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The Jolt of the Grotesque: Aesthetics as
Ethics in The Satanic Verses
Gaurav Majumdar
Now
1
challenge anyone to explain the diabolic and diverting farrago
of Brueghel the Droll otherw ise than by a kind of special, Satanic grace.
For the word s special grace substitute, if you wish, the wo rds mad-
ness
or hallucination, but the mystery will remain almost as dark.
- Char les Baudela i re , The Painter of Modern Life
Am plifying a tendency in Salman Ru shdie's novels since Midnight s
Children his The
Satanic Verses
engages the grotesque to pose various
ethical questions. He relates these questions with textual problems that
engage literary invention, authorship, normalization, urban tensions,
and the migration of both individuals and their stories. Rushdie has
been celebrated for his alertness to processes of cultural trarisfer and
transformation, even as he has been accused of an uncritical celebration
of m ixture. The performance and diagnosis of such transfer in
The Satanic
Verses combines the dynam ics listed above with hu m or and irony. One of
the novel's recurring strategies is to combine discordant, supp osed ly het-
eronom ous attributes, thereby b lurring identities, geographical specificity,
and chronology, as well as breaking lingu istic strictures, as its dissonan t,
frivolous tones define m om ents of pathos, violence, and dou bt. H owever,
its inappropriateness allows The Satanic Verses to prod uce sophisticated
acts of introspection and criticism. These incongruities give the text an
elusiven ess that multiplies the challenges of reading it and of forming an
ethical response to its peculiarity. Even as it explores cultural a nd person al
com binations and collisions, it performs verbal com binations, m utations,
and collisions. That is to
say,
its very form evokes qualities and argum ents
that resist the ironies and asymmetries of orthodox assumptions.
It is th roug h such aesthetic strategies that it jolts its read er into ethical
questions, its moves resonating strongly w ith Derek A ttridge's discussion
of the singular and the other in The Singularity of Literature. Attridge's em-
phas is is on sing ularity w ith relation. For him , the singularity of the othe r
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32 Gaurav Majumdar
Verses shows its very formation and transformation as the functions of
relafions. It is designa ted the other as a function of its subjection to the
operations of the gaze, its aberration emerging from normalizing pro-
cesses and the aspirations that the observafion of (and desire for) powe r
brings. In its inventiveness. The atanic Verses itself displays, and encour-
ages its reader to see, a rang e of relations that d em ons trate its alterity or
originality. This alterity requires the reader's participafion to realize its
inventiveness—whether in recognizing a pun, a playful allusion, words
from another language, or various other verbal formations that invite
interpre tive agility. As Attridge contends, Absolute alterity, as long as
it remains absolute, cannot be app rehen ded at all; there is, effectively, no
such thing (30). Alterity, as an expression of difference, or singularity, has
its engine in its invention of difference thro ug h its enga gem ent w ith the
resources of the past. To write an original work involves the rewo rking
of available ma terials by destabilizing them, heigh tening their internal
inconsistencies and ambiguities and exploiting their gaps and tensions
so as to make their otherness manifest (Attridge, 62-3). The gambit of
the inventive work—and its ethical demand on the reader—is to make
its inventiveness explicit. Moreover, Attridge notes, the un iqu eness to
wh ich an ethical read ing must do justice is not an unc hanging essence,
nor the sum of the work's difference from all other w orks as it appears
in a time and place, bu t the inventive otherness of the work (Attridge,
91). Therefore, this ethical dem and also seeks a response that traces the
w ork 's play with its resources while recognizing its reconfiguration of—
and differences from—them.
efinitions of the Grotesque
The aesthetics of such an ethics is dep ende nt on recognizing both the
need for them atiza tion and the otherness or difficulty of the text. In The
atanic Verses the grotesque threatens familiar pleasure and dem and s a
renegotiation of aesthetic assum ptions a nd practices that decide pleasu re
or displeasure. What ethical procedures and gestures does a reading of
the grotesque involve? How might its strangeness operate as a kind of
critique? s forms of unfamiliarity, the grotesque (in particula r instances)
and the inventive text itself might be expected to follow ope rations and
produce effects that resemble one another. What traits do they share?
How — or when— are these ope rations and effects different? Ho w d o they
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The Jolt of the G rote squ e 33
to the ethical in Rushdie's novel.
will begin w ith a slightly larger reading
of John R uskin's canonical view of the grotesque, in order to contrast it
with that of The atanic Verses later.
In the concluding chap ters of
The tones
of Venice, Ruskin interrogates
the late sixteenth-century Venetian grotesque as an unde sirable form of
self-indulgence :
The architecture raised at Venice during this period is among the
worst and basest ever built by the hands of men, being especially
distinguished by a spirit of brutal mockery and insolent jest, which,
exhausting itself
in
deformed and m onstrous sculpture, can sometimes
be hardly otherwise defined than as the perpetuation in stone of the
ribaldries of drun kenn ess. (236)
The Venetian grotesque is, therefore, offensive because it lacks sobriety,
and its semiosis is cor\fused, confusing, or sugg estive of dru nk en ne ss.
Ruskin's lack of hum or, evide nt in his disgust with insolent jest and
ribaldries, is increasingly apparent as he hierarchizes form, stressing
the importance of
a
distinction betw een the noble and true grotesque,
on the one han d, and the m onstrous and false grotesque, on the other
(236-39). Even w he n the former displays hum or and playfulness, it pres-
ents a dee p internal seriousness of disposition (241). On the other han d,
the false grotesque displays the spirit of mere levity that renders it
incapable of ha pp y jesting, capable only of tha t wh ich is bitte r (241).
This low Venetian grotesque is a consequence of a nation that drank
w ith deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidden pleasure , and du g for
springs, hithe rto unknown , in the dark places of the ea rth (243).
