| Selected by Rakesh Rampertab |
Salman
Rushdie: Fiction's Embattled Infidel BRICK LANE, IN LONDON'S EAST END, IS A neighborhood peopled by those whom the city never expected to accommodate. It is a neighborhood of Asians - as they are called by the English, who are comfortable still with the old colonial term that did not distinguish among the many peoples east of Europe. There are thought to be 40,000 Asians in Brick Lane, mostly Muslims from Bengal, a region cleaved in 1947 when India was partitioned and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) created. They have come for many reasons - exiles, refugees, schemers - and they have not always been welcomed. ''Asian'' suggests not only the distance the immigrants have traveled but also the distance at which they remain. And something more troubling, a sense of unease and estrangement, is suggested by newer, post-colonial terms: quotas, fourth world, National Front, Paki-bashing. I walked in Brick Lane one morning last November with the novelist Salman Rushdie. Rushdie, who is 41, was born in Bombay; he was sent to England to be schooled, and later chose to settle in London because London was where he could write the fiction he wanted to. In Bombay or in any other city in that part of the world, there wasn't the climate for the writer he wanted to be, not yet. ''I wanted to write globe-swallowing, capacious books, ones with that sense of size, novels that expressed history, the public side of things as well as the private, the intimate,'' he had told me when I'd first met him, in New York, early last fall. And he did write such books. Two sweeping, stylistically dazzling novels - ''Midnight's Children'' and ''Shame'' - established his reputation in the early 1980's as one of the most important writers of his generation in England. Moreover, he is the only one among them - I am thinking of such writers as Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan - whose books have traveled well. Rushdie, in the United States especially, is discussed in the company of our world storytellers: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera, Gunter Grass. When I first met Rushdie, I had just finished reading his extraordinary new novel, ''The Satanic Verses,'' now making its way into American bookstores. (A review appears today in The Times Book Review.) The book may be understood as the third volume of an unintended trilogy, one in which a novelist named Salman Rushdie moves not only westward but inward, searching for yet another way to redescribe a world increasingly connected, but in no way whole. The societal fissures that Rushdie examines in ''The Satanic Verses'' have been sharply, if strangely, mirrored in the book's reception. In England, it has attracted praise, award nominations (it won Britain's Whitbread prize as best novel), and many, many readers. In England, it has also been vilified and even burned at rallies by Islamic fundamentalists. The controversy - and it is not just England's controversy; the book has been banned in India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia - is about more than the book, of course. But like all controversies surrounding novels, it has reopened one of our great cultural questions: how and why does fiction mean so much? The book's opening pages tell of an astonishing, fantastical immigration: Two middle-aged Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, hurtle through cold thin air toward the English coast - singing, razzing each other, and already, like all immigrants, longing at once to remember and to forget. They have been blown out of a hijacked airliner, and miraculously, after a 29,000-foot free-fall, survive and make their ways to London. In episode after episode of the loose, shifting narrative that moves the novel forward and frames its many stories, they struggle to get a fix on London, and on themselves. They learn new ways of construing the world. They are mugged by ghosts - old lovers, old habits of mind and feeling. They return to the East, in jumbo jets and dreams, but never fully, never again. (An excerpt appears on page 48.) Deep, at times fathomless questions are plumbed: what is the nature of Good? Of Evil? Is Farishta an archangel? Chumcha Satan? Was their fall a contemporary version of The Fall? But the novel never strays too far or too long from London's streets: Rushdie's prose - the lustrous, alloyed English he's fused from street slang, Great Books, rock songs, ad jingles, immigrant patois, everything - has a way of keeping us in the crowded, gritty here and now, even in the book's most phantasmagoric pages. Farishta and Chumcha, and the Dickensian array of characters they encounter (or imagine), people what is ultimately the first major novel of the new England, an England with more than two million immigrants, one in which it is no longer clear, exactly, what ''English life'' comprises, what ''being English'' means. A good deal of the novel unfolds in a neighborhood called Brickhall - a neighborhood, Rushdie had told me, utilizing one of his favorite locutions, that ''is and is not'' Brick Lane. I had asked him when I'd met him in New York if he might show me around - Brick Lane is not a part of London a Western visitor sees - and he had agreed. But when I'd arrived in London and phoned him, I'd expected he would tell me he had changed his mind. In places like Brick Lane now, there were individuals vowing to kill him. EARLY IN OCTOBER, ''THE SATANIC Verses'' had