Abstract
The article examines two unpublished novels and a TV script by Rushdie deposited in the Emory University Salman Rushdie Archive. Its aim is to offer an analysis of the contents of these unpublished works as well as to theorize their status with reference to fair copies of texts that do not have their corresponding published versions. Against Rushdie’s own declaration that these works were “garbage”, ephemeral material unworthy of circulation in the public domain, and certainly not useful to him as signposts of paths taken towards the composition of his more artistically accomplished works, the paper suggests unpublished fair copies have both intrinsic and textual value. As texts in potentia they require a theoretical model that would read them as text qua text and not as fair copies to be compared to their published versions.
The questions one asks are straightforward but difficult: how to theorize an author’s unpublished fair copies, and what is their literary standing? In textual criticism an ideal text (that is, a critical edition) is one that replicates as “closely as the extant material allows” (McKerrow, 1939: 6) a fair copy made by the author. In this critical procedure, the existence of a fair copy in manuscript implies that it is the text by which the author wanted him- or herself to be remembered. The typescripts of unpublished material by Salman Rushdie, which form the crux of this paper, by contrast, are fair copies with no corresponding published text. It follows that the primary use of manuscript material — that is, the construction of a critical edition by which the author wants him- or herself to be remembered — is inoperative, as there are no published versions which may be (re)edited in light of a fair copy, which in the instances discussed in this article exists in the archive. One therefore turns to the second use of manuscript material in an author’s apprentice phase: unpublished (and perhaps even unpublishable) manuscripts that show the paths taken by a writer on the road to success. In the case of Salman Rushdie, that success came in 1981 with the publication of Midnight’s Children, unarguably one of the great novels in English in the second half of the twentieth century. Rushdie himself is not particularly helpful here, because on a number of occasions he has declared that he does not believe in hours spent by scholars to uncover the processes that led to the accomplished literary artefact. To Rushdie, an archive tells a reader what a writer did “on the way to other work […] a means of getting from here to there”. He confessed, “to me the book at the end” is the important thing, “the process is not very interesting”. 1 In lectures and talks at Emory University (2007–2012), Rushdie continued to restate that lack of interest in the processes of composition was also a feature of none other than Shakespeare, who left behind no autograph versions of his plays, no early drafts, let alone handwritten notes about their genesis. He did, however, write a will in which he left his wife, Anne Hathaway, his second-best bed (the bed shared by husband and wife; the best bed was in the guest room), a point made a number of times by Rushdie himself. 2
Why then has Rushdie kept these unpublished works in the archive, if neither as holograph material to be compared to their corresponding published works, nor as material indicating the road taken by him towards superior literary achievement? Rushdie’s views are shared by many writers, but any theory of the unpublished manuscript cannot simply discard works in near fair copy state written during the 13 years between June 1968, when Rushdie graduated, and April 1981, when Midnight’s Children was published. He has confessed that in between “he wrote unbearable amounts of garbage” (Rushdie, 2012: 49). But the “garbage” he refers to and which has survived in the archive is not the drafts of his great novels such as Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), which do serve the purpose of alerting students to likely variant readings. Instead, they are unpublished typescripts as near fair copies, which in some cases carry signs of being manuscripts rejected by publishing houses. In retrospect, they do constitute material that may be published because of the literary standing of the author. To Rushdie, his early “apprentice” work may well be no more than just garbage; for the textual critic archival literary garbage is of immense value in as much as it shows the links between labour and genius. It demonstrates the fact that works of creative imagination, however flawed, as V. Voloshinov (of the “Bakhtin School”) observed, are products of ideological creation that “arise only within society and for its sake” because as “ideological formations” they are “internally, immanently sociological” (Voloshinov/Bakhtin, 1983: 7). Bakhtin adds: “Man, in his human specificity, is always expressing himself (speaking), that is always creating a text (though it may remain in potentia)” (qtd. in Todorov, 1984: 17). Hence, the unpublished manuscript as the creative text in potentia is also, by its very nature, an ideological phenomenon “simultaneously determined from without (extrinsically) and from within (intrinsically)” (Medvedev/Bakhtin, 1978: 29). 3 In spite of the use values imposed on manuscript material by textual scholars, and against Rushdie’s own dismissal of it on the grounds that the end-product is all that matters, textual manuscripts enter into the usual dialectic of being determined by their formal characteristics (what genre they are written in, what are their anxieties of influence) as well as how they have been “determined by other spheres of social life” (Medvedev/Bakhtin 1978: 7). They may not have the aura of a published text or earlier less developed manuscripts (such as those of Midnight’s Children in the Emory Rushdie archive) because they have not been part of the critical protocols or scholarly apparatus that govern the published work (including legal authorship), but they are much more than a purely transitional and ungrounded object. Manuscripts read as ideologically inscribed phenomena, immanently sociological — especially when they exist as near fair copies that, if accepted for publication, may circulate in the public domain — are of value. And in the case of Rushdie’s unpublished works the first two principles of textual criticism, valuable as they are, need to be supplemented by the third, the ideological.
The archive carries marginal notes and fragments, as well as full transcripts of a number of works (Mishra, 2016).
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The latter are mentioned in a journal entry (redacted copy because the journal is not open to readers) of around the mid-1970s, which also carries an illustration of the title page of a novel “The Satanic Comedy”, which at this stage does not seem to have moved beyond its title. Salman Rushdie’s name is beneath it followed by “author of Grimus, Madame Rama, The Antagonist, Holinshed’s Chronicle, Alpha-Zygote, The Slapstick Scenes from a Place in the Crowd, Clarissa, etc”. Some of the works mentioned here are contextualized in an essay titled “Scheherazade”, in which he writes about his early apprentice work.