The oppressions of surveillance (surround ing forbidden pleasu res
as
objects guarde d in
a
system of exclusion and policing) and the fear of dif-
ference (of things unkn ow n, in the da rk places ) are crucial for Rusk in's
aesthetics. He asserts that such grotesque represen tation traces the moral
trajectory of the falling Vene tians[,] wh ich proceeds from pride to
infidelity, and from infidelity to the unsc rup ulo us
pursuit
of
pleasure
(em-
pha sis Rusk in's; 236). Th us, noting a depa rture from earlier figurations
of the grotesq ue as a sublime and an ecclesiastical form, his text suggests
a link betw een secularism and this version of the grotesqu e.' Ruskin's
use of infidelity and the adjective falling are significant. He notes
that, in the latter pa rt of the sixteenth century, Venetian churches w ere
first bu ilt to the glory of man, instead of the glory of God (240). Venice,
adrift from religion, sincerity, devotion, and virtue, is then condemned
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34 Gaurav Majumdar
directing
the
efforts
of the
builder
to the
formation
of
anything worthy
the name of a style or schoo l (244). Rusk in does not acknowledge that
the grotesque cannot
be
consistent with
itself. It is a
morphographic
problem precisely because
it is a
construction
of
inconsistency.
Following Rusk in's rhetoric,
the
absence
of
familiarity, order,
and
the reassuring display
of
feeling consistent w ith
itself,
produces
the
threat of the grotesque. The grotesque, in its partiality, makes its lack
overt— unlike the beautiful, its surface dis pla ys -rathe r than absorbing
or resorbing—its inconsistencies.
Its
status
as
grotesque
is
decided
by its
lack of the virtues attributed by Ruskin to noble forms, even as some of
its features are exaggerated.
It is
precisely aro und such
a
strange form of
absence that Hom i Bhabha structures
his
comm entary
on the
stereotype
in The Other Qu estion. For Bhabha,
It is
the
force
of
ambivalence that gives
the
colonial stereotype
its cur-
rency; ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive
conjunctures; informs
its
strategies
of
individuation
and
marginaliza-
tion; produces the effect
of
probabilistic truth and predictability which,
for the stereotype, m ust alway s be
in excess of
wha t can be em pirically
proved
or
logically c onstrue d.
The Location
of Cu lture
66)
The stereotype dep ends, therefore, on a double-displacement: an exaggera-
tion/hyperbole ( excess )
and an
erasure/cancellation ( individuation,
marginalization )
for the
dissemination
of
colonial discourse. Bhabha's
thesis refiects the adap tability
and
end uran ce a stereotype possesses after
its formulation,
its
success reinforced
by the way in
which
it
combines
particularization
and
generalization through
the
scope
of its
overstate-
ment. However,
the
stereotype also serves
as a
means
of
controlling
the
unpredictable through the very m odes of its produ ction. It avoids alertness
to resemblance
in
its lack
of
sympathy
and its
hyperbole, even
as it
stays
blind
to
differences within
the
same delusional dyn amic.
The
grotesque
is
the
product
of
such parallax, literalized
and
given
a
body.
The grotesque,
as
a com binative form, radically expresses a problema-
tization of
the
inside and the outside. Migration, as an act proceeding from
within a defined space into another—as a movem ent from the inside to
the
outside—manufactures
the
confiation
of the
familiar
and the
unfam iliar
that we find
in
the grotesque:
it
literally presents the play
of
the F reudian
heimlich and Unheimlich.
When,
as
with
the
stereotype,
the
unfam iliar
is
seen—^but
not
recognized— as
the
estranged familiar,
its
strangen ess
(its
excess )
is
read
as
dangerous, unstable,
and
threatening, transforming
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T he Jolt of the G rot es qu e 35
Disob eying Rusk in 's prosc ript ions against the spir it of m ere levity,
The Satanic
erses
em brace s p i t t ing levity agains t grav i ty {The Stones of
Venice,
241 ;
The Satanic Verses,
3 ).
Rushdie em ploy s a shut t ling i rony to d is-
place the bo un da rie s of bo th gravi ty an d hu m or (as w e will see below ); his
i ronic cr i t iques use hu m o r as their chief m od e. Exp loring the crit ical role
play ed by the supe r-ego in the mak ing of hum or , Simon Cr i tchley p oin ts
to a crucial ar gu m en t in the later Fr eu d's essay on the topic: In hum or,
the super- ego looks at the ego from an inflated posi t ion, wh ich m ak es th e
ego itself look tiny and trivial . [I]n humor I find myself ridiculous and I
acknowledge th is in laughter or s imply in a smi le . Humor i s essent ia l ly
sel f-mocking r id icule (79) . This i s the k ind of hu m or R ushd ie e m ploy s
when mocking the not ion of authorship and i t s concomitant author i ty ,
which I wil l discuss below.
Th rou gh i ts m igran t forms, Ru shd ie ' s novel pa ys heed to , an d then
sw erve s aw ay from, the herm ene ut ic conven t ions for the sat i ric gro-
tes qu e as a force of neg at ion , as estab l ished by H einric h Sch nee gan s in
The History of Grotesque Satire, an d com pl icated by Er ich Au erba ch in h is
discu ssion of Rabelais in Mimesis. For A ue rba ch , the sat i ric grote squ e, al-
tho ug h hype rbol ic and r ibald, perform s an aff irmative function: Au erb ach
argu es that Rabelais 's s ty le pro du ce s a fruitful irony which confuses the
customary aspects and propor t ions of th ings [and] through the p lay of
possibi l i ties, casts a da w ni ng l ight on the possibi l i ty of freed om (247).
