“The Man Who Would Be Popular”: An Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s Twitter Feed

Abstract

In September 2011, Salman Rushdie joined the popular social network Twitter. What initially began as an experiment to tweet a narrative in 140 characters became an intensely dynamic platform for engaging with the public and cultivating an authorial persona for the well-known author. By early 2015, Rushdie had nearly 700,000 Twitter followers and regularly appeared in news media for his Twitter content. Shortly after joining Twitter, Rushdie eagerly demonstrated his knowledge of the platform and has involved some of his 1.25 million followers in debates and conversations about a wide range of issues from the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns to gun control. More than just an interesting glimpse into Rushdie’s everyday thoughts, his Twitter feed is a valuable archive. By applying qualitative discourse analysis to Rushdie’s Twitter feed, patterns in Rushdie’s use of the social network emerge, revealing some of the ways in which he attempts to engage readers, defend his positions, and cultivate his authorial legacy. This article develops careful categorization of concepts and themes which emerge from a review of Rushdie’s tweets. Applying discourse analysis to this data will enable scholars to make valuable connections between analyses of Rushdie’s published work and his social media persona. In particular, this study looks at the ways in which this noted author is attempting to disseminate his message, inhabit his role as a celebrity author, and shape his authorial legacy.

Few contemporary authors can claim the complex and varied relationship to celebrity that Salman Rushdie has had since his first successful novel Midnight’s Children (1981). In the past 35 years, Rushdie has been publicly heralded as responsible for putting contemporary South Asian literature on the map of western readership, chastised for causing worldwide controversy with the publication of The Satanic Verses (1989/1988), and admired for his ability to attract supermodel Padma Lakshmi as his fourth wife. Throughout this often intense media scrutiny, Rushdie has alternately shunned and embraced the spotlight. More recently it seems he is not only embracing his role as a celebrity author, but also taking on a more active approach to cultivating his public persona. In September 2011, Rushdie joined the social network Twitter. What initially began as an experiment to tweet a narrative in 140 characters became an intensely dynamic platform for engaging with the public and cultivating an authorial persona. Rushdie now has 1.25 million Twitter followers and regularly appears in news media for his Twitter content. Using the popular platform, Rushdie has engaged thousands of his followers in debates and conversations about a wide range of issues, from the 2012 and 2016 US presidential campaigns to gun control. More than just an interesting glimpse into Rushdie’s everyday thoughts, his Twitter feed is a valuable paratext ¹ and digital archive of Rushdie’s work processes, political views, personal interactions, and public persona. This article explores the question of what value an author’s social media engagement can produce for literary scholarship by applying qualitative discourse analysis to Rushdie’s Twitter feed. An analysis of these patterns offers insight into his authorial persona and his position as a prominent cultural figure. Read in connection with the publication of his memoir Joseph Anton (2012a), and the opening of his official archive at Emory University in 2010, Rushdie’s Twitter feed provides a valuable opportunity to discuss the ways in which this noted author is attempting to disseminate his message, embrace his role as a celebrity author, and shape his authorial legacy.

In “Salman Rushdie as Public Intellectual”, Chris Rollason argues that Rushdie was and remains a Saidian intellectual who belongs everywhere and nowhere at once. Furthermore, Rollason suggests that Rushdie is a public intellectual: “who writes in the press, appears on audiovisual media or, today, blogs or tweets on the internet on a variety of subjects of public interest and whose opinions are listened to, dissected and syndicated as an important contribution to debate” (Rollason, 2013: 1). He is, however, critical of Rushdie’s most recent forays into the public intellectual realm, suggesting that the latter has “been less eloquent politically and culturally as he might have been” since “Twitter is a poor substitute for a New York Times column” (Rollason, 2013: 7). And perhaps the same could be said of his frequent television interviews. However, even if we look closely at Rushdie’s appearances on the Bill Maher Show or Charlie Rose Show, two US television programmes with significant viewership, his persona in those televised public contexts is still vastly different to his persona on Twitter. Rollason is perhaps correct in his assertion that Rushdie’s Twitter feed makes him appear less eloquent. Although Rushdie can be pointed, abrupt, and argumentative on television, his behaviour on Twitter is in many ways petty, irrational, and rarely resembles anything like the reasoned discourse in his published essays. Of course much of this behaviour is facilitated by the unique nature of Twitter’s parameters as a communication tool. While Twitter has occasionally been compared to more traditional archival materials like letters, news releases, or private journals (it is after all a microblogging tool), it is in reality unlike any traditional author archival material because of its public nature, its character limit, and its immediate response function. ² At the same time, Twitter offers valuable insight into an author’s thinking about a wide variety of topics, much like more traditional archival materials. In many ways, it is becoming the archive of the future. ³ For the study of a contemporary author, an active Twitter feed is a veritable gold mine of information not just about what they say, but also what is said about them (via hashtags), responses to what they say (via reply tweets), and the speed and frequency with which their words get disseminated (via retweets).

