Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1988) is one of
the relatively few works of fiction to have made a significant
and permanent impact outside the enclosed world of literature.
Despite W. H. Auden's assertion that "poetry [by which he
meant imaginative literature in general] makes nothing happen,"
this novel has clearly made a number of things happen. It has
led to the loss of over twenty lives. It made its author go into
hiding from the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa of 1989 where
he has remained under government protection ever since. Above
all, coinciding with the ending of the Cold War, it has played
a significant role in redefining the West's image of itself. The
Other is no longer the threat of Communism, but that of Islamic
fundamentalism - far more of a paper tiger than the very real
nuclear menace offered by the USSR and its allies. The book was
similarly used by Islamic clerics to reinforce their image of
the United States (and its Western allies) as the Great Satan
- doubly ironical seeing what a fierce critic of American policy
abroad Rushdie had shown himself to be in The Jaguar Smile:
A Nicaraguan Journey (1987) . The Iranian President Khamene'i
told his followers, "The Satanic Verses...is no doubt
one of the verses of the Great Satan" (Appignanesi 87). In
giving Rushdie's ironic title a literal reading (although itself
figurative in another way) Khamene'i politicized the novel irrevocably.
The Ayatollah Khomeini justified his fatwa against Rushdie
by similarly accusing him and "the world devourers"
(the West) of publishing The Satanic Verses as "a
calculated move aimed at rooting out religion and religiousness,
and above all, Islam and its clergy" (Appignanesi 90). Considering
that the clergy in Iran occupied the highest positions of political
power, it can be seen how threatening Rushdie's novel must have
appeared to the leaders of an Islamic theocratic state.
Whereas Western politicians have chosen to represent this conflict
as a battle between democratic freedom of speech and autocratic
censorship or even terrorism (the fatwa), Rushdie's ideological
stance, both within the the novel and in his numerous comments
on its reception, is a great deal more complex and problematical.
In an article written about responses to the book, "In Good
Faith" (1990), Rushdie insists that he has "never seen
this controversy as a struggle between Western freedoms and Eastern
unfreedom." Instead, he asserts, his novel champions "doubts,
uncertainties." "It dissents from the end of debate,
of dispute, of dissent" (Imaginary Homelands 396).
In defending his right to defend all issues endlessly, to postpone
closure indefinitely, to oppose certainties of all kinds whether
they originate in the East or the West, Rushdie is clearly positioning
himself as a writer in a postmodern world where nothing can be
asserted with assurance. "I am a modern, and modernist, urban
man," he insists in the same essay, "accepting uncertainty
as the only constant, change as the only sure thing" (404-5).
This refusal to countenance any of the grand narratives that have
governed Eastern or Western civilization is precisely the stance
that Jean-François Lyotard identifies as central to the
postmodern condition. Rushdie has been simultaneously hailed by
many critics as the preeminent practitioner of post-colonial writing
which is normally characterized by its opposition to the values
and ideology of the metropolitan center. While postmodernism itself
is said to embrace cultural relativity, it tends to prioritize
relativity per se, whereas post-colonialism normally prioritizes
non-Western culural diversity. In other words there is an implicit
conflict in the two positions: post-colonialism adopts specific
political positions which postmodernism goes out of its way to
relativize.
Rushdie's own life history further complicates this dichotomy.
Brought up a Muslim in a Hindu country, he was sent to an English
public school at the age of fourteen, and chose to stay on in
England after obtaining a degree in history at King's College,
London. Self-exiled from his native country, he was repeatedly
rebuffed by the inherent racism he met with in his adopted country.
Prior to the proclamation of the fatwa Rushdie was one
of the acutest critics of the Thatcher regime's brand of racist
politics. After he was placed in the care of the British security
services he found himself in the ambivalent position of an adopted
citizen owing his life to a government that was simultaneously
passing anti-immigrant legislation motivated by the fear of being
swamped by alien races. Marginalized racially, Rushdie nevertheless
belongs more to the center of the dominant culture when considered
in terms of class and wealth. He has turned the hybridity of his
migrant (as opposed to immigrant) status into a desirable if uncomfortable
mode of existence. It offers him freedom from "the shackles
of nationalism," but it is "a burdensome freedom"
(Imaginary Homelands 124). It means that writers in his
position "are capable of writing from a kind of double perspective,
because they, we, are at one and the same time insiders and outsiders
in this society" (19). As an insider, Rushdie is postmodern
in his validation of the uncertainty principle, including the
area of religious belief. As an outsider, he is post-colonialist
in his satirical subversion of the certainties of metropolitan
(Thatcherite) politics and the center's exercise of power.
Rushdie attempts to reconcile these internal stresses by resorting
to a trope - that of oxymoron - by means of which he seeks to
celebrate the certainty of uncertainty, the singular affirmation
of plurality. Inevitably he has been taken to task by each camp
for supposedly embracing the opposing one. In particular, he has
come under sustained attack for his quintessentially postmodern
attitude by Marxists, especially by Aijaz Ahmad. Ahmad attacks
Rushdie on the grounds that his fictional space is "occupied
so entirely by Power that there is no space left for either resistance
or its representation" (127). In Ahmad's eyes Rushdie lacks
proper anti-imperialist political conviction. However, critics
such as Ahmad embody a specific post-colonial interpretation of
the political that is far too crude when applied to Rushdie's
writings. Rushdie refuses to adopt any easy position in the post-colonial
debate, because he stands on both sides of its divide. This enables
him to discern in both dominant and emergent cultures the same
desire to appropriate the truth for themselves and to use this
truth to valorize their imposition of it on believers and dissenters
alike.
Despite Rushdie's later protestations, there is no doubt that
he set out in this novel to confront what he disparagingly calls
"Actually Existing Islam" (by which he means "the
political and priestly power structure that presently dominates
and stifles Muslim societies") with the uncertainties governing
the circumstances under which the Qu'ran came into existence (Imaginary
Homelands 436). The original verbal battle between Muhammad
and the poets who defended the polytheism he set out to replace,
which is reenacted in Rushdie's fictional reconstruction of it,
has since been replayed - verbally - between its author and the
mullahs. Islamic fundamentalism squares off against Islamic secularism
(Rushdie was brought up in a Muslim family where, however, "there
was an absolute willingness to discuss anything." Appignanesi
30). As Aamir Mufti has put it, "in secularizing (and hence
profaning) the sacred 'tropology' of Islam by insisting upon its
appropriation for the purposes of fiction, the novel throws into
doubt the discursive edifice within which Islam has been produced
in recent years" (107). In effect Rushdie chooses to oppose
the anti-imperialist discursive formation of Islam by pitting
against it the alternative discursive formation of imaginative
fiction. Rushdie seems to see in fictional discourse a neutral
discursive space in which he can give free play to competing discourses
that oppose both the discourse of Islam and that of Thatcherite
nationalism. The Satanic Verses, then, can be seen as a
bricolage of conflicting discourses framed by the controlling
discourse of fiction. But just how neutral is a discourse that
controls? In its postmodern form is not fictional discourse itself
competing for dominance with the other discursive formations it
seeks to incorporate within its all-embracing grasp?