However, he notes that , in the protocols of the Rabelaisian grotesque,
real i ty is su bs um ed by the sup er-re al , an d that the possibi l i ty of de -
velo ping a realistic scene of ev ery da y l i fe. . . .i s ent i rely inco m pa tible w ith
grote squ e farcical ity [and] sta nd s in del ibera tely absu rd contra st to i t
{Mimesis, 247, 237) . Ru shd ie man ifest ly violates the dist inct ion s b etw ee n
the ident i f iably real and the ident i f iably fantast ic—in other words, he
undoes the incompat ib i l i ty perceived by Auerbach, and, l ike Freud, he
dism ant les any clear d is t inct ion betw een the heimlich an d the Unheimlich,
the fami liar a nd the uncanny . A l thoug h Auerba ch defen ds the R abelais ian
gro tesq ue as a form w he re the serious nes s l ies in the joy of disco very—
pre gn an t wi th al l poss ib i li t ies , he del imi ts the grotes que as a genre that
in i tself exc lude s de ep feel ing an d hig h t ra ge dy in Pantagruel {Mimesis,
24 9,247) . This l im i ta tion i s w ha t Ru shd ie ch al lenges , as T he Satanic erses
transgresses the specificity of satire to ironically subvert i ts manifest and
implici t -but not specif ic—targets . Moreover, in the novel , the grotesque
com bines an d exceeds Ru skin 's categ or izat ions of the t ru e an d the
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36 Gaurav Majumdar
grotesque does not merely acknowledge the other, but, in its very form, it
accommodates the other: it often comprises parts of different bodies or spe-
cies (as in the case of a gryphon or a manticore), showing an inclusiveness,
the presence of difference on its own body, a capacity for transformation,
and a welcome to alterity. This instance of the grotesque overtly signifies
difference through deformation or a changing, unstable shape. Further,
it has no dominant social or political sanction—a lack that catalyzes its
designation as the grotesque. T'o be sure, its categorization as deformed
and its lack of political currency are often mutually debilitating. However,
its forms frequently express a deviance from norms through a sympathetic
strangeness or even an exuberance (as in the Rabelaisian grotesque). In
sharp contrast, the repressive grotesque asserts a repressive violence,
either through the agency of a single subject (in the repression of the self
or an unacknowledged aggression), or through the repressions exercised
by state-power and other forms of institutionalized power (military power,
censorship, and other forms of politically-induced violence). This form
of the grotesque possesses the ability selectively and willfully to hinder
the permeation, reshaping, translation, vulgarity, and contamination
of forms. It enforces the economies of the same, the performance of the
normative, and the preservation and establishment of orthodoxies. It has
(or presumes ownership of) political heft, and the power to conceal its
violation of its own laws and proclamations. The object of its repressions
is, frequently, the expressive grotesque. This is not to say that there can
be—or is—no overlap or link between the expressive and repressive
forms of the grotesque. That connection differs from moment to moment,
instance to instance, as I will show below in my discussion of the two
main characters in
The Satanic
Verses. Subverting Ruskin's command, the
expressive grotesque does not silence feelings and attributes inconsistent
with itself. In an essay published nearly a century after The Stones of
Venice,
Peter Fingesten argues that in genuine grotesques there must be
a congruity between subject matter, mood, and the visual forms in which
they are cast
(419).
The problem of the genuine and the artificial aside,
it is precisely such calls for congruity that The Satanic Verses contests.
A Suchmuch Thing : Infected Iteration and Excessive Forms
In an essay on Terry Gilliam's film
Brazil,
Rushdie argues that the
fantastic is a symptom of a politically resistant Utopianism: Unreality is
the only weapon with which reality can be smashed, so that it may sub-
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The Jolt of the Grotesque 37
Farishta and Saladin Cham cha hurtle tow ard a wa tery reincarnation of
the English Channe l, wh ile hyb rid cloud creatures, gigantic fiowers
with hum an breasts, winged
cats
and various other grotesque creatures
app ear before them
(5,6).
As they approach their rebirth -by-migration,
Gibreel sings, echoing Gramsci, To be born again...first you have to
die
(3). While acknowledging the reinvention of the self that migration
brings (a read ing various critics of the novel have offered), the scene also
acknow ledges invention as the function of new relations. Soon after this,
the obscure boun darie s of life and dea th in the novel are re-engaged . The
obvious suspension of reality at the nove l's beg inning is augmented w hen
Gibreel spo ts the gh ost of his former lover Rekha Merchant, recently dead
after com mitting suicide. Gibreel adm onishe s her for her fatal
act:
A sin.
A suchmuch thing (7). The portma nteau, suchm uch, makes Gibreel's
remark a bilingual formulation: read as English, the comment says that
Rek ha's act of suicide is similar to and excessive like a sin. Read as Urdu
or Hindi, it declares that sin is such m uch, a single word that wo uld, in
this case, roughly deno te the colloquialism for real, bu t m eans truly
or really in a more strict translation. The word suchm uch itself per-
forms the excess it conveys, as it fuses tw o (or three) language s, its sin
the transgression of the sanctions an d norm s of each. In its bilingualism,
its prope r meaning is undecidable. Echoing W ittgenstein's duck -rabbit
puzzle verbally, it can only be read in a single language at a time, but,
wh enever it is read in one language, it is only thro ugh a repression of the
presence of the other (or the O ther ). How ever, as A ttridge notes, The
experience of singularity involves an app rehension of otherness (67, At-
tridge's italics). As another language combines with the text's primary
language to produc e the langu age of the other, it produce s a com binative,
elusive grotesque that
no
dictionary recognizes.
he
negotiation of read ing
it requires a stren uous ve rsion of the barely-registered procedures tha t, as
Attridge notes, are involved in our reading of a letter of the alphabet: an
event of recognition, usually coupled with an even t of combination and
an event of com prehen sion (63). W hen a text uses such strategies (and
especially when it does so frequently), it de m ands an ethical acknowledg-
ment of an interprefive deficit: particularly whe n a reader lacks familiarity
with a second language incorporated within recognizable formulations in
the text's first language, s /h e has to adm it the possibility of a vast slip-
page in h is /h er unpacking of formulations that the text's language m ight
encod e. Put differently, such interpretation dem and s its readers ' conces-
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38 Gaurav Majumdar
th Grotesque
137).
However, R ushdie's novel em ploys Joycean moves
to
make
a
more overtly political, formal gesture .
In
his hom age
to
Rushdie,
Claude Lefort writes,
In
democracy
itself, the
institution
of
individual
and political freedoms couldn't make one forget that freedom is not given;
speech always requires
an int rruption of the
ordered relations among
men...a sort
of
violence (31). Rushdie's inventiveness articulates such
interruptions through
its
formal violence, often expressed
in
devi-
ant speech-impediments and foreign accents. The dru nk en W hisky
Sisodia stutters
The
trouble with
the
Engenglish
is
that their hiss hiss
history happened overseas,
s
they dod o do n't know w hat it m eans (343).
