A Parting Shot

http://kafila.org/2012/01/18/satanic-versus-moronic-how-salman-rushdie-lost-the-up-election/

long and fun. funtoosh.

Homing Instincts

We're in the "home-stretch" now, too, I guess, or coming full circle, or merely arriving at our final class meeting (which is not in fact an end, I hope, being the intellectual migrants that we all are). It seems appropriate that we began our time together with Grace Nichols's declaration that "wherever I hang me knickers that's me home" and end with Okwe's emotional message to his daughter "I'm coming home." This class has been quite centrally concerned with the poetics of home, on so many levels (the family as nation, the national motherland, the alternative spaces and sanctuaries, the rhetoric of pedestrianism, the writer who is forced to move from one temporary home to the next to evade a fatwa, the exiles and migrants who know home as much as an idea as a geographical place, etc.). In contemplating the converging discourses of "the home" and "the nation" in Dirty Pretty Things (what ideas of the nation require these ghosted non-citizens to seek homes on rented couches and in the subterranean shelter of a crematorium?), we might think more generally about the implications of our spatial imaginaries and our terminology. In our own country and our own cultural moment, what kind of work is being accomplished with a designation like "homeland security"? What kind of logic of belonging and exclusion was installed with the word "homeland" in this case? One senses how importantly our inquiry this semester branches out to our own modest migrant sensibilities, to our own understanding of ourselves as citizens of a national space.

I think our post-film discussion gave us some very useful leads to pursue, especially in that apparent tension between romanticized sub-communities and more responsible, nuanced gradations of migrancy and homelessness (something that Elizabeth brought up with her observations, I believe). The film's poignant rendering of the latter seems to me to be an important contribution to our inquiry this semester, even as it may in some respects cross over into the former. Here is James Clifford, from that important 1994 essay "Diasporas" (I hope you had a chance to look at the first 10-12 pages or so): "How do diaspora discourses represent experiences of displacement, of constructing homes away from home? What experiences do they reject, replace, or marginalize? ... What is the range of experiences covered by the term [diaspora]? Where does it begin to lose definition"? (302, 306). Caren Kaplan, in an essay that also would have been relevant in these final weeks, cautions us against homogenizing the terms and understandings of displacement and travel, fearing that we'll end up "masking the economic and social differences between kinds of displacement in a homogenized 'cosmopolitanism' and generalizing nostalgia through a celebration of the condition of exile" (102). Rushdie's fiction and his personal example have created a wonderfully rich and complicated test case for these questions and ideas (recall the questions we raised, for example, when we discussed Chamcha fleeing burning Brickhall for India).

(ibid. Between that last paragraph and this one I left to spend thirty minutes on the elliptical machine downstairs, and, listening to Iron Maiden on my iPod (ah, the things I admit to! Yes, lest you think from this class that I only listen to Ravi Shankar, Judy Garland, Nitin Sawhney, and Andrew Bird, now you know about this guilty pleasure left over from my heavy metal days of youth!), I just happened to hear the songs "Coming Home" and "Running Free" (the latter with such elevated lyrics as "I've got no place to call my own / Hit the gas, and here I go"). So our course, Rushdie, Okwe, Dorothy & Toto, et al., pursue me even when I'm working out. And that makes me think of other rock and roll links, such as Rushdie's friends U2, whose song "Walk On" offers this: "Home, hard to know what it is / If you never had one / Home, I can't say where it is / But I know I'm going / Home, that's where the heart is.")

Anyway, where was I?! Do you have any other thoughts about/reactions to the film?? The connections with our readings and contexts are legion, aren't they? These "nobodies" circulating furtively and invisibly in a remapped London (another palimpsest? remember the Under World beneath the Over World in Abraham's Bombay in The Moor's Lsst Sigh?) remind me not only of Bhabha's "gatherings" in the "Dissemination" essay, but also of those "maybe thirty human beings, with little hope of being declared permanent" (273) that Chamcha sees through a crack in the door in the Shaandaar -- lives in deferral, spectral individuals who can't even be migrants yet, much less citizens. The emphasis on doors, stairs, elevators, hidden entryways, etc., was appropriate, too, as was the fact that this was a very kinetic film: the characters were always on the move, it seemed, flowing from one frame and location to the next (and, in the case of Okwe and Senay, never sleeping). Back to Bhabha, I can't help but cite again that quote I had on the board all those weeks ago: "We find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. For there is a sense of disorientation, a disturbance of direction, in the 'beyond': an exploratory, restless movement caught so well in the French rendition of the words au-delà - here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and thither, back and forth."

Baudrillardian Bits

We reconvene tomorrow night, of course, for our penultimate meeting, and our viewing of Stephen Frears captivating 2003 film, Dirty Pretty Things. The film may most evidently connect with the contemporary London sections of The Satanic Verses, but I think you'll find that it is richly conversant with our conversations about issues of migrancy, the reach of the past, imaginary homelands, the "gatherings" of Bhabha, the rhetoric of the streets and pedestrianism, global citizenship and imagined communities, etc.