The use of discursive formations, according to Michel Foucault,
represents an attempt to control and contain the "barely
imaginable powers and dangers," the "ponderous, awesome
materiality" of language (Archaeology/Discourse 216).
Within The Satanic Verses Rushdie pits secular against
sacred, nationalist or racist against transnationalist or migrant,
historical against ahistorical, and above all, authoritative against
fictional forms of discourse. I want to concentrate on Rushdie's
attempt to use fictional discourse to undermine the totalizing
discourses of religion and nationalism. To undermine is not necessarily
to destroy. Rushdie has said that the novel is an exploration
of the "God-shaped hole" left in him after he had abandoned
the "unarguable absolutes of religion" (Appignanesi
75). Apart from a brief moment of reverse apostasy during the
period of the fatwa, he has remained a secular Muslim who
has always aspired to achieve within an aesthetic context that
transcendence experienced by the religious mystic. He maintains
that art, like religion, can produce a "flight of the human
spirit outside the confines of its material, physical existence"
(Imaginary Homelands 421). Clearly the danger for someone
holding this belief is that he will treat art or fiction as a
transcendental signifier. Like many writers of the twentieth century,
he is looking for an alternative religious experience outside
the restrictive confines of an organized religion such as that
of Islam (which literally means "Submission"). He would
claim that, unlike Islamic fundamentalists, he does not seek to
compel anyone to accept his aesthetic ideology. Nevertheless he
clearly believes that this ideology is superior to that of either
the fundamentalists
or the imperialists. He has no wish to compel, but a strong wish
to persuade.
This still leaves open to question why Rushdie should think that
the discourse of art or fiction should have a truth-value unavailable
to revealed religion. Can there be a hierarchy of discourses?
According to Foucault all discourses are equally subject to their
own particular confining sets of rules. If this is the case, why
should the discourses of fundamentalist religion and nationalism
find Rushdie's use of fictional discourse in The Satanic Verses
so threatening? Is it because fiction claims to incorporate those
other discursive formations within its own discourse and in doing
so to reveal the will to power underlying their will to truth?
(But doesn't the Qu'ran do the same thing in its treatment of
contemporary poets?) Foucault identifies the will to truth as
the most important of the three systems of exclusion that govern
discourse. He claims that it has tended to assimilate the other
two systems - prohibited words, and the division between reason
and folly. Each discursive formation claims for itself the status
of "true" discourse, concealing behind its will to constitute
the truth of things its desire for power. This is obviously the
case in the instance of a theocratic state such as Iran where
Islamic faith (of the Shi'ite variety) is invoked to justify a
war against even fellow (Sunni) Muslims of a neighboring state
such as Iraq. By calling it a jihad or holy war, by definition
a war waged against infidels, such a state draws on the discourse
of "true" religion to sanction its naked nationalist
and political ambitions. In a similar fashion Mrs. Thatcher appealed
to the "truth" of the rights to self-determination by
the Falkland Islanders to sanction her desire to retain political
power back in the metropolitan center.
But Foucault insists that the same great systems of exclusion
govern the discourse of literature. Literature too feels that
it has to extend its power over its readers by claiming truth
for itself. According to Foucault, "Western literature has,
for centuries, sought to base itself in nature, in the plausible,
upon sincerity and science-in short, upon true discourse"
(Archaeology/Discourse 219). One might argue that what
is loosely referred to as postmodern literature does anything
but base itself on nature. As Mimi insists in the novel: "I
...am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g.
that we have here a society capable only of pastiche: a 'flattened'
world" (261). Rushdie has obviously read his Jameson. Yet
when Rushdie comes to defend fiction in his own person he claims
that postmodern writing offers the truest reflection of contemporary
human experience: a "rejection of totalized explanations
is the modern condition. And this is where the novel, the form
created to discuss the fragmentation of truth, comes in...The
elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself, the
acceptance that all that is solid has melted into air,
that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs,
is the point from which fiction begins" (Imaginary Homelands
422). This comes close to basing fiction in nature by redefining
the natural. Rushdie is unashamedly pitting his naturalized fictional
discourse against what he terms (with an acknowledgment to Lyotard)
the unnatural, totalizing discourses of religion and national
politics. As Foucault suggests, the will to truth "tends
to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other
forms of discourse" (Archaeology/Discourse 219).
In effect Rushdie claims for fictional discourse an imaginative
form of truth where freedom reigns in place of institutional control.
Fiction, he maintains, can flout the mundane facts and still appeal
to the world of the imagination to claim that it represents the
"true" or authentic transcription of human experience.
In "Imaginary Homelands" he argues that "[w]riters
and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the
world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
And the novel is one way of denying the official, politicians'
version of the truth" (14). Rushdie's figurative allusions
here are revealing. While he is ostensibly arguing about claims
to truthfulness, his vocabulary ("rivals," "fight,"
"territory") belongs to the the world for power.
In the opening chapter of the novel Rushdie forces his readers
to become conscious of the paradoxical nature of fiction's notion
of "true" discourse: "Once upon a time - it
was and it was not so, as the old stories used to say, it
happened and it never did - maybe, then, or maybe not..."
(35). All fictional discourse is predicated by that "maybe."
It is for the reader to decide on the probability of the imaginative
construct. The book begins by flouting any sense of factual reality
with an impossible rebirth - two actors (as the two main protagonists
are tellingly characterized) falling to earth without parachutes
or wings from a height of twenty nine thousand feet. Other improbabilities
follow. Gibreel acquires a halo and Chamcha goat hooves and horns.