been banned by the Indian Government under pressure from several Muslim leaders, who insisted that the novel - two hallucinatory chapters of which involve a prophet who is and is not Mohammed - was insulting to Islam, blasphemous. By the end of October, the controversy had surfaced elsewhere, and angrily - in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, South Africa, every country or city with a sizable Muslim population, including London, where the book had been published in late September and had quickly become a best seller. Rushdie and his book were denounced in mosques around the city. Hundreds of protest letters (most of them form letters, a sign of an organized campaign) were arriving each day at the London offices of Viking, the book's publisher. Leaders of Islamic groups attending the annual Conservative Party convention in Brighton called on the Thatcher Government to ban the book; and it was reported that Britain's Attorney General had been asked to begin criminal proceedings against Rushdie under the archaic blasphemy laws. Rushdie received several phone threats. When, on the night of Oct. 25, he attended the awards dinner for Britain's most prestigious literary prize, the Booker -''The Satanic Verses,'' with its many good reviews, was among the six novels nominated, but did not win - he was accompanied by a bodyguard. In the months that followed, the controversy would not abate. Two weeks ago, in the city of Bradford in northern England, 1,500 Muslims held a demonstration at which they burned copies of the novel. W.H. Smith, Britain's biggest bookseller (it has 430 shops), withdrew the book from display in its two Bradford outlets - this at a time when it remained high on the best-seller lists. Officials at Viking, which is believed to have paid an advance of about $800,000 for world hardbound and paperback rights to the book - a huge sum for a literary work - is bracing for similar protests here next month, when Rushdie arrives in the United States to give public readings from the book. Already, in New York, Viking has received protest letters and calls from thousands of American Muslims, and there have also been a number of bomb scares, which are being investigated by the F.B.I., at the company's offices. I had suggested to Rushdie, when I'd talked with him on the phone, that it might not be such a safe thing for him to walk around Brick Lane. ''You cannot let something like this take over your life, or you have lost,'' he said. He sounded frustrated, beleaguered. Was he sure? ''They're not going to know my face from the book jacket. They're not allowed to buy the book.'' I took a taxi to Rushdie's home in a northern borough of London, and he greeted me at the door, smiling and shaking his head. ''So strange, all this, isn't it,'' he said. Rushdie's face was dominated last fall by a black, gray-flecked and somewhat pointy beard, which he has since shaved off - and a number of cartoonists in the English papers had been inspired by it, working him up for the review columns as Satan. But it didn't convince; his eyes, heavy-lidded behind thick glasses, are too soft. There is no hardness, either, to the way he holds himself and speaks. You see in his small gestures and phrasings a hint of formality once adhered to, but this has given way to gentlemanly casualness. The tautness, the sharp edges, are kept within somewhere, to emerge only in the writing. We drove down to Brick Lane in Rushdie's Saab, and parked along a small, charmless side street of small factories and tenements. It was a cold, damp morning, the sky the color of fine ash, and the only ones on the block were three young men unloading heavy rolls of cloth from the back of a truck. Rushdie explained that this was still London's garment district. The garment business had once been owned by English Jews who employed other English Jews, but now it was dominated by the Bengalis. ''That is the mosque down on the corner,'' pointing down the block to what looked to me to be simply a large meeting hall. ''It used to be a synagogue.'' We walked down the block, and turned onto Brick Lane, the narrow shopping street from which the neighborhood derives its name. There was a Muslim butcher shop, and the Aladdin Sweet Center, and signs in Arabic script above all the storefronts, and in the air the smell of curry. ''The thing you have to understand about a neighborhood like this,'' Rushdie said now, ''is that when people board an Air India jet and come halfway across the planet, they don't just bring their suitcases. They bring everything. And even as they reinvent themselves in the new city - which is what they do - there remain these old selves, old traditions erased in part but not fully. So what you get are these fragmented, multifaceted, multicultural selves. ''And this can lead to such strange things,'' he continued. ''You will find teen-age girls in this neighborhood who in so many ways are London kids: Levi 501's, Madonna T-shirts, spiky hair. They never think at all of going back to India or Pakistan, even for a visit. They might actually have been born here in London. And yet you may find among them a willingness, an eagerness in some cases, to have an arranged marriage. An arranged marriage. ''Or this story: In this very neighborhood, it was early in the 1980's. A Pakistani father stabbed and murdered his daughter, his only child, because he heard she had made love to a white boy. Which turned out not to be true, but that is not my