)—to be more than subjective in his account and recall. The fatwa’s impact on Rushdie’s career—the nagging question of being associated only
with a controversy rather than a text—haunts Joseph Anton Being notorious for all the wrong reasons brings its own bitter deserts.
True to
form, Joseph
Anton is rife with contradiction. By turns, thoughtful, self-deprecatory, witty, self-absorbed, myopic, combative, engaging, inert.
It may take complete
outsiders—a band of curiosity-seekers and bold fantasists—to evoke the
contrarian struggle at the heart of the story. And what characters, what flavours. Who could not see Philip
Seymour Hoffman as Christopher Hitchens, Roshan Seth as Joseph, Catherine
Keener as Marianne Wiggins?
Are you
there John Malkhovich?
