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 otherwise than by a kind of special, Satanic grace.
For the words "special grace" substitute, if you wish, the words "mad-
ness" or "hallucination," but the mystery will remain almost as dark.
- Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life
Amplifying a tendency in Salman Rushdie'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 mixture. The performance and diagnosis of such transfer in The Satanic
Verses combines the dynamics listed above with humor and irony. One of
the novel's recurring strategies is to combine discordant, supposedly het-
eronomous attributes, thereby blurring identities, geographical specificity,
and chronology, as well as breaking linguistic strictures, as its dissonant,
frivolous tones define moments of pathos, violence, and doubt. However,
its "inappropriateness" allows The Satanic Verses to produce sophisticated
acts of introspection and criticism. These incongruities give the text an
elusiveness that multiplies the challenges of reading it and of forming an
ethical response to its peculiarity. Even as it explores cultural and personal
combinations and collisions, it performs verbal combinations, mutations,
and collisions. That is to say, its very form evokes qualities and arguments
that resist the ironies and asymmetries of orthodox assumptions.
It is through such aesthetic strategies that it jolts its reader into ethical
questions, its moves resonating strongly with Derek Attridge's discussion
of the singular and the other in The Singularity of Literature. Attridge's em-
phasis is on singularity with relation. For him, the singularity of the other
is not premised on an inviolable or absolute distinction. For Attridge,
"Otherness...is produced in an active or event-like relationwe might
prefer to call it a relating" (29; italics Attridge's). A singularity cannot be
different or "other" in a voidit can only be "other than" something to
which it is placed in a comparative relation. The grotesque in The Satanic
Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 20009 31
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32 Gaurav Majumdar
Verses shows its very formation and transformation as the functions of
relafions. It is designated "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) power
brings. In its inventiveness. The Satanic Verses itself displays, and encour-
ages its reader to see, a range of relations that demonstrate its alterity or
originality. This alterity requires the reader's participafion to realize its
inventivenesswhether in recognizing a pun, a playful allusion, words
from another language, or various other verbal formations that invite
interpretive agility. As Attridge contends, "Absolute alterity, as long as
it remains absolute, cannot be apprehended 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 through its engagement with the
resources of the past. To write an original work involves the reworking
of available materials "by destabilizing them, heightening 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 workand its ethical demand on the readeris to make
its inventiveness explicit. Moreover, Attridge notes, the "uniqueness" to
which an ethical reading "must do justice is not an unchanging essence,
nor the sum of the work's difference from all other works as it appears
in a time and place, but the inventive otherness of the work" (Attridge,
91). Therefore, this ethical demand also seeks a response that traces the
work's play with its resources while recognizing its reconfiguration of
and differences fromthem.
Definitions of the Grotesque
The aesthetics of such an ethics is dependent on recognizing both the
need for thematization and the "otherness" or difficulty of the text. In The
Satanic Verses, the grotesque threatens familiar pleasure and demands a
renegotiation of aesthetic assumptions and practices that decide pleasure
or displeasure. What ethical procedures and gestures does a reading of
the grotesque involve? How might its strangeness operate as a kind of
critique? As forms of unfamiliarity, the grotesque (in particular instances)
and the inventive text itself might be expected to follow operations and
produce effects that resemble one another. What traits do they share?
Howor whenare these operations and effects different? How do they
demand an ethics that registers their difference? Through what procedures
might they disturb their own ostensible ethics, story, or actions? What are
the traits of the grotesque that render it frequently deemed unethical? Let
me include a necessarily brief overview of some prominent modern valu-
ations of the grotesque before I turn to a detailed discussion of its relation
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The Jolt of the Grotesque 33
to the ethical in Rushdie's novel. I will begin with a slightly larger reading
of John Ruskin's canonical view of the grotesque, in order to contrast it
with that of The Satanic Verses later.
In the concluding chapters of The Stones of Venice, Ruskin interrogates
the late sixteenth-century Venetian grotesque as an undesirable 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 monstrous sculpture, can sometimes
be hardly otherwise defined than as the perpetuation in stone of the
ribaldries of drunkenness. (236)
The Venetian grotesque is, therefore, offensive because it lacks sobriety,
and its semiosis is cor\fused, confusing, or suggestive of "drunkenness."
Ruskin's lack of humor, evident in his disgust with "insolent jest" and
"ribaldries," is increasingly apparent as he hierarchizes form, stressing
the importance of a distinction between the "noble" and "true" grotesque,
on the one hand, and the "monstrous" and "false" grotesque, on the other
(236-39). Even when the former displays humor and playfulness, it pres-
ents a "deep internal seriousness of disposition" (241). On the other hand,
the "false" grotesque displays "the spirit of mere levity" that renders it
"incapable of happy jesting, capable only of that which is bitter" (241).