point: My point is that he had brought with him this idea of honor and shame. And when I wrote about this later, I said that although I was obviously appalled - I mean, what can be more awful than murdering your own child? - I understood what had motivated him. I am a first-generation immigrant from that part of the world. I know how you can be here, and, in a way, still there.'' The setting for ''Midnight's Children'' is Rushdie's boyhood Bombay, that for ''Shame'' a country he describes as ''not quite Pakistan'' - he had written here but about there. ''The Satanic Verses'' is his first novel to deal with London, with the city that has been his home for 20 years. I asked him why it had taken him so long to write about it. ''I think I just had to do a lot of things first,'' he said. ''I had to make my reckonings with those other parts of the world I had come from. Before I had the platform from which to approach this country.'' As we walked down the street, he pointed out a video shop that rents tapes of Bombay-produced Hindi films, hundreds of different ones. ''Watching these films is entertainment of course,'' he said, ''but this also nourishes, yes? And in a way, when I go back - inside me, when I've written, if you understand -this going back to the East nourishes me. More than anything else, I would say.'' Later, as we got back into his car, I asked him if he thought those who wanted his book banned - if he thought they too were, inside themselves, ''going back,'' seeking some kind of nourishment in their religion, their orthodoxy. ''If you are asking me if I understand them, well yes, I understand them. But in a way they are not 'going back' to something. Their extremism is actually something fairly new. I have written about Islamic culture in the novel - Islamic culture set against the background of the West. Basically, Islamic culture is the one in which I grew up - I know it well. Its narratives are my narratives.'' ''But their Islamic culture is something new and dangerous. You have a situation where a handful of extremists are defining Islam. And what makes it even sadder for me is that they are simply feeding the Western stereotype: the backward, cruel, rigid Muslim, burning books and threatening to kill the blasphemer.'' THE FOLLOWING morning, I walked up to the London Central Mosque in St. John's Wood -the city's largest mosque and, I was told, the organizational base for the protest against ''The Satanic Verses.'' The mosque is huge, with a glittering golden dome I could glimpse, despite the day's thick fog, as I walked toward it through Regent's Park. I wanted to see Dr. Ali Mugram al-Ghamdi, director general of the Islamic Cultural Center, which has its offices at the mosque. Dr. al-Ghamdi was leading the fight against ''The Satanic Verses'' in London - he had been quoted as calling the novel ''the most offensive, filthy and abusive book ever written by any hostile enemy of Islam.'' I had tried to phone him, and could not get through, and so I'd decided to simply present myself. It was a Friday, prayer day, not the best day to talk, his secretary explained, but yes, Dr. al-Ghamdi would see me. He emerged from his office minutes later. He was a short and round man, elegantly dressed in a pin-stripe suit and fine silk tie. He extended his hand in greeting, invited me in, and pushed closely together two chairs, where we sat. I explained how I had spoken the day before with Rushdie about his novel, its spiritual themes. After our walk in Brick Lane, we had gone to a pub, and at one point, as we talked, he had said, ''I obviously did not set out to write a novel about Islam - and it is not a novel about Islam. The novel does deal with spiritual life, very much so - that's one aspect of the book. There is a hole inside me where God used to be - I am no longer an observant Muslim - and I wanted to explore this hole. And of course that's what novels do, isn't it? Explore.'' And now, sitting with Dr. al-Ghamdi, I asked if he could understand the book in this way - as an inquiry. ''The book is really very, very offensive,'' he said gently, with no bitterness. ''I cannot overstate this. And I cannot expect you - you who are not a Muslim - to feel this.'' Then, addressing my question more directly: ''This was something that the author deliberately did. This was not just a slip of the pen.'' We discussed the parts of ''The Satanic Verses'' that have caused most offense to fundamentalist Muslims. Gibreel Farishta, who back in Bombay had starred in popular religious films, suffers a breakdown, and we are made privy to his mad dreams, dreams in which he supposes himself to be the Archangel Gabriel. For many Muslims, the Koran is held to be the ''uncreated'' Word of God, dictated by the Archangel Gabriel through the Prophet Mohammed, and written down, perfect and unaltered, by the Prophet's scribes. In the dreams of Rushdie's Gibreel, a certain Salman the Persian, in the employ of the Prophet Mahound, makes a deliberate mistake in his transcription - he wants to see just how divine the Prophet is - and when the Prophet reads over the text, the mistake goes unnoticed. Rushdie also ''redreams'' (his word) the famous episode in Islam of the ''Satanic verses,'' from which the novel takes its title. Historians of Islam explain it this way: Mohammed was under pressure from the citizens of Mecca to moderate his staunch monotheism, to accommodate his new faith to the city's traditional polytheism, to make room in Islam