Migrancy and Metamorphosis in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

Abstract

There is no novel more irreverent than Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988). The fatwa pronouncing death on Rushdie for his alleged apostasy towards Islam, from which the Iranian government has distanced itself, but which is also periodically “renewed” by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, confirms the incendiary, religious sense in which this novel is irreverent. But as my discussion of Jorge Luis Borges makes clear, there are other senses in which irreverence is a useful term for describing certain kinds of postcolonial writing. Borges claims in “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” that the Argentine writer has a greater claim to the ideas, traditions and texts of Europe than does the European. Eclectic, idealist, sceptical, and parodic, his writing bulldozes binaries of all kinds, inverts established hierarchies, plays games with time and infinity, seeks out those “tenuous crevices of unreason” that fissure the rational-empirical world view. Irreverence in the Borgesian sense is a ludic, critical attitude favoured by intellectuals and writers marginalised by reasons of geography, race, or culture, yet who are still able to avail themselves of the cultural resources of the centre. Rushdie is just such a writer, and his magical realism exemplifies the irreverent strand of the mode.