This "low" Venetian grotesque is a consequence of a nation that "drank
with deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidden pleasure, and dug for
springs, hitherto unknown, in the dark places of the earth" (243).
The oppressions of surveillance (surrounding "forbidden pleasures"
as objects guarded in a system of exclusion and policing) and the fear of dif-
ference (of things "unknown, in the dark places") are crucial for Ruskin's
aesthetics. He asserts that such grotesque representation traces the moral
trajectory of the "falling Venetians[,]" which proceeds "from pride to
infidelity, and from infidelity to the unscrupulous pursuit of pleasure" (em-
phasis Ruskin's; 236). Thus, noting a departure from earlier figurations
of the grotesque as a sublime and an ecclesiastical form, his text suggests
a link between secularism and this version of the grotesque.' Ruskin's
use of "infidelity" and the adjective "falling" are significant. He notes
that, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, Venetian "churches were
first built to the glory of man, instead of the glory of God" (240). Venice,
adrift from religion, sincerity, devotion, and virtue, is then condemned
for its painting, which "appears in some degree frivolous or sensual"
and "delighting in...grotesque incident" (241-42). Offering a contrast to
these, Ruskin praises the "grotesques of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries" for exhibiting a "feeling consistent with itself, and capable of
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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 school" (244). Ruskin 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 Ruskin's rhetoric, the absence of familiarity, order, and
the reassuring display of "feeling consistent with itself," produces the
threat of the grotesque. The grotesque, in its partiality, makes its lack
overtunlike the "beautiful," its surface displays-rather than absorbing
or resorbingits 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 around such a strange form of
absence that Homi Bhabha structures his commentary on the stereotype
in "The Other Question." 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, must always be in excess of what can be empirically
proved or logically construed. (The Location of Culture, 66)
The stereotype depends, 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 adaptability and endurance 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 modes of its production. It avoids alertness
to resemblance in its lack of sympathy and its hyperbole, even as it stays
blind to differences within the same delusional dynamic. The grotesque
is the product of such parallax, literalized and given a body.
The grotesque, as a combinative form, radically expresses a problema-
tization of the inside and the outside. Migration, as an act proceeding from
within a defined space into anotheras a movement from the inside to the
outsidemanufactures the confiation of the familiar and the unfamiliar
that we find in the grotesque: it literally presents the play of the Freudian
heimlich and Unheimlich. When, as with the stereotype, the unfamiliar is
seen^but not recognizedas the estranged familiar, its strangeness (its
"excess") is read as dangerous, unstable, and threatening, transforming
it into the grotesque. It is, therefore, a function of a self-limiting vision,
consistent with Ruskin's paranoid criteria for the "noble" grotesque.
The unfamiliar displays a disorienting, uncontrollable, "monstrous" co-
operafion of difference and resemblance. It is in this sense of the unfamiliar
that the figure of the migrant is a form of the grotesque, and the grotesque
is an instance of the migrant form.
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The Jolt of the Grotesque 35
Disobeying Ruskin's proscriptions against "the spirit of mere levity,"
The Satanic Verses embraces "pitting levity against gravity" {The Stones of
Venice, 241; The Satanic Verses, 3). Rushdie employs a shuttling irony to dis-
place the boundaries of both gravity and humor (as we will see below); his
ironic critiques use humor as their chief mode. Exploring the critical role
played by the super-ego in the making of humor, Simon Critchley points
to a crucial argument in the later Freud' s essay on the topic: "In humor,
the super-ego looks at the ego from an inflated position, which makes the
ego itself look tiny and trivial. [I]n humor I find myself ridiculous and I
acknowledge this in laughter or simply in a smile. Humor is essentially
self-mocking ridicule" (79). This is the kind of humor Rushdie employs
when mocking the notion of authorship and its concomitant authority,
which I will discuss below.
Through its migrant forms, Rushdie' s novel pays heed to, and then
swerves away from, the hermeneutic conventions for the "satiric gro-
tesque" as a force of negation, as established by Heinrich Schneegans in
The History of Grotesque Satire, and complicated by Erich Auerbach in his
discussion of Rabelais in Mimesis. For Auerbach, the satiric grotesque, al-
though hyperbolic and ribald, performs an affirmative function: Auerbach
argues that Rabelais's style produces "a fruitful irony which confuses the
customary aspects and proportions of things [and] through the play of
possibilities, casts a dawning light on the possibility of freedom" (247).