for three local goddesses. He did; he had his scribes write down verses praising al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat as the ''swans exalted, whose intercession is hoped for.'' But he soon revoked these verses. He'd had a true revelation from the Archangel Gabriel, who told him they had been dictated by Satan. Mahound, too, is visited by Satan and tempted to do more than utter compromised verse to scribes. Mahound likes to eat what he forbids others to - ''those fabled and legendary unclean creatures, what's their name, prawns.'' He also likes the whores. Where, in the Koran, Mohammed has many wives, revered as the Mothers of the Believers, the fictional Mahound has a brothel. I said to Dr. al-Ghamdi that even though Christian fundamentalists might object to the use of Christian allegory and symbol in a novel like ''The Scarlet Letter,'' or to historical depictions of Christ in movies like ''The Last Temptation of Christ,'' they have come to see that in Western society, there is no way to enforce religious orthodoxy. Anyway, I said, most Western readers would understand Mahound as a religious hypocrite, a satiric creation, nothing more, nothing historical. Dr. al-Ghamdi looked now to be practicing patience. ''For us,'' he said, ''this is not a matter of long ago. The Prophet Mohammed and his family are alive for us. They are here, with us, and we love them so much. I am prepared - and not only me - I am prepared to die one thousand deaths to assure that Mohammed and his family are not hurt. Such anguish this book has caused.'' I asked him what the solution was. He wanted the book banned, he said. He would like Viking to act on its own, to withdraw the book from the stores. I told him that Viking had issued statements saying it had not meant to offend anyone, that it regretted any distress the book may cause, but that it believed in Rushdie, his novel - and especially in freedom of expression. I said that freedom of expression was a very important Western concept. ''Islam has never been accepted here all through history,'' Dr. al-Ghamdi said. ''Here, you can just trample on people's feelings. You call that freedom of expression? And then you are shocked when emotions run high.'' I asked him about the threats made on Rushdie's life. What did he feel about these threats? Wasn't he, whether he realized it or not, inciting people with his talk? His face tensed. ''We are trying to project a mature community here,'' he said. ''I am doing my best to keep the community in check.'' He got up from his chair, walked over to his desk, and lifted from it a manila folder thick with papers. ''These letters,'' he said, ''you should see what people say.'' I asked if I could read them. ''They are in Arabic,'' he said. ''You do not read Arabic.'' He picked one up himself, then another, then another. And now he giggled a little. What did it say? ''This is not for you,'' he said. Our meeting was over. THAT EVENING, I was invited to a dinner party at Rushdie's home. It was to be a New England-style Thanksgiving feast, planned and cooked by Rushdie's wife, the American writer Marianne Wiggins. (Rushdie's first marriage ended in divorce several years ago. He has a 9-year-old son by the marriage, Zafar.) Their house is a four-story row house on what had not long ago been a working-class block, and Rushdie's studio is on the top floor; there, each morning at an electric typewriter, he tries to write 700 good words. He had yet to begin a new novel, that would take time, much thinking. He would travel first, write essays. Rushdie is a writer in the very English way of Orwell - he takes stands. He has written a slim, sympathetic book about Sandinista Nicaragua, and he has frequently spoken out - in the British papers, on television -on what he sees as Britain's two great problems: ''institutionalized'' racism (in employment practices and housing), and the domestic policies of the Thatcher Government. Rushdie's politics do not sit well with many in English literary circles, and especially, it would seem, with the press. He is described as arrogant, self-righteous. Challenging Rushdie's thinking about racism in England, and his sincerity as well - and perhaps revealing the very tension he is seeking to deny - a reporter in The Sunday Times of London Magazine recently wrote: ''Certainly he is assimilated to the extent of being one of the 20 just persons summoned to the [ Harold ] Pinter dinner table in Campden Hill Square to discuss opposition to Thatcherism.'' In the front room on the parlor floor as I entered Rushdie's house that night, I saw two large tables: There were to be many guests. A number of them were already downstairs, clustered in the kitchen and in Wiggins's study: the critic Michael Ignatieff; the American writer Michael Herr, author of the Vietnam book ''Dispatches''; the poet Tess Gallagher, in town for a memorial held in honor of her husband, Raymond Carver. A literary crowd; Rushdie has many friends in literary circles, too. And Rushdie was in good spirits, truly at home (as most writers are) among writers he likes. Upstairs later, watching Rushdie propose a toast above the all-American turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes, I recalled a passage from ''The Satanic Verses'': An Indian boy, at boarding school in England only a few days, comes down to breakfast to find a kipper on his plate. He has no idea how to eat it, and his fellow students have no intention of telling him. '' [ H ] e