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This essay is the third part of Rushdie’s Richard Ellmann Lectures (named after the great James Joyce scholar) on Modern Literature delivered at Emory in 2004. We read here that after graduating from King’s College, Cambridge, in the summer of 1968 he shared a house in London (29 Acfold Road, London SW6) with his sister Sameen and three of his college friends. On an Olivetti Dora typewriter and with £500 “start up” seed money from his father, he spent the next few years writing four novels and a television screenplay: “The Book of the Peer”, “Grimus”, “The Antagonist”, “Madame Rama”, “Crosstalk”. Except for one of the novels – Grimus – none of these were ever publisher or filmed. Those not published continue to languish, he writes, “in the drawer in which I consigned them, and there, deserving no better, they will stay” (11). Since he never read English at university, “in the matter of books” he was self-taught. And in this matter of books there were the non-canonical fabulists such as the writers of Alf Layla Wa Laylah (“The Thousand Nights and One Night”), who could be placed alongside the interior world of Beckett and the linguistic experimentation of Joyce. These were powerful influences, varied, strong, inimitable, but, and as was inevitable, slavish imitation of them could only produce “still-born texts” (12). At this juncture, let Rushdie continue:
One, The Antagonist was its title, was an approximation of a Thomas Pynchon novel set in Notting Hill and as feebly derivative as the tale of the female Samsa’s metamorphosis into a washing machine […] Another, Madame Rama, was an attempt at Indian political satire, in the vein, I suppose of Philip Roth’s attack on Nixon in Our Gang. It transposed the story of Mrs Indira Gandhi into the Bombay film industry and imagined, I am sorry to say, that beneath her sari she grew a talking penis which actually ran the studio […] In the third unpublished novel, The Book of the Pir, I actually came up with a good idea, an idea that even looks a little prescient today. In an unnamed Muslim country a popular holy man or pir, a firebrand and demagogue, joins forces with an unscrupulous army general and an equally unscrupulous billionaire, who propel him to power, intending him to be their puppet, only to discover that he’s too wily and too ruthless to control. Unfortunately I was blind to the story’s requirements. It deserved to be told straight, in a fast, unadorned, even thrillerish style, and had I the wit to do that it might have succeeded. Instead, of course, I wrote it in a Joycean stream-of-consciousness gobbledygook language that ruined it completely. Until I escaped such mandarin influences, I would never write a line worth reading. Later, when I found my way, I could benefit from what they had to show me. But that was later. That was after the TV script Crosstalk, in which, I regret to say, two crucified men on a hill pass the time while awaiting the arrival of Jesus Christ by chatting idly and, I hoped, wittily and profoundly, existentially, in the manner of Beckett’s tramps, Vladimir and Estragon. I might as well have called the piece Waiting for Godot at Golgotha. I entered it for a competition to find a new television dramatist for the BBC. It didn’t win. (12–13)
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I turn to three of the four works mentioned here — “The Book of the Peer” (1969?–), “Crosstalk” (1974?), and “The Antagonist” (May 1975) — and read them in chronological order against Rushdie’s directive that “deserving no better” they should have remained in the drawer to which they had been consigned by the author. The other important novel in manuscript noted in the quoted passage, “Madame Rama” (1st version August 1975; 2nd version February 1976), where Bombay cinema functions as the substrate, has been examined in an earlier essay (Mishra, 2012) and is therefore not used as a proof text here. The theoretical problematic I explore, however, has less to do with an unpublished work’s aesthetic merits, or its value in delineating editorial problems in Rushdie, than with manuscript materials as carriers of immanent meaning, and as material that tells us about the author’s own ideological leanings as well as his engagement with the craft of fiction. Given Rushdie’s involvement in issues ranging from religion to social equity, the manuscripts hold the key to an understanding of the man and his writing. It may well be that in preserving these manuscripts in the archive, Rushdie intended the lone scholar to stumble upon them as independent works in their own right and not as evidence of creative struggle.
In the summer of 1968, Rushdie leaves his London flat to go to Karachi, a city to which his parents had migrated from Bombay in 1964, after a brief stint in London vividly (and painfully) captured in an unpublished screenplay “‘The Courter’”.
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He works there for Pakistan TV but, disaffected, returns to London. Upon his return he writes “The Book of the Pir [Peer]”, about which Rushdie notes:
[the novel] was prophetic, in a way because it was about a country not unlike Pakistan or Iran in which the Holy Man is used by military and different interests as a front person for a coup or revolution, after which he destroys them. It was a kind of prophecy of Iran.
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He says that he had misunderstood Joyce and Beckett, thinking that one should write at “degree zero”, which meant that there was a “kind of coldness in the writing” from which “heat and passion” had been taken out. He didn’t see himself as a “cold writer” and so, he notes, “I never published my first attempt”.
“The Book of the Peer”
“The Book of the Peer”, 9 the work mentioned in Rushdie’s Ellmann Lectures, is set in an unnamed coastal town, which is obviously Karachi (“the city around which the adherents of her particular religion had built their brave new world” [64]), and deals with the attempts by people of a secretive Society to transform a newly-formed nation (implicitly, Pakistan 10 ) by presenting the citizens with new ideas about God and belief. Playing on the concept of the Trinity (here derived more from Hindu thought than from Christianity), three people, as representatives on earth of this Trinity — a President (Sahib Sahib), his wife (Begum Sahiba, later replaced by his daughter Beti), and a dedicated acolyte Vazir — set about making this ideological change possible with the aid of a white-robed sage or Pir (“Peer”).
