University:
University of Michigan
Course:
ENGLISH 473 | Topics in American Literature
Academic year:

2024
Views:

394

Pages:

30
Author:

Walker G

20 Chapter Two: The Ascendance of Doubt Authors in The Satanic Verses demonstrate a tendency to play with the authority of their own texts, suggesting another function of the satanic redefined in secular terms-the planting of doubt, which translates into both uncertain authority and the creation of fiction. According to Sawhney, the novel toys with the issues of authority and the Devil's identity in order to make a larger claim. Referencing the novel's epigraph, which refers to Daniel Defoe's vagabond Satan, Sawhney finds within The Satanic Verses an argument about the nature of literature itself, claiming the novel suggests: that perhaps all verses could be satanic and that literature itself is migrant, not only because it wanders wantonly from reader to reader, but also because it does not derive authority from its source or origin, as for instance Mahound's words claim to do. (269) However, Sawhney argues that, within the text, literature seeks to shed its migrant state, aspiring to the status of authorized revelation represented by Mahound while undermining the authority of revelation itself. She writes: "The hidden desire of literature is to be the law itself, even as its work is to transgress the law" (272). I would like to put forth a slightly altered version of Sawhney's argument, approaching literature's lack of a source for its authority as a strength of the satanic rather than a weakness. This chapter addresses the authors within The Satanic Verses who create doubt while consciously and intentionally rejecting their own claims to authorship. Their verses are not satanic as a result of their migrant status, but rather because of the intents of their authors, who play with the status of their own authority as a means of creating doubt for their audiences. Various authors in The Satanic Verses willingly or inadvertently take on roles corresponding to the Devil's role as deceiver and planter of doubt. In response to criticisms of The Satanic Verses that identify these doubting authors as blasphemous voices issuing forth from the novel, Rushdie writes, "how could a book portray doubt without allowing the uncertain to articulate their uncertainties?" (IH 401). The authors defined by their undermining creation of doubt reflect the mode of the novel as a whole. The status of anti-establishment pride and rebellion requires an authority to rebel against. Instead of this oppositional stance, the novel puts forth doubt as a preferable alternative, both for its characters and its own operating premise. The establishment of doubt as a valid stance takes form in the novel in part through the activities of its author characters. In the traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Devil starts off his career as a rebel. After his initial act of defiance, he then becomes for Islam and Christianity a liar and deceiver bent on confusing and misleading humans. This is his enduring role, and it is the one adopted by the most tangibly successful authors within The Satanic Verses: Salman the Persian in his permanent corruption of Mahound's recorded recitations and the re-humanized Saladin Chamcha in his destruction of Gibreel Farishta through the power of his devious verses. Salman the Persian as Textual Corrupter Within the dream narratives of The Satanic Verses, both Baal and Salman the Persian mirror the revelatory activities of Mahound. However, in their versions of revelation, both author figures steal authorship from God, claiming their verses as their own while at the same time questioning the validity of Mahound's. In their treatments of revelation, authority becomes a debatable issue. While Baal attacks Mahound through rebellious subversion, Salman the The novel's structure, itself an aspect of narration, complicates the functioning of the novel's characters and events even further, creating doubt through the uncertainty of second- and third-hand transmission. The novel's many embedded narrative levels create multiple filters for the events and characters that must pass through various unreliable perspectives before they are transmitted to the reader. Although, according to theories of narrative, everything in the text is subject to this narrative corruption, the dream figments Baal and Salman the Persian in particular function as apt examples of this phenomenon. They are dreamt by an unreliable, disturbed, and possibly insane character, whose dreams are in turn narrated by the novel's unreliable narrator. Finally, we arrive at the author underlying them all. Salman Rushdie, who thwarts literary theories that reject the presence of the author by continually planting playful self-references within his novel. By planting characters bearing his name, appearance and occupation in the text, Rushdie seems to say that the author may be dead, but he lives on in Hell, having one Devil of a time. This play with authority on the author's part suggests a redefinition of the satanic as an artistic tool aiding in the creation of literature. The Narrator's Play with the Satanic The narrator in The Satanic Verses broadcasts his unreliability, making even his own identity uncertain in his play with narrative authority. He operates as what Mieke Bal describes as a "character-bound narrator," a narrator who becomes a part of the text by making self- referential comments in addition to telling of other characters' (Bal 22). The narrator sets the stage for his uncertain yet implied identity as the Devil early in the novel, asking two questions which direct the play of his uncertain persona: "Who am I? / Who else is there?" (SV4). Hints 1 Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 22. Hereafter cited in the text. of possible answers to this question are interspersed through the text. The narrator refers to himself as "Higher Powers" (SV 137), identifies himself as the force causing Saladin's misery (SV 265), and finally claims to be the figure who appears to Gibreel and issues a divine command, informing the reader, "I sat on Alleluia Cone's bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel. Ooparvala or Neechayvala, he wanted to know, and I didn't enlighten him" (SV 423). This last example explicitly names two possible identities for the narrator: Ooparvala, "the Fellow upstairs," or Neechayvala, "the Guy from Underneath" (SV 329). Several other narrative comments tip the scales of doubt in favor of the latter identification. The narrator directly follows the statement "I know; devil talk. Shaitan interrupting Gibreel" with a one-word paragraph: "Me?" (SV 95). One page later, he begins a sentence with the phrase "I, in my wickedness" (SV 96). If this justifies naming the Devil as the narrator of The Satanic Verses, the Devil then becomes an author himself whose behavior functions as an example for the use of satanic characteristics by other authors in the text. In this interpretation, the narrator sets the guidelines for what constitutes the satanic aspect of authorship within the novel. Regardless of whether or not these teasing comments definitively identify the narrator with the Devil, the frequent, transparently misleading commentaries of the narrator make the distinction of his identity ultimately inconsequential. His style of narration still adheres to the behavior of other authors in the text that the text explicitly or implicitly associates with the satanic. He is a playfully deceptive narrator-one of the picaresque trickster figures Frederick Luis Aldama identifies as a common feature of writers like Rushdie. The narrator's voice causes the novel to operate as a self-aware text, pointing out the power of a narrator to distort events with his inherently subjective and unreliable point of view, The narrator's references to the "wickedness" of his nature make plain the possibility of ulterior motives. This activity on the part of the narrator corresponds to a tendency of Rushdie's writing that Brennan identifies in Rushdie's earlier novel Midnight's Children (1980): Rushdie deliberately prevents his readers from being caught up in a story with its own 'organic' life, that progresses uninterrupted, and that creates a completely imagined world. We are instead always shown 'the hands holding the strings (MC p.72), are having metaphors cut short by on-the-spot examination [....] (Brennan 85) These metafictional interjections are also present in The Satanic Verses to some extent, with the narrator mimicking the tendency of Saleem Sinai in Midnight's Children to show us his hands as he operates the strings of his narrative. However, while Saleem's awareness of his unreliability acknowledges the subjectivity of personal memories, the narrator in The Satanic Verses flaunts the fallibility of his narrative as proof of his power as a narrator. The location of this particular author figure at the highest level of narrative within the text privileges his words over those of the authors nested within lower, interior levels, granting him a certain degree of authority over them since he is able to comment on and edit their assertions and activities. By making this plain to his audience, the narrator reminds us that the text we read is influenced by his diabolical intentions. In The Satanic Verses, reading becomes a process of uncertainty in which we cannot know exactly what role the influence of a devious narrator has had on the fictions we read.

Redefining the Satanic in The Satanic Verses-2

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