cut into it, and got a mouthful of tiny bones. And after extracting them all, another mouthful, more bones. It took him ninety minutes to eat the fish.'' Chewing, he has this revelation: ''England was a peculiar tasting smoked fish full of spikes and bones, and nobody would ever tell him how to eat it.'' He discovers he is tough and vengeful. ''I'll show them all,'' he swears. ''See if I don't.'' After dinner, I asked Rushdie about the kipper: It seemed too painful, too sadly funny, to be anything but autobiographical. ''Yes, I'm afraid it's only slightly embellished,'' he said. ''And I've never eaten another one.'' He'd been sent from India to Rugby at age 13. His family was Bombay upper-middle-class; his grandfather had made the family money and his father, who died two years ago, had, in Rushdie's words, ''spent the rest of his life losing it.'' Salman, the only son (he has three sisters), had attended the British-style Cathedral School in Bombay before being sent abroad. ''I was miserable at Rugby,'' he told me a couple of days later when we sat and talked again at his home. ''I think I had actually wanted to go - I was groomed for it. Very conventional. Bookish - I was the kind of boy who got books for presents. No good at games. ''But at Rugby I was suddenly an Indian. There are no Indians in India. There are classes, of course, and regional identifications. Here in England, however, it is largely understood as a race - and at the school-boy level, back then, that was no fun.'' The boys at Rugby not only watched Rushdie struggle with his kipper, but scrawled racist graffiti. He has told friends of his that he never really made a friend there. His father had attended King's College, Cambridge, and he expected his son to follow when he was graduated from Rugby. Rushdie refused, then pleaded, then enrolled for classes in the fall of 1964. He knew he wanted to be a writer, he told me - his hero, he said, was the acclaimed Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz. However, he chose to study not literature but history. (Most of the references to Islamic history in ''The Satanic Verses'' are drawn from one of his college papers.) Rushdie liked Cambridge. It was the 1960's: ''Everyone was rethinking things,'' he said. ''I was too.'' He became interested in the theater, got parts and worked backstage as well in a number of college productions. In the spring of 1968, he graduated from Cambridge, and returned home - not to Bombay, but to Karachi. His parents had moved there several years before. ''I was so angry they had moved to Pakistan,'' he said. ''But in truth when I'd left England, I'd only purchased a one-way ticket.'' His stay in Pakistan turned out to be short, sour. Not long after arriving, he began putting together a production of Edward Albee's ''Zoo Story'' for the country's new government-operated television station. ''Well,'' he said. ''it turned out one of the lines in the play includes the word 'pork.' A character is regularly attacked by his landlady's dog, and to keep the dog away he goes and buys these hamburgers, which he tosses to it. It doesn't work: The dog doesn't go for the hamburgers. And the character has to say something to the effect that he can't understand why the dog doesn't like the hamburgers. After all, there isn't enough pork in them to make them disgusting. ''O.K. The play is censored. One can't say the word 'pork' on TV in Pakistan. So I appeal. I say, What more could you ask for? Here is a play in which an actor points up how disgusting pork is. I mean, this is very sophisticated antipork propaganda if you consider it. But no one saw it that way. Pork was simply a four-letter word.'' An article he wrote for a small magazine on his first impressions of Pakistan was also censored. Before the end of the year, he was back in England. He would return East in the future only to visit. It was in 1970, after having worked for a time in experimental theater, when Rushdie turned his energies to writing fiction. ''I'd always imagined myself telling stories, and now I imagined I had stories to tell,'' he said. Beginning at that time as well, and then for 10 years, he worked to support himself as an advertising copywriter, first at Ogilvy and Mather, then at Charles Barker. Nights, weekends he devoted to his novels. Drafts came slowly (and still do; it took Rushdie five years to complete ''The Satanic Verses''). He abandoned one novel, about a Muslim holy man. Late in 1973, having taken time off from his advertising job, he completed what would be his first published novel, ''Grimus'' - a dystopian allegory set on an imaginary island, a novel quite remote from the kind of writing he would do later. (The book was poorly received.) However, the language, aural and eclectic, hints at things to come, as does this line from the book: ''It is the natural condition of the exile, putting down roots in memory.'' This process of using one's own stories and experiences began for Rushdie with ''Midnight's Children,'' which he completed in 1979. He had traveled to Bombay shortly after finishing ''Grimus,'' and the trip had been important to him. He decided at that time not only to write an autobiographical novel, but to write one that would encompass the biggest of India's cities, its people and history. ''I think I saw the Bombay I had grown up in slipping away,'' he told me, ''and that made me get on with the writing. I felt I had to reclaim the city - and also my own memories of it. I