Rushdie imposes a layered technique of authorial distancing from the contents of the work, making himself a third party editor—discoverer of a manuscript originally written by the Peer and collated/translated by a person unnamed. The work has four epigraphs, the first of which repeats the opening lines of the 96th sura of the Qur’an: “Recite, in the name of the Lord, | thy Creator, | who created Man from clots of blood”. Although these epigraphs are from the collator/translator (199), it is clear that Rushdie’s first completed novel pays homage to what are the first religious verses he had ever heard, and these from the religion of his forebears. Its title page is followed by a further qualification: “the authorised version of the manuscript discovered at Ordu and with a preface by Rushdie”. “Ordu” refers also to the idiom of the “military camp”, later to be known as Urdu (Schimmel, 1975: 126). This technique of authorial distancing from the contents of a text is not uncommon; a foundational instance is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). There are therefore three “agencies” at work here: the “author” of the original manuscript who is the Peer; the collator of the manuscript whose notes end the manuscript; and the editor—discoverer of the manuscript, “Salman Rushdie”, who writes the Preface and who points to interruptions in the text (158) as he constructs a copy-text.
I turn now to the collator’s “Afterword”. Here we find that the collator is in fact the translator of a text written by “three separate hands” (200) organized as chapters by the “Peer”, the author. The collator, acting as a textual or analytic bibliographer, has his own views about authorship: he suggests that the text may well be the work of a single author who has created the varied styles of the three principal narrators and this author may be either an orientalist, or a local with an extensive knowledge of the West. But then in a final stroke the collator plays the “writerly” game by insinuating that the text comes to an end only when he lifts his hand from the page. Turning to “editor—discoverer Rushdie’s” Preface (which is his, as it is signed “s.r.”), we discover the usual technique of declaiming responsibility, with the author referring to a chance encounter with a manuscript. This happens when Rushdie checks himself into a hotel in a “small Black Sea port called Ordu” where, declaring himself a poet, he finds in his allocated Room 7 a manuscript left behind by an earlier occupant who was also a poet. The Preface ends with:
I know no more of its origins than this, and the account given in the manuscript itself. My additions are limited to this preface and the title. I lay no claim to the work. Its merits and demerits are its own. Unless, of course, I am lying. (1)
The novelist as the most beautiful liar (after Mark Twain) is a well-known conceit, and the very young Rushdie, at no more than 22, puts into the text his entire undergraduate readings to date.
After reading History at Cambridge, it is clear from this unpublished novel that he was taken in by an essentially Manichean view of the world. The view had, quite possibly, come from the final year paper on Muhammad and the Caliphate he had taken at Cambridge. In the Qur’an the struggle between God and Satan is ongoing, with Satan (as in Milton) acting as the perennial obstacle to man’s desire for absolute submission to the will of God. Through a dialogue between “Fatman and Willow” (the two Manichean figures in constant tension in “the Book of the Peer”, who incarnate themselves as the corpulent Begum Sahiba, her husband, the silently suffering Sahib-Sahib, her daughter, the femme fatale Beti, and the gaunt Vazir), the Manichean binary is reversed as “God” is the “obstacular” (20), the real obstacle to a fuller understanding of desire and the sensual nature of the world. Although this is not, outwardly, a critique or a commentary on the Qur’an or any other religious text, “The Book of the Peer” has the aura of a Gospel inasmuch as it is presented as a commentary on a nascent nation state. This is a country where the “holy book is memorized by rote” (53), where caveats rule, and as a result the philosopher—king Chanakya’s idea of “living in the world” (Rushdie is touching on Heidegger and Nietzsche, anticipating Agamben) is lost as priestly dictates make sure that one does not see the world as it is (54).
The novel may be read as a first run on Rushdie’s own unease with belief, as he explores the virtues of a polytheistic monism (against monotheism). Rushdie’s further interest in the co-existence of the sensual and the spiritual, the value of the corporeal and the affective in our lives is clearly evident. The way to expose religion as “the opiate of the masses” (174) was for the earthly “triple godhead” (the Willow and Fatman arriving as members of the Society, each with the purpose of curing the “body politic of its affliction with the god-virus” [174]) to make men doubt the validity of the act of belief itself (174). The way to do this effectively, as the Begum Sahiba had explained, was to persuade people “that a prophet X is the possessor of a truly faith-worthy message, only to expose his fraudulence at the crucial moment” (174). “Creation”, after all, suggests the Begum, “is no more than the supreme act of the imagination” (174), a theme which, against the backdrop of things generally falling apart, will inform much of Rushdie’s writing.
“Crosstalk”
“Crosstalk” was written in 1974, and is the next work of Rushdie’s that has survived in its entirety. As we have noted, Rushdie himself dismissed this TV play as a poor undergraduate imitation of a great writer, and had damningly referred to it as “Waiting for Godot at Golgotha”. This 30-page play with a three-page preface is set in the afternoon of the Crucifixion of Christ. Christ has yet to arrive, but two people have already been crucified with enough space left in between their crosses for a third man. The two already crucified men are Alph, “about 25, a large emotional man” and Zee, “about 47, a smaller, slighter, man, with a rather dainty voice and manner” (i) (Box 51, folder 5). The author’s explanatory notes are interesting as these are given under the rubric of “Theme”. Here, in a reversal of the Calvary narrative, it is Zee, the man of ideas to whom death is irrelevant and is therefore critical of Christ, who is “dragged down to earth”, whereas “practical Alph” sees in the “idea” of Paradise the fulfilment of the “ambitions he never achieved on earth”. In a further directive to the cinematographer (again his interest in cinema is evident), Rushdie asks that a hand-held camera should be used and the first section of the TV play should be shot entirely in close-up.