A dead lover visits Gibreel on a magic carpet. Gibreel tropicalizes
London's climate. The British authorities turn immigrants into
a water-buffalo, slippery snakes and a manticore, itself a beast
of fictional invention. In effect Rushdie is exploiting the extended
boundaries of fictional discourse to demonstrate that what is
invented is not necessarily untrue if read figuratively. When
Chamcha asks the manticore how "they" manage to turn
the immigrants into such weird creatures, he promptly replies,
"They have the power of description, and we succumb to the
pictures they construct" (168). But the novelist, Rushdie
goes on to imply, has the superior power of description, which
should enable him to overpower the descriptive discourse of the
racist immigration authorities. Like the novelist, these authorities
make the "story" they concoct about how Chamcha came
to be unconscious (mainly due to the beating they gave him) "more
convincing" by incorporating into their fiction the fact
that he was at any rate genuinely sick beforehand (169). Rushdie
parodies their method of telling a story by starting off as they
do with a fiction, such as the manticore, and then offering -
not facts, but a figurative explanation for the seemingly unreal
shapes they assume.
Interspersed with the "realist" chapters are chapters
in which Gibreel is visited by unwanted dreams or nightmares.
Paradoxically, within his surreal world of dreams Gibreel becomes
the spectator or participant in a series of historically authenticated
occurrences (suggesting that history itself is a collective dreaming
about the past). His dream of Mahound (the Christian crusaders'
demonic term of abuse for Muhammad) incorporates numerous incidents
from accounts of the life of Muhammad. Similarly the story of
Ayesha makes free use of a widely reported episode that happened
in Karachi in 1983 when Naseem Fatima led thirty eight Shi'a followers
into the sea which they expected to part for them. Another narrative
strand in Gibreel's dream chapters - the account of the Imam's
return from exile - resembles the Ayatollah Khomeini's return
to Iran on the downfall of the Shah in 1979.
Gibreel is torn between a "real" world where the miraculous
happens and a world of dreams where the miraculous is restored
to an imagined but largely verifiable historical past. As Gibreel
gradually drifts into a state of schizophrenia Rushdie further
complicates the already confused distinction between material
and imaginative reality by showing the barrier between waking
and dreaming worlds slowly crumbling. Neither Gibreel nor the
reader can be sure of where one world ends and the other begins.
The resulting confusion can be either liberating or destructive.
"The imagination," Rushdie admits, "can falsify,
demean, ridicule, caricature and wound as effectively as it can
clarify, intensify and unveil" (Imaginary Homelands
143). On the other hand he reveals his own prejudice when he inconsistently
insists that "the opposition of imagination to reality...reminds
us that we are not helpless; that to dream is to have power."
Here again we glimpse the will to power underlying fiction's will
to (imaginative) truth. Rushdie continues: "Unreality is
the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it
may subsequently be reconstituted" (Imaginary Homelands
122). But what does he mean by "reality"? Apparently
"our conventional, habit-dulled certainties about what the
world is and has to be," a world "in which things inevitably
get worse" (122). The dream worlds of the artist have "the
power . . . to oppose this dark reality" (122). Their (postmodern)
plurality, Rushdie asserts, brings the light of truth to a world
benighted by the unitary truths of politics and religion. But
the discourse of fiction is seen here to be as incapable as is
all true discourse, according to Foucault, "of recognizing
the will to truth which pervades it" (Archaeology/Discourse
219). It is as blind to its determination to establish its superior
status as are the discursive formations of nationalism and Islam
that it subordinates to its purposes. Discourse, like knowledge,
is necessarily contaminated by its desire to dominate.
How does fictional discourse exercise its power of constraint
on those totalizing discourses it opposes? Primarily by appropriation.
It incorporates them into its own discourse, one which ostensibly
throws all proclaimed truths into question. Whereas Muslims believe
that the archangel Gabriel dictated God's verses to Muhammad,
Mahound, in Rushdie's subversive version of the origins of the
Qu'ran, exercises a form of telepathy by means of which he mesmerizes
Gibreel into dictating what he (Mahound) needs from him. In other
words Rushdie replaces the unauthored word of God by the psychologized
interaction between the needful Prophet and his supposedly angelic
mouthpiece--an internal projection. Since Gibreel is responsible
for uttering under Mahound's spell both the Satanic verses and
their angelic rebuttal, the fictional discourse places him in
a position to throw doubt on Mahound's claim that the first set
of verses came from Satan:
Being God's postman is no fun, yar.
Butbutbut: God isn't in this picture.
God knows whose postman I've been. (112)
Cast in fictional discursive form and undermined by Rushdie's
use of a playful, punning tone, the absolutes of Islamic faith
become humanized and relativized. The mere substitution of "postman"
for " Messenger" reduces the sublime to the mundane.
Rushdie repeatedly exploits the polysemantic nature of language
to make us conscious of the possibility of alternative readings
that were present at the moment that the discourse of Islam privileged
one of them for its own use. For instance, Bostan, one
of the two gardens of paradise, is also the name of the plane
which is blown up by Sikh terrorists in the opening chapter of
the book. Paradise, then, within a framework of fictional discourse,
offers no haven from the uncertainties of this world. The sight
of perfection that Allie Cone glimpsed on Mount Everest is seen
by this representative figure of the postmodern world to be unattainable
in the here and now. Perfection entails absolute silence, according
to Allie: "why speak if you can't manage perfect thoughts,
perfect sentences" (296)? Entry into the world of language,
as the writer of fiction knows, entails the compromises and ambiguities
that accompany imperfection, a fact that the believers in scripture
deny. Within Rushdie's fictional universe most certainties (especially
those consolatory absolutes held by religion) crumble. Uncertainty
is the only unchanging certainty that Rushdie perversely posits
in the novel.
Within his own discourse Rushdie performs what Foucault terms
a genealogical analysis on the discourse of Islam. Such an analysis
involves investigating how that discourse was formed, what were
its norms, and what were the conditions for its appearance, growth
and variation (Arcaeology/Discourse 231-2). Indeed it is
precisely this interest in what Foucault terms genealogy that
predominates in this novel:
How does newness come into the world? How is it born?
Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? (8)
Mahound's discourse is founded on the insistence that there is
only one God. He imposes this monotheistic idea on the people
of Jahilia (meaning the period of ignorance prior to the advent
of Islam), themselves polytheists who have constructed their city
out of the shifting sands of the desert. Mahound's insistence
on repetitive ritual washing is itself a threat to the survival
of their multifold structures built of dry sand, as well as offering
a paradigm of the difference in their ideological positions. The
Jahilian polytheists (like contemporary postmodernists) can accept
a greater degree of linguistic discontinuity in their belief in
gods with overlapping powers and domains than can Mahound who
belongs to what Foucault terms the "'critical' group"
which imposes "forms of exclusion, limitation, and appropriation"
on the threatening linguistic universe (Knowledge/Discourse
231). Mahound's triumph represents the imposition of a unitary
belief system on a society that resembled India where "the
human population outnumbers the divine by less than three to one"
(16). Here Rushdie combines a postcolonial admiration for Indian
diversity with a Western postmodern endorsement of the polysemantic
nature of language. But he seems to forget that diversity can
be (and was in the case of the British Empire) used to divide
and rule.
What also emerges from Rushdie's fictional historicization of
the origins of Islam is that Mahound began life as a successful
businessman (as Muhammad did) and subsequently used the new religion
to consolidate in business-like fashion his secular hold on power.
Mahound moves from the will to power to the will to truth which
soon enough reveals the underlying will to power that resurfaces
as the religious metamorphosizes into the political. Mahound is
also likened to Ibrahim (Abraham), who at God's command abandoned
his wife in the desert. The narrator comments, "From the
beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable" (95).
Such an aside implicitly opposes a different discourse (humanism?
feminism?) to that of religion. But simultaneously it gives narratorial
approval to the opposing discourse, which defeats the ostensible
postmodern stance of universal doubt. The context suggests that
the primary discourse invoked is that of feminism. Much is made
of Mahound's imposition of a maximum of four wives on his followers
while permitting himself twelve. In a section of the novel that
particularly inflamed Muslims Rushdie parodies Mahound's household
by inventing the brothel in which Baal the poet (representative
of the discourse of literature) parallels Mahound and the twelve
prostitutes he marries take on the names of the Prophet's twelve
wives. Sacred (that is, divinely condoned) and secular sexuality,
like sacred and secular verbal creativity, are made to appear
virtually identical in a fictional context. The distinctions that
define Islamic discourse (Foucault's external rules of exclusion)
are subtly elided until that discourse merges into the discourse
of fiction where it becomes just another imaginative textual construct.
In this instance Rushdie is more successful in undermining a unitary
discourse by placing it in a discursive context that deliberately
equates sacred and secular through the use of literary parallelism.
Rushdie has a more difficult task attempting a genealogical analysis
of the discourse of nationalism, if only because the formation
of nations predates recorded history. In the case of Britain he
chooses instead to invoke the Norman conquest of 1066 (an event
used by English historians to mark the beginning of the Middle
Ages) by having Gibreel and Chamcha fall to earth at Hastings,
the sight of the battle in which William the Conqueror defeated
Harold and replaced Anglo-Saxon civilization with a new regime.
Just as William swallowed a mouthful of sand on landing at Hastings,
Gibreel swallows a mouthful of snow, while Chamcha had already
been forced to swallow a kipper, bones and all, "the first
step in his conquest of England" (44). The narrative reminds
us from the start that Britain is the product of countless invasions
each of which has put new blood into its system. Gibreel invokes
another royal foreigner, William of Orange, whose bloodless revolution
in 1688 brought with it an influx of new ideas from the Continent.
Gibreel reflects, "Not all migrants are powerless...They
impose their needs on their new earth, bringing their own coherence
to the new-found land, imagining it afresh" (458). The newest
conquerors are immigrants from the West Indies and the Indian
subcontinent. Conquest, however, is not without its dangers. Both
Williams died of unnatural causes - Rushdie refers in the novel
to the later William's death from falling off his horse onto the
hard earth he'd civilized. Similarly one of the two migrant protagonists
and other immigrant characters in the novel meet unnatural deaths,
some at the hands of the xenophobic British authorities who remain
blind to their own mixed racial origins.
Margaret Thatcher, who had been in power for over nine years by
the time the novel was published, comes in for harsher treatment
than does Mahound, being referred to as "Torture. Maggie
the Bitch" (269). Rushdie had been particularly enraged by
a speech she had made after Britain's victory against Argentina
in the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas) in which she "most
plainly nailed her colours to the old colonial mast, claiming
that the success in the South Atlantic proved that the British
were still the people 'who had ruled a quarter of the world'"
(Imaginary Homelands 92). Unconsciously she was betraying
the fact that she did not consider immigrants like Rushdie who
had come from the ruled quarter to be a true part of the national
identity. Rushdie goes further, arguing that "the British
authorities, no longer capable of exporting governments, have
chosen instead to import a new Empire, a new community of subject
peoples" (Imaginary Homelands 130). It is this attempt
to reverse the course of history that enables Rushdie to establish
a link between Mrs. Thatcher and the Imam, the contemporary representative
of Islamic fundamentalism. When Mrs. Thatcher called for a return
to Victorian values, Rushdie wrote, "she had embarked on
a heroic battle against the linear passage of Time" (Imaginary
Homelands 92). In the novel Valance makes the same point more
colorfully to a disconcerted Chamcha. The connection to the Imam
becomes clear when the Imam tells an equally disconcerted Gibreel
that he will smash all the clocks when he comes to power in the
name of God's "boundless time, that encompasses past, present
and future; the timeless time, that has no need to move."
"I am eternity," he asserts (214). Whereas Jean-François
Lyotard and Fredric Jameson both claim in their way that the postmodern
entails a denial of the forces of history, Rushdie's satire at
the expense of these two modern leaders who have set out to reverse
the chronological progression of time emanates more from his postcolonial
belief in the need to acknowledge the historical effects of imperialism
if these are to be overturned and left behind by the newly liberated
peoples of the old empires. The truly postmodern response to Mrs.
Thatcher's and the Imam's reversal of historical time would be
to allow temporal and atemporal forces equal play.
Instead Rushdie attempts to subvert the uncreated word of God
by rehistoricizing the origins of Islam (just as he undermines
the Thatcher regime's desire to return to the Victorian days of
Empire by staging a race riot that is representative of contemporary
immigrants' militant rejection of the ideology of imperialism).