Sisodia's stutter contributes semiotic richness
to his
opinion, suggesting
that the ignorance
of
the English people a rises from the fact their history
was covertly performed ( hiss hiss )
and the
elusiveness
of
such history
makes the English foolish ( dodo -like). Later, Sisodia intones, Go to
the
Che
Che
Chamber
of
horrors
and
you 'll
see
w hat 's
rah rah
wrong with
the Eng lish (343). A possible reading
of
Sisodia's jeremiad here: Eng land
is
a
Chamber
of
Ho rrors since
it
is
a
place
of
failed revo lutions (the last
word evoked
by the
implied reference
to Che
Guevara) that encourages
its own errors (̂ it is rah rah about its wrongs).^ These sentences add
alterity
to
the overt narration
of
history: Sisodia's stam mers becom e gro-
tesque additions
to
wo rds that,
in
being synecdochic—or interrupted ,
to use Lefort's term— partially un do his speech imp edim ent and become
an eccentric form
of
historiography which,
in
Attridge's words,
is not
pure:
it
is constitutively im pure, always open
to
contam ination, grafting,
accidents, reinterpretation,
and
recontextualization
(63).
rauma nd ransformation
The Satanic Verses recognizes bo th acting
and
performance
as
staging
the
other within
the self. It is
significant that both Farishta
and
Chamcha
are
actors,
the
former
a
star
in the
Bombay film industry,
the
latter
a
popular voice-over performer
in
British television
and
adve rtis-
ing. G ibreel
has
himself performed
the
identities
of
various gods
as the
star
in
various Indian theologicals
(16).
Since he has been missing from
Bombay after
the
aerial disaster,
the
local media announces
his
absence
as
the
death
of
God,
an
irorüc suggestion that
the
status
of the
divine
is pliable,
an
inconsistent concomitant
of
celebrity,
and so
itself
a
kind of
grotesque—a matter
of
mistaken public percep tion (16). Reincarnation
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The Jolt of the Gro tesque 39
differences and variety (60). However, once he steps out of that role and
resum es his chosen and carefully produced Eng lish persona, he refuses
to acknowledge that he chooses, and needs, repeated self-translations.
Later in the novel, he is distressed w hen he thinks that he has become
embroiled, in things, in the world and its messes, and I cannot resist.
The grotesque has me, as before the quotidian had me, in its thrall
(260). Chamcha does not see that the heimlich and the Unheimlich (the
quo tidian and th e grotesque, if you will) are inextricable categories, that
each appears in, and as, the other. Later in the text, after he finds himself
transformed into the Goatm an (he is defined as a satanic satyr by the
gaze of English state-apparatuses), Chamcha tries to convince people of
his identity by reminding them of one of the television characters to whom
he lends his voice: I'm Maxim. Maxim Alien (140). This is a poig nan t
lapsus— hamcha overlooks the fact that he has been aliena ted (mad e
grotesque, if you will) to the maxim um by trying to stay rigidly defined.
Moreover, as Rebecca Walkowitz notes, Playing the greatest of aliens,
Saladin becomes a 'ma xim ,' an abstract emblem of 'overseas' (143).
Am ong Cham cha's various roles as the Man of Tho usand Voices
and a Voice, is that of the rabbit, Ridley, w ho had an obsession with the
Hollywo ood star Sigourney W eaver (62). As that reference to low cul-
ture suggests, the novel makes various and rapid connections with other
texts. The house where Gibreel finds shelter after his arrival in England
is fianked by M artello Tower, a reference to Stephen D edalus 's residence
in Ulysses (148). In an allusion to Finnegans Wake, Chamcha's former
college-mate. Jum py Joshi has named his traveling disco Finn's Th um b
in honour' of the legendary sleeping giant of Ireland, Finn MacCool,
another sucker, as Cham cha used to say (179). Likewise, in the closing
chapters of The Satanic Verses, Inspector Stephen Kinch (his surname an
acknow ledgem ent of Buck M ulligan's nickname for Stephen D edalus in
Ulysses investigates the violence spreadin g across Lo ndon (464). A nd, of
course. The Satanic Verses is written in notorious intertextuality with the
Qur'an. Alongside its tracing of the origins of Islam and its quotation of
high literature (including Blake, M ilton, Ovid, an d Lucrefius), it includes
numerous references to the subversive power (and exuberance) of rock
music. Following the imp risonm ent of Cham cha the Go atman, [a]t
demonstrations and broadcasts protesting the Goatman's arrest, radios
blare out the Rolling Stones's 'Sym pathy for the Devil,' the lyrics for
wh ich Rushdie gives an im pure, orthographically-fiexed form: Please-
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40 Gaurav Majumdar
insert various in-jokes an d allusions to the Bom bay film indu stry. As its
intertextuality identifies some of the text's resources, it also und ersco res
its open ness, its disturba nce (if not subversion) of hierarchies of hig h
and low culture, its impurity, and its refusal of historical or cultural
insularity. These allusions, then, decline—if not disqualify— any read ing
of the novel's inventiveness as p roduced in hermetic conditions or in some
solitude conducive to genius. To register even a majority (rather than the
totality) of their vas t scale, a reader requires a cosmopolitan interest driv en
by an ethical openness to the world at large.
Chamcha's transformation into the Goatman is itself marked by
sym ptom s p resented as metaph ors invoking rock and roll, which is, of
course, overtly a syncretic, im pu re text: [H]is body w ould emit alarm-
ing noises, the howlings of infernal wahwah pedals, the snare-drum
crackling of satanic bo nes (285). The traum atize d body, in its pain and
rage, is by definition a conflation of the inside and the outside— articulat-
ing migration in its very form. While the Goatm an's body expresses itself
as a combination of rock instrum ents , the flamboyant flexing of langua ge
by rock and roll is in sharp contrast to another form of the grotesque in
the novel: Saladin Cham cha, in his norm al form and his desperation for
inflectional stability. Chamcha is ironically referred to (and even describes
himself as
a
creature of selected discontinu ities (427). Assu m ing tha t
the self can control its attribute s, he models himself on, and strenuously
tries to preserve, li hés of British
identity.