However, he notes that, in the protocols of the Rabelaisian grotesque,
reality is subsumed by the "super-real," and that "the possibility of de-
veloping a realistic scene of everyday life.. ..is entirely incompatible" with
"grotesque farcicality [and] stands in deliberately absurd contrast" to it
{Mimesis, 247, 237). Rushdie manifestly violates the distinctions between
the identifiably real and the identifiably fantasticin other words, he
undoes the incompatibility perceived by Auerbach, and, like Freud, he
dismantles any clear distinction between the heimlich and the Unheimlich,
the familiar and the uncanny. Although Auerbach defends the Rabelaisian
grotesque as a form where "the seriousness lies in the joy of discovery
pregnant with all possibilities," he delimits the grotesque as a genre that
"in itself excludes deep feeling and high tragedy" in Pantagruel {Mimesis,
249,247). This limitation is what Rushdie challenges, as The Satanic Verses
transgresses the specificity of satire to ironically subvert its manifest and
implicit-but not specifictargets. Moreover, in the novel, the grotesque
combines and exceeds Ruskin' s categorizations of the "true" and the
"false" grotesque, as its various instances of the grotesque make humor
collaborate with protest and anger.
To understand the ethical charge of The Satanic Verses, we need to
differentiate between the two most prominent varieties of the grotesque
considered by literature-"expressive" and "repressive." The expressive
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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 sanctiona 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
beor isno 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-
sequently be reconstructed" (Imaginary Homelands, 111). The emphasis on
reconstitution in this remark explains the linking of reality, rebirth, and the
grotesque that is manifest at the beginning of The Satanic Verses. Following
the mid-air explosion of a plane on which they were passengers, Gibreel
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The Jolt of the Grotesque 37
Farishta and Saladin Chamcha hurtle toward a "watery reincarnation" of
the English Channel, while "hybrid cloud creatures," "gigantic fiowers
with human breasts," "winged cats" and various other grotesque creatures
appear 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 reading various critics of the novel have offered), the scene also
acknowledges invention as the function of new relations. Soon after this,
the obscure boundaries of life and death in the novel are re-engaged. The
obvious suspension of reality at the novel's beginning is augmented when
Gibreel spots the ghost of his former lover, Rekha Merchant, recently dead
after committing suicide. Gibreel admonishes her for her fatal act: "A sin.
A suchmuch thing" (7). The portmanteau, "suchmuch," makes Gibreel's
remark a bilingual formulation: read as English, the comment says that
Rekha's act of suicide is "similar to and excessive like" a sin. Read as Urdu
or Hindi, it declares that sin is "suchmuch," a single word that would, in
this case, roughly denote the colloquialism "for real," but means "truly"
or "really" in a more strict translation. The word "suchmuch" itself per-
forms the excess it conveys, as it fuses two (or three) languages, its "sin"
the transgression of the sanctions and norms of each. In its bilingualism,
its proper meaning is undecidable. Echoing Wittgenstein's "duck-rabbit"
puzzle verbally, it can only be read in a single language at a time, but,
whenever it is read in one language, it is only through a repression of the
presence of the other (or "the Other"). However, as Attridge notes, "The
experience of singularity involves an apprehension of otherness" (67, At-
tridge's italics). As another language combines with the text's primary
language to produce the language of the other, it produces a combinative,
elusive grotesque that no dictionary recognizes. The negotiation of reading
it requires a strenuous version of the barely-registered procedures that, as
Attridge notes, are involved in our reading of a letter of the alphabet: "an
event of recognition, usually coupled with an event of combination and
an event of comprehension" (63). When a text uses such strategies (and
especially when it does so frequently), it demands an ethical acknowledg-
ment of an interprefive deficit: particularly when a reader lacks familiarity
with a second language incorporated within recognizable formulations in
the text's "first" language, s/he has to admit the possibility of a vast slip-
page in his/her unpacking of formulations that the text's language might
encode. Put differently, such interpretation demands its readers' conces-
sion that their reading is, necessarily, incomplete and open to reshaping.
Unlike Joyce's use of multiple languages, Rushdie's is not as overtly
vertiginous. Of course. The Satanic Verses displays the infiuence of what
Kelly Anspaugh has called Joyce's "linguistic gigantism" (Literature and
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38 Gaurav Majumdar
the Grotesque, 137). However, Rushdie's novel employs Joycean moves to
make a more overtly political, formal gesture. In his homage 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 interruption 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 drunken "Whisky"
Sisodia stutters "The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss
history happened overseas, so they dodo don't know what it means" (343).