I hope your thoughts about your final papers are developing productively apace. I just had a couple more mini-insights/possible leads (as I imagine writing a similar paper -- and, indeed, I keep threatening myself that I'll try to write an article soon), which don't necessarily go anywhere yet but which may be suggestive nonetheless: during one of the characterizations of the cracked, banal state of "stock-owning Mall America," the narrator of Fury indicates that "among the young, the inheritors of plenty, the problem was most acute" (115). When, two pages later, we read that "such was the life of the young in the America of the incipient third millennium" (117), I perked up and thought, "Oh, that's almost the Midnight's Children idea in a new setting, context: i.e., the one novel is about the children of independence in India, and the other is about the children of the third millennium. Both combine propitiousness and peril. One sees clearly in a simple example like this how Rushdie's mind and thoughts have traveled across two decades as a novelist. As we move into tomorrow night's film and continue to think about notions of global citizenship (and the corresponding ethical orientation that accompanies the new forms of citizenship and (un)belonging), I also remain intrigued by how Rushdie has moved (in The Moor's Last Sigh and Fury) to a more critical stance vis-a-vis hybridity. I'm still thinking about that 2-3 page description of the Spanish town of Benegeli in TMLS, and specifically about the hollowness of the town's multiculturalism/hybridity; it seems to anticipate the discourse of the simulacrum in Fury in that it's a kind of fake/simulated hybridity. There's no serious, community-building essence to the diversity on the Street of Parasites. It reminds me a little bit of Malik's disgust and astonishment as he is forced to listen to pedestrians conduct intimate conversations on their cell phones for all the world to hear.

Which brings me to Baudrillard and the title of this posting. Many of you have probably read excerpts from his provocative little book Simulations (I passed out a handout in class last time about Disneyworld: his argument there is that having places like Disneyworld leads us (falsely) to believe that there are imaginary/simulated spaces (e.g., Disneyworld) and "real" spaces (e.g., the world outside of Disneyworld), when in fact even that so-called "real" world is now hopelessly gone amidst the barrage of images, signs, media blitzes, etc.). Baudrillard elsewhere proposes (in a passage I read to you last week,and, again, think of Fury in this context) that "today it is quotidian reality in its entirety--political, social, historical, and economic--that from now incorporates the simulatory dimension of hyperrealism" and that, consequently, "art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image." Maybe these ideas help us to perceive and assess the accomplishment of a novel like Fury (especially combined with how presciently the novel diagnoses the Baudrillardian/postmodern condition and connects this condition with what will happen on 9/11).

I'll reproduce it here (since I can't recall if maybe it was covered by the screen after I wrote it on the whiteboard last week), but the following is a useful way of contextualizing/mapping all of this. According to Baudrillard, there are four basic historic phases of the sign (recall from your past encounters with theory and structural linguistics that a sign is composed of any signifier and signified): (1) There is a truth, a basic reality that is faithfully represented (by a sign, by language, etc.); (2) This truth/reality still exists, but it is distorted, warped, or perverted through representation; (3) This truth/reality has gone, though we still try to cling to it by masking its disappearance through representation; (4) There is no relationship between the sign and reality, because there is no longer anything to to reflect. Western society, according to Baudrillard, has now entered this 4th stage and is unambiguously in the age of simulation. Fury might then be asking if there can be any degree of recovery. And does/can this help us work through some of the vexing questions about gender and sexuality with which we struggled last week? That is, via Baudrillard's logic, normal sexual desire is no longer a personal response to a person we meet and engage: instead, it's created and stimulated by images of beauty and desire with which the media bombards us.

Still Thinking Furiously

Hello again, all. Another posting from a Rushdie "webspyder." I must say that I feel quite stirred up about Fury after our discussion this past Wednesday; I'm also eager to see it continue, so, if you're at all inclined, join me here! First of all, a tidbit or two from Sassen, if only so we get her article into the conversation in some way. How about this for a line that could centralize an argument for an extended paper on Rushdie: "Replete with such regulatory fractures, global cities include dense and complex borderlands marked by the intersection of multiple spatiotemporal (dis)orders" (221) (there are some echoes of Bhabha in there, too, right??). Later, Sassen proposes that "insofar as much of this activity happens in cities...much new critical and analytic effort is directed at the city....Borderzones have become the sites of analytic interest and complexity" (222). It seems that Rushdie's Bombay, London, and New York could be brought together profitably around the suggestions and possibilities of quotes such as these. His novels do nothing if not assess the new approaches to questions of national cultures and identities, and the new epistemological logic of "living here, belonging elsewhere." I also think back to our discussion of Chamcha's flight from London after everything goes haywire in The Satanic Verses: Rushdie seems so good at diagnosing the ills of globalization (via marginalized and/or working class characters; see, too, those crucial 184-187 pages in The Moor's Last Sigh, which tell us how urgent is the imperative that we theorize globalization carefully, which was part of my rationale for assigning Sassen), but when it comes right down to it the mode of response seems to be flight rather than the construction of a local politics. It's an interesting issue and problem with which to grapple.

Regarding this past Tuesday night, I now see what you all were up to. Everyone ate just the right amount of jelly bellies such that when Kaylen sent me home with the remainder the jar was poised for maximum sonic noticeability as I walked down the sidewalks to my car. It was as if you wanted to put me in the position of Malik on his bouncy castle. Ah, but we decided that we needn't interpret the ending in terms of infantilization, right?! Do others want to weigh in on Malik's return to Asmaan? Overly sentimental? Pathetic? Is Solanka merely infantilizing himself here, or does it recall the ending of Haroun and the Sea of Stories and thus become somehow right, somehow consistent with fairy stories and Tolkien's idea of "eucatastrophe"? "Read and bring me home to you" implores the epigraph of Haroun. Simple yet poignant stuff, and somehow it's echoed (for me) at the end of Fury. There's real emotion here and we might appreciate the sense of closure for a change (since we don't usually get it in Rushdie's novels), even though Malik's condition as he wanders "Asmaan's Heath" still seems exilic. This ending offers the antidote, perhaps, to life in the simulacrum, life in an unsettled, postmodern world: to quote the title of a novel we're not reading, salvation is to be found in the ground beneath your feet (even if you're carrying a noisy bucket of jelly beans).

