SOURCE: Ben-Yishai, Ayelet. “The Dialectic of Shame: Representation in the Metanarrative of Salman Rushdie's Shame.” Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 1 (spring 2002): 194-215.

In the following essay, Ben-Yishai discusses the duality in Rushdie's metanarrative approach to his subject material in Shame.

I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage, betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all manner of sinuous complexities, to see my “male” plot refracted, so to speak, through the prisms of its reverse and ‘female’ side.

—Salman Rushdie, Shame

This passage from Salman Rushdie's third novel has been pivotal in most analyses of the novel, and indeed...