Sisodia's stutter contributes semiotic richness to his opinion, suggesting
that the ignorance of the English people arises 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 what's rah rah wrong with
the English" (343). A possible reading of Sisodia's jeremiad here: England
is a "Chamber of Horrors" since it is a place of failed revolutions (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 stammers become gro-
tesque additions to words that, in being synecdochicor "interrupted,"
to use Lefort's termpartially undo his speech impediment and become
an eccentric form of historiography which, in Attridge's words, "is not
pure: it is constitutively impure, always open to contamination, grafting,
accidents, reinterpretation, and recontextualization" (63).
Trauma and Transformation
The Satanic Verses recognizes both 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 advertis-
ing. Gibreel 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 irorc suggestion that the status of the divine
is pliable, an inconsistent concomitant of celebrity, and so itself a kind of
grotesquea matter of mistaken public perception (16). "Reincarnation
was always a big topic for Gibreel," Rushdie writes, and, as the narrator
reminds us, "Rebirth: that's God stuff, too" (11,17). Saladin Chamcha, in
his voice-over artist's role as "the Man of Thousand Voices and a Voice,"
is a figure of multiplicity and coherence, or, more precisely, a figure of
coherence gained through multiplicity, through its comfort with its own
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The Jolt of the Grotesque 39
differences and variety (60). However, once he steps out of that role and
resumes his chosen and carefully produced "English" persona, he refuses
to acknowledge that he chooses, and needs, repeated self-translations.
Later in the novel, he is distressed when 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
quotidian and the 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 "Goatman" (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 poignant
lapsusChamcha overlooks the fact that he has been "alienated" (made
grotesque, if you will) to the "maximum" by trying to stay rigidly defined.
Moreover, as Rebecca Walkowitz notes, "Playing the greatest of aliens,
Saladin becomes a 'maxim,' an abstract emblem of 'overseas'" (143).
Among Chamcha's various roles as "the Man of Thousand Voices
and a Voice," is that of the rabbit, Ridley, who "had an obsession with the
Hollywoood star Sigourney Weaver" (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 Martello Tower, a reference to Stephen Dedalus's residence
in Ulysses (148). In an allusion to Finnegans Wake, Chamcha's former
college-mate. Jumpy Joshi has named his traveling disco "Finn's Thumb
in honour' of the legendary sleeping giant of Ireland, Finn MacCool,
another sucker, as Chamcha used to say" (179). Likewise, in the closing
chapters of The Satanic Verses, Inspector Stephen Kinch (his surname an
acknowledgement of Buck Mulligan's nickname for Stephen Dedalus in
Ulysses) investigates the violence spreading across London (464). And, 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, Milton, Ovid, and Lucrefius), it includes
numerous references to the subversive power (and exuberance) of rock
music. Following the imprisonment of Chamcha the "Goatman," "[a]t
demonstrations and broadcasts protesting the Goatman's arrest, radios
blare out the Rolling Stones's 'Sympathy for the Devil,'" the lyrics for
which Rushdie gives an "impure," orthographically-fiexed form: "Please-
chu meechu...hopeyu guessma nayym" (286). Depicting another political
demonstration, the novel comments on a performance of Bob Dylan's "I
Pity the Poor Immigrant" and, later, it even references the theme song from
Chostbusters (415). His selection of Gibreel's profession allows Rushdie to
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40 Gaurav Majumdar
insert various in-jokes and allusions to the Bombay film industry. As its
intertextuality identifies some of the text's resources, it also underscores
its openness, its disturbance (if not subversion) of hierarchies of "high"
and "low" culture, its impurity, and its refusal of historical or cultural
insularity. These allusions, then, declineif not disqualifyany reading
of the novel's inventiveness as produced in hermetic conditions or in some
solitude conducive to genius. To register even a majority (rather than the
totality) of their vast scale, a reader requires a cosmopolitan interest driven
by an ethical openness to the world at large.
Chamcha's transformation into the Goatman is itself marked by
symptoms presented as metaphors invoking rock and roll, which is, of
course, overtly a syncretic, "impure" text: "[H]is body would emit alarm-
ing noises, the howlings of infernal wahwah pedals, the snare-drum
crackling of satanic bones" (285). The traumatized body, in its pain and
rage, is by definition a conflation of the inside and the outsidearticulat-
ing migration in its very form. While the Goatman's body expresses itself
as a combination of rock instruments, the flamboyant flexing of language
by rock and roll is in sharp contrast to another form of the grotesque in
the novel: Saladin Chamcha, in his "normal" form and his desperation for
inflectional stability. Chamcha is ironically referred to (and even describes
himself ) as "a creature of selected discontinuities" (427). Assuming that
the self can control its attributes, he models himself on, and strenuously
tries to preserve, clichs of British identity. In this curatorial role, Chamcha
seeks to exchange one form of authenticity for another. In so doing, he re-
doubles the double movement of the stereotype, and produces a grotesque
display of external signs of authenticity alongside the tension of the effort.