I handed out the Yeats poem the other night not only because it's invoked in Fury (what isn't invoked in this novel, right?!), but also because I like the way Fury becomes kind of a turn-of-the-century bookend to Yeats's early-century warning about the (violent? apocalyptic?) culmination of "twenty centuries of stony sleep." Each is concerned with the best lacking all conviction and with the fear of what "rough beast" might be slouching towards Bethlehem. 9/11 has only made this a more startling comparison. I think I saw the novel less as a critique of America, per se (at least along the lines of what could have been "those nasty cultural imperialists" et al.), than as a sobering critique of postmodern/American banality, where the simulated and the real are almost indistinguishable (Ted was speaking persuasively to this the other night). That doesn't strike me as cliched, even though we've seen films like The Matrix and read William Gibson's fiction, etc. Zygmunt Bauman refers to "the consuming desire of consuming," and it seems Rushdie's novel can/will indeed ultimately serve (again to use Ted's phrase) as a kind of time capsule related to that notion. I've been thinking more, too, about all those pop culture references and "lists": is it the case that this novel will not age well because of them, or might the opposite be true? That is, will the point about the banality of this part of postmodern life become even more striking when readers no longer can smile knowingly and recognize the references? Maybe some particularly resourceful reader of the future will still be able to track the reference to "sly-eyed lady of the fenlands" here so as to enjoy some poetry Dylan-style.

I was also interested in that part of the conversation that wondered if this novel should provide more of a localized description and experience of New York. Part of me is inclined to think this novel could no more be Let the Great World Spin in that regard than The Matrix could be a Woody Allen film. Still, this issue gets even more interesting when we consider the cover image, with that hovering cloud over the Empire State Building. Talk about adding an uncanny element to the novel's reception (post-9/11).

Could it be that this novel is interrogating and undermining one of Rushdie's most treasured elsewheres, destinations, imagined homelands: Oz? Fury tells us that Oz is sometimes a land of "half truths." There's a paper in there somewhere, too (one that might include Benengeli vs. Erasmo in The Moor's Last Sigh, the ruby slippers, the vacuousness of "Dream-America" in Fury, the wandering, can't-go-home-again Malik, etc.). Rushdie's gathering body of palimpsests are really quite extraordinary across the full trajectory of his work.

I could also see someone pursuing a comparison between the sea of stories and Solanka's hypertext tale-telling as companion and mutually-enriching metaphors. The digressiveness and endless possibilities of The Thousand and One Nights could come into play here, too. At their best, these various venues for stories suggest fluid mergings, recombinations, multiple pathways, nomadic stories (ah, there's also the Moor nailing his "last sigh" of a story to all those various doors) -- whether it's the oral tradition, the novel, or hypertext/cyberspace, the power of stories transfers to each new medium with confidence and verve. And we subsequently learn the use of stories that "aren't even true."

Well, there's a start, a 31st jar for Fury! And I already sense I'll be back with more ...

From "Fundo Stuff" to Furia

Greetings, yet again! It seems a bit strange to say/realize this, but tomorrow night's class represents a culmination of sorts, a kind of invocation of "khattam-shud" before the real khattam-shud of the semester. Tomorrow represents the last spittoon in which to catch the commentary of a reading-intensive week, the last real class discussion. From there, we'll of course have the second film (Frears's Dirty Pretty Things) to look forward to, and then the various odds & ends that come with the final class meeting on 5/1. You'll want to bring a lateral-minded, longitudinal, capacious, recapitulatory type sensibility to our final conversations, especially since it's this approach that will launch you on your final writing projects for the course. To that end, in terms of tomorrow night, we should be prepared to consider Fury on its own terms (with all of its oddities and eccentricities!) and in the context of the various novels and critical pieces that we've read. What kind of conversation can we create between Fury and The Moor's Last Sigh? Between Fury and Haroun and the Sea of Stories? Between Fury and The Satanic Verses? And we'll also, of course, have the Saskia Sassen essay to fold into the ongoing conversation, as well.

And surely there are some remainders, some thoughts still in the queue from The Moor's Last Sigh? I'm suddenly thinking (as I continue to ruminate on the novel's haunting conclusion and on our brief conversation about Barthes' "The Death of the Author") about incarceration and the writer, and specifically the way Rushdie so wonderfully brings together the Moor's story, Rushdie's personal experience with the fatwa, and the incarceration of Cervantes (which is said to have led to the inspiration for and creation of Don Quixote). I'm also thinking there might be some nice comparative possibilities as we consider the Moor's enlistment in Mainduck's "fight club" in the context of Saleem's Buddha/CUTIA experience in Midnight's Children: in the latter it's Islamic extremism/purity that is interrogated, and in the former it's Hindu extremism ("the virile pleasures of comradeship and all-for-one" (305)). I'm also remembering that wonderful example of cultural hybridity early in the novel when the Catholic nativity scene gets cross-fertilized with an Eastern experience: the holy family goes native, you might say, and a solidly Western/European tradition gets hybridized and amalgamated (see pages 62-3).

