Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy by Vijay Mishra (review)

As both an archival study and an approach to Salman Rushdie’s texts and contexts, Vijay Mishra’s Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy is exemplary. It is the result of the first extensive study of the Emory University Salman Rushdie archive, conducted by Mishra over a period of many years, during which time the author undertook “a complete and thorough reading of all available material” (xii)—the accessible materials are extensive, and the archive also holds some materials which remain under an embargo for the time being. The book asks searching questions about the nature of the archive: is it a kind of “autobiography” (5)? How do we understand its selective nature? What do we do with the secrets it reveals or attempts to conceal? It also considers how to theorize the archive of a living author (undertaking a Joycean wake in order to do so, adding a Freudian level of uncovering what is buried, pausing before being overwhelmed by a Derridean fever for the “desire and the disorder of the archive” [31]). And, finally, it addresses the value and function of archival materials. Responding to Rushdie’s own assertion that “the process” (2) and therefore the resulting archive “[are] not very interesting” in the first chapter, Mishra offers convincing evidence that the opposite is true, explaining that his aim is to “flesh out diverging narratives that throw light on the other archive, the already edited and therefore already censored archive which constitutes the writer’s published corpus” (30).

Through its breadth, depth, and urgency, Salman Rushdie and the Genesis of Secrecy is sure to instill curiosity about, and warmth toward, Rushdie and his works in a new generation of scholars. For a fan and/ or scholar, the items included indiscriminately (perhaps accidentally) by Rushdie among his archived papers—“a necklace with ‘Salman’ written on a grain of rice inside a liquid-filled bulb” (5), a set of tarot cards, a pair of broken spectacles worn by the author to receive the Booker Prize, and a “Salman Rushdie puzzle”—offer fascinating new dimensions to consider. While these objects tantalize, Mishra demonstrates the potential of archival research in recuperating some of Rushdie’s less acclaimed novels, including a reading of Fury which understands it as a translation of, and intertext for, Ovid’s story of the grief of the Furies, weeping for the first time over the song of Orpheus. Likewise, the book anticipates academic approaches to recent works. A lengthy discussion in the Epilogue on The Golden House, published in 2017, leads academic work on the novel by approaching it as representative of Rushdie’s storytelling oeuvre as revealing a “karmic or preordained” (221) story. It foregrounds the novel’s frequent embedded references to literary and filmic texts through a discussion of the novel’s authorial presence, which reveals as much about world literature as it does about Rushdie who (in this text and his published and unpublished archive) “conceals nothing” (224).

The book is innovative in its range and content, offering new insight into Rushdie as a writer, a reader, a scholar, and a professional. Archival materials are revealed with generosity, while there is a good sense of balance between attention paid to important works (chapter 3 is dedicated to Midnight’s Children) and the discussion of unpublished materials, including a screenplay version of “The Courter” and works titled “Crosstalk,” “The Antagonist,” and “Madame Rama.” Mishra often writes in the voice of an enthusiastic scholar permitted access to a compelling archive—as he intervenes on our behalf, he shares tantalizing selections from the archive, including the typescript of the second draft of the first chapter of Midnight’s Children, and the first draft of the novel’s ending, signed and dated by the author. Alongside these is the beginning section from the “Perforated Sheet” chapter, originally titled “The Holy Sheet,” which shows more than half of the page crossed out in Rushdie’s editing process. Mishra also discusses multiple versions side by...