He does this by turning to a distinctive characteristic of literary
discourse - literary form - in order to subvert the claims to
truth of Islamic discourse. He employs a form that begins by attempting
to distinguish through alternating chapters between the waking
present-day "reality" of London (and Bombay) and Gibreel's
dreams of his participation in phantasmagoric historical events,
and that deliberately engineers the collapse of that distinction
as the fictionality of the controlling literary discourse asserts
itself. In framing history within a fictional context this novel
is not behaving like a typical postmodern work of art in which,
as Fredric Jameson puts it, "the past as 'referent' finds
itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether"
(18). Rather, the mythologized past of the origins of Islam is
given a sense of lived historical actuality by being dramatized
within the novel; in the process it is demystified and returned
to the fallible world of human need and error. Simultaneously
the fictionalized episodes involving Gibreel's and Chamcha's escapades
in Ellowen Deeowen (itself a product of fiction, a child's nursery
rhyme name for London) incorporate recognizable elements from
contemporary history: references to Enoch Powell's famous prediction
in a speech to the House of Commons in 1969 that rivers of blood
would flow if immigration to Britain were not severely restricted;
recognition that Mrs. Thatcher was attempting "literally
to invent a whole goddam new middle class in this country"
(270); the easily identifiable London ghetto of Brickhall where
the harassment of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent by police
and white youths boils over into a full scale race riot. In these
and other similar sections of the book contemporary reality constantly
erupts into and disrupts the impression that we are occupying
a world of pure imagination. This bricolage of historical and
fictional components is not available to the discourse of religion
for which a condition of the discourse is that the truth be accepted
as of divine origin. Whereas religion asserts the truth of its
discourse (itself a will to power), postmodern fiction ostensibly
questions all forms of truth--those of both historical fact and
fictional invention.
Or does it? Behind the postmodern pastiche artist can't one discern
the traditional writer as seer? However, instead of finding truth
in long established shared verities, Rushdie privileges a non-totalized,
pluralistic, open ended form of discourse that coincides with
postmodern writing practices. Truth-value in his view is multiple
and conflicting; it comes closer in definition to the satisfactoriness
of belief favored by pragmatic philosophers. But the will to truth
persists. A radical postmodern stance, on the other hand, would
proclaim the inaccessibility of truth and confine itself to undermining
all claims to absolute truth by and in discourse. Rushdie's position
entails an assumption of superiority over those claiming to represent
the truth by demonstrating the impossibility of doing so. In contrast
Rushdie implicitly elevates the multiple and conflictual nature
of fictional discourse to a position of higher "truth."
The very fact that it can incorporate the truth of religion into
its manifold discourse--and The Satanic Verses certainly accomplishes
this--is intended to show the superiority of plural fictional
discourse to the unitary discourse of Islam. But, as Sara Suleri
has acutely pointed out, "the desacrilizing of religion"
in The Satanic Verses "can simultaneously constitute a resacrilizing
of history" (190). Even history, however, is subordinated
in the novel to the playful and irresistible powers of the artistic
imagination. And, despite Rushdie's assertions to the contrary,
the imagination goes well beyond the raising of questions in Rushdie's
fiction. He tends to say one thing while accomplishing another.
"Answers are cheap. Questions are hard to find," he
asserted on the occasion of his emergence from hiding in September
1995 to talk about his latest novel, The Moor's Last Sigh
(Montalbano E7). Yet the new novel shows him once again implicitly
going beyond mere questions when deploring "the tragedy of
multiplicity destroyed by singularity, the defeat of Many by One"
(Wood 3). Why the insistence on binary polarity? What is wrong,
for instance, with the One and the Many? Is this not the more
genuine postmodern alternative to the exclusivity of the One?
Another characteristic of fictional discourse which Rushdie uses
to subvert the truth claims of other unitary discourses is its
ability to exploit a disparity between tone and substance. Having
already written one comic epic (Midnight's Children ),
Rushdie considered The Satanic Verses the most comic of
his first four novels (Jain 99). By "comedy" he understands
"black comedy" "that doesn't always make you laugh"
(Haffenden 240). Black comedy, which applies a comic tone to serious,
even tragic subject matter, is a mode that in its written form
is largely appropriated by literature. It is much used by postmodern
writers confronted with a world on the brink of self annihilation.
Rushdie makes skillful use of this mode to undercut the serious
tone which religious and political discourse employs most of the
time. As the narrator says at one point, all he can offer in place
of tragedy is the echo of it, a "burlesque for our degraded,
imitative times, in which clowns re-enact what was first done
by heroes and kings" (424). So heroes of the past (like Muhammad)
are transformed into burlesque images (like Mahound) of their
heroic models in this contemporary retelling of their stories.
Rushdie's use of black comedy is particularly evident in the passages
concerning politics, capitalist greed and racism, all of which
tend to mutually support one another's rhetoric. The epitome of
this ethos is a minor character in the book, Hal Valance, an advertising
executive who used to employ Chamcha for the voice-overs in his
commercials. His hero is Deep Throat who advised Bob Woodward:
Follow the money. Hal takes this advice to heart. Over lunch he
confides to Chamcha:
"I...love this fucking country. That's why I'm going to sell
it to the whole goddamn world, Japan, America, fucking Argentina.
I'm going to sell the arse off it. That's what I've been selling
all my fucking life: the fucking nation. The flag." (268)
Hal uses market research to justify removing all signs of black
immigrants from his commercials, ending up by sacking Chamcha
for being "a person of the tinted persuasion" (267).
His justification: "ethnics don't watch ethnic shows"
(265). Chamcha's media image is "just too damn racial"
(265). (It is interesting that most of Hal's racial prejudices
echo actual instances of racism that Rushdie records encountering
while working for the advertising industry - see Imaginary
Homelands 136-7.) Hal has no compunction about projecting
his racism onto the immigrant community by accusing Chamcha of
being too alien even for his fellow immigrants (for the "ethnic
universe" as Hal puts it in his execrable commercialized
jargon).
Political opposition to Hal's television show in which Chamcha
starred comes from a black activist, Dr. Uhuru Simba. The police
claim that, while under arrest, he fell off the lower of two bunks
in his cell on waking up from a nightmare and broke his neck falling
to the floor. The absurd improbability of this explanation is
typical of the way Rushdie employs black humor to expose the repeated
instances of racial bias offered during the eighties by the British
police, who habitually employed a quasi-legal terminology (such
as is used by the Community Relations Officer in the book) to
lie their way out of their illegal actions. It is interesting
to reflect that the reality of the lies told in court by the police
during the prosecution of the Birmingham Five (or by Mark Fuhrman
during the O.J. Simpson trial) was actually more subversive of
social justice than the hilarious and absurd explanations offered
in Rushdie's novel for the death in jail of Dr. Simba. The exposure
effected by the supposedly superior discourse of fiction is less
credible, if more enjoyable, than the simultaneous press exposure
of police perjury by the supposedly inferior discourse of the
media. Comedy, in this case black comedy, may expose the hypocrisies
of those in authority, but cannot and does not attempt to affect
the course of social history in the way that more utilitarian
discourses can and do. In his role as a postmodern writer, Rushdie,
in "bracketing off the real social world," (as Terry
Eagleton writes of all postmodernists) "must simultaneously
bracket off the political forces which seek to transform that
order" (?).
