Joseph Anton and the storyteller's art

Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's memoir of the fatwa years, is one of those rare books whose vices and virtues are identical. It's long and gossipy, full of shameless name-dropping and self-righteous defensiveness; Rushdie exposes his own fears and foibles but also shines a harsh but sometimes humorous spotlight on the inadequacies of others. For those reasons alone it's well worth reading, but I cherish those moments when the book offers a peek at the writer's imagination at work.

Soon after the fatwa required Rushdie to go into hiding, he began writing a book for his young son, Zafar: "He had told Zafar stories while the boy took his evening bath, bath-time stories instead of bedtime ones. There were little sandalwood animals and shikara boats from Kashmir floating in the bathwater and the sea of stories was born there, or perhaps reborn." From this bath-time ritual grew Haroun and the Sea of Stories, an enchanting tale of the power of storytelling.

He recalls experiencing this power on a visit to Kerala, where an oral storyteller broke all the rules of conventional narrative: "The storyteller stirred stories into one another, digressed frequently from the main narrative, told jokes, sang songs, connected his political story to the ancient tales, made personal asides, and generally misbehaved," but the audience did not "hiss or boo or throw vegetables" (or draw guns or throw bombs or declare death sentences). Rushdie wonders why the audience remained enraptured by the storyteller's unconventional art--"Did it do so in spite of the storyteller's complicated story-juggling act, or because of it?" 

I want to share this question with my postcolonial survey students, who have just begun reading Shame and wonder why Rushdie didn't arrange his story in strict chronological order but instead allows different times and places to intermingle promiscuously. Rushdie describes his earliest attempts to find the connection among the various "fragments of narratives and characters" that eventually assembled themselves not very neatly into The Satanic Verses, a book in which he realized that "his real subject, the one he would worry away at for the rest of his life," was not India or Pakistan or any particular place or time but "the great matter of how the world joined up, not only how the East flowed into the West and the West into the East, but how the past shaped the present while the present shaped our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention, and, yes, belief, leaked across the frontier that separated it from the everyday."

The everyday hassles of life in hiding consumed great swaths of the writer's time and imagination, requiring him sometimes to forsake fiction and master the alien language of political speech, which felt flat, ugly, colorless:

Did it matter if the 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.

And beauty is only one of many luxuries he has to do without. The claustrophobic nature of his life in hiding comes through clearly in the book, but when the walls close in, he finds escape in writing. "Literature," he writes, "tried to open the universe, to increase, if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before."

And the audience sits enraptured and listens, despite the storyteller's juggling act--or perhaps because of it.