The first guard addresses the camera and speaks of the gathering crowd, who it seems are the TV spectators, as participants in a carnivalesque spectacle, and bemoans the declining numbers. On the cross Zee and Alph make small talk about birthdays in the style of Beckett (only Zee is dying on his birthday, not Alph). Frivolously, Zee notes Alph’s unusual mouth, his tongue, his teeth which are like bars, and is accused, in turn, by Alph for being a “pansy” because Zee had noted “those lips are made for kissing” (in an allusion to Nancy Sinatra’s “these boots are made for walking”). Anecdotally Zee tells the story of the illegitimate child who becomes a carpenter, but fails to sell his chairs and so he turns to stealing. Initially, Zee does most of the talking, and in between hallucinates that it is nightfall, only to be reminded by the practical Alph that it is midday. Then Alph begins to talk a lot. They are there because of some kind of conspiracy that they had hatched together; it was a conspiracy in which Peter was involved but Zee had left Peter for Alph because Peter was getting to be a bit old. The nails hurt, the crucified find it hard to breathe. Then comes the announcement from the first guard: “And now … ladeeez an gennelmen … the moment you’ve all been waiting for […] self-styled […] King of the Jews … Jesus E. Christ!” Rushdie gives the traditional Gospel speeches of Christ: “Forgive them — they know not what they do”, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” Zee repeats the damned thief’s line: “get off these nails … and get us off”, while Alph’s request, “Jesus … remember me … when you come into your kingdom” gets the assurance, “I say to you … this very day … you will be with me — in Paradise”. After a few general announcements — next day being Passover, there will be no crucifixion — the legs of Zee and Alph are broken, but not those of Christ because he is presumed dead. The first guard addresses the camera: “Hope you enjoyed the show, madam. If you want to know confidentially, though, it’s a sadness. I can remember when people performed on those crosses for days. These stars nowadays … they’ve got no staying power”. The “stage notes” read, “
A singular moment in history: two criminals alongside God; one asks the right question and is redeemed; the other tells the truth and is doomed. But it isn’t the either/or which has fascinated human history that is of value here, it is the singularity of the event, a rare moment in written human history (the other is the encounter in the Bhagavadgītā where Arjuna is redeemed simply through the act of listening to Krishna) when a direct choice is made. In Christian religious eschatology, the moment transforms the Abrahamic narrative of the gift of death into a gift of salvation through an act of love. In modernist existentialism, the moment corresponds to the limit situation through which the idea of being finds its concrete, lived existential value. Largely ephemeral as “Crosstalk” is, it nevertheless points to Rushdie’s own metaphysical grounding in the Christian tradition of love, as well as in religious narratives that move into the realm of narrative fiction. The latter manifests itself in Rushdie’s interest in anecdotal narratives which are inversions of parables in as much as they carry ironic intent. Zee tells the story of the wife made pregnant by her doctor and then rejected by her husband. The rejection damns the husband, because the village gets to know that he is impotent. Then there is the story already noted of the carpenter whose chairs remain unsold because of lack of customers and who consequently turns to stealing. The anecdotal (made famous by Dostoevsky) will become part of Rushdie’s own sense of narrative organization. Unpublished as it is, “Crosstalk” thus speaks of Rushdie’s Western lineage, a feature often overlooked by postcolonial critics who desperately try to locate his formalism in non-Western narratives. Both “The Book of the Peer” and “Crosstalk” as texts in potentia are immanently sociological and in spite of Rushdie’s own avowed disinterest in “unarchiving” an archive for traces of epistemological lineage, these manuscripts underscore a consciousness about Western literary forms in need of postcolonial disavowal and even, after Adorno, some creative “hating”. In the next and final near fair copy discussed in this essay, that voice and the disavowal begin to take shape but without the rare originality one finally uncovers in Midnight’s Children.
“The Antagonist”
I turn now to Rushdie’s third unpublished work and his second unpublished novel, “The Antagonist”, which is Rushdie’s most ambitious project prior to Midnight’s Children. Completed on Monday, 12 May 1975, and written after the copy-text of Grimus (published 1975) had been submitted to Gollancz, “The Antagonist” marks Rushdie’s attempt at creating a distinctive “personal” narrative, different from the heavily keyed roman à clef “Madame Rama” and “The Book of the Peer”, which are, respectively, his early, highly political, Indian and Pakistani novels. Unlike the other two novels in manuscript, “The Antagonist” gives us an insight into the creative process that led to the writing of Rushdie’s masterpiece. Although the spirit of challenge and innovation, of the “new”, is evident from the very first epigraph of the novel (“Have I the ‘Spirit of Orthodoxy’? | I have not. But have I | The spirit of opposing? Perhaps — (Gregory Grigson)”), the difficulty with this novel is that the spirit of opposing and innovation functions at too many levels.