In this curatorial role, Chamcha
seeks to exchange one form of authen ticity for another. In so doing, he re-
doubles the double movem ent of the stereotype, and produces a grotesque
display of external signs of authenticity alongside the tension of the effort.
(His attemp ted retu rn to India at the novel's closing replicates this effect.)
During their descent into England, Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta
experience w hat the novel calls blast-delirium , each assum ing the traits
and delusions of the other (5). This delirium grow s into an identification
with the other, and into an intense hostility at moments of stress. As the
fugitive Go atman, Cham cha takes sanctuary at the Club H ot Wax:
w he n h e was alone Chamcha was able to fix his thoughts on the face
that had finally coalesced in his mind 's
eye..
.the face he had been try-
ing to identify in his dreams, Mr. Gibreel Farishta, transformed into
the simulacrum of an angel as surely as he w as the D evil's mirror self.
Who should the Devil blame b ut the Archangel, Gibreel?
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The Jolt of the Grotesque 41
As simulacra of angels, of the Devil (the D in the w ord appears
frequentiy capitalized, wh ile the g in god rem ains largely in lower
case), and of each other, the figures of Farishta and Chamcha exchange
angelic and diabolical functions. In his plight as outcast and grotesque,
Cham cha is vulnerable and threatening, at the same time. In a flamboy-
ant metaphor, Saladin's agonistic breath melts the nightclub's gallery of
wa xw orks. Slightly earlier in the novel, the figures in this gallery, various
m igran ts of the past, are identified as History (292). In melting their
effigies, then, Saladin has melted history, an action that Gibreel wishes
to perform later in the novel, when, halluc inating th at he is the Archangel
Gibreel, he threatens initially to tropicalize Lon don to imp rove it and ,
later, when he celebrates what he sees as the God-willed destruction of
the city (354, 461). While Farish ta an d Chamcha are frequently victims
pictured as the expressive grotesque, it is as the exemplars of ahistoric-
ity that they are manifestly the threatening, repressive grotesque. In its
ethical largeness, the text offers no outright condemnation for its main
characters, but such mo m ents (when their positions as expressive and
repress ive blur) enable the text to present a crucial figurative remind er
that blindness to history, rather than physiognom ic strangeness, produces
the monstrous.
Camera and Spectator: The Novel s Form
The text's own physiogn om ic strangeness underscores its ec-
centricity. It frequently produces perspectives and tones that clash and
collude not merely through the formation of unusual words and idiom,
bu t in its very syntax. s Gibree l's delirium intensifies into halluc inations,
he begins to see himself as the Archangel G abriel (or Gibreel ). The
nov el's language reflects his confusion thro ugh ironic, confused forms.
Imagining that M ahou nd's uncle, Ham za, has ordered M ahound to ask
the Archangel about the propriety of including goddesses in the Islamic
order of the divine, Gibreel thinks, Mahound comes
to
me for
revelation,
asking me to choose between mon otheist and henothe ist alternatives, and I'm just
some idiot actor having a bhaenchud
[ 'sisterfucking']
nightmare, what the fuck
do I know, yaar what to tell you, help. Help
(108-09; i talics R us hd ie's ). T he
deflation of religious rhetoric and solemnity through the vulgar and the
comic rend ers Gibreel's langu age itself grotesque. The text's m echanism s
for the procedu re rely on a subversion that wo uld be impossible w ithout
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42 Gaurav Majumdar
As Gibreel sits at Mount Gone, awaiting the word of God on Ma-
ho un d's question, his point of view is som edm es that of the camera
and at other mom ents, spectator. When h e's a camera the pee oh vee is
always on the move[,] so he's fioafing up on a high crane looking do w n
at the foreshortened figure of the actors, or he 's swo oping do w n to stan d
invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a three-
hundred-sixty-degree p an ... (108). This Gibreel, present at the mom ent
of the bi rth of Islam, is also the In dian film star, Gibreel Farishta, w ho , at
the same time, imagines a new scene for a film as he aw aits divine w ord.
The novel m akes clear that Gibreel's religious hallucinafions re not m erely
hallucinafions—they are experiences persuasive enough to be facts. Gi-
breel's dual statu s as camera and spectator ensures tha t his perspective is
vertiginous an d vivid, perm itting no ascetic vantage p oints from wh ich
to view the scene and its contemporary, cinematic vocabu lary as histori-
cally discreet. [In the novel's final third, the na rrato r describes Gibreel's
though ts: The doctors had been wron g, he now perceived, to treat him
for schizophrenia (351).] Perspectives migrate further as the narra tor
describes Chamcha, seeing w ha t's in Gibreel's eye (467). Cham cha's and
Gibreel's serial perspectives feed the ensuing confusion and violence in
the text, even
s
they indicate the novel's formal expansiveness. The series
further complicates the three most prominent story-lines in The Satanic
Verses:
everits describing the beginnin gs of
Islam;
a pilgrimage by w ay of
the Indian O cean led by the mystic, Ayesha; and the migration a nd hallu-
cinatory violence experienced by Chamcha an d Farishta. These narra tives
echo, intersect, and am plify each other, producin g a visual, auditory, an d
lexical montage in Rushdie's novel that challenges interpretation.
The Satanic Verses imbricates narratives no t merely by the juxtapo si-
tion of images, the play of auditory and visual tones, or the m anipula tion
of their duratio n. While it does dep loy these more frequentiy-used forms
of mon tage, its narrative also relates selves and spaces by suggesting—or
declaring—the irruption of overtly different stories within other stories
and other places. Reprising the dynamics of Joyce's character-clusters
and sigla in innegans
Wake
the repetition of names activates narrative
series in Ru shd ie's book: the m ultiple relocations of the nam e Gibreel
to different historical mom ents a nd p laces are manifest exam ples of this
strategy. As theatres for such relocation, exchange, and their attendant
traum as, cities play a crucial part in the stag ing of relations in the novel.
