(December, 2017)
From the opening lines of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, the novel announces its sprawling, disjunctive form, its anti-colonial affiliations, and its contempt for the conventions of realism. A mysterious narrator cinematically depicts Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha as they fall from an exploding airplane, singing and dancing in the night air before landing in the waters of the English Channel. Falling alongside and “mingling with” the novel’s protagonists and “the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home” (Rushdie 4-5). Read as a statement of poetics, it follows that the novel suggests — in part — its own fragmented, absurd, and untranslatable character. Indeed, the immense, overflowing referentiality of The Satanic Verses consistently highlights its irreducible excess, its refusal to submit to totalizing readings.
Accordingly, in this paper, I will take my cue from these poetics and from The Satanic Verses’ play with postmodern form in order to construct a befitting lens for understanding the novel. Drawing on the theory of Edward Said, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I offer a reading of the novel as enacting an aesthetics and ethics of dissonance and grotesquerie. In this way, I hope to point towards the tensions between ethical and political ways of reading the novel insofar as it endlessly embraces complexity and refuses reductions, closures, and delimitations. To facilitate this approach, I will first elucidate Edward Said’s theory of contrapuntality in order to demonstrate its capacity for dissonance and grotesquerie, and for the endless recombination of forms, ideas, and disciplines.
Said’s notion of contrapuntal reading emerges analogically from out of a Western classical music tradition. He describes counterpoint as a form in which “various themes play off one another, with only a provisional privilege being given to any particular one; yet in the resulting polyphony there is concert and order, an organized interplay that derives from the themes, not from a rigorous melodic or formal principle outside the work” (Said 51). Sounds layer on top of one another and refer to one another, sometimes in harmonious and comforting ways, sometimes in discordant and unsettling ways. Said later refers to these two modes of counterpoint as “symphon[ic]” and “atonal,” the latter being the preferable of the two (ibid. 318-9). Atonal counterpoint refuses the totalizing and carefully orchestrated aesthetic of the symphony, where all instruments work to create a unity of sound which rides roughshod over notes (e.g. narratives) which resist its trajectory. Instead, Said insists that ‘atonal ensemble,’ as the preferable form, “must take into account all sorts of spatial or geographical and rhetorical practices — inflections, limits, constraints, intrusions, inclusions, prohibitions — all of them tending to elucidate a complex and uneven topography” (ibid.) Contrapuntal reading, then, as an historically situated and worldly kind of analysis which does not resist atonality, is the process which can navigate the fields where these spatial and rhetorical practices take place, producing these complex and uneven topographies. For Said, it enables us to pull together disparate histories, narratives, literatures, and disciplines in order to put them into ‘concert and order.’
The question I am interested in posing here is this: what happens when literature resists even the comforts of concert and order? As classical prescriptions within our music analogy, these forms already fail to encompass the vast possibilities for musical production at our fingertips today, and reflect only a sliver of the contemporary cultural metrics we have for assessing music. Said himself suggests that “we have rarely been so fragmented, so sharply reduced, and so completely diminished in our sense of what our true (as opposed to asserted) cultural identity is” (ibid. 319-20). In context, these words refer to Said’s frustration with “specialized and separatist knowledge,” but they also point towards the ways in which these specialized and separatist fields have produced new forms that often fail to be intelligible or persuasive when placed within different discursive fields. Sonically mirroring this cultural phenomenon, postmodern musical forms — the possibilities for which have expanded radically with the advent of computer-generated sounds — are often chaotic, dissonant, noisy, grotesque, and almost uninterpretable along the axes provided by classical conventions (e.g. the pentatonic scale, musical key, etc.). However, we can nonetheless understand how these dissonant and experimental contemporary forms might present us with a kind of modified contrapuntal practice. This practice would be able to embrace the encompassing concerns Said points towards, and would not despair of failing to understand the product of its analysis by way of classical conventions. The Satanic Verses, written in a form which explicitly rejects anything so comforting or classical as ‘concert and order,’ already calls out to be read along these lines.