Significantly for this study, Rushdie’s Twitter feed allows us to see patterns relating to his role as a celebrity author. Rushdie has a long and varied relationship with the global press and reader responses. Prior to the publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie received a fair amount of press because of his novel Midnight’s Children, which won its first of three Booker prizes in 1981. After Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 in response to the publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie went into hiding and became regular headline news. Martin Amis, English novelist and one of Rushdie’s closest friends, described Rushdie’s sudden fame in Vanity Fair: “Salman had disappeared into the world of block caps. He had vanished into the front page” (1990: n.p.). Amis further describes Rushdie as “disturbed” by the “sudden promiscuity of his fame” (1990: n.p.). Since emerging from hiding, Rushdie has been engaged in a largely unsuccessful campaign of trying to wrestle his work back from the clutches of the fatwa and hoping that his readers could look at his work as literary instead of a political work. ⁴ Rushdie’s marriage to American fashion model Padma Lakshmi seemed to signal a new status of modern celebrity author. ⁵ Since the fatwa, Rushdie embraced the US as his home, courted American audiences, stepped eagerly into the celebrity spotlight, and with the publication of his memoir Joseph Anton in 2012, risked another decade of fatwa-related interview questions in an attempt to set the record straight.

While Rushdie is subject to often intense media scrutiny, he is far from a passive author caught up in an unstoppable American celebrity machine. Ana Cristina Mendes, in her seminal work on Rushdie’s position within the literary marketplace, writes of his “strategic negotiation of his celebrity status” and “his practice as a writer in exposing, intervening, and manipulating the machinery of celebrity to meet his own ends (for example, to open up a space in the global literary market for diasporic South Asian artists)” (2014: 65). One of the ways in which he does this is to shape his fame in the academy. In 2006 Rushdie placed his archive at the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University. Between 2006 and 2011, when the archive opened to the public, Rushdie became a distinguished writer-in-residence at Emory and spent many hours going through his archive with library archivists. Although the library archivists note that he is free with items relating to his work and creative process, evidence of Rushdie’s influence on the available material in the archive is significant. ⁶ Rushdie also returns to the archive at least once a year ⁷ and has promised to pass along “all his subsequent digital effects” including, perhaps, his tweets and Instagram photos (Rockmore, 2014: n.p.). In an interview at the Woodruff Library, Rushdie stated that going through the archive “‘allowed [him] to write the memoir’” (Williams, 2012: n.p.). Both the curation of the archive and the publication of the memoir are legacy-shaping gestures that attempt to both craft and control access to and understanding of Rushdie’s past. ⁸

This concerted effort is arguably the result of Rushdie’s feelings of being misunderstood and doomed in the postmodern media cycle, continually reduced to popular misconceptions and viral rumours. In The Enchantress of Florence (2008a), Rushdie sets out to rectify what he calls a serious historical injustice: the modern reputation of Machiavelli, who is now associated exclusively with the controversial politics of his book The Prince. Rushdie confirmed that there was a parallel between his interest in Machiavelli and his own experiences of being misrepresented: “I came across [this history of Machiavelli] before I was myself the target of falsifications […] this demonization process happened to me” (Rushdie, 2008b: n.p.). According to Rushdie (1997), Machiavelli is just one of many historical figures who, in his view, have become “abstract, ahistorical, postmodern […] a free floating concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented, to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth” (n.p.). He goes on to say in the interview that he hopes that hundreds of years from now, someone will likewise take up the cause of redeeming him from the abuses of history (Rushdie, 2008b). However, Rushdie does not seem content to wait on that eventuality. His archive, his memoir, and now his active Twitter feed suggest that he would rather not leave it up to someone else to shape his legacy.