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The Jolt of the Grotesqu e 43
in epic scope: in the guise of eagles, jackals, horses, gry pho ns, salam an-
ders, warthogs, rocs; welling up from the murk of the alleys have come
two-headed am phisbae nae.. .Djinns, houris, dem ons po pulate the city on
this night of pha ntasmago ria and lust (117). In the book's next section,
Chamcha glimpses similarly grotesque inhabitants of London (171). In
Bombay, Changez Chamchawala's art collection includes a large group
of the legendary Hamza Nama cloths, mem bers of that sixteenth-century
sequence depicting scenes from the life of a hero who may or may not
have been [Hamza,] M uha m m ad 's uncle (69-70). Echoing the prolepsis
in the images of Gibreel earlier in the text, the M ahou nd section of the
novel introduces the real Ham za in Jahilia. Thus, the text links not only
representations and their models, but (with images of particular figures
in one place foretelling the actions of figures in another) also landscape s.
he book sim ultaneously sugges ts that events (especially those in Jahilia)
do, and do not occur. This simultaneity ad ds to its indeterm inacy; its un-
decidability amplifies, even as its stories do .
In the latter half of the novel, the art historian and b iograph er Otto
Cone, a Polish migrant w ho has proclaimed himself an Englishman, de-
scribes the m od ern city as the locus classicus of incompatible realities
(314). Such incompatibilities are manifest in the book 's oscillations to and
from Bombay, Lon don, and Jahilia. As Eeroza Jussawalla has noted , the
very hybridity that Rushdie manifests results from his being not only a
'post-British' colorüal bu t also a 'pos t-M ugh al' colonial (79). o rearrange
that argum ent for som ewhat different purposes (and to distance my read-
ing from any subscription to the critical value of authorial b iography ), I
would argue that the nove l's juxtaposition of Bombay, London, and Jahilia
accounts for its own various cultural inheritance, radicalizing the juxta-
position to form a conjuncture. As the novel m akes clear, these cityscapes
them selves are transferred into each other. Joel Kuortti has observed that,
since the novel calls London Babylon (from the Assyrian 'babilu'— The
Gate of God ) as well as Jahann um or hell, the names of Heaven and
Hell are intertw ined , confused, in the nam e 'Lon do n' (145).
Having suggested that cultures and places themselves are chiastic
forms, the novel view s religion as an obstacle for such transfer. Against the
thrust of Ru skin's claims for the nobility of the divine v ersus secularism
of the grotesque. The Satanic Verses is narrated by a secular, mischievous
voice that speaks in m any registers, as it hints, notoriously and repeatedly,
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44 Gaurav Majumdar
about the angelic and the monstrous, the narrato r warns , I'm saying
nothin g. Don't ask me to clear things up . . .the time for revelations is long
gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things u p , you make
them th us and so, and then yo u let them roll (408). Displaying an op -
posite aesthetics of creative control, the holy text of Islam is num erou sly
show n as a produ ct of repressive redaction. Despite the novel's several
remind ers that scenes describing the Q ur 'an 's p rocess of comp osition are
filtered through Gibree l's/Saladin's hallucinations, the narrator makes no
attem pts to repu diate the accuracy of these scenes. ̂The text tantalizingly
offers a fluctuating access to history and truth. Mahound armounces the
true recitafion, al-qur an, to Salman the Persian, M aho und 's am anuensis,
w ho deliberately m iswrites the words to test M aho und 's alertness and the
veracity of his words. Upon discovering the altered verses, M ahoun d pro-
nounces a death-sentence on Salman: Your blasphem y, Salman, can't be
forgiven. Did you th ink I wo uldn 't work it out? To set your w ords against
the Words of God (374). Mah ound declares the presence ofthe discordan t
satanic verses a dream (124). s Mahou nd erases the difference betw een
the metaphorical and the literal in a m om ent of violent wish-fulfillment,
the satanic verses are publicly torn out, the unruly objects cast out, and
the text dism em bered (124). In this lacuna te and m ultiply disfigured
condition, the Qur'an is itself a repressed form that is assumed to have
absorbed the damage visited upon it. The strategies for the announcement
of the true word of Go d are violence, politicking, misleading spectacle,
and rhetorical paradox. It is the sele ted dis ontinuities in the transmission
of the divine word that Rushdie critiques. The novel clearly sug gests that
the actions that make Chamcha struggle with the repressive grotesque
aspects of himself are echoed in the Q ur 'an 's produ ction.
Even as it exp lodes the certainties of religion a nd identity, the text
asserts its aesthetic resistance to the damage censorship does—^both to
those exercising it and those subjected to it. Such damage is implicit
when Rushdie shifts the narrative to the exiled imam, Ayatollah Kho-
meini, planning his coup in Iran from Paris. The narrator comments
on the imam as an exile and on the exile as a photograph—an identity
reduced to its pre-exilic
self
an image suspended in time and waiting
for a glorious return (205-206). His is, therefore, an existence based on
a two-dimensional aesthetics, with an obsessive and exclusive focus on
static images. However, we are told in a mordant detail that the imam
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The Jolt of the Gro tesque 45
enemy. His self-denial and morbid obsessions render him vulnerable to
the dynam ics that pro duce the repressed grotesque. Earlier in the novel,
Saladin Chamcha suffers from such repression w hen, deliriously yearning
for definitive Eng lishness, he drea m s of hav ing sex with an emblem
for this restricted identity, the Queen, whom he regards as a religious
m etaph or: the avatar of the State (169).
Ad herents to various kind s of mo nadism , the Queen, the Ayatollah,
Mahound, Gibreel, Chamcha, and the Qur'an itself stand as ideologi-
cal mirrors for each other in the novel. The monologism of orthodoxy
manufactures the repressed grotesque, deny ing it know ledge outside its
own instructions—the novel itself mentions the Ayatullah's pride in the
fact that he will remain ignorant, and therefore unsu llied, una ltered,
pure (207). Discussing post-lapsarian knowledge, the novel's narrator
describes the mom ent of the Biblical Fall: Of the fruit of the tree of the
know ledge of good and evil they sho uldst not eat, and ate. Woman first,
and at her suggestion man, acquired the verboten ethical standards,
tastily apple-flavoured: the serpent bro ugh t them a value system (332).