Returning to the opening lines of the novel, the text presents the reader with the literal dissonance resulting from Gibreel and Saladin’s singing as they fall from the airplane. While Gibreel, “the tuneless soloist,” belts out an “impromptu gazal,” Saladin, “appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel Farishta’s mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr. James Thomson, seventeen-hundred to seventeen-forty-eight” (Rushdie 3-6). Rushdie pits Gibreel’s Urdu love song against Saladin’s “wild recital” of Thomson’s “Rule, Brittania!” These two songs resist and combat each other, as if each might be capable of silencing the other. Understood by way of our musical analogy, Gibreel and Saladin may be read as attempting to enact what in acoustics is referred to as active noise cancellation. In this process, a microphone listens for the amplitude of incoming frequencies in order to generate opposing amplitudes which cancel the incoming ones to produce silence. If, however, the amplitude generated fails to be precisely the ‘antiphase,’ or opposite of the incoming sound, the sound is modified but not cancelled. What I want to suggest by this analogy is that The Satanic Verses, by pitting Gibreel and Saladin against each other this way — the textual equivalents of ‘phase’ and ‘antiphase’ — beg the reader to consider what results from this collision.
Here, Derrida’s linguistic theory becomes useful for understanding how this musical analogy might apply to the ‘reality’ of text. In Of Grammatology, Derrida insists that words consistently fail to deliver meaning as a ‘thing-in-itself’ or as the intended signified. Instead, words work as “representamen[s],” or signs which always shield their meaning from “the simplicity of intuitive evidence.” He writes, “The representamen functions only by giving rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself unceasingly and is always on the move” (Derrida 49). That is, each word can only ever be explained by other words in a process which is never ending. Already, we can see that meaning in language can only fail to oppose itself with the crispness necessary for anything like noise cancellation to occur. Each representamen contains such a plurality of possible interpretants such that every antonym to any given word is already ‘impure,’ bearing a vast excess of possible associative meanings which prohibit pure opposition between words.
The meaning of Gibreel and Saladin’s songs fail to cancel each other because of this impurity, which also already points towards the implications language’s inability to ‘cancel’ itself has for the novels ethics and its combinative form. Instead of producing silence, “the miracle of their singing,” their dissonant duet, culminates when they find themselves embracing in the air, cartwheeling towards the earth. As they fall wrapped around each other, “Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too, had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck” (Rushdie 7). Gibreel and Saladin’s metamorphosis points towards the new forms that can emerge from dissonant combination. Although Gibreel “pit[s] levity against gravity,” dancing and swimming through the air while Saladin “fastidious[ly]…fall[s] headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up,” in their hybrid embrace something else entirely emerges out of their mutual alterity: the text’s grotesque aesthetic (ibid. 3-4). By combining elements — melodic and familiar enough on their own, but dissonant and unfamiliar in their combination — into a single hybrid, grotesquerie rejects self-consistency and univocality in favor of inconsistency and complexity. Rushdie’s narrator puts the question this way: “How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is?” (ibid. 8-9). The danger of newness, and of the grotesque, stems from its volatility. It is the product of ‘fusion’ and combination, and both makes itself available for and catalyzes other such combinations, often with unpredictable consequences.