The work is at times playfully magical, at times painfully autobiographical. It is often science fictional (Rushdie’s fascination with black holes is evident throughout), and on occasion obsessively paranormal, preferring the intuitive over the empirical. Sometimes Rushdie appears a committed relativist (against a prescriptive dualist), or then an “orientalist” (the Xavier character in the novel is framed by the Goanese Catholic St Francis Xavier, whose body is exhumed every 10 years and then paraded). At other times Rushdie appears magical (abracadabra uttered in reverse “arbadacarba” [155]), where Borges becomes important, numerological (“numbers are an improvement on people” [156]), and fantastic (two golden Oaxcu eggs play an important role in the attempt by an underground Society, located at King’s College Cambridge, to recreate a brave new world out of the ashes of a fading British Empire). In other words, the early Rushdie is struggling to find the right voice, the right generic register for his Stephen Daedalus-like protagonist named Saleem. There is much here which is symptomatic of a writer putting every idea on paper — from esoteric hobbies (tegestology is the study of beer-mats, phillumacy is love of matches [78]), to the contributions of immigrant cultures to British way of life. Nothing is what it seems in this novel: there are parallel underworlds, characters have aliases, and realist representation is filtered through the eye of the camera. Reality becomes mechanical reproduction with no original as the primary signified (Box 43, folders 1–4).
Before we turn to the crux of the novel — the Saleem–Shiva antagonism, which would make “The Antagonist” a first run of Midnight’s Children — what else can one say about this novel in manuscript, its value as a text in potentia? What themes, what influences are obvious? The text, in a very real sense, is a learning curve as the intertextual indebtedness to Joyce, Beckett, Borges, Pynchon, and Calvino makes clear. And it is this indebtedness, often overdetermined by slavish imitation, that makes him cover too much ground. Sometimes the balance is not right, such as in the rather “raw” representation of the sex scenes between Olga and the novelist’s alter ego Saleem Sinai (185). Telepathy and paranormal communication are evident in Olga’s capacity to plug into Saleem’s doppelgänger Black Saleem’s voice and become excited (188). Rushdie’s interest in etymology is clear — “smaragd”, we are told, is from Old French for “emerald” (via Sanskrit) — as is his interest in synchronicity (201), word play (“Amalekite”, a male kite), numbers (379 men, 126 women [201]), black holes, the “theory of cosmic parallelism” (203), and the like. There are wayward, as-yet unassimilable, and even specious references that anticipate idioms and expressions that make their way into Rushdie’s mature works. These include: Emperor Akbar’s game of ank micholi (hide and seek) (246–7); echoes of a Bollywood song from one of Rushdie’s favourite movies Shree 420 (“Do not freak me O my darling” is a translation of mudh mudh ke na dekh from that film [249]); Rushdie’s interest in the emigrant, as in Sinai’s comment “I am an emigrant who refused to become an immigrant” (253); the use of the conceit that Sinai is 13 years old — “I happen therefore I am” (253); dreams of the yellow city Bombay (256–7); descriptions of swampy England (259); the use of the refrain “Physician … Heal thyself” (263); and many more.
The novel begins on 10 February 1974, the “Year of the Reverse” (1947 was the date of Indian Independence, but reverse also implies reverse migration from the ex-colonies to Britain), and the opening scenes are located in Bliss Grove, a London suburb based on Notting Hill, with its outcasts who had come to “a historically snobbish, insular land of elites” (2). Flashback to January 1961, and we find a 13-year-old Saleem Sinai in the old Cumberland Hotel, Marble Arch, Room 947. His father who has accompanied him from India is always drunk, and he finds a little diversion by watching Tottenham Hotspur play. He sees his 13th year (in 1974) as a rebirth, “a second adolescence following gleefully on the first. Thirteen A.B., after-birth” (14). We continue to read:
It is February 1961 in the old Cumberland Hotel at Marble Arch, olive seats snaking down the foyer, paint peeling carelessly off the walls of room 947. I didn’t expect the peeling paint, not in the heartland of empire. The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s at the Odeon next door, Supermac in his heaven, Superspurs en route to the double. John White, John White, where art thou now? (John White, inside-right for Tottenham Hotspur and Scotland, was struck dead by a bolt of lightning when sheltering from a storm on a golf course: an object lesson on the dangers of trees.) The foetal Sinai, thirteen years in the womb of a comfortable, sightless, middle-class Indian childhood, is in London for two weeks before being launched upon an unsuspecting British boarding school. It is to be a painful Birth, since it is his father who will bear him, will bear him in drink-sodden nights. Clutching a ten-shilling note he goes nightly to the take-away chicken joint in Edgware Road, then sneaks back into the great hotel, greasy hen concealed beneath new school coat, blue serge. The elder Sinai spends his money on drink, not food, and won’t even share it. Nightly stupors of abuse are hurled at the young foetus, and it is this pain, this opening of the eyes that brings about the Birth. His father died at the instant of it; he is Sinai sapiens, sui generis, innocence corrupted, worldly-wise baby off to school. No going back. Deserts are the desserts of the deserter. (14)
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Although the novel itself is capacious and unwieldy with far too many generic and discursive registers at play, it is self-evidently a work in which one of the key themes of Midnight’s Children (the baby swap, and the binary of Saleem and Shiva) is given a first run. In this respect “The Antagonist” is very much a precursor text of immense value to our understanding of the genesis of the Saleem character, and the latter’s pervasive presence in the Rushdie imaginary. For readers unfamiliar with this novel in manuscript, tracing the role of Rushdie’s alter ego Saleem Sinai and its suggestive foreshadowing of elements that make their way into Midnight’s Children may be of considerable interest. As Rushdie noted in Joseph Anton, “Saleem” was deliberately created as his alter ego in memory of his “Bombay classmate Salim Merchant (and because of its closeness to ‘Salman’), and ‘Sinai’ after the eleventh-century Muslim polymath Ibn Sina (‘Avicenna’), just as ‘Rushdie’ had been derived from Ibn Rushd” (2012: 54). This Rushdie character — Saleem — Rushdie noted in his autobiography, was largely inconsequential as the novel itself was, but he had one value, he was born at midnight 14–15 August 1947. But that was not the only birth that night: there was another, that of Shiva, as we also read in Midnight’s Children. In “The Antagonist”, this Shiva surfaces as Black Saleem who, upon discovering his true origins, will stalk the other (Saleem) Sinai but without ever meeting him. Their interconnected lives are narrated through the device of letters that “Black Saleem” writes to Saleem Sinai who until now had been living a relatively carefree, but in some ways disturbing, life in Bliss Grove. Black Saleem’s letters sent at intervals slowly divulge his genealogical secret, a secret linked to a dramatic baby swap at birth in Bombay.
