Authorship as Crisis in Salman Rushdie’s Fury

Abstract

The development of literary fiction as a popular niche for the publishing industry has been accompanied and encouraged by the increasing presence of writers of non-European origins, often from formerly colonized nations, writing in English for the Anglo-American market. The literature championed by postcolonial scholarship develops largely out of this matrix, and Salman Rushdie is one of its definitive lead authors. Rushdie has built a career on fictions set in locales foreign to many of those who read them, having taken up the task of exploring some of the most topical and contentious political phenomena of the late twentieth century, from anti-capitalist, anti-American revolutions in Central America to religious fundamentalisms in South Asia, from racism in England to the increasing presence of corporate influence in cultural production. Though his first novel Grimus (1979) sold a dismal 800 copies in hardcover,1 since Midnight’s Children was published in 1981 by Jonathan Cape, then the “most prestigious house for literary fiction”, Rushdie has been a lead author.2 The initial printing of Midnight’s Children in England was 1,750 copies, but it eventually sold 40,000 copies in hardcover.3 Marketing the book in the United States was more difficult, perhaps due to the lack of American attachment to India, the novel’s major setting and subject. Eventually Alfred P. Knopf did acquire it and they marketed it aggressively. A review by V.S. Pritchett was slated to appear in the New Yorker to coincide with the US release. It went on to sell very well in hardcover in the US, where the paperback rights went Authorship as Crisis