Social media and authorship

Rushdie’s first entry into social media was his Facebook page in 2008. Soon afterward in 2011, he joined Twitter, promising his readers that he would tweet a short story he was developing called “A Globe of Heaven” (Rushdie, 2011a). Although he abandoned this idea, it was clear from the outset that Rushdie’s interest in Twitter was significant. In the first month he attempted to demonstrate his total mastery of the site, utilizing popular hashtags, advising others on direct messaging, and limiting his tweets to 120 characters to enable retweeting. Rushdie spent his first weeks on Twitter amassing followers and enduring targeted questions by fans to determine whether or not he was who he claimed to be. Early on, Rushdie described his interest in Twitter as “more of a one-night stand right now; it’s not a marriage” (Pauker, 2012: n.p.). Despite this initial scepticism, he subsequently tweeted 3,500 tweets over the course of five years. In addition to a Facebook page and Twitter feed, Rushdie also has a Tumblr site and Instagram account. He is arguably one of the most “plugged-in” authors of his generation, and more famous as a result of this type of public engagement.

All of these social media experiments offer the literary scholar unique opportunities to examine discursive patterns and significant insights into an author’s process, identity-formation, and political, as well as cultural priorities. ⁹ Some might suggest that these epitexts, like Nietzsche’s laundry list, ¹⁰ have some voyeuristic value but are essentially worthless in the study of an author’s body of work. However, as Sergio Tavares argues in “What is an Author in Social Media?”, an author’s Twitter feed is another kind of authorial product more than worthy of our attention. In the past, the development of an author persona, engagement with fans, and management of public relations was the purview of publishers, public relations specialists, and authorized fan clubs. Now, however, in “new media, the trivial and the personal blends with authorial content, and it is meant to be that way” (Tavares, 2013: 3). Tavares provides tweet categories similar to the ones designated for this study, focusing on three major areas: curation tweets, personal remark tweets, and public relations tweets. The first set involve the dissemination of information and include retweets that the author feels his or her followers should consider and are new methods of performing within the role of a public intellectual. The third set, tweets dealing with matters of public relations, signal two important shifts in our conceptualization of the author persona: a new “degree of transparency” and a new “level of frailty” (Tavares, 2013: 8). That the author uses the Twitter platform to promote his or her own work challenges the myth of the artist and his or her work as separate from the promotion and sale of the product. Rushdie certainly devotes a significant number of tweets to the promotion of his saleable products, but the vast majority of his tweets serve ultimately to cultivate a specific authorial image. He might tweet about an upcoming charity event to ostensibly promote the charity, but often it is an event featuring himself and/or his work; thus the tweet works to present him as a philanthropist donating his creative talents in the service of a good cause.

On 17 September 2011, Rushdie tweeted that he would tweet a story in 140 characters a day, which he later titled “A Globe of Heaven”. The short story, which concerned a globe collector who refuses to believe that a set of gemstone star map globes came from outer space, proved too challenging for the author to tweet 140 characters at a time, so he turned to Tumblr to post the story in a series of blog posts (Rushdie, 2011a), after which his use of the platform to post stories fizzled. However, the death of his good friend Christopher Hitchens prompted Rushdie to return to Tumblr to post his response to Hitchens’ death (Rushdie, 2012b), even though it had already been published by Vanity Fair. This use of Tumblr, like his wider use of Twitter, speaks to his awareness of and desire for a wider readership. Up until the advent and popularity of these sites, Rushdie’s readership was largely limited to the select readers of publications like The New Yorker and Vanity Fair (largely liberal, educated, and middle-to-upper class). Now, however, Rushdie seems to be interested in the idea of reaching new readers outside of that matrix, resulting in a more global, diverse, and youthful audience who would be likelier to watch a book trailer, listen to an audio story, or see a film adaptation than read his novels. ¹¹ His use of social media spaces to craft narrative and engage with readers is an extension of his long interest in transmedia projects, suggesting continuity as well as innovation. As Tavares notes, the unique circumstances of social media platforms (content, space, and publicity) ultimately result in “a meltdown of concepts, borders and authorial functions that may constitute of a new idea of what is an author” (2013: 9).