wanted to tell India's story, or stories, as well as my own.'' ''Floating in the amniotic fluid of the past,'' as he writes in ''Midnight's Children,'' Rushdie not only found his own story, and that of the nation of India; he found a way of telling. He mixed the fabulous and the historic, he made room for anecdotes, tales, essayistic asides, political commentary, digressions, retracings, sidetracks - the draft of the novel ran to 900 pages. ''Midnight's Children'' was a huge critical success. It won the 1981 Booker Prize, and along with the prestige came a check for $10,000. Rushdie was 34, but in a photo I have seen of him holding up the check, he could be a struggling graduate student, save for the grin that conveys: I guess I showed you. ON MY LAST DAY IN London, I visited Rushdie again, and we talked more about his novel. But talk kept spilling beyond strictly literary matters. The Islamic fundamentalists came up again. ''I am most afraid that they will succeed in reducing the novel in people's minds to a pamphlet,'' he said. Two weeks ago, after the Bradford book burning, I spoke with Rushdie on the phone, and he said: ''When they burned my book, in a way as if it were a pamphlet, I think they went too far. It is such a charged image. It got people concerned about me, sympathetic toward me, who had been content to sit on the sidelines. There were Labor Party M.P.'s - Asians representing Bradford - who attended that book burning; that's a horrible thought for many people. They get to thinking, 'If it's him today, it's me tomorrow.' '' It struck me, his use of ''him,'' ''me,'' ''they.'' I remembered what he had told me just before I left his house that day in London: ''In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this. ''But most of the time, people will ask me - will ask anyone like me - are you Indian? Pakistani? English? ''What is being expresssed is a discomfort with a plural identity. And what I am saying to you - and saying in the novel - is that we have got to come to terms with this. We are increasingly becoming a world of migrants, made up of bits and fragments from here, there. We are here. And we have never really left anywhere we have been.'' [Credit: Gerald Marzorati, a senior editor of Harper's, writes regularly for The New York Times Magazine on literary subjects. January 29,1989 New York Times.] TOP
Critic's
Notebook; Telling Truth Through Fantasy: Rushdie's Magic Realism
That these events have actually come to pass only serves to underscore the ability of reality to continually overtake our imaginations - a predicament, oddly enough, that has long troubled writers like Mr. Rushdie and that has indelibly shaped the character of their work. Writers throughout this century, in fact, have struggled to render a reality that has seemed increasingly unreal. World War I fostered the fragmentations of modernism; World War II raised new questions about the limits of language and perception. And in the wake of the 1960's - which witnessed the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the divisive war in Vietnam and growing unrest in the third world - novelists, both here and abroad began to experiment more freely with alternatives to naturalism. In this country, Donald Barthelme created surreal fictional collages that used Brechtian devices to force the reader to re-examine his relationship with the printed word. Norman Mailer temporarily turned to journalism as a substitute for fiction. And Philip Roth, who noted writers' ''inability or unwillingness to deal'' imaginatively with ''our cultural predicament,'' experimented with such comic fantasies as ''Our Gang'' and ''The Breast.'' In other countries, writers embraced a kind of phantasmagorial writing known as magic realism - a narrative technique used by Mr. Rushdie, himself, in his earlier novels, ''Midnight's Children'' (1981) and ''Shame'' (1983), as well as ''The Satanic Verses.'' It is no coincidence that magic realism - which combines heightened language with elements of the surreal - has tended to flourish in troubled areas of the world, or that many of its practitioners have sought to describe calamitous events that exceed the grasp of normal description. The transactions between the extraordinary and the mundane that occur in so much Latin American fiction are not merely a literary technique, but also a mirror of a reality in which the fantastic is frequently part of everyday life - a reality in which military death squads have effectively turned the word ''disappear'' into a transitive verb. Similarly, the grotesque inventions of Gunter Grass's ''Tin Drum'' serve as a perfect mirror of the novel's subject - German history before, during and after World War II. In the case of Mr. Rushdie, he has used the hallucinatory devices of magic realism to try to capture, metaphorically, the sweep and chaos of contemporary reality, its resemblance to a dream or nightmare. For instance, in ''The Satanic Verses,'' strange and impossible events occur: an orphan girl subsists on a diet of butterflies; two men fall from an airplane and miraculously survive; one sprouts an angelic halo, and the other, a tail and horns. The characters' bizarre adventures, the novel's numerous dream sequences, the convolutions of its plot, the melodramatic effusions of Mr. Rushdie's prose - all are meant, in some heightened way, to give the reader a sense of just how fantastic recent history has become. Many American and British writers have reacted to the