In other w ord s, the serpent activated the ir critical faculty. As The atanic
Verses dem onstrates in its depiction of the Q ur 'an 's m anufacture, ethical
stan dards and value system s are functions of subjective choices. Even as
it un ravels the certainties of religion an d identity, the text asserts its place
in a tradition of eclectic openn ess. In an analog to its interroga tion of reli-
gion, it subverts unq uestioning attitudes to even more radical discourse.
The mysticism of Ayesha is described by the unwaveringly Nietzschean
Mirza Saeed, in the very metaphors of contamination that meet foreign-
ers in the England of the novel's Gibreel/Saladin sections. Saeed calls
Ayesha's belief a germ this whore has infected the villagers w ith (238).
Again, infection becomes a prom inen t transforming m etap hor in the text,
but Ayesha's version of it is, by its privileging of a single goal, a denial
of syncretic possibility. Ayesha respo nds to Saeed's tirade, saying, God
chooses many means...by which the doubtful may be brought into his
certainty (240).
In
The
atanic
Verses
divine certainty and divine need for control
are thwarted by the fugitive identity of the devil. As already suggested
in Ru shdie 's quo tation from Sym pathy for the Devil, the nam e of the
devil is a problem atic, elusive thing. In is persona of the aveng ing angel,
Gibreel wants to exercise religion's pow er over identity. He seeks to nam e
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46 Gaurav Majumdar
How does this influence the city and the text, the spaces where the contest
between definition and indefinition is staged?
Welcome to Inconsistency
In his introduction to
ation and
Narration, Hom i Bhabha contends:
It is when the western nation comes to be seen...as one of the dark
corners of the earth, that we can begin to explore new places from
which to write histories of people and construct theories of narration.
Each time the question of cultural difference emerges as a challenge
to relativistic notions of the diversity of culture, it reveals the margins
of modernity. (6)
The reversal desired he re is reductive and peculiar (particularly in its ap -
paren t subscription
t
the need for a cultural marginalization of the west-
ern nation , and given that Bhabha himself has privileged the marginal
as a culture's laboratory for the new ), but Bhabha's statemen t depicts
the margins of the nation and the city as eccentrically recon stitutive and ,
therefore, grotesque, providing an insight into the representation of the
city in
The Satanic
Verses. Evoking Milton, Gibreel calls Londo n Pa nde -
m oniu m and, as he seeks his enemy w ithin its borders, he sees as alive
the city
itself
which in its corruption refused to subm it to the dominion
of the cartographers, changing shape at will and without warning...
Some days he wo uld turn a corner at the end of a grand colonnade bu ilt
of human flesh and covered in skin that bled when scratched, and find
himself in an uncharted wasteland, at whose distant rim he could see all
familiar bui lding s (352, 327). To Gibreel, the city, as the loca tion of im-
perialist history and as the space of migrant narratives, appears mobile,
cannibalistic (made of hu m an flesh ), and wounded.** The violence in
the image clarifies the mutual wounding of inhabitants in such a meta-
m orpho sing, contested space, which (as earlier conflation of textual and
hum an identities in the novel suggests) could be read as a metap hor for
the novel and for its characters themselves.
Gibreel's ow n grotesqu e suicide, and the novel's end ing, affirm the
threatening pow er of the repressive grotesque, even as the novel m ourn s
the shaping factors for such pow er.' Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has noted
that the violence in the last section of the novel is the absurd disconti-
nuity of the hyper-real
{Outside
in
the Teaching
Machine, 117 . However,
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The Jolt of the Gro tesque 47
irony the ethics of its resistance to Gibreel's violent messianism. (Recall
the na rra tor 's claim that, as an author, you set things up. ..a nd you let
them roll. ) For Mikhail Bakhtin, desp ite his awareness of
Üi
poten tial for
violence and the melancholic tensions
in
the camivalesque, the R abelaisian
conception of the grotesque presented not abstract thought abo ut the
future b ut the living sense that each ma n belongs to the imm ortal pe ople
who create history Rabelais
and
his World 367). In contrast, Rushdie's
novel argues that destruction works in crucial co-operation with recon-
stitution, adopting modes wider and less optimistic than those Bakhtin
locates in Rabelais, and ques tioning the very no tion of imm ortality.
Critchley argues that hum or recalls us to the m odesty and limitedness
of the human condition, a limitedness that calls not for tragic-heroic af-
firmation but comic acknowledgement not Promethean authenticity but
laughable inauthenticity (82). The Satanic Verses ackn owledges the latter,
but provides both affirmation and concession, thus the unreadability in
its inven tiveness. Critchley claims that all Freudian hum or— indeed,
all humor—is replete with the unh app y black
bile,
the melan-cholia (79,
Critchley 's italics). Tha t fact is under-considered in his argum ent: In The
Satanic
Verses,
the dissatisfaction and rage for heroic status in Gibreel and
Saladin produces melancholia that Rushdie's use of humor repeatedly
critiques, allowing its reader the room to sublimate their flaws with
frequent laughter. The text's own dissatisfaction and rage at injustice is
a more complex matter. Rather than produ cing som ething like a minor
sublimation, rage, melancholy, and hum or seem to coalesce in much of
the novel, giving it its tonal peculiarity.
The novel includes grotesque caricature and the larger violence of
the m ons trous, repressive grotesque, bu t it disallow s clear divisions
between the two. Perhaps its most overt irony occurs in the moment of
Chamcha's return to India, a moment in which Rushdie clearly appro-
priates the Joycean m odel of an eccentric narrative followed by an ironic
return. Various critics hav e read C ham cha 's decision to retu rn to the place
wh ere he belongs as a betrayal of the novel's cosmopolitan imp ulses.