The letters that Black Saleem writes to Saleem Sinai form the crux of a parallel narrative in “The Antagonist” and it is this narrative that is of value in our understanding of this fair copy text in potentia. The other narrative (which also gives the narrative a powerful science fiction edge) revolves around sinister underworld figures and their designs on the world. The broader theme, it seems, involves a post-imperial Britain in which a centrally controlled imperial power is replaced by a New Empire (“born in a nation of shopkeepers” [75]) that brings Egypt and the Pyramids into its political discourse and has covert colonial designs on the world, including manipulating the first Indian nuclear explosion in 1974 (referred to as the Ahorgan [Atomic Holocaust Organ] Project, aimed at creating a war between India and Pakistan). Here, as Yael Maurer argues, Rushdie’s sense of the historical “becomes science fictional at every turn” (Maurer, 2014: 79). The Empire has its own Empire Room, secret passages, and guards called “Hypnoguards” under the leadership of Cheops (after one of the Pharaohs). Cheops is none other than Rudyard Wayland-Smith, father of Saleem Sinai’s wife Susan, and who, we are told, in an earlier avatar as Mr Edwards, was the notorious killer of Calcutta (16–18 August 1946).
When we then turn to the Saleem–Black Saleem [in Midnight’s Children, Shiva] section of the novel, and the section with which the novel ends, “The Antagonist” becomes a more valuable work. Through five letters that Black Saleem writes to Saleem (and these letters are written in the discourse register of thrillers), there is a gradual unfolding of the secret baby swap, the work of the nurse Mary Pereira, “the shortest woman you ever saw” (55), who later comes to the Sinai household as the baby’s ayah. The first letter captures many of the key events which, with greater artistic control and discursive brilliance, we find in Midnight’s Children: the links between “the birth of this baby and of the infant, squalling, turbulent nation” (55), Dr Narlikar’s Nursing Home, father Sinai dropping the chair and breaking the toe of his right foot, 12 the four houses on the Southacre Estate (Buckingham Villa, Blenhime Villa, San Souci Villa, Versailles) (55). 13 In his second letter, Black Saleem, who upon the death of his father Wee Willie Winkie discovers that Mary Pereira did the deed “for Joseph” (135), seeks revenge for an historical miscarriage of justice that had denied him his proper ancestral rights, and would kill Mary Pereira. Black Saleem, anticipating the Humming Bird in Midnight’s Children, has the miraculous gift of whistling, through which he can locate anyone he wants.
Before Rushdie divulges the contents of the third and fourth Black Saleem epistles, in a clear homage to Borges, he inserts a work by “a South American surrealist, aficionado of Joyce and antiquity, maker of intricately jewelled fictions, a purblind, Ultraist pedagogue of a genius” (174). The book, also called “THE ANTAGONIST”, is dedicated to “Vittoria Babbington”. The title is preceded by a parenthetical statement about the “material” status of the work:
(Here’s a thing Sinai will never discover: there is no other copy of this book which contains this story. It is as nonexistent as the Moving Toyshop or the Encyclopaedia of Tlön. It exists here, now, for this reader, and nowhere else.) (174)
The reference to the “Encyclopaedia of Tlön” links the embedded tale directly to Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” in his 1941 collection “The Garden of Forking Paths” (Borges, 1965). “Tlön”, going back to Swift, is a world with labyrinthine rules, but rules plotted by men and “destined to be deciphered by men” (Borges, 1965: 33). Since the secret underworld of the Empire is headed by Cheops, named after one of the Pharaohs, Rushdie’s Borges-inspired embedded story deals with two gifted rivals, both Egyptomanes, who tended to be passionate about the same things, including women. The two rivals, Arthur Perring and Richard Howard-Vyse, who bear the same surnames as the British archaeologists John Shae Perring (1813–1869) and Richard Howard Vyse (1784–1853), leave Buenos Aires to explore “the bent pyramid at Dashur, the pyramid of Sneferu, father of Cheops” (174), precisely the pyramid explored by their namesakes almost a century before. Given that both love the imbecile Clara, each decides to waylay the other in the hitherto undiscovered passage in the pyramid — mentioned in the 1950s by one Ahmed Fakhry (1905–1973), who had worked on the same pyramid not long before their arrival. Perring and Howard-Vyse discover the hidden passage, a magnificent structure unchanged after all these years. But as they run towards what seemed like a great chamber ahead, “a great slab of solid stone slid into place behind them, barring the exit for all time” (176). They are doomed and all thoughts of murder are banished. They look up and Howard-Vyse reads the writing in hieroglyphics, which says “