Methodology

Although various efforts to archive internet content exist and continue to evolve to meet the demands of digital-born materials, Twitter has only recently been deemed worthy of archiving for future reference. ¹² The staff at the Gelman Library at the George Washington University developed the Social Feed Manager which connects to Twitter’s approved public APIs to collect data on specific Twitter users. The data not only includes date-stamps and tweet content, but also several columns of analytics including how many followers Rushdie had when he tweeted each tweet, how many times the tweet was retweeted, and other relevant information. This study considers tweets between 15 September 2011 (when Rushdie first started tweeting) and 18 February 2015, totalling 2,925 tweets.

I used the grounded theory approach to discourse analysis, as explored by Glaser and Strauss (2009). This approach enabled me to mine Rushdie’s Twitter feed for discursive patterns relating to his larger literary and political concerns, as well as discover trends in his usage of the platform over time. After an initial review of his feed, I developed the following categories: Self-Promotion, Activism, Death Threat, Games, Follower Critique, Follower Correction, and Commentary. The characteristics of each category are catalogued below:

• Self-Promotion: Tweets that were intended to promote his work, his public schedule, or projects relating to his work.

• Activism: Tweets relating to various social and activist causes.

• Death Threat: Tweets in which Rushdie retweets a death threat received via Twitter or via other mediums.

• Games: Tweets designed to host a public game on Twitter for Twitter followers to play.

• Follower Critique: Tweets which respond to followers in a critical or negative manner.

• Follower Correction: Tweets which seek to correct his followers either to clarify something about himself (or his work) or to respond to misinformation, rumours, impersonator accounts, and so forth.

• Commentary: Tweets which comment on abstract topics or current events.

After coding the tweets using these categories, I tallied the number of each type of tweet and calculated the percentage for each category. Only 942 (32%) of the 2,925 tweets selected for this study fell into one or more of these categories. The results below are based on this sample.

Results

One of my goals was to determine overall trends in Rushdie’s Twitter usage. Though my results are based on a relatively small percentage of his total tweets to date, they represent an accurate reflection of Rushdie’s tweeting behaviour and general approach to using the platform. Many of the tweets which were left uncoded comprised vague replies to other Twitter users and lacked appropriate context to determine their content or function. After considering the tweets which were coded, three major trends emerge: Self-Promotion, Games, and Commentary.

The largest majority of coded tweets (25%) were those relating to Self-Promotion. This is perhaps not surprising considering the general trends in Twitter usage for Twitter users both celebrity and not (Marwick and Danah, 2011). However, I noticed that his Self-Promotion tweets included not only general updates on his forthcoming work or public readings, but also specific information designed to promote unique aspects of his celebrity persona. For example, while Rushdie is very interested in promoting himself as a literary celebrity, he seems equally interested in promoting himself as a social media celebrity, tweeting links to lists which include him, such as “From Pen to Camera, Authors on Instagram”. In response to his inclusion in the “Must-Follow Media Personality” Award list hosted by Mashable, Rushdie tweeted the link to followers to vote for him and the comment, “Ridiculously pleased by #MashableAwards @Mashsocialmedia nom… means I may not be making a total ass of self in this new 140 world” (Rushdie, 2011b). Rushdie also appears to be aware that celebrity associations are integral to one’s own celebrity status. Rushdie only occasionally, but still significantly, tweets comments designed to promote his association with other well-known celebrities. These “Celebrity Association” tweets are often short welcome messages, shared inside jokes, and so on, intended for the celebrities themselves to see, but by placing a period in front of the tweet, Rushdie signals his desire for all of his followers to view the exchange. His memoir Joseph Anton has been famously critiqued ¹³ for also being a minefield of well-known names. Though this is perhaps unremarkable for someone whose legitimate friends are celebrities, this public cultivation of his status as a celebrity associated with other celebrities is part of Rushdie’s larger investment in shaping his celebrity author persona.