Rushdie’s novel relies throughout upon the newness which comes from the clashing and fusing of such dissonant forms, a vast portion of which stems from the various cultural and historical forces the novel brings into play. By interspersing words from a variety of languages with the English narration and combining familiar words into unfamiliar portmanteaus, the novel’s form enacts the grotesque as Gibreel and Saladin narratively express it, traversing the rocky and confrontational terrain of the purportedly ‘post-colonial’ globe. If The Satanic Verses shows us one thing however, it is that the harmony and resolution implied in that sometimes dubious term are nowhere to be found. Immediately after Gibreel and Saladin crawl from the sea after their fall from the plane, their transformations continue. Saladin is arrested by English immigration control, and realizes in despair that he has become a satyr, a human-goat hybrid with furry legs, horns, and pellet-shaped feces (Rushdie 162-3). He has come crashing up against the ‘post-colonial’ British state, and he takes a chimeric, grotesque form which mirrors the policemen’s treatment of him: “‘Animal,’ Stein cursed him as he administered a series of kicks, and Bruno joined in: ‘You’re all the same. Can’t expect animals to observe civilized standards. Eh?” (ibid. 164). Trying to explain his situation to the officers, Saladin tells them that he is “Maxim Alien,” a television character they might know for whom he is the voice. But he fails to be heard because he in fact is maximally alien to these officers. He cannot make himself heard or intelligible to them in his otherness. The violence of such collisions recurs throughout the novel, and highlights its anti-colonial ethics, even as it refuses to be reduced to anything as simple as a unilateral posture.
Nevertheless, we can certainly parse the novel and find threads that articulate an ethical strain. Edward Said, discussing a passage from Rushdie’s essay “Outside The Whale,” notes that Rushdie’s writing exposes “a field without special historical privileges for one party”: that is, the hybridity and mixture that Rushdie celebrates disavows notions of historical destiny, of totalizing knowledge graspable by a particular party or individual. Instead, if we are to face up to the difficult realities of the contemporary world, we each become, in Rushdie’s words, “part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm, so that objectivity becomes a great dream, like perfection, an unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite of the impossibility of success” (Said 27-28). The Satanic Verses, in its self-consciously vain struggle for objectivity, both refuses to lend itself the divine authority of this position, and refuses the comfort of the ‘inside of the whale,’ of a posture which turns away from difficult historical and political realities. Instead, the novel portrays the moments of collision occasioned by these realities as both “farce and tragedy,” never surrendering humor’s capacity for ethical insight.
One moment in which the novel highlights the inevitability of these collisions and our ability to understand them ethically occurs when Otto Cone sits at dinner with his family, boring them with a lecture on the modern city. He calls such a cosmopolitan space “the locus classicus of incompatible realities. … One universe, on a zebra crossing, is caught for an instant, blinking like a rabbit, in the headlamps of a motor-vehicle in which an entirely alien and contradictory continuum is to be found” (325). Cone’s language invokes hybridity and grotesquerie here by mixing a zebra and a rabbit into his metaphor. The zebra itself is already a hybrid animal: an unfamiliar kind of horse whose stark black and white stripes stage the same oppositions he speaks about. Cone continues, “And as long as that’s all, they pass in the night, jostling on Tube stations, raising their hats in some hotel corridor, it’s not so bad. But if they meet! It’s uranium and plutonium, each makes the other decompose, boom’” (ibid). Saladin, in his confrontation with immigration control, already resembles the helpless zebra-rabbit blinking in the headlamps. But does this confrontation necessarily result in a ‘boom’? In mutual decomposition? As we have already seen, the novel seems to reject this assessment in favor of understanding these confrontations combinatively. Rather than an explosive mutual destruction, in which the incompatible realities collide and cause each other to ‘decompose,’ such encounters provide the occasion for dissonance and grotesquerie, for volatile newness and unfamiliar combinations. The novel can be read as using humor to undercut the strength of Cone’s claims. No sooner has he finished pontificating than his wife, Alicja comments dryly, “‘As a matter of fact, dearest, … I often feel a little incompatible myself” (ibid.). Here, Alicja’s words bear a dual meaning: she may feel incompatible with the realities of the modern city, but her words also suggest an incompatibility with herself. She points towards the ways in which she is already hybrid, already a bundle of incompatible and inconsistent selves. Later in the novel, the narrator tells us that “as usual, she hid her concern beneath wisecracks,” suggesting that her sardonic comment here potentially expresses both the novel’s parodic mode of critique as well as her own frustration with her husband’s reductionist and binary view of the modern city. (ibid. 366).
