’Precious Gift/Piece of Shit’: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Revenge of History

Abstract

Salman Rushdie’s work has been formed by his obsession with history and the way its elusive quality constantly betrays those certainties we die to believe. Taking as his target the slippery nature of ontological histories: nationalist, ethnic, regional and religious, his novels show us that these histories have proved less than stalwart; betraying his characters, forcing them to recognize that all that seems solid is in fact air, entrapping them in their claims to truth, permanency and belonging, he delivers them only when they accept their rootlessness as the true human condition. Curious then, that this prophet of transformation and rebirth has himself been witness to the irrevocability of history and the claims of religion and national myths. Curiouser still, he has since found his latest incarnation as a celebrity writer in the country where the erasure of history, of immigrants and others, is a rite of passage. Now he finds himself as a polemicist without an object to hate. Paradoxically, it is since moving to the United States that his novels, both rooted in and rooting against history, have found nothing to attack, and so have been solipsistically about himself, trapped airily without the anchor of history. This cosmopolitan writer, in a fascinating return of the repressed, finds himself without the form of history to sustain his scorn.