It is after reading this story, dedicated to one Babbington (a name, the middle name of Thomas Babbington Macaulay, which returns in The Satanic Verses), that Sinai remembers the third and fourth letters from Black Saleem. The third had already been recounted via its reading by Saleem’s friends Gutte and Vanilla. Sinai now reads the “fourth epistle of Black Saleem” (177–9), in which Black Saleem “reveals all” (177). On Indian Independence day 1947, Mary Pereira is the nurse on duty at the Narlikar Nursing Home. Dr Narlikar himself delivers the Sinai baby. In an adjoining smaller ward (an act of social responsibility on the part of the doctor), Dr Mrs Uhlendorff and Mrs Edwards deliver the child of one “Laxmi Bai, wife of Vinoo (Wee Willie Winkie, the man with the golden voice)”. Still recovering from her unrequited love for Joseph DaCosta, Mary wants to undertake her own revolutionary act, and exchanges the two babies: the Sinai baby to Laxmi Bai, and the Bai baby to Mrs Sinai. Mrs Edwards notices the exchange but remains silent. The act does not redeem Mary in the eyes of Joseph. When she tells him “I have given one poor child the chance of wealth”, he replies: “You have no concept of revolution. Do you think that by turning masters into servants and servants into masters you have changed a single thing about the country we live in?” When Mary replies “Yes”, he calls it a “wrong revolution”, of one kind of materialism against another. Later through Dr Mrs Uhlendorff, his mentor, Black Saleem locates the records of the Nursing Home and discovers his real parentage — a discovery made all the more urgent because upon Wee Willie Winkie (Vinoo’s) car accident, he is unable to save Vinoo, because his blood is of a rare type totally unlike that of his parents.
14
The letter ends:
You and I: the signposts of one of history’s blindest alleys. No wonder I adopt your name. No wonder I loathe you so utterly. No wonder Ramaji [his sadhu protector] could not make me gentle. […] I want one thing only. Revenge. (179)
At the beginning of Book Three is a quotation from Edmund Burke: “He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skills. Our antagonist is our helper”. The quotation is repeated in Joseph Anton (Rushdie, 2012: 345), where it is used to signal the extremist views currently espoused in the name of Islam. Later in the same Book (Three), we get the Fifth Epistle of Black Saleem. This letter begins with the warning that Black Saleem would love to tear Sinai into 29 pieces because he had laid eyes on Olga (with whom Black Saleem had been telepathically communing); the number recurs throughout the Rushdie corpus, because of its links to the “simurg” myth made famous by Attar.
15
After pointing out that India is no longer a spiritual country, its gods abandoned and put to different, cynical uses, Saleem develops the idea of “Eki” or parallelism, which means that their lives parallel the history of India as a nation since independence, when the nation came into being. The latter was the “generative moment” (290). This moment, however, creates not only a “new historical direction, but also a human being” (290), much like the Hegelian Lukács’ (1974) notion of the world-historical character in his discussion of the historical novel. Since the birth of the nation must have its individual, human parallel, Sinai and Black Saleem are the individuals. But the act of Mary Pereira reversed their roles: one became the representative of the downtrodden, the other of privilege, in a replay of the old imperialist notion of divide and rule. So to get to a new “Eki”, Saleem has to be brought back to India and the two must confront each other, since, collectively, they are the nation’s “Ek” (“one” in Hindi). Black Saleem’s revenge is focused on both Sinai and Mary Pereira, whose whereabouts in Colaba he knows. His dark plan is hinted at with reference to a “special knife, the sister of the one I sent you at the opening of our correspondence […] sleep, little mother, don’t you cry, And I will sing a lullaby” (292). The letter ends:
Come by air to Bombay. Every day for the next month a man will wait at Santa Cruz Airport for you; he’ll find you, don’t worry. He will bring you to me, and then we shall have our little chat. If you do not come, well, you will not hear from me again. I shall have failed in my attempt to create a new generative moment, but revenge on Mary Pereira will console me amply. Think on it. (292)
Back at home, the battle for the Empire continues, with Hanna carrying the other Oaxcu egg to King’s College where the meeting is being held. In India, Saleem finds that Mary has been murdered and Black Saleem is awaiting trial. Saleem himself escapes being assassinated because Black Saleem’s agent, one Mr Farthing, loses his nerve. But his body is ravaged by nonspecific urethritis and he nears death; he screams and talks about the Black Hole (327). Two jump-cuts follow.
The first is in a garden full of bougainvillea, cacti, roses, and sunflowers. Beyond is the Arabian Sea. Four people in cane chairs sip numbu-pani (328). The description is of Rushdie’s home in Bombay, recalled also in Joseph Anton: “Windsor Villa, Warden Road, Bombay -26. It was a house on a hill and it overlooked the sea and the city flowing between the hill and the sea” (Rushdie, 2012: 20).
16
This first jump-cut ends with a man of 64 “looking red with rage and blood pressure, and a woman, his wife, about 58, looking depressed” (328):
Their conversation can be summed up in two short sentences; they have been repeating variations on these sentences for some time now.