The feature of fictional discourse that, it is claimed, distinguishes
it from all other discourses is its unique and special use of
language. Ever since the Russian Formalists argued that literary
language defamiliarizes "everyday" language (but which?
and whose?), there seems to have been general agreement that the
discourse of fiction has at its disposal uses of language that
other discourses may borrow but do not deploy systematically.
If one accepts Foucault's assertion that discursive formations
are governed by internal and external thresholds and limits "to
master and control the great proliferation of discourse, in such
a way as to relieve its richness of its most dangerous elements"
and "to organize its disorder so as to skate round its most
uncontrollable aspects" (Archaeology/Discourse 228),
then the question arises whether literature is privileged above
other forms of discourse because it allows within its borders
more of the dangers and disorder of uncontrolled discourse, ostensible
chains of signifiers refusing all semblance of closure. Foucault
at times suggests as much, as when he writes, for instance, that
"literature's task is to say the most unsayable-the worst,
the most secret, the most intolerable, the shameless" (Power,
Truth, Strategy 91). Surely this is just what The Satanic
Verses is doing? In a key essay, "Is Nothing Sacred?"
Rushdie claims that one way in which his use of literary language
acts in just this fashion is by undermining the monologic discourse
of religion: "whereas religion seeks to privilege one language
above all others, one text above all others, one set of values
above all others, the novel has always been about the way
in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel, and
about the shifting relations between them, which are relations
of power" (Imaginary Homelands 420). If Rushdie begins
to sound like Foucault here this may be because he has read him
and goes on in the essay to quote extensively from his "What
is an Author?". It is significant, however, that neither
Foucault nor Rushdie are entirely consistent in their claim to
see in literary discourse a (negative) superiority over rival
discursive formations.
By placing the monologic discourses of Islam and of nationalism
within the polyglossic and heteroglossic discourse of fiction,
Rushdie is able to decenter them and reveal the self interest
that lies behind all special uses of language--except that of
fiction to which he remains largely blind. Rushdie is extremely
adept at using literary language to expose the polysemantic nature
of terminology given a unitary (or, as Bakhtin would say, a centripetal)
interpretation by the forces of authority. His sheer linguistic
inventiveness produces neologisms whose uncomfortable conjunctions
expose the contradictions inherent in the original word-"Bungledish"
and "BabyLondon" come to mind. With one inventive word
combination, London, the imperial center, the epitome of wealth
and power, that held its colonial peoples in captivity as Nebuchadnezzar
did the Jews, is by verbal association made to share the downfall
of Babylon and become "the habitation of devils" (Rev.
18.2). Similarly he strings words together the effect of which
is to undermine the conventional distinction between them: "angelicdevilish,"
or "information/inspiration." Another linguistic feature
that enables Rushdie to make seemingly impossible connections
in this particular novel is his multiple use of the same proper
names. He takes from Islamic history Ayesha, the name of the Prophet's
favorite wife, and uses the same name for the most popular of
the prostitutes in the Jahilia brothel, for the Muslim visionary
who led her fellow villagers to drown in the sea, and for one
of the girl prostitutes in London. Sacred and profane versions
of womanhood become fused and indistinguishable by this linguistic
sleight of hand. Whereas all the Ayeshas exist in Gibreel's dreams,
the name of Gibreel's lover, Alleluia Cone, who belongs to the
waking world, becomes metamorphosed via her nickname, Allie, to
Al-Lat, the goddess denounced by Mahound, and to Mount Cone (the
equivalent to Mount Hira in Islamic tradition) which Mahound ascends
to receive the words of Allah, both of which feature in Gibreel's
dream world. In this instance Rushdie is using language to reinforce
the lack of distinction between material and imaginative worlds.
Many other characters share their name with characters who belong
to a different narrative sequence, such as Mishal, Hind, and Salman,
Mahound's scribe, who bears the same name as the author. Salman,
when he starts deliberately mistranscribing Mahound's dictation,
discovers that his "poor words could not be distinguished
from the Revelation by God's own Messenger" (367). Rushdie's
mischievous use of his own name for this character cannot help
privileging Salman's subversive discourse in which the natural
slippage of language undermines the divine status of the Q'uran.
Is this deliberate on Rushdie's part? - an attempt to escape from
his own logocentrism by acknowledging it? Or is he once again
giving narrative sanction to the superior status of literary discourse?
Rushdie repeatedly dramatizes the heteroglossic quarrel between
languages that he, like Bakhtin, considers the special province
of fictional discourse. Heteroglossia, according to Bakhtin, is
"another's speech in another's language . . . a special
type of double-voiced discourse" (324). On two occasions
Rushdie pits a poet's linguistic dexterity against the thunderings
of, respectively, a politician and a prophet. Enoch Powell's racist
speech threatening rivers of blood is appropriated by the immigrant
Jumpy Joshi as the title and subject for a poem in which the river
of blood of the slain is transformed into the river of blood of
humanity in all its variety: "Reclaim the metaphor, Jumpy
Joshi had told himself. Turn it; make it a thing we can use"
(186). The second instance involves the linguistic battle between
Baal, the satirical poet, and Mahound who stands opposed to all
poets and poetry. Baal pits his poetic satires against Mahound's
Recitation. The role of the poet, Baal declares, echoing Foucault,
is to "name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides,
start arguments, shape the world and stop it going to sleep"
(97). Words, it turns out, can be mortal (as Rushdie knows to
his cost). When Mahound finally has Baal in his power he orders
him and the twelve prostitutes he married to be executed. "Whores
and writers, Mahound," Baal shouts as he is dragged away.
"We are the people you can't forgive." To which Mahound
replies, "Writers and whores. I see no difference" (392).
The grand narrative of religion can only see the plural and contradictory
discourse of literature, what Rushdie has called "the schismatic
Other of the sacred (and authorless) text," as a prostitution
of the one truth (Imaginary Homelands 424). But doesn't
the decentered discourse of postmodern literature equally see
the grand narrative of religion as a prostitution of the truth?