And on another note, perhaps one/some of you might be inclined to start a thread relating to final paper ideas? We could all seek to comment, to offer suggestions, to share our own ideas about this paper within that thread ... Just an idea! If nothing else, each of you will have at least a few minutes to preview your inquiry when we meet on that last night ...

"Not with a bang but a whimper": Thoughts on the ending of TMLS

So, I've been thinking about last night's discussion, particularly the comments I made regarding the ending and I want to expand and clarify to a certain extent. I broached that the ending was less than satisfying or at least raises more questions than it settles. I don't mean to say that everything should be tied up nicely or that there should be that happy ending instead of ending with Moor waiting for that happily ever after, but rather I just felt that there was something happening with the ending in its oddity. After thinking on it for a while, I've come up with the idea that the dissatisfaction with the conclusion of the Moor's story is intended by Rushdie. Through the use of point-of-view narration, the audience has sutured itself onto the character of the moor. So when we reach the end, as moor looks for a place to lie down and sleep, waiting for a better time when things aren't so crazy, we are included in this action- or this final act of passivity. In this way, Moor's cowardice is an indictment of the audience and of contemporary society at large for their complacency in the face of fundamentalism, terrorism and gross injustice in the world. In The Satanic Verses, the satirist Baal insists that his work is "to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep." In raising the larger issues, fundamentalism, fanaticism, national identity, capitalism, etc. Rushdie is working to rouse us from our slumber and inspire conversation on these topics. Coming from this angle, the lackluster ending takes on new meaning and deeper resonance. I don't know- just a thought.

Late but....

I know this is very late notice for anything involving The Moor's Last Sigh, but I hope you find this link helpful and/or interesting.  I love finding sources in texts and following the trails of inspiration and creative theft that authors leave for us. I think this interest of mine comes from my Medieval studies background, and I find that it trickles over into my study of more recent and contemporary authors as well.  - catie

A Hammer and Some Nails

Those are the crucial implements for Moor as he sets off to leave his story "nailed to the landscape in my wake" (433). Rushdie will begin his own such endeavor -- in a slightly modernized way, beginning with a Facebook posting and this teaser on his website -- in the coming months with the appearance of his new book, Joseph Anton: A Memoir. The publication date is September 12, it's listed as being 656 pages (!), and you can get a first look at the cover here ...

See you tonight!

Moor-stuff, Granada-yada

Thanks to Eric for the various discussion questions he provided the other night. Here are some other tidbits/links that you may find worth pursuing: since the novel's primary setting is in southern India, you may want to read about the Malabar coast; the presence of the Portuguese in India and the role of Vasco de Gama also play significant roles in The Moor's Last Sigh; finally, since he will increasingly develop into a villain via the character of Mainduck, you might wish to learn about Bal Thackeray, the head of Shiv Sena (a party he founded in 1966) and someone who has been called the "godfather of Bombay" for more than thirty years (actually, it was Thackeray who had the city renamed Mumbai some years ago). Also, if you don't quite know what a palimpsest is, you might want to procure a working definition of the notion! Regarding all of the contexts, we have some fundamental questions to consider (some of which we got started on this past Tuesday): Why would Rushdie use Arab Spain to reimagine contemporary India? Why would he choose to focus on a Bombay characterized by its Portuguese heritage and by the presence of Jewish and Christian minorities on the Malabar coast? How does The Moor's Last Sigh update the politics of Midnight's Children? The Moor, of course, is born in 1957 (so he's ten years younger than Saleem) to a Jewish father and a Portuguese Catholic mother; he's also the descendant of Vasco de Gama, the early Jews of Cochin, the last Moorish caliph, and possibly -- and crazily (see p.176 & following) -- Prime Minister Nehru.

Given the pepperiness of this novel, it's also interesting to think about the spice trade (i.e., Sydney Mintz's book on sugar comes to mind, as does Timothy Morton's book on "the poetics of spice"). The discussions of pepper early in the novel call our attention to the history and travels of products that the colonies supplied to the metropolises of empire ("'not so much sub-continent,'" Aurora would say, wittily, "'as sub-condiment'" (4-5)), which is another aspect of the genius of this novel (it calls attention to the notion of consumption in other ways, too; I'd still like for us to look at the ambivalent assessment of capitalism and globalization in the "Under World/Over World" sequence on pages 184-7). This line-of-inquiry connects with Paul Gilroy's work, too, since before the passage of cultural productions across the Black Atlantic there was the passage of bodies (slaves-to-be) and goods like sugar and spices. Complicated questions and issues ensue from this convergence.

Well, enough for now. Thank you for your hard work, collegiality, and consistent contributions to our lively (and, remembering the Walrus mustaches, unpredictable) Tuesday night discussions. If you're on the move during this Spring Break week, travel safely, and I wish all of you some restorative hours over the coming week! See you on the other side ...

Enjoyofying TMLS?

Hey all. A word from the frontlines of this week's reading, I guess: I don't know about you, and I'm only just now into the second hundred pages of The Moor's Last Sigh, but at numerous times during the first hundred pages I found myself thinking that this nearly appears to be Rushdie's tightest, most captivating novel in terms of pure storytelling. It seems positively inspired at times, despite the fact that the vision of India has by this time (1995) darkened for him significantly. I read somewhere that this is the first novel he composed on a computer, so perhaps that explains the even more pronounced linguistic playfulness in this novel. Anyway, it has me thinking about technique. We recently noted our appreciation for the warmth and poignance of that deathbed scene between Chamcha and his father at the end of The Satanic Verses, which made me wonder if, for all its brilliance, Rushdie's writing doesn't often invite or enable this particular kind of emotional enlargement of our selves (which comes from caring deeply about the characters) during the reading process (does that make sense? do you agree?). The rewards he does offer (which are multiple, to be sure) are of a different kind/register.