We turn to the second jump-cut. The scene is the Breach Candy Hospital, with white doctors. One of them tells Vanilla, who had come from Bliss Grove to forewarn Saleem, that Saleem has cataleptic illness (muscle rigidity, lack of sensations) and requires ECT (electro-convulsive therapy). Fade-in to Mr Sinai. Mrs Sinai tells Vanilla, who now has Saleem’s contagious disease, to leave as they will look after Saleem. The chapter (eleven) ends with a shooting script:
A slow zoom down from our heights brings us to the roof of the Breach Candy hospital, and by magic through the roof of the small room where Sinai sits, and now we close in on his face which looks at us — no, not at us — which looks at something through, close right in on them now, through those eternally staring eyes. (331)
In the final chapter of the novel (chapter twelve), we find Saleem reading his mind as a black hole, a fantasy space into which India with its chaos and noise is sucked. Many years before, there was of course a real black hole, a historical black hole, the Black Hole of Calcutta (1756) where a number of British soldiers were held and many suffocated for lack of air. The incident also led to the Battle of Plassey (1757), which marked the beginning of a more direct colonization of India. This world cannot be explained but understood only through the gift of the artist for whom alone, as Calvino said, fantasy is available as a means of explaining the world to oneself (334). The hospital is a cage to him and now he is in a Nursing Home. He is in the care of a sympathetic nurse, Nurse Sharmila (named, as is likely, after the Bollywood star of the period, Sharmila Tagore), who helps Saleem Sinai escape in her 1955 Buick. With Sinai in the back seat she drives home but stops at a vegetable stall. This is when Sinai walks out of the car towards the Regal Cinema in Colaba (then the city’s premier cinema), where “an old American movie, starring Lana Turner, John Saxon [sic] and Sandra Dee” is being shown (340). The movie, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), has a guest appearance by the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. Although she does not sing this song in the film (in the film she sings “Trouble of the World”), the novel ends with Mahalia’s classic, “He got the whole world, in his hand” [sic] (340), the song in Sinai’s head as he walks away.
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There is a one-word coda, though, on a separate page, which reads “
Theorizing the unpublished manuscript
The foregoing account will be for many readers their first encounter with Rushdie’s early unpublished work. “The Book of the Peer” marks Rushdie’s interest in demonic sacralization in Islam, “Crosstalk” his interest in modernist existentialism, and “The Antagonist” signifies the search for the right voice and genre for the Indian novel he has been struggling to write (in this respect it anticipates Midnight’s Children). It also provides him with the kinds of fabulist time-travelling machines that will make their way so much later into Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015). “Madame Rama” (which we have not examined here) takes us to Rushdie’s interest in cinema, and specifically to Bollywood Cinema, which functions in this novel not so much as a source of idioms and ideological critique as a substrate for the plot itself. Apart from their functional use value, the summary and analysis of these unpublished works take us to the larger problematic with which we began this essay: what is the “mode of being” of the unpublished work as an intentional object, and what is its critical-auratic status? The unpublished manuscripts as read here are thus curiously overdetermined by generic fluidity, thematic capaciousness, and a disingenuous style. Self-consciously designed to reflect personal recollections as well as the political disenchantments of the author’s two homelands — India and Pakistan — they are meandering, largely decentred narratives. But although they are neither earlier drafts (as the Midnight’s Children manuscripts in the archive are), nor works of great power and imaginative force, they are not to be read as pure ephemera of little consequence. They have value in their own right insofar as they are a crucible of materials (both aesthetic as well as ideological) which make their way into Rushdie’s mature works.
Apart from a few marginal notes here and there, these works exist in near fair copy typescript, and require no palaeographical skills on the part of a scholar to consider them as copy-texts for purposes of a critical edition (if indeed the author’s permission to do so were available). In that respect their auratic value (often linked in textual criticism to the author’s handwriting, with its affective connections to the author’s own body) is negligible. Nor can these unpublished manuscripts be used either for purposes of a “bibliographie du bibliographe” (the bibliography of the bibliographer) or for a “bibliographie de l’érudit” (the bibliography of the scholar), because there is no published first edition to which the manuscript may be compared. However, as texts in potentia, texts which were written to be published or produced, they carry ideological meaning and are a valuable source for an understanding of the making of a writer. They do, as argued in this article, have an undertheorized standing in the sense that they belong to what may be called the genre of the unpublished text, as fair copy, that is neither a first draft of the more accomplished later texts nor one that the writer, as later suggested, wished to publish. They therefore exist in a vague world as texts in potentia, an expression of will and volition, of the capacity to write, which is the defining characteristic of being human. Rushdie himself has resisted the idea of reading archival material as steps toward an understanding of the more accomplished products, and certainly of both Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, in light of the manuscripts discussed. The evidence given and the readings offered here, however, clearly show a writer’s attempts to find the right voice, the right balance between fantasy and reality and the creation, in the final instance, of the exemplary text of postcolonial modernity.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This essay could not have been written without the archival work of Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Rare Books and Manuscript Collection librarians. I am deeply indebted to them. An early version of this paper was delivered as a keynote address at the “Salman Rushdie in the 21st Century: ‘Swallowing the World’” Conference, Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon, November 6–9, 2013. I thank Ana Cristina Mendes for inviting me to the conference and both Ana Cristina Mendes and Rachael Gilmour for silently editing the essay. This essay is dedicated to my mother Lila W. Mishra who, without understanding a word of it, would patiently listen to my enchantment with James Joyce, a Rushdie favourite.
Funding
This essay forms part of a larger manuscript (The Genesis of Secrecy: Annotating Salman Rushdie) written during my tenure as an Australia Research Council Professorial Fellow.