More affirmatively, Rebecca W alkowitz reads the nove l's en din g as a
model of cosmopolitan affiliation that is critical of national paradigms
bu t nevertheless specific and co llective (144). W alkowitz indica tes that,
in the nove l's last parag raph , Zeeny, Saladin's lover, says to him, My
place.. .Let's get the hell out of he re and that Cha mcha 's assent to head
to Zee ny's apartm ent signals his choice of cultural and rom antic flirta-
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48 Gaurav Majumdar
phrase are 'I'm coming,' he answ ered
her
and turned
away from
the view
(547,
my
italics).
The vista from which C hamcha turn s aw ay is that of an
obvious metaphor for change— the nocturnal patterns of the Arabian
Sea — upon which he imagines a silver path w ay produ ced by the
moonlight and leading across the sea to miraculous land s (543,546). He
rejects the view, canceling his intimation of (or desire for) a possible life
elsewhere and choosing to get the hell out of
here.
But, in its dep iction
of various moments where the unwanted past irrupts into the present,
the nove l forecloses the casual rem oval of he ll from on e's life tha t the
pu n in Zeeny's com ment em beds. Yet again, Chamcha chooses to select
discontinuity, a decision the novel's final exchange doubly implies and
opens to doubt: the novel has insisted th at variou s kinds of hell (national,
international, and personal) as well as past and future relations, can't
merely be wished away: earlier, the narrator wryly notes that a history
is not so easily shaken o ff (535). The novel's use of the pu n in Ze eny 's
remark s a quick gesture to the protocols of reading ts aesthetics dem and s:
even at its curtain, it leavens melancholy with a humorous device and
solicits the questioning of its appa ren t story.
The critical mobility of The atanic Verses has already unpacked the
convenience of cyclicity, closure, and Chamcha's easy return to (or dis-
crete future in) India—earlier in the text, Cham cha himself thinks of the
impossibility of return (427). Cham cha 's failure to see discon tinuity as
unstable is made ironic by the transgressions of the text's use of serial,
grotesque montage. The ostensible incompatibility of its stories and its
narra tive m odes feeds its inconsistency. While very different from com-
plaints that might come from adhere nts to Ru skin's aesthetics, Spivak's
objection to the formal swerve in the novel's ending , and the com plaints
about Chamcha's return, are calls for consistency. It is possible to read
the object of the latter's disappointment in another way: the outbreak of
the hyp er-real in the novel's closing section is a critical gesture by the
text. Bleached of its innovative chromatics there, the text announces its
critique of Chamcha's return through an act of self-distancing from the
realist aesthetics of that section. While this seems a violation of formal
decorum (as it were, a violation of the conventions of the exp erim enta l
work itself), the novel suggests a disagreement w ith Chamcha, rather tha n
imposing upo n him a prescription for heroism or a condem nation of his
act. The text veils its ethical responsibility and su ggests its ethical prefer-
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The Jolt of the G rotesque 49
These transgressions question and dissolve previous views of the
grotesque: Ruskin's condemnation of the levity in the false grotesque,
Auerbach 's qualifications to the generic possibilities
of
th grotesque,
and
Bakhtin's limitations on the optimistic reading of the genre. The novel does
not seek a restitution of w holeness or certainty to its am biguo us claims;
as the possibilities in its stories p roliferate, the novel declines the discon-
tinuity that its end ing ostensibly offers. It gestures tow ard further expres-
sion. In doing so.
The Satanic Verses
is defiantly an expressive grotesqu e, a
celebration of strangers and strangeness, welcoming and estranging as it
asks to be reread and reconsidered. Its overt aesthetic brio— its welcom e
to excess, disruption , play,
flux,
and
metam orphosis— is inseparable from
its ethical generosity. Shape-shifting and unstable, it demands a reading
that is scrupulously willing to reconfigure itself, an ethics that m irrors its
endless emigration and immigrafion across feeling consistent with itself.
Whitman College
Notes
1.
For a discussion
of
the grotesque as sublime, see Frances
K.
Barash's The Grotesque:
Its
History as a Literary
Term.
Erich Auerbach comm ents on the ecclesiastical tradit ion of
grotesquerie
in
Mimesis (235-42).
2.
Walkowitz (131-33), Bhabha (The Location of Culture 167),
and
Baucom (3) read S isodia's
commentary differently.
3. During
a
lecture
at
Camb ridge Un iversity
in
1993, Rushdie himself indicated that
the
story of the 'satanic verses' can be found, am ong other places, in the canonical writings
of the classical writer al-Tabari {Step Across This Line 230).
4.
Borrowing a metaphor from Dickens
and
Conrad,
the
British novel
of
the late twentieth-
century performs several acts
of
metropolitan self-analysis, making frequent reference
to London as a traumatized/traumatizing grotesque. See the passages on the city's
substratum
of
mortality
in
Lemprière s Dictionary
by
Lawrence Norfolk (48-49);
on the
city
as an
alien plane t, ringed
by a
labyrinth
of
ascent ramps
and
feeder lanes,
in
J. G. Ballard's
Concrete Island
(148-49); on the city's voluntary amnesia in Zadie Sm ith's
White Teeth (420-25);
on
London's anodyne, num bing places
in Ian
M cEwan's Enduring
Love (54-55); and on various horrors of the city in most of Martin Amis's London
Fields
but especially pp .
448-51.
5. Non etheless (or, perhap s, because of this), the novel subverts Roger
Y.
Clark's assertion
that the concluding section of the novel is meaningless and without value, unless
we are aware that it affirms love and tolerance on a symbolic and mystical level[,]
despite
its
satanic na rrato r (180,181).
It
is through this insight that the novel can be-
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50 Gaurav Majumdar
Works Ci ted
A m i s ,
M ar t in . London Fields. N ew York: H arm on y Books , 1989.
Attr idge , Derek.
T he Singularity of Literature.
London: Rout ledge, 2004.
Auerbach, Erich.
Mimesis: The Representations of Reality in W estern Literature.
Trans. W illiam
Trask. New York: Do uble day A ncho r Books , 1957.
Bakht in , Mikhai l . Rabelais and His World Trans . Hélè ne Iswolsky. Bloom ington, IN: In diana
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