The second significant trend is based on the category of Games (19% of coded tweets). Early on in his use of the Twitter platform, Rushdie mainly used the space to play with words and to garner more followers. While Rushdie quickly learned the basic Twitter strategies to cultivate interest in his feed, his conceptualization of literary games designed for Twitter was important in building up his follower base. Most of his Twitter games are literary, such as #Literarysmackdown (in which he pits two well-known authors against one another in a contest), but some are more simply based on linguistic playfulness such as “Name that #diety” (in which he asks followers to come up with diet-based deity names). The clever aspect of these games is the way in which it prompts followers to engage with the celebrity author and other followers. The linguistic games like #diety and the #Kardashian limerick (which was prompted entirely by one Twitter user’s suggestion that Rushdie quit tweeting about literature and art and instead focus on the gossip surrounding Kim Kardashian’s divorce) both reinforce Rushdie’s reputation as a wordsmith and cultivate his image as comical, on-trend, and accessible.

The third significant category is Commentary, which comprised 16% of the coded tweets. These tweets often offer a brief statement on current events and very often result in a flurry of Twitter user comments as well as traditional press coverage. While Rushdie is no stranger to offering up commentary on contemporary events, ¹⁴ Twitter has become ground zero for this public intellectual to enter an ongoing debate and to start debates as well. Whereas Rollason has suggested this type of commentary is hardly worthy of a Saidian public intellectual like Rushdie, I argue that engaging in commentary on this platform is part of a larger strategy to reinforce his position as a public intellectual. Rushdie still uses traditional media outlets to disseminate his views. He regularly appears on Bill Maher’s television segment to comment mainly on issues relating to free speech and Islam. He interviews alongside other public intellectuals on the Charlie Rose Show. He issues formal, written statements in response to controversial events. However, he also engages the public on these topics with sometimes purposely provocative statements on Twitter, and spends a good deal of his personal time debating with followers. For example, his comment on the Sandy Hook School shooting provoked thousands of responses (“Next time babies. Well done American gun zealots. Keep up the good work”; Rushdie, 2011b). In other examples, the debate can extend over days or even months, as in the case of Rushdie’s comments on the Charlie Hebdo incident. While some of his comments are not substantiated in any meaningful way, he supplements many of his debate points with research, links to his longer published works on the subject, and/or taped interviews in which he elaborates more fully on his positions. His tweets appear in the news and his appearance in the news ends up in his Twitter feed; this cross-media strategy for commenting on the news of the day perpetuates Rushdie as a celebrity figure and go-to commentator/consultant on a variety of newsworthy topics.

Three additional trends also emerged as important for further analysis: Follower Correction, Follower Critique, and Death Threat. Though each of these categories concerned only a small number of tweets (11%, 9%, and 1% of coded tweets respectively), they are significant because of the amount of traction they achieve and what they demonstrate about Rushdie’s author persona. The first two categories reflect Rushdie’s tweets (20% of the coded tweets) criticizing and correcting his followers. The “Correction” tweets typically have a neutral tone because he is usually just conveying information and only sometimes demonstrating frustration with a repeated question or incorrect rumour. These specific corrections are often made with exasperation not only because they happen frequently, but also because I suspect he is more than usually annoyed when someone or something interferes with his carefully crafted image. Although he tweeted that @RushdieExplainsIndia account is “funny” and that he “enjoy[s] reading it” (Rushdie, 2011b), Rushdie has also taken care to correct followers with tweets such as “You do know that @RushdieExplainsIndia is a parody site and not written by me?” (2011b). This kind of correction, among many other kinds relating to incorrect quotations of his work, incorrect spellings of his name, and misinformation about his published works, signifies Rushdie’s intense desire to control the information about himself on Twitter and within the wider public sphere as well.