growing confusion of the public world by focusing on the more accessible world of the self. Earlier Indian writers like R. K. Narayan and Anita Desai have withdrawn from the turmoil of their times to create charming miniaturist portraits. Mr. Rushdie, however, has always maintained that the writer has a responsibility to tackle the larger issues of the day. ''It seems to me imperative that literature enter such arguments,'' he wrote in an essay, ''because what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and what untruth, and the battleground is our imagination. If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history's great and most abject abdications.'' ''There is a genuine need for political fiction,'' he continued, ''for books that draw new and better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world.'' It is necessary, even exhilarating, he wrote, ''to grapple with the special problems created by the incorporation of political material, because politics is by turns farce and tragedy, and sometimes (for example, Zia's Pakistan) both at once.'' In ''Midnight's Children,'' Mr. Rushdie used a hyperbolic narrative - by turns lyric and vulgar, street smart and allusive - and a cast of improbable characters (a telepathic narrator, a child who can travel through time, another who can change sex at will) to create a parable of modern Indian history. His next novel, ''Shame,'' turned from India to a country that was ''not quite Pakistan,'' using a character named Raza Hyder as a kind of fictional surrogate for Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, the former President of Pakistan. As Mr. Rushdie saw it, the story he wanted to tell was ''a tragedy on a very large scale,'' but its ''protagonists are not tragic actors.'' ''It's as if you had 'Macbeth,' '' he said, ''and you cast a group of second-rate vaudeville clowns in it, and you have clowns trying to speak those great lines.'' When ''Shame'' was published in 1983, many critics, here and in Great Britain, remarked upon the author's gift for comic invention. ''Mr. Rushdie particularly delights in palpable absurdities such as those resulting from Raza Hyder's attempt to impose Islamic fundamentalism upon his country after seizing power,'' wrote the critic Robert Towers in The New York Times Book Review. In one episode cited by Mr. Towers, a simpering foreign journalist asks Hyder if he has a ''point of view about the allegation that your institution of such Islamic punishments as flogging and cutting-off of hands might be seen in certain quarters as being, arguably, according to certain definitions, so to speak, barbaric?'' Hyder replies: ''We will not simply order people to stick out their hands, like this, and go fataakh! with a butcher's knife. No, sir. All will be done under the most hygienic conditions, with proper medical supervision, use of anaesthetic etcetera.'' In light of recent developments, many aspects of ''Shame'' now seem less satirical than oddly prescient. In one passage, the narrator expresses little surprise that a Pakistani man, living in London, has killed his daughter for sleeping with an English boy: ''We who have grown up on a diet of honour and shame can still grasp what must seem unthinkable to peoples living in the aftermath of the death of God and of tragedy: that men will sacrifice their dearest love on the implacable altars of their pride.'' In another aside, the narrator muses upon the fate of Islamic fundamentalism. ''Autocratic regimes find it useful to espouse the rhetoric of faith,'' he says, ''because people respect that language, are reluctant to oppose it. This is how religions shore up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.'' In ''The Satanic Verses,'' a character named Gibreel similarly observes that ''something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet.'' ''Too many demons,'' he thinks, ''inside people claiming to believe in God.'' One of the multiple ironies of Mr. Rushdie's situation, of course, is that his own words in ''The Satanic Verses''- the words of a novelist, not a religious zealot - are now being taken so solemnly by his Muslim opponents, who literally want to make them a matter of life and death. It's a situation not unrelated to the one that obtains in countries in other regions - from Latin America to Eastern Europe - that have responded to writers' work with jail sentences, torture and exile. Just this week, the playwright Vaclav Havel was sentenced to jail by a Prague court for inciting illegal protests and obstructing the police; Mr. Havel maintained his innocence. His plays have not been produced in Czechoslovakia in 20 years. To writers in America, the stakes are considerably different. At worst, a writer risks bad reviews, embarrassment, a loss of self-esteem; at best, a writer garners fame, money, fancy invitations. Given this situation in which freedom is taken for granted but writers are often looked upon as glorified entertainers, it's not surprising that booksellers were so quick to remove ''The Satanic Verses'' from their shelves. Nor is it surprising that many authors, who were initially silent, are now condemning one another for not doing enough in defense of Mr. Rushdie's book. As for Mr. Rushdie, he remains in hiding in Great Britain, where he doubtless has time to begin work on a new novel. Although he once observed that his fictions often contain characters close to himself - but exaggerated ''to make things easier to discuss'' - he will have difficulty, this time, embellishing the ''farce and tragedy'' of what has happened in real life. [Credit:
