Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir: Third-person narrative of his years in hiding from a death-threat for The Satanic Verses

Rushdie’s pseudonym in hiding was “Joseph Anton”: “Joseph” taken from Joseph Conrad, author of the “The Secret Sharer” (see past post).

I don’t know whether Rushdie’s use, in a memoir, of a third-person narrator reflects the author’s multiple personality or is a purely technical choice. It never felt natural to me.

Nor am I sure who vandalized his college room—probably a racist and not an alternate personality:

“…a few nights before his [Rushdie’s own] graduation, some anonymous wit…chose to redecorate his…college room, in his absence, by hurling a bucketful of gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture, to say nothing of his record player and clothes. With that ancient tradition of fairness and justice upon which the colleges of Cambridge prided themselves, King’s instantly held him solely responsible for the mess…” (1, pp. 45-46).

“He was a migrant…The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogeneous…multiple rather than singular…” (1, pp. 53-54).

He calls the following alternate perspective his “unconscious,” but it sounds like a second self who has artistic differences: “His conscious mind was, as usual, at odds with his unconscious which kept throwing angels and miracles at his rationality and insisting that he find ways to incorporate them into his way of seeing” (1, p. 73).

Near the end of his memoir, he says: “In the pages of a novel it was clear that the human self was heterogeneous not homogeneous, not one thing but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory…” (1, p. 627).

He goes on to illustrate his comment with things that could represent ordinary roles in life, and not alternate personalities. But a person who has various ordinary roles in life—like most people—usually experiences himself as multifaceted, and the roles as complementary.

However, if a person feels himself to be “not one thing, but many, multiple, fractured and contradictory,” it sounds less like ordinary roles and more like multiple personality. 

1. Salman Rushdie. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. New York, Random House, 2012/2013.