(His attempted return to India at the novel's closing replicates this effect.)
During their descent into England, Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta
experience what the novel calls "blast-delirium," each assuming the traits
and delusions of the other (5). This delirium grows into an identification
with the other, and into an intense hostility at moments of stress. As the
fugitive "Goatman," Chamcha takes sanctuary at the Club Hot Wax:
when he 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 was the Devil's mirror-self.
Who should the Devil blame but the Archangel, Gibreel?
The creature on the sleeping bags opened its eyes; smoke began to issue
from its pores. The face on every one of the waxwork dummies was
the same now, Gibreel's face.. .The creature bared its teeth and let out a
long, foul breath, and the waxworks dissolved into puddles and empty
clothes, all of them, every one. The creature lay back satisfied. (294)
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The Jolt of the Grotesque 41
As simulacra of angels, of the "Devil" (the "D" in the word appears
frequentiy capitalized, while the "g" in "god" remains 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,
Chamcha is vulnerable and threatening, at the same time. In a flamboy-
ant metaphor, Saladin's agonistic breath melts the nightclub's gallery of
waxworks. Slightly earlier in the novel, the figures in this gallery, various
"migrants 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, hallucinating that he is the Archangel
Gibreel, he threatens initially to "tropicalize" London to improve it and,
later, when he celebrates what he sees as the God-willed destruction of
the city (354, 461). While Farishta and 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 moments (when their positions as "expressive" and
"repressive" blur) enable the text to present a crucial figurative reminder
that blindness to history, rather than physiognomic strangeness, produces
the "monstrous."
Camera and Spectator: The Novel's Form
The text's own "physiognomic" 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,
but in its very syntax. As Gibreel's delirium intensifies into hallucinations,
he begins to see himself as the Archangel Gabriel (or "Gibreel"). The
novel's language reflects his confusion through ironic, "confused" forms.
Imagining that Mahound's uncle, Hamza, has ordered Mahound 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 monotheist and henotheist 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; italics Rushdie's). The
deflation of religious rhetoric and solemnity through the vulgar and the
comic renders Gibreel's language itself grotesque. The text's mechanisms
for the procedure rely on a subversion that would be impossible without
the trajectory from the resonant confidence of Hamza's injunction to the
colloquial, nervous second half of Gibreel's response. The convergence
of at least two contrasting historical moments (Gibreel's present and his
imagined past) and two contrasting narrative modes points to the reso-
nance of each in the other, but not of each as the otheror not entirely.
Substance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009
42 Gaurav Majumdar
As Gibreel sits at Mount Gone, awaiting the word of God on Ma-
hound's question, his point of view is "somedmes that of the camera
and at other moments, spectator. When he's a camera the pee oh vee is
always on the move[,] so he's fioafing up on a high crane looking down
at the foreshortened figure of the actors, or he's swooping down to stand
invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a three-
hundred-sixty-degree pan..." (108). This Gibreel, present at the moment
of the birth of Islam, is also the Indian film star, Gibreel Farishta, who, at
the same time, imagines a new scene for a film as he awaits divine word.
The novel makes clear that Gibreel's religious hallucinafions are not merely
hallucinafionsthey are experiences persuasive enough to be facts. Gi-
breel's dual status as camera and spectator ensures that his perspective is
vertiginous and vivid, permitting no ascetic vantage points from which
to view the scene and its contemporary, cinematic vocabulary as histori-
cally discreet. [In the novel's final third, the narrator describes Gibreel's
thoughts: "The doctors had been wrong, he now perceived, to treat him
for schizophrenia" (351).] Perspectives migrate further as the narrator
describes "Chamcha, seeing what's in Gibreel's eye" (467). Chamcha's and
Gibreel's serial perspectives feed the ensuing confusion and violence in
the text, even as they indicate the novel's formal expansiveness. The series
further complicates the three most prominent story-lines in The Satanic
Verses: everits describing the beginnings of Islam; a pilgrimage by way of
the Indian Ocean led by the mystic, Ayesha; and the migration and hallu-
cinatory violence experienced by Chamcha and Farishta. These narratives
echo, intersect, and amplify each other, producing a visual, auditory, and
lexical montage in Rushdie's novel that challenges interpretation.
The Satanic Verses imbricates narratives not merely by the juxtaposi-
tion of images, the play of auditory and visual tones, or the manipulation
of their duration. While it does deploy these more frequentiy-used forms
of montage, its narrative also relates selves and spaces by suggestingor
declaringthe irruption of overtly different stories within other stories
and other places. Reprising the dynamics of Joyce's character-clusters
and sigla in Finnegans Wake, the repetition of names activates narrative
series in Rushdie's book: the multiple relocations of the name "Gibreel"
to different historical moments and places are manifest examples of this
strategy. As theatres for such relocation, exchange, and their attendant
traumas, cities play a crucial part in the staging of relations in the novel.