Why does its plurality and fragmentation make it preferable to
a unitary master narrative? Different, yes. More comprehensive,
because less insistent on the unitary nature of truth, maybe.
But superior? It still betrays the same will to power as those
grand narratives that it despises.
Although Foucault at times appears to suggest that fictional discourse
enjoys some exemption from the limitations governing other discursive
formations, in "The Discourse of Language" he treats
literary discourse as an exemplary case when outlining the program
for a critical (as opposed to a genealogical) analysis of discourse.
Critical analysis involves identifying the forms of exclusion,
limitation and appropriation that enable us "to conceive
discourse as a violence that we do things, or, at all events,
as a practice we impose upon them" (Archaeology/Discourse
229). Rushdie sees fictional discourse as an opportunity to counter
"false" narratives, such as that of national politics,
with the supposedly superior truth-value of imaginative literature.
"I think it is a curious phenomenon of the twentieth century,"
Rushdie has said, "that politicians have got very good at
inventing fictions which they tell us as the truth. It then becomes
the job of the makers of fiction to start telling the (real) truth"
(Interview, BBC). Whether the "(real)" is Rushdie's
or Malice Ruthven's explanatory addition when she transcribed
this excerpt, the claim to have access to the truth (and what
is an unreal truth?) reveals the contradiction that lies at the
heart of Rushdie's fictional polemic. The "real truth"
is exactly what every discourse aspires to embody, according to
Foucault. In Foucaultian terms The Satanic Verses has the
same truth-value as those discourses it sets out to undermine.
Its author unabashedly asserts that its own set of truths consist
of "hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation
that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings,
cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs" (Imaginary Homelands
394). Rushdie additionally claims that his use of non-naturalistic
material in his books constitutes "a method of producing
intensified images of reality" (Haffenden 246). In privileging
the non-naturalistic, is not Rushdie displaying his own discursive
rules of exclusion, limitation and appropriation that do as much
violence to things as do discourses privileging the naturalistic?
Certainly others have interpreted his use of magic realism in
less positive ways. Sara Suleri, for instance, felt that in Shsme
it represented a "startlingly conservative need to take
refuge in formalism" (175). What appears to be a form of
freedom in one discourse, that of literature, appears to be a
sterile retreat within the context of another, that of liberal
politics.
Rushdie's stream of comments about the nature of his work falls
under one of Foucault's internal, as opposed to external, set
of rules whereby "discourse exercises its own control"
(Archaeology/Discourse 220). Foucault's diagnosis of the
function of commentary is amusing, paradoxical and disturbing
(for those of us engaged in the act of commentary). "Commentary,"
he writes, "averts the chance element of discourse by giving
it its due: it gives us the opportunity to say something other
than the text itself, but on condition that it is the text itself
which is uttered and, in some ways, finalized" (221). Commentary,
in other words, is charged with restricting the potentiality of
discourse to proliferate uncontrollably by the use of repetition.
Very few other novels have generated the volume of commentary
that The Satanic Verses has in the short period since it
was published. Most of these commentaries have attempted to appropriate
the book to a particular ideology - anti Islamic, pro-Islamic,
secular, postcolonial, postmodern, etcetera. By ignoring the totality
of voices and discourses within the novel, they seek to fix its
meaning within their particular discursive field. Rushdie's own
voluminous commentary focuses on the plurality of meanings that
postmodern fiction nurtures and exploits. But he remains blind
to the fact that the indeterminacy and universal doubt which his
commentary champions is frequently abandoned in the novel, not
just when he assumes his post-colonial mantle, but also when satirizing
the abuses of Islamic religion. Incidents such as the burning
of the wax effigy of Mrs. Thatcher and the Imam's swallowing whole
the armies of his supporters demonize the two leaders of racist
nationalism and militant Islamic militancy respectively in such
a way as to leave little or no room for alternative readings.
Rushdie might argue in his defence that he has also demonized
his narrator, although his treatment of him is more ambivalent
- and therefore truer to the spirit of the postmodern - than is
his representation of the two leaders. Often posing as the Devil,
the narrator is careful to leave open the possibility that he
may as readily represent "Ooparvala." "The Fellow
Upstairs," as "Neechayvala," "the Guy from
Underneath" (318). Under cover of this ambivalence the narrator
in his own commentary on the action betrays a fundamental vacillation
between a postmodern open-endedeness and an older humanist defense
of liberal values.
But what of my own and similar instances of literary commentary
that focus on (and thereby implicitly endorse) the novel's plurality
of discourses, its multiplicity of voices, its postmodern resistance
to totalizing explanations, positivist ideologies and narrative
closure? Don't I have Rushdie's own commentaries as a guarantee
of authenticity? Couldn't I argue that Rushdie and I in our commentaries
are both opening up his fictional discourse, rather than circumscribing
its fortuitousness, its propensity to semantically proliferate?
After all the novel undermines not just Islamic fundamentalism
but Christian fundamentalism (Eugene Dumsday, the American evangelist),
not just British racism, but Indian racism (Hindu nationalism).
It even makes fun of Baal, the representative of literary discourse
within this literary discourse, Baal whose poems as he grows old
degenerate into celebrations of loss. And yet does it really put
down Baal's poetry? What form does his loss take? "It led
him to create chimeras of form, lionheaded goatbodied serpenttailed
impossibilities whose shapes felt obliged to change the moment
they were set, so that the demotic forced its way into lines of
classical purity and images of love were constantly degraded by
the intrusion of elements of farce" (370). Isn't this a description
of Rushdie's own style of writing? Isn't one of the features of
postmodernism its conjunction of the demotic with the classical
- what Fredric Jameson terms "aesthetic populism" (2)?
Compared to the (modernist) clarity and finished quality of Mahound's
verses, are not Baal's an anachronistic anticipation of postmodern
literature? Doesn't Baal conveniently conform to Rushdie's definition
of his own position within the contemporary literary universe?
And do not Baal and Rushdie claim a privileged status for that
position? And by writing this commentary am I not employing what
Foucault calls "the infinite rippling of commentary"
in order "to say finally, what has silently been articulated
deep down" (Archaeology/Discourse 221)? Am
I not privileging those qualities of semantic plurality and endless
signification that characterize his and other postmodern literary
discourses at the expense of the monologic utterances of religious,
political and other authorities? Bakhtin, on the other hand, insists
that "[l]anguage . . . is never unitary" (288). He claims
that "[e]very concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves
as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are
brought to bear" (272). If The Satanic Verses is intent
on exposing the centrifugal forces concealed within the discourses
of politics and religion, then it would be appropriate for a commentator
on the novel to concentrate on centripetal forces lurking behind
its postmodern carnivalesque facade.