I've been noticing the comedy so far in The Moor's Last Sigh, particularly in the dialogue -- I'm not sure Rushdie's dialogue would often be singled out, but damn if it isn't often hugely funny and inventive and, despite its 'hyperbolized' strangeness, somehow both real and rhythmically compelling (look at the exchange between Aurora, Vasco, Sunil Dutt, and Nargis on p. 138, for example). I got a kick out of the sex scene between Aurora and Abraham, too ("you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she, and then he, and then they, and after that she, and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for awhile..." (89)); Rushdie manages to avoid cliche and find freshness (via comedy) in a common task for the fiction writer, while also mining the discomfort we'd all feel in trying to describe our parents having sex!

Regarding last week's discussion of Haroun and Tolkien's essay "On Fairy Stories," I wonder what some of your "rabbit-hole" reading experiences have been in your life (the reference, of course, is to Alice in Wonderland, but invoking rabbits reminds me of the fact that at this very moment my son is reading Richard Adams's Watership Down, a novel that is literally about rabbits and that was probably, I'm now reminded, one of those magical reading experiences for me when I was young). When was the power of effective "sub-creation," to quote Tolkien, so great that when you finished a book the feeling was more of one from moving from reality to fantasy rather than the other way around? I guess The Lord of the Rings would have been another one for me (and isn't it odd/wonderful to think that the created world of the book can seem more real than the world you return to when you close the book?!).

And then there was Jordan and Kaylen inviting us to find our own answers to Haroun's question of "What's the use of stories that aren't even true?" Would any of you recommend writers/essays/books that in various ways answer that question in smart and persuasive ways? I always think of the cultural critic & essayist Sven Birkerts, who writes about the glories and pleasures of reading in often inspiring ways: for example, in The Gutenberg Elegies: "Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started" (146). Elsewhere, he proposes that "to open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one's life or of one's orientation toward it. The distinction must be recognized, for when we read we not only transplant ourselves to the place of the text, but we modify our natural angle of regard upon all things; we reposition the self in order to see differently.... We are, for the duration of our reading, different, and the difference has more to do with the process than with its temporary object--the book being read. As with meditation, both the pulse rate and the breathing seem to alter; the interior rhythms are modified in untold ways" (88,89). I wonder what kind of repositioning of the self, specifically, Rushdie's fiction allows us ...

Finally, although this one deals with "stories" that are "true," I love the language Jane Hirshfield finds for justifying the importance of reading poetry: "A good poem makes self and world knowable in new ways, brings us into an existence opened, augmented, and altered. Part of its work, then, must also be surprise -- to awaken into a new circumference is to be startled.... Through a good poem's eyes we see the world liberated from what we would have it do. Existence does not guarantee us destination, nor trust, nor equity, nor one moment beyond this instant's almost weightless duration. It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy." That notion of making the "world knowable in new ways" reminds me a bit of the great line in the Tolkien essay when he argues that "we need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity -- from possessiveness" (77). This seems to be an important part of Haroun's epiphany, too, and may be part of the gift we receive from this novel if it's one that works for us.

God's Postman (a 3/13 recap)

Well, greetings again, from the anchorage of the weekend. Gibreel laments that "being God's postman is no fun" (114), reducing the sublime to the mundane in classic Gibreel fashion, but being God's postman in our own cultural moment might include being God's blogger. Thus, keep posting your verses here. My mind is certainly still astir following last Tuesday's class meeting, and in fact it seems to be filled with a rich stew of debris like that which falls from the sky in the novel's opening moments -- debris that awaits capture, settlings, recombinations. And yet we must move on, alas. Ah, but wait, Bhabha has told us we needn't inhabit the linear temporality, that we can instead celebrate and nurture the temporal disjunctures! We can actually keep talking about The Satanic Verses in the post-Satanic Verses era! And right about now you're thinking I'm as hopeless a nut as Gibreel, the avenging angel ...

No, seriously, I do hope our conversations become recursive and inclusive across our various texts, especially as we must inevitably start considering paper topics and lines of inquiry for research. I'm not even sure where to begin with that aforementioned debris, so maybe I'll start with some of the lingering questions/comments that filled our conversation this past Tuesday. I've continued to think about the anger that informs Chamcha's behavior in the novel's concluding sections (specifically his curious role in initiating Gibreel's dissolution). I went back and tried to track the progression, and I can nearly feel comfortable with the argument that endorses Chamcha's anger/role because Gibreel has become a threat that needs to be neutralized/stopped. Rekha Merchant (around 333?) offers him a chance to become a hybrid divinity (i.e., one that emphasizes the many rather than "one one one") but he rejects that (and her), saying "It's a trick. There is no God but God.... I won't deal with fogs" (346). Then, later, he chooses clarity over hybridity, closure over open-endedness: "Clarity, clarity, at all cost clarity!" (364). His messianic zeal that develops here and that then informs his subsequent actions aligns him with the other totalizing figures in the novel (Thatcher, the Imam, Ayesha, etc.), and he becomes the antithesis to the migrant self eventually sought by Chamcha. I'm trying to see Chamcha's anger towards Gibreel, then, as being validated similarly to the anger evidenced in the Club Hot Wax and on the streets of Brickhall (in defense of the wrongly accused Uhuru Simba). I always think of Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell when I read this novel (of course, since it's actually invoked at one point), and specifically the proverb to "Damn braces, bless relaxes." Sometimes violence and diabolical energies are absolutely necessary.