This internal inconsistency, mirroring the fractured form of the novel, appears not just in Alicja Cone, but in Gibreel, Saladin, and many of the novel’s other characters. Here, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can The Subaltern Speak?” becomes useful for understanding both the novel’s critique of the unified Subject and its play with continuity and discontinuity in Gibreel and Saladin respectively. Spivak’s essay poses its question in order to undergo a critique of Foucaultian and Deleuzian theory’s tendency “to disguise itself in transparency,” hiding its own inevitable worldliness and failure to attain an objective representation of the other, either politically or philosophically speaking (Spivak 266). Appealing to Derrida and Marx in her analysis, Spivak elucidates how Western thought has tended to define its Other from out of an uncritical ethnocentrism. Parsing Derrida, she stakes her position as a Western intellectual who “feel[s] that the ‘subject’ has a history and that the task of the first-world subject of knowledge in our historical moment is to resist and critique ‘recognition’ of the Third World through ‘assimilation’” (ibid. 263). That is, Spivak suggests that it is incumbent upon Western thinkers to avoid recognizing and assimilating the other (in the Hegelian sense) and instead to find new interpretive practices which work to hear the subaltern in their alterity, despite the inevitability of failure. Derrida describes this kind of hearing as “rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us” such that the Subject no longer takes place as an intelligible unity which has already assimilated the other, but as a bundle of powers, desires, interests, discourses, and voices which cannot add up to the self-certainty and transparency of the universal Subject (ibid. 265).
The Satanic Verses plays on this disunity of the subject, perhaps most poignantly through the ‘schizophrenia’ of Gibreel’s angelic visions. As the novel progresses, Gibreel becomes more and more diffuse and fragmented as a subject. At one point, Rushdie illustrates his internal multiplicity, writing,
Gibreel: moves as if through a dream, because after days of wandering the city without eating or sleeping, … he no longer recognizes the distinction between the waking and dreaming states; — he understands now something of what omnipresence must be like, because he is moving through several stories at once, there is a Gibreel who mourns his betrayal by Alleluia Cone, and a Gibreel hovering over the death-bed of a Prophet, and a Gibreel watching in secret over the progress of a pilgrimage to the sea, waiting for the moment at which he will reveal himself…. And there is a Gibreel who walks down the streets of London, trying to understand the will of God (Rushdie 472).
The colon which marks the passage’s beginning already formally separates the multiple versions of Gibreel from the unity his name might evoke. The reality or unreality of the ‘several stories’ he moves through at once seem to matter little in the face of the erased distinction between waking and dreaming. Gibreel’s ‘omnipresence’ nevertheless fails to provide him divine insight, and instead he still struggles to grasp the will of God, to unite these warring, disparate subjectivities under a single omniscient Subject.
Despite the impossibility of this kind of unity, Gibreel — in his delirium — nevertheless conceives of himself as rightfully divine at various points in the novel. In doing so, he claims for himself the authority to make absolute determinations, and wonders whether he ought to act as “the agent of God’s wrath? Or of his love?” (ibid.). The novel can be read as critiquing — along with Spivak — this strain of absolutist or transparent thinking. In one particularly absurd moment, Gibreel hovers over London and asserts that the problem with the English is their weather: “O most slippery, most devilish of cities! — In which such stark, imperative oppositions were drowned beneath an endless drizzle of grey” (ibid. 364). Declaring that he will “tropicalize” London and thereby solve its problems, Gibreel reasons, “when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything — from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs — as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus” (ibid. 365). In his attempt to play God, reviving the extremity of truth and bringing “increased moral definition” to the English, the angelic Gibreel fails to grapple with his intuition that he is “forever joined to the adversary,” the devilish satyr Saladin (ibid. 364). The novel — as the Qu’ranic history in its name suggests — constantly blurs the lines between good and evil, between God and Satan. Gibreel’s claim to know the truth and his willingness to impose it upon London, in this light, suggests the danger of believing oneself capable of expressing the will of God, of conceiving of oneself as the Subject of knowledge.