Jahilia, London, and Bombayeach works as a metonym forand an in-
version of-the other, with characters, events, and even art from one city
re-appearing in the others. On the last night of the festival of Ibrahim, the
debauched inhabitants of Jahilia (in Urdu, the city's name would indicate
an infernal place, a place of darkness, or a place of ignorance) are seen
Substance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009
The Jolt of the Grotesque 43
in epic scope: "in the guise of eagles, jackals, horses, gryphons, salaman-
ders, warthogs, rocs; welling up from the murk of the alleys have come
two-headed amphisbaenae.. .Djinns, houris, demons populate the city on
this night of phantasmagoria 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, members of that sixteenth-century
sequence depicting scenes from the life of a hero who may or may not
have been [Hamza,] Muhammad's uncle" (69-70). Echoing the prolepsis
in the images of Gibreel earlier in the text, the "Mahound" section of the
novel introduces the "real" Hamza 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 landscapes.
The book simultaneously suggests that events (especially those in Jahilia)
do, and do not, occur. This simultaneity adds to its indeterminacy; its un-
decidability amplifies, even as its stories do.
In the latter half of the novel, the art historian and biographer Otto
Cone, a Polish migrant who has proclaimed himself an Englishman, de-
scribes the modern city as "the locus classicus of incompatible realities"
(314). Such incompatibilities are manifest in the book's oscillations to and
from Bombay, London, and Jahilia. As Eeroza Jussawalla has noted, "the
very hybridity that Rushdie manifests results from his being not only a
'post-British' coloral but also a 'post-Mughal' colonial" (79). To rearrange
that argument for somewhat different purposes (and to distance my read-
ing from any subscription to the critical value of authorial biography), I
would argue that the novel'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 makes clear, these cityscapes
themselves 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 "Jahannum" or "hell," "the names of Heaven and
Hell are intertwined, confused, in the name 'London'" (145).
Having suggested that cultures and places themselves are chiastic
forms, the novel views religion as an obstacle for such transfer. Against the
thrust of Ruskin's claims for the nobility of the divine versus secularism
of the grotesque. The Satanic Verses is narrated by a secular, mischievous
voice that speaks in many registers, as it hints, notoriously and repeatedly,
at its own grotesque fusion of diabolical and d'ivine powers: "Who am
I?" it asks. And then responds: "Let's put it this way: who has the best
tunes?" (10). This moment of apparently sly authorial self-congratulation
is undercut later by an ironic, but candid, suggestion of an absence of au-
thorial control. After ventriloquizing a sequence of Chamcha's questions
Substance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009
44 Gaurav Majumdar
about the angelic and the monstrous, the narrator warns, "I'm saying
nothing. 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 up, you make
them thus and so, and then you let them roll" (408). Displaying an op-
posite aesthetics of creative control, the holy text of Islam is numerously
shown as a product of repressive redaction. Despite the novel's several
reminders that scenes describing the Qur'an's process of composition are
filtered through Gibreel's/Saladin's hallucinations, the narrator makes no
attempts to repudiate 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, Mahound's amanuensis,
who deliberately miswrites the words to test Mahound's alertness and the
veracity of his words. Upon discovering the altered verses, Mahound pro-
nounces a death-sentence on Salman: "Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be
forgiven. Did you think I wouldn't work it out? To set your words against
the Words of God" (374). Mahound declares the presence ofthe discordant
"satanic" verses a dream (124). As Mahound erases the difference between
the metaphorical and the literal in a moment of violent wish-fulfillment,
the satanic verses are publicly torn out, the unruly objects cast out, and
the text "dismembered" (124). In this lacunate and multiply 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 God" are violence, politicking, misleading spectacle,
and rhetorical paradox. It is the selected discontinuities in the transmission
of the divine word that Rushdie critiques. The novel clearly suggests that
the actions that make Chamcha struggle with the repressive grotesque
aspects of himself are echoed in the Qur'an's production.
Even as it explodes the certainties of religion and 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 photographan 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
is "the enemy of images" (206). Apart from some postcards displaying
Iranian landscapes and a portrait of the Iranian empress (kept to sharpen
his hatred for her), the imam bans images from his home, in obedience
to Islamic strictures that forbid icons. Connecting these thoughts, then,
the imam, as exiled photograph and as enemy of the image, is his own
Substance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009
The Jolt of the Grotesque 45
enemy. His self-denial and morbid obsessions render him vulnerable to
the dynamics that produce the repressed grotesque. Earlier in the novel,
Saladin Chamcha suffers from such repression when, deliriously yearning
for definitive "Englishness," he dreams of having sex with an emblem
for this restricted identity, the Queen, whom he regards as a religious
metaphor: "the avatar of the State" (169).