Well, I'll still surely have a couple recapitulatory comments to share on Tuesday, so you should feel free to do the same, before we move on to Haroun and the battles of the Gups and the Chups ...

Cross-pollination

I was doing a little reading today for my linguistics class on the history of the English language, and the Norman invasion and the battle of Hastings came up, which made me think of those early scenes with Rosa Diamond. (pp. 133-135) Maybe everybody already knows this and it was only revelatory to me, but the Anglo-Saxon defeat at Hastings by the French Norman invadors marked the beginning of 300 years in which England basically became a colony. Norman French and Latin became the languages of power and prestige, and by the time England regained independence, its language and culture were extremely hybridized in the wake of 300 years of occupation and intermarriage.

What's interesting is that Rosa welcomes the phantom of "(William) the Conquerer in his pointy metal-nosed hat," and just when she thinks the ghosts are all in her imagination, she sees Gibreel awaken with his mouth full of snow rather than sand, and she's ecstatic.

From here, I'm not exactly sure where to go, but it seems to have something to do with the notion of a more recent invasion, not by armies of soldiers from across the channel, but by armies of migrants from England's former colonies, that, after 900 years, will once again forever transform and further hybridize Britain.

Posted by Eric Lynn (Sorry, I wasn't able to sign in because I'm using my wife's laptop and all the settings are in Korean.)

Islam as Nation: Finding Its Slippage in The Satanic Verses

I'd like to suggest another angle from which Bhaba's DISSEMINATION essay might be applied to The Satanic Verses.  It requires the leap of consideration of religion as nation.  I'll posit that an organized religion, such as Catholicism or Islam, may be treated theoretically in similar terms as nation, that it is similarly an essentialist entity that is written and narrated in a liminal space between pedagogy and performativity, a "cultural construction ... as a form of social and textual affiliation" (Bhaba).  And it is through a comparable "process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the" religion.

That religion is by its nature pedagogical is clear.  Consider the Zen send-up of organized religion, The Cat in the Temple:

One day, a cat came into the temple, and began meowling, which disturbed the daily prayers.  The Master ordered that the cat be tied up outside the temple.  After the prayers, the cat was released to go free.

The next day, the cat returned, and again, the Master directed that it be tied up outside the temple.  This day, out of compassion, the Master ordered the Disciples to put a bowl of water and a bowl of food outside for the cat.

The next day, the cat returned, and again was tied up outside and given a bowl of water and a bowl of food.

This continued, day upon day, month upon month, and on and on…

Eventually, the Disciples moved on, and new Disciples came.  And eventually, the Master, who was very old, grew older, and finally died.

A new Master came, as did new Disciples.

Eventually, the cat, who was very old, grew older, and finally died.

So the Master ordered that a new cat be found, and tied up outside the temple.

Centuries later, many great works had been written about the importance of having a cat tied up outside the temple during prayers.

Point taken.  The "homogeneous, visual time of the horizontal" religion resides in its catholic (small c) historicity.  However, the codes of conduct, rites, and rituals of religions are not static turgid codes, but dynamic beasts ridden by the people.  Further, the geographic and cultural boundaries of Islam, for example, are little more fixed than those of nations.  And, finally, the memberships of religions are plastic and similarly subject to modernist, feminist and postcolonial temporalities.

The Satanic Verses may not be about Islam, as Rushdie asserts in In Good Faith, but as he makes clear in that same essay, parts of the novel do indeed address the slippage that exists between the pedagogy of the religion and the performativity of many of its followers.  Specifically, the novel and the essay both address the disconnect between the pedagogy and performativity as it regards women.  Note that the role of women in society has been the central area of discourse and debate in the Muslim world over the last three to four decades, not unlike in the Catholic nation.  Rushdie's contribution to this discourse in The Satanic Verses has been overshadowed by other obvious front-burner issues, but it has not gone unnoticed.  The novel has offered an important voice in the debate and has done so by painting the slippage, back to and before the "beginning of time."

The Weekend's Final Gleanings

Greetings again, everyone. As the weekend slips away (and we lost an hour, besides!), I have just a few more items to pass along to you. First of all, thank you for your patience last week in class. I hope my personal situation/sadness over losing Lucy (seen above, in perhaps the one picture by which I'll most want to remember her: early in her thirteenth year, she even manages to get that fourth paw airborne!) wasn't betrayed too evidently by a sense of waywardness; that is, I hope we accomplished enough and that the class session had a sense of shape (it's all a blur to me now). It was a strange thing to acknowledge to myself, but I think last Monday was probably one of the three saddest days of my life so far. Some/most of you will respond by saying I'm very lucky to be able to say that -- since this only involved losing a dog -- and indeed I am, especially after living some 16,000+ days, but, well, it's a lot more complicated than that, too. I guess it's one of those "It's the blight man was born for / It is Margaret you mourn for" kind of occasions: I'm grieving for a dog, yes, but also for a whole lot more. Given the numbers involved (i.e., 3 truly profoundly rotten days out of 16,000+), I wonder why my main take-away from this past week is to be reminded that life is about loss (the loss of Lucy portends other losses, other vanishings, other sorrows, other closed doors, other partitionings of my life). And, yet, that's where I'm at right now. Fortunately, I have three young boys to serve as an antidote.