Further evidence of this is found in the Follower Critique tweets, which are typically hostile, rash, and sarcastic. For example, during the height of the Occupy Wall Street campaign, Rushdie was criticized by D. G. Myers at the Commentary Magazine for signing a statement of support for the campaign. Rushdie tweeted a sarcastic comment and link to the scathing article in which he was labelled as one of many left-wing American writers whose positions on capitalism are at odds with concepts of freedom: “Hurray! I’m an Idiot Who Hates Freedom! @Commentary says so, so it’s true! #OWS A Useful List of Useful Idiots: http://t.co/9cYUyccr” (2011b). One of his Twitter followers replied by asking him if he knew the history of the term “useful idiot”, and Rushdie replied, “@KevinSiekierski @Commentary No, we useful idiots don’t know any history, even if we studied it at Cambridge (hotbed of useful Red idiots)” (2011b). The reply to what may or may not be a critical question (the follower’s tone or intention is not clear) about the history of “useful idiots” demonstrates a significant pattern of behaviour when engaging with potentially hostile follower comments: sarcasm, and a purposeful reminder of his credentials and/or experience. Other Follower Critique tweets focus on the follower’s ill usage of grammar or an attempt to diminish the follower with snide comments on his/her age, profession, belief system, and so on. While these critiques, especially when they are meant for all his followers to see, could be considered unflattering to the author and his wider persona, I argue that Rushdie views these interactions as indicative of his capacity for witty commentary and that in order to ensure that his life and work are not misrepresented and his authorial legacy remains intact, he frequently has to enter the fray.

One of Rushdie’s more curious Twitter trends is retweeting and/or publicly replying to death threats that are sent to him. Although this behaviour comprises only 1% of the coded tweets, it is significant in the larger context of Rushdie’s celebrity. Essentially, these occasional death threat tweets demonstrate his continued position as a persecuted writer. While this position garners much attention in a wide variety of contexts, it can also be exploited, as Rushdie discovered in 2012 when his appearance at the Jaipur Literary Festival in India was cancelled due to a threat made on his life. Rushdie tweeted about the threat and his initial disappointment, but quickly became angry and defensive when he found out that the local authorities in Jaipur lied about the threat to prevent him from participating in the festival. Following the initial news of the threat, Rushdie replied to a series of “hate-tweets” (as he calls them) initiated by Muslim Twitter users and offered the following commentary on them: “The hate tweets dribble on. Moronic thinking + bad grammar: good combo. Keep ’em coming, if you want to make your faith look ugly & fascist” (2011b). In fact, Rushdie often uses the opportunity of Twitter death threats to illustrate specific viewpoints he has on freedom of expression or the discourse about Islam: “‘@iali4576: @joshglancy @salmanrushdie say that again and you too will be on somebody’s hit list.’ The voice of the religion of peace” (2011b). Even though the Jaipur threat against his life was discovered to be fake, he made sure his Twitter followers were aware of the circumstances leading to the incident and the significant threat this fact poses to freedom of expression; namely, the potential for violence from a violent extremist group in response to his scheduled appearance. This pattern of Twitter usage illustrates both Rushdie’s purposeful use of the medium to remind readers of his position as a persecuted author, and as a jumping-off point to discourse on two major topics which have consumed his public life in recent years: freedom of expression, and the deteriorating status of Islam in the twenty-first century. For example, Rushdie uses the metaphor of Alfred Hitchcock’s infamous horror film The Birds in Joseph Anton (2012a: 4) to claim his fatwa experience as one of the “first birds” or origin points for the rise of Islamism in the contemporary moment. This tautological view of the events succeeding his experience with the fatwa serves to reinforce the urgency of his cause to educate the public about the growing threat of religious fundamentalism (and more specifically Islamic extremism).

Conclusion

While Twitter has a reputation for being a great source of news or a superficial networking tool, this study demonstrates its great potential for scholars. By focusing on trends in Rushdie’s Twitter usage, we can draw conclusions about his public engagement, his political and cultural interests, and his authorial persona. These patterns in his Twitter content not only offer a view into Rushdie’s state of mind, but also illuminate the literary choices in his creative work. Scholars can no longer write about Rushdie’s views on freedom of expression without addressing the month-long debate which he hosted on Twitter about the Charlie Hebdo incident, or the Facebook fight he had with Francine Prose after her walk-out of the PEN event honouring the Charlie Hebdo staff. As Matthew Kirschenbaum suggests, the threshold of literary scholarship has shifted. As a result of digital platforms, the role of the author is expanding, methods of authorship have become more and more public, and narratives embrace transmedia modalities, all of which challenge traditional literary analytical categories and suggest the need for different, hybrid, and interdisciplinary modes of scholarship.