5 - The Satanic Verses

Summary

The Satanic Verses is a novel bristling with difficulty. This is due not so much to the cloud of controversy that has settled over it, as to the complexity of the novel itself, which makes the most disinterested reading a challenge. This complexity is no mere provocative, postmodernist ‘top dressing’ but arises from the nature and intensity of the metaphysical speculation that lies at the heart of the work. There is a dense, nuclear fusion of ideas, grouped around the nature of modern identity, personal and national/ethnic; the relationship between our instinct for good and evil; the implications of this for our understanding of human disposition and potentialities; the nature of the ‘reality’ within which we are required to live out our lives. These ideas are galvanized by what may even be described as a dangerous experiment with the limits of imagination, which involves testing to destruction the coherences we ordinarily rely upon, via discontinuity, dream, fantasy, and psychosis; and exploring – by living through it – the nature and authority of ‘inspiration’, including religious revelation. But let us remember, as Rushdie himself and some of his more perceptive critics have reminded us, that despite the seriousness of these preoccupations, we are dealing with a novel – even, a comic novel – which, while it engages with other ideological discourses, does so (or at least attempts to do so) on its own terms. Rushdie presented his own formal defence in the essay ‘In Good Faith’ (1990: IH 393–414), and the position outlined here has been supported by many other novelists and critics.

One of the difficulties has to do with the extreme formal complexity generated by Rushdie's fictional scheme. As he conceded in a newspaper interview that coincided with the publication of the novel in September 1988:

The Satanic Verses is very big. There are certain kinds of architecture that are dispensed with. Midnight's Children had history as a scaffolding on which to hang the book; this one doesn't. And since it's so much about transformation I wanted to write it in such a way that the book itself was metamorphosing all the time. Obviously the danger is that the book falls apart.