New York Times, February 24, 1989.] Brian Finney 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 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 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. Being
God's postman is no fun, yar. 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? 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). 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). What
About Rushdie? I thought the death sentence would be laughed off -- condemned as despicable, and then mocked. Of course, I did not foresee much merriment about "The Satanic Verses" in any Islamic state, where building blueprints have to be submitted to a board of Islamic scholars, the ulema, so that the authorities can make sure that no toilet faces Mecca. Where toys and calendars and mugs based on the Muppet figure of "Miss Piggy" are dragged from shops by the religious police and ritually destroyed. Where there are equally batty and murderous-sounding fatwas, such as the recent one delivered by a Saudi Arabian official cleric that declared that as all Shiite Muslims are heretics they should all be killed. You know you have traveled through the looking glass when you are in a land where Miss Piggy is seen as the very embodiment of evil. How disgusting to see that so far the intimidation of fanatics has worked. Mr. Rushdie is in hiding, his book is still vilified, his life is still threatened. Most countries, including his own, Britain, are doing business with Iran, buying its oil and cashew nuts, and selling the Iranians new cars and wristwatches, and sending them paper and ink so they can print their fatuous laws. Trading partners in Europe and the U.S. are treating the Islamic Republic of Iran as though it is a thoroughly rational place, when any fool can see that the Ayatollah's fatwa is barbarous, as well as, from the point of view of international law, an example of criminal incitement. In Sydney, Australia, one of my taxi drivers was an economic refugee from Pakistan, a man of 60, with a science degree from Karachi University. We talked about the Koran for a while, and then I asked him about the fatwa. His bony hands tightened on the steering wheel: "Rushdie must die." I had a similar encounter in rural Fiji. Also with a credulous Muslim. Naturally I set these people straight: I suggested to them that these were ignorant sentiments. And I mentioned my experiences to Mr. Rushdie's Australian publishers. These Australians, living in a democratic country, with a tradition of rugged individualism and a talent for being rude, said confidentially that they were frightened. One said, "Some of us have families." This is all very discouraging. On a personal level people are muddled or uninterested; on an official and governmental level, the response has been weak and cowardly; on a religious level, the Muslims have either been supine or vindictive. There is very little that Salman Rushdie can do himself. The task is for the rest of us to resist the notion that beheadings and ritual destruction of toys are rational and humane, and that a religious leader in one country has the power to condemn a citizen of another country to death for writing a book. We often find ourselves in odd postures in our dealings with the Islamic world. It always strikes me as perverse when British and U.S. academics willingly go to any number of countries and teach in schools where women are segregated from men and the laws are medieval. They do it for the money. The governments that have been timid in defending Mr. Rushdie's rights have been influenced by money, too. They need to see him as he is -- a hostage to much worse fanaticism than confined Terry Anderson or John McCarthy. It is not just Hezbollah but the entire Muslim world that has been urged to kill him. The first step is for governments and world leaders to speak out on Salman Rushdie's behalf. Then it is our turn -- the readers and writers. It is obvious that if any of us raises the fatwa in Iran or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, or like-minded countries, Mr. Rushdie will be vilified and we will be hounded. But this ought not to be the case in the rest of the world. Any non-Muslim country with the rule of law ought to be a safe haven for Salman Rushdie, where he can walk the streets and ride the buses and live without fear of being set upon. It is awkward to be talking about Muslims this way because Islam is one of the world's great religions and many of its tenets are humane. But Muslims who do not understand that we regard the fatwa as an aberration must be singled out, because only they pose a threat to Mr. Rushdie. With his confinement in mind, I have made a point of asking all the Muslims I meet their views on Mr. Rushdie and his book. I have had some crisp replies, but I still think my little practice is salutary. It ought to happen everywhere: first the question -- What about Rushdie? -- and if the answer is hostile, set them straight. This should also happen on an official level, whenever a world leader communicates with President Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran. What about Rushdie? I have no doubt that eventually the message will get through, and he will be free. Paul
Theroux is author of the forthcoming travel book, "The Happy
Isles of Oceania
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