Anyway, I fear this will be the kind of sadness with staying power, and that I'll be reeling for a good while. My wife and I can't even vacuum the rugs right now for fear that all of Lucy's blond hairs will eventually be gone. And yet, I can't help but think of (and draw hope from) that scene in Pather Panchali when Apu throws the beaded necklace into the pond (the one Durga denied having stolen earlier in the film). As we watch it disappear below the surface, we interpret it as one of Apu's moments of grieving, as well as a way of protecting his memories of his sister; knowing, though, that he has been learning how to write during the progression of the story, we also might think of this as a kind of metaphorical moment: something is sinking down deep so that, just maybe, it might be pulled up again later ("emotions recollected in tranquility"?) and transmuted (via writing?), into something that will provide solace and affirmation. I'm hoping Lucy's loss promises the same for me, eventually. You all are writers, so I suspect you know what I'm getting at. Anyway, onwards ...

Having invoked PIco Iyer in a previous posting, I went ahead and added that first chapter of The Global Soul to the moodle site. And although I know you hardly have time for any more secondary readings, I also put up there a chapter ("'Jewels Brought From Bondage': Black Music and the Politics of Authenticity") from Paul Gilroy's book, The Black Atlantic, which I thought might be of interest to some of you (now or eventually), and which probably intersects productively with specific scenes like the Club Hot Wax and with Rushdie's general project of exploring hybridized identities in late twentieth century London. Finally, a couple of web resources: you might find Paul Brians' online guide to The Satanic Verses to be especially useful (I should have thought to pass this one along to you last week). I also just chanced upon this story about Rushdie's presence at Emory University these days, which, most recently, involved a marathon public reading of Haroun and the Sea of Stories (maybe that should be a model for our class on the 20th!). You'll also find some other Rushdie-related links embedded in that story. Finally, do consider the invitation below (in the "Up in the Air" posting) to share an interesting passage and just a few sentences of commentary from your reading of the novel over the past week, and do also stop by and read Ted's phantasmagorical tour of The Satanic Verses in his posting. See you on Tuesday night.

Up in the Air

I keep talking about those Sinai-like cracks, and I certainly felt/saw them widen within and beneath me this past Tuesday night as we parted with still so very much to talk about relative to The Satanic Verses. We got things off to a productive start, certainly, especially with the Mahound section (strand B according to the Kundera structural/rondo logic, which, by the way, can indeed be found in Testaments Betrayed: Essay in Nine Parts). Clearly we'll have to pay some foundational attention to strands A (contemporary London and Bombay) and C (the Ayesha pilgrimage) next week and I'm hoping we can work directly from a rich cross-section of specific textual moments next week. To that end, shall I/can I call upon you to find a passage in the novel that speaks to you in some way and to share with us a modest observational, critical close-reading of your chosen passage here on the blog? (At some point, too, we should probably find occasion to point out and discuss the verbal/linguistic felicities of Rushdie's prose as evidenced in this text).

I personally simply love the way Rushdie uses the metaphor of floating debris in the opening scene, and the way that debris is composed of both material and immaterial things (e.g., "remnants of the plane" and "debris of the soul"; "drinks trolleys" and notions like land, belonging, and home). In a course that's so much about things being "up in the air" (identity possibilities, power dynamics, historical truth, personal histories, narratorial reliability, etc.), this scene is devastatingly appropriate. I recall, too, that great section in the first chapter of Pico Iyer's The Global Soul (which we're scheduled to read for Week 14 but which we won't have much time to discuss) in which Iyer describes that "High above the clouds, in an alternative plane of existence--a duty-free zone, in a way, in which everyone around him was a stranger--the Global Soul would be facing not just new answers to the old questions but a whole new set of questions, as he lived through shifts that the traditional passenger on ocean liner or long-distance train could never have imagined. " New questions that need answers. It's no surprise when, a few pages after the crash of the airliner, Rushdie's narrator poses the central question of the book: "How does newness come into the world? How is it born? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is?" (8).

The Iyer connections in The Satanic Verses continue in a passage like that one on page 41, when Chamcha considers the distance between Bombay and London, between Indianness and Londonness. In one sense it's "five and a half thousand as the crow," but in another sense it's "not very far at all." This novel will be about movements between these two cities, and everything that movement implies for identity. It sounds very Joycean, too, to think of identities being unmoored and recombined in cities, to think that one of the prime effects of cities is to bring stories and narratives together.

I also always relish the visual nature of that scene that ends Chapter 3 of Ellowen Deeowen: "The monsters ran quickly, silently, to the edge of the Detention Centre compound, where the manticore and other sharp-toothed mutants were waiting by the large holes they had bitten into the fabric of the containing fence, and then they were out, free, going their separate ways, without hope, but also without shame. Saladin Chamcha and Hyacinth Phillips ran side by side, his goat-hoofs clip-clopping on the hard pavements: east she told him, as he heard his own footsteps replace the tinnitus in his ears, east east east they ran, taking the low roads to London town" (176-7). That's just wonderful writing, and it so sharply makes London a radically unstable notion (linguistically via the "Ellowen Deeowen" signifier, spatially, symbolically, etc.). 



I often teach Heart of Darkness in my British Lit survey class, and isn't this a kind of reverse Heart of Darkness paradigm, with the colonized Other (monstrous in the eyes of the "motherland") marching east to recolonize/reverse colonize the city. It's a companion image to the "two brown bodies" that fall from the sky in the novel's opening moments, both dramatic literalizations of the postcolonial moment.

