‘The Ghost of Other Stories’: Salman Rushdie and the Question of Canonicity?

Abstract

In a piece first published in the New Statesman in 1990, Paul Gilroy compares the diverging fortunes of two heavyweights of the British media during the late 1980s: Salman Rushdie and Frank Bruno. Gilroy argues that, at the time of his first World Championship fight against Mike Tyson, Bruno became a potent symbol ‘of the future of blacks in this country’, while Rushdie and the ‘Affair’ that surrounded him came to symbolize the foreignness of Muslim settlers. What Gilroy calls the ‘canonization’ of ‘our Frank’ was contemporaneous with the marginalization of British Asians, who found themselves construed as utterly and irredeemably different:

For a while, Frank’s muscular black English masculinity became a counterpart to the esoteric and scholastic image of Rushdie — the middle-class intellectual immigrant — so remote from the world of ordinary folk that he was able to misjudge it so tragically.

For two weeks the stories were articulated directly together. They fed off each other, echoing, replying and re-working the same range of visceral themes: belonging and exclusion, sameness and assimilation … The image of each man stood as a convenient emblem for one of Britain’s black settler communities, marking out their respective rates of progress towards integration. Each image increased its symbolic power through implicit references to the other — its precise inversion.¹