Instead, even the best commentators attempt to impose their own
circumscription on the novel's tendency to semantically proliferate.
Consider the commentary of Homi Bhabha. In his view it is Rushdie's
contextualization of the Qu'ran within the discourse of postmodern
fiction that has brought on the charge of blasphemy:
It is not that the "content" of the Koran is directly
disputed; rather, by revealing other enunciatory positions and
possibilities within the framework of Koranic reading, Rushdie
performs the subversion of its authenticity by the act of cultural
translation - he relocates the Koran's "intentionality"
by repeating and reinscribing it in the locale of the novel of
postwar cultural migrations and diasporas. (226)
In his commentary Homi Bhabha is intent on revealing the impersonal
operations of cultural translation. Blasphemy, he contends, constitutes
"a moment when the subject-matter or the content of a cultural
tradition is being overwhelmed or alienated, in the act of translation"
(225). Rushdie's secular translation of the origins of Islam is
itself the product of "the disjunctive rewriting of the transcultural,
migrant experience" (226). Homi Bhabha is clearly employing
a postcolonial critical perspective. So he is endorsing, by reinterpreting,
Rushdie's implicit ideological stance, on the grounds that it
is representative of the way postcolonial newness makes its contribution
to the postmodern world. As Foucault ironically observes, "the
novelty lies no longer in what is said, but in its reappearance"
(221). The apparent openness of postmodernism to both or all sides
of an argument seems calculated to invite readers and commentators
(even Rushdie) alike to try to tie down and circumscribe the plurality
of meanings playfully offered by the text.
Foucault has not finished with me/us yet. Literary discourse,
he argues, is also a prime example of a "fellowship of discourse"
whose function is "to preserve or reproduce discourse, but
in order that it should circulate within a closed community..."
(Archaeology/Knowledge 225). Ridiculous, the reader will say.
Anyone who wants to can read The Satanic Verses. But look
at what happens to those who attempt to read it outside the literary
fellowship. Enraged Muslims are reminded by those within the fellowship
that this is mere fiction. To read into a novel an act of blasphemy
is to misunderstand the nature of fictional discourse. As Billy
Batusta, the producer of a "theological" movie about
the life of Muhammad says in the novel, when asked if it would
not be seen as blasphemous, "Certainly not. Fiction is fiction;
facts are facts" (272). Rushdie has echoed this argument
privileging the literary reading over all others in his many commentaries
defending the novel. So have most of the book's commentators.
When Margaret Thatcher and her foreign secretary dared to apologize
on behalf of the British nation for any offense the book might
have caused and expressed a dislike of its contents, the Financial
Times published a rebuke from within the literary community proclaiming
that "they are wholly unqualified, in their capacity as elected
politicians, to have a useful opinion" on matters of literary
taste (Appignanesi 148) - a perfect instance of the operation
of a fellowship of discourse claiming exclusive right to comment
on one of its own productions.
So where do I stand as a critic of this novel within the fellowship
of discourse? Should I, in typical poststructuralist fashion,
explore the semantic multiplicity of this text, its inclusion
of competing discursive formations, its self-conscious deconstruction
of its apparent thematic position(s)? Yet isn't there something
hypocritical about this impersonal stance? Like Rushdie, I lost
my religious faith long ago, and share with him his dislike of
religious dogmatism as well as his admiration for the state of
transcendence that religion can produce. Like him I was politically
opposed to the Thatcher government's implicitly racist attitudes
while living in London during her period in office. I have no
patience with the concept of blasphemy (which incidentally illustrates
another of Foucault's rules determining conditions under which
discourse may be employed - ritual, which restricts who may even
talk about the discursive content). Am I to pretend that I have
no opinions of my own? Won't my readers and students simply lose
patience with my liberal refusal to take sides? The appeal to
plurality, with which much of the time I find myself in sympathy,
seems to me totally inappropriate when faced with the need to
take a unitary stand on subjects like the Thatcher government's
immigration policy.
Is not, then, what is missing in Rushdie's fiction any critique
of the pluralist position he espouses in his fiction? In his commentaries
on the novel he is prepared to adopt, as we have seen, a unitary
(and superior) attitude to the dogma of Islamic fundamentalism
and Thatcherite racism. What is missing is any recognition on
his part of this contradiction between his defence of his unitary
stance as commentator of his own work and the creative plurality
lying at the center of his imaginative fiction. So there appears
to be no escape from the blindnesses and limitations of discursive
formations within which we operate. All I can do, and have done,
is to make explicit the limitations of the literary discourses
that on the one hand Rushdie and on the other hand I are working
within. They are not superior to others. I choose to read and
comment on fictional discourse finally because I personally feel
more comfortable within it, because I like to enter the world
of Wonderland where writers name the unnamable, where language
is a tool of power, where dreams hold their own with material
reality, and where, as Blake wrote (whom Rushdie quotes in the
novel), "a firm perswasion that a thing is so" will
"make it so" (338).
Works Cited
Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.
London: Verso, 1992.
Appignanesi, Lisa, and Sara Maitland, eds. The Rushdie File.
London: Fourth Estate, 1989.
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Holquist. Austin: U of
Texas P, 1981.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge,
1994.
Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain. London: Verso 1986.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse
on Language. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon/Random,
1972.
---. Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy. Trans. Paul
Foss and Meagan Morris. Ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton. Sydney:
Feral Publications, 1979.
Haffenden, John. Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen,
1985.
Jain, Madhu. Interview. India Today 15 Sept. 1988: 98-99.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Montalbano, William D. "Salman Rushdie Moves Out From the
Shadows." Los Angeles Times 14 Sept.
1995: E1, 7.
Mufti, Aamir. "Reading the Rushdie Affair: An Essay on Islam
and Politics." Social Text 29 (1991): 95-116.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981-1991. New York: Granta Books in association with Viking
Penguin, 1991.
---. Interview. Desert Island Discs. BBC Radio 4, London. 8 Sept.
1988.
---. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking Penguin, 1989.
Ruthven, Malise. A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage
of Islam. London: Chatto & Windus, 1990.
Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1992.
Wood, Michael. "Shenanigans." London Review of Books
7 Sept. 1995: 3, 5.
Copyright 1998 Brian Finney