Saleem and Saladin, Buddha and Goat-man

I mentioned, I think, in an earlier posting that "every epic needs its trip to the underworld," and somehow it seems as if there could be an interesting line of inquiry (final paper?) to be found in comparing the metamorphoses of Saleem Sinai and Saladin Chamcha. Each seems to suffer through periods of (forced) submission to the agents of purity (which maybe somehow reminds us of Bhabha's notion of the "pedagogical" in his "Dissemination" essay?), and thus create significant narrative subsections that link these two novels in very interesting ways. Saleem, moved to Pakistan, realizes that “in the land of the pure, purity became our ideal” (355). He understands the change in his life by virtue of a comparison between two cities: Karachi, in which he is “beset … by the knowledge that the name of the faith upon which the city stood meant ‘submission,’” is set against “the highly-spiced noncomformity of Bombay” (353). In a way, I wonder if Bombay finds a counterpart of sorts in pre-Islamic (even early-Islamic) Jahilia in The Satanic Verses, described as it is (at least initially) as a nexus for nomadicism and multiplicity, a space marked by the shiftiness of sand, "the very stuff of inconstancy" (96). In any event, as Saleem tells us, “I never forgave Karachi for not being Bombay” (352). Just as a more open-minded, tolerant, pluralist version of Islam is closed down in The Satanic Verses by the emphasis on “an all-rounder in an age of specialist statues” (SV 101), Saleem laments the divisions in the Midnight’s Children Conference and, subsequently, “the impossibility of a third principle” (MC 348). Before long, as Indo-Pakistani relations deteriorate, as Jamila Singer turns ever increasingly towards the service of “blinding devoutness” (359), as the “dizzying early days before categorization” (362) become a more distant dream, as Saleem suffers in his “mosque-shadowed house” (378), and, finally, after he’s “spittoon-brained” (397) and “stripped of past present memory time shame and love” (392), Saleem is lost within the Buddha. Now a citizen of Pakistan, he “learned the arts of submission” (403) and joins the cause of tracking down “the fleeing enemies of national unity” (411).

Purity, national unity, submission, categorization: these read like keywords, like hot links that connect Midnight’s Children with The Satanic Verses. So does, mercifully, the word “anger,” because it’s anger, right, that allows the Buddha to return to being Saleem (“But then I was angry…. I had begun once again, to feel” (MC 441)), and that reduces the horns and abjectness of the deviled Saladin, who is “humanized … by the fearsome concentration of his hate” (SV 304); it’s righteous anger that brings both back out of invisibility and into an engaged relationship with the problems and questions that face them. Maybe there’s even a strange kind of shared narrative role played by Deshmukh, the “vender of notions” (428) and the diverse inhabitants of the Shaandaar Café. Deshmukh enables the killing fields of Bangladesh to become, as the Shaandaar does as well, a kind of therapeutic zone, a zone of resuscitation. Maybe the logic of each story required that these characters needed to be purged and remade before they could be connected to potential change (change which I guess is a little less ambiguous in the case of Chamcha and the later novel).

In Regard to The Satanic Verses

Cover of The Satanic Verses

The Carnivalesque Phantasmagoria Ride of Religious Fury

by Theo Cecil DeCelles

Welcome all to the roller coaster mutant ride somewhere past the crispy zesty rainbow. I present to you the most thrilling ride here at Six Six Six Flags called Rush to Die inspired by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Was the rainbow you just walked over on a wobbly catwalk real or was the rainbow just a cheap Disneyland rip-off that uses lasers and poof?  As you can see the thrill ride appears to be quite dangerous but folks don't be daunted. Over there is an optical illusion where you riders might derail and crash into a jailhouse hell called British Immigration.


There at British Immigration, amusement park employees wearing Nazi uniforms claiming authentic English ancestry are torturing the new English immigrants with pitchforks. "How dare they let in these devilish rogues into the purest land in the world, even if we can't decide if we are Norman or Anglo-Saxon, these tinted skinned aliens are probably in line with the third coming of the Antichrist that was a Paki, he turned our tasty fish and chips into chips and curry," they may say. If the roller coaster actually doesn't derail, you will find the ride soaring into the clouds where you will see mirages of robotic goddesses hanging from wires. Some will declare, "How do they do that? Are helicopters jangling the three Arabian goddesses Lat, Manat, and Uzza?" Ah, the world of illusion is quite mysterious. Even prophets, messengers, and businessmen cloying for the top know how to deceive the masses. Anybody can convince anybody of seeing mesmerizing mirages of authoritarianism with film effects, sponsored by Coca-Colonization.


Once you descend with the Angel Gibreel out of the clouds, the ride stops and you will need to walk into a floating ancient maze made out of sand. Sandcastles in the sky get me high. There is a replica of a temple in Jihilia. In the temple there are three hundred and sixty idols including images of al-Lat (The Goddess), al-Uzza (Strong), and Manat (Fate), and Allah (The God). They will not be singing the song It's a Small World. The devilish at Six Six Six Flags will never dare torture you with a song so sweetly passive-aggressive than all of hellfire. There in the temple you will see such Earthly beauty that even you, the flocks of moral aptitude, will be tempted. To the left al-Uzza will mesmerize you with the morning and evening star. Beside her, the springtime sun will rise above al-Lat. Manat is the goddess of death. I quite like her. The moon will rise above her