Returning to Spivak, we can read The Satanic Verses’ frustration with this divine and absolute perspective as both playing upon and warning about the complicity between re-presentative ethics and representative politics. The Marxist distinction here between re-presentation (darstellen) and representation (vertreten), Spivak argues, has been eradicated in Foucaultian and Deleuzian theory. She writes, “two senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation,’ as in art or philosophy” (Spivak 243). If, as Deleuze claims, “There is no more representation; there’s nothing but action,” then every re-presentation is already a representation, and vice versa (ibid. 242). In maintaining the discontinuity of these terms, Spivak renders the subject itself — insofar as it partakes in both senses of the term — discontinuous, preserving the distinction between aesthetics and ethics (darstellen) on the one hand and politics on the other (vertreten) even as she recognizes their frequent “complicity” (ibid. 245).
The Satanic Verses critiques its own potential for ‘complicity’ by way of a meta-commentary from the narrator, assessing Gibreel as “continuous” and Saladin as a “creature of selected discontinuities.” Gibreel is “joined to and arising from his past,” and therefore “‘good’” while Saladin “revolt[s] against history,” falsifies himself and is therefore “‘evil’” (Rushdie 441-2). However, the narrator almost immediately recants these descriptions, saying “Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally) homogenous, non-hybrid, ‘pure,’ — an utterly fantastic notion! — cannot, must not, suffice. No! Let’s rather say an even harder thing: that evil may not be as far beneath our surfaces as we like to say it is” (ibid.). The implication here, in light of Spivak’s analysis, seems to be that neither the Ovidian nor the Lucretian model can fully describe the protagonists’ moral characters. That, in fact, ‘evil’ (and ‘good’) emerges from our excess in relation to ourselves, from the plenitude of interpretants in relation to the representamen. Our failure to hear each other precisely, insofar as we cannot always successfully root out or escape the historical endurance of the Subject in order to “render[] delirious the interior voice that is the voice of the other in us,” causes us to conflate the two senses of representation, to uncritically run our aesthetics and politics together, thinking ourselves almost divinely correct. Rushdie’s novel’s self-conscious marking of the ways in which it may unwittingly perform this conflation operates to warn the reader of the possible complicity between its re-presentative and representative expressions. It also cautions us against collapsing aesthetics, ethics, and politics into a single force in our reading, presuming the text itself to be the voice of a united Subject (Spivak 269).
So what are we to make now of the novel’s dissonant and grotesque aesthetics? Its anti-colonial ethics? It reminds us that even the most fervently opposed binaries can be brought into combination with one another to form something new, that even the strongest adversaries may already be bound to one another. It reminds us that newness itself, rather than consisting only in the frightening and violent explosion of “uranium and plutonium,” can challenge our aesthetic and ethical standards in order that they continue adjusting to the ever-shifting complexity of the contemporary world (ibid. 325). At the same time, it cautions us against uncritically transposing these evaluations into the political realm. The Satanic Verses — as a work of art rather than a political manifesto — explicitly privileges its own re-presentative qualities over whatever representative qualities it may knowingly or unknowingly carry along with it. By refusing to bear any single meaning, or to symphonically announce its univocal representative purpose, Rushdie’s novel shows us our own complicities, continuities, and discontinuities, our own necessary hybridity and grotesquerie. Moreover, it announces these qualities as bearing aesthetic and ethical value. If we can understand ourselves and others as mixed and dissonant beings, perhaps we can listen more closely to one another. Perhaps we can find new ways to hear and be heard, just as Gibreel and Saladin somehow heard each other sing over the roar of the atmosphere as they fell, embracing and cartwheeling, merging and metamorphosing in order to be born again (ibid. 6).
WORKS CITED:
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U Press, 1980. Print.
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Random House, 1988.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak.” Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea. Ed. Rosalind C. Morris. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Collected Writings of Nolan Bishop 