Meditations of Genre in Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton

Abstract

In Salman Rushdie’s book Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012), the narrator alternates between first-person and third-person and leaps from the present back to his childhood. He combines the sub-genres of life writing with a novelised account, stressing the concept of story. In the former, we study the implications of “memoir,” the possibility of defining the work as an example of J M Coetzee’s “autre-biography” or autobiography “against itself” à la Barthes. Through the contribution of the latter aspect, read as a literary novel and also a detective story, Rushdie has created a work in which all these apparently defining factors are present and which can therefore only be described as generically “hybrid.