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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



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



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



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



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



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-



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-



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



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-



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?



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



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.



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,



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




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



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,




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-



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-



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-



50 Gaurav Majumdar

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the jolt of the grotesque.pdf