Adherents to various kinds of monadism, 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, denying it knowledge outside its
own instructionsthe novel itself mentions the Ayatullah's pride in the
fact that he will remain "ignorant, and therefore unsullied, unaltered,
pure" (207). Discussing post-lapsarian knowledge, the novel's narrator
describes the moment of the Biblical Fall: "Of the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil they shouldst not eat, and ate. Woman first,
and at her suggestion man, acquired the verboten ethical standards,
tastily apple-flavoured: the serpent brought them a value system" (332).
In other words, the serpent activated their critical faculty. As The Satanic
Verses demonstrates in its depiction of the Qur'an's manufacture, ethical
standards and value systems are functions of subjective choices. Even as
it unravels the certainties of religion and identity, the text asserts its place
in a tradition of eclectic openness. In an analog to its interrogation of reli-
gion, it subverts unquestioning 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 with" (238).
Again, infection becomes a prominent transforming metaphor in the text,
but Ayesha's version of it is, by its privileging of a single goal, a denial
of syncretic possibility. Ayesha responds to Saeed's tirade, saying, "God
chooses many means...by which the doubtful may be brought into his
certainty" (240).
In The Satanic Verses, divine certainty and divine need for control
are thwarted by the fugitive identity of the devil. As already suggested
in Rushdie's quotation from "Sympathy for the Devil," the name of the
devil is a problematic, elusive thing. In his persona of the avenging angel,
Gibreel wants to exercise religion's power over identity. He seeks to name
(and thereby to identify and control) the devil, but the name remains "on
the tip of Gibreel's tongue^just as the face of the adversary, horned and
malevolent, was still somewhat out of focus" (327). The subversive gro-
tesque thwarts the stabilizing force of religion through its lack of definition.
It is generalized as "monstrous" precisely because it is not identifiable.
Substance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009
46 Gaurav Majumdar
How does this influence the city and the text, the spaces where the contest
between definition and indefinition is staged?
A Welcome to Inconsistency
In his introduction to Nation and Narration, Homi 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 here is reductive and peculiar (particularly in its ap-
parent subscription to 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 statement depicts
the margins of the nation and the city as eccentrically reconstitutive and,
therefore, grotesque, providing an insight into the representation of the
city in The Satanic Verses. Evoking Milton, Gibreel calls London "Pande-
monium" and, as he seeks his enemy within its borders, he sees as alive
the city itself, which "in its corruption refused to submit to the dominion
of the cartographers, changing shape at will and without warning...
Some days he would turn a corner at the end of a grand colonnade built
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 buildings" (352, 327). To Gibreel, the city, as the location of im-
perialist history and as the space of migrant narratives, appears mobile,
cannibalistic (made of "human flesh"), and wounded.** The violence in
the image clarifies the mutual wounding of inhabitants in such a meta-
morphosing, contested space, which (as earlier conflation of textual and
human identities in the novel suggests) could be read as a metaphor for
the novel and for its characters themselves.
Gibreel's own grotesque suicide, and the novel's ending, affirm the
threatening power of the repressive grotesque, even as the novel mourns
the shaping factors for such power.' 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,
the violent discontinuity in the deaths of Farishta and his lover. Alleluia
Cone, enlarges and comments on the eccentric logic of the grotesque in
the book. Rushdie's version of magic realism literalizes metaphors ironi-
cally; its grotesquerie accounts for the ironieshumorous and tragicin
violence. It does not permit its reader simple judgments, as it conceals in
Substance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009
The Jolt of the Grotesque 47
irony the ethics of its resistance to Gibreel's violent messianism. (Recall
the narrator's claim that, as an author, "you set things up...and you let
them roll.") For Mikhail Bakhtin, despite his awareness of ie potential for
violence and the melancholic tensions in the camivalesque, the Rabelaisian
conception of the grotesque presented "not abstract thought about the
future but the living sense that each man belongs to the immortal people
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 questioning the very notion of "immortality."
Critchley argues that "humor recalls us to the modesty 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 acknowledges the latter,
but provides both affirmation and concession, thus the unreadability in
its inventiveness. Critchley claims that "all Freudian humorindeed,
all humoris replete with the unhappy black bile, the melan-cholia" (79,
Critchley's italics). That fact is under-considered in his argument: 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 producing something like a "minor
sublimation," rage, melancholy, and humor seem to coalesce in much of
the novel, giving it its tonal peculiarity.
The novel includes grotesque caricature and the larger violence of
the "monstrous," repressive grotesque, but it disallows 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 model of an eccentric narrative followed by an ironic
return. Various critics have read Chamcha's decision to return to the place
where he "belongs" as a betrayal of the novel's cosmopolitan impulses.
More affirmatively, Rebecca Walkowitz reads the novel's ending as "a
model of cosmopolitan affiliation that is critical of national paradigms
but nevertheless specific and collective" (144). Walkowitz indicates that,
in the novel's last paragraph, Zeeny, Saladin's lover, says to him, "My
place.. .Let's get the hell out of here" and that Chamcha's assent to head
to Zeeny's apartment signals his choice of "cultural and romantic flirta-
tion," of intimacy and personal space over national belonging (Walkowitz,
143-44). However, Walkowitz neglects the novel's disagreement with
Chamcha's implicit assumption that he has severed ties with his past.
The words that follow Chamcha's assent to Zeeny, the novel's closing
Substance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009
48 Gaurav Majumdar
phrase are "'I'm coming,' he answered her, and turned away from the view"
(547, my italics). The vista from which Chamcha turns away is that of an
obvious metaphor for change"the nocturnal patterns of the Arabian
Sea"upon which he imagines "a silver pathway" produced by the
moonlight and leading across the sea to "miraculous lands" (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 depiction
of various moments where the unwanted past irrupts into the present,
the novel forecloses the casual removal of "hell" from one's life that the
pun in Zeeny's comment embeds. Yet again, Chamcha chooses to select
discontinuity, a decision the novel's final exchange doubly implies and
opens to doubt: the novel has insisted that various 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 off (535). The novel's use of the pun in Zeeny's
remark is a quick gesture to the protocols of reading its aesthetics demands:
even at its curtain, it leavens melancholy with a humorous device and
solicits the questioning of its apparent story.
The critical mobility of The Satanic Verses has already unpacked the
convenience of cyclicity, closure, and Chamcha's easy return to (or dis-
crete future in) Indiaearlier in the text, Chamcha himself thinks of the
"impossibility of return" (427). Chamcha's failure to see discontinuity 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
narrative modes feeds its inconsistency. While very different from com-
plaints that might come from adherents to Ruskin's aesthetics, Spivak's
objection to the formal swerve in the novel's ending, and the complaints
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 "hyper-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 "experimental"
work itself), the novel suggests a disagreement with Chamcha, rather than
imposing upon him a prescription for heroism or a condemnation of his
act. The text veils its ethical responsibility and suggests its ethical prefer-
ences through its aesthetic inconsistency. This subtle ethical modesty or
generosity requires attentive reading, and shocks, or pleasantly surprises,
its interpreter. In other words, thwarting expectations of aesthetic consis-
tency, the novel sustains its jolts in its turns to realism when describing
Chamcha's return to India, and its inconsistency conceals an ethics.
Substance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009
The Jolt of the Grotesque 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 the grotesque, and
Bakhtin's limitations on the optimistic reading of the genre. The novel does
not seek a restitution of wholeness or certainty to its ambiguous claims;
as the possibilities in its stories proliferate, the novel declines the discon-
tinuity that its ending ostensibly offers. It gestures toward further expres-
sion. In doing so. The Satanic Verses is defiantly an expressive grotesque, a
celebration of strangers and strangeness, welcoming and estranging as it
asks to be reread and reconsidered. Its overt aesthetic brioits welcome
to excess, disruption, play, flux, and metamorphosisis inseparable from
its ethical generosity. Shape-shifting and unstable, it demands a reading
that is scrupulously willing to reconfigure itself, an ethics that mirrors 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 comments on the ecclesiastical tradition of
grotesquerie in Mimesis (235-42).
2. Walkowitz (131-33), Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 167), and Baucom (3) read Sisodia's
commentary differently.
3. During a lecture at Cambridge University in 1993, Rushdie himself indicated that "the
story of the 'satanic verses' can be found, among 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 Lemprire's Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk (48-49); on the
city as an "alien planet," 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 Smith's
White Teeth (420-25); on London's anodyne, numbing places in Ian McEwan'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. Nonetheless (or, perhaps, 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 narrator" (180,181). It is through this insight that "the novel can be-
come everything the satanic narrator does not mean it to be" (181). Clark's commentary
presumes that intention is locatable in a narrative drenched with irony. The narrator,
who simulates the diabolical through his ironic idiom, also (presumably) describes the
sympathetic scenes describing the last days of Saladin's father, Ghangez Chamchawala.
Substance #120, Vol. 38, no. 3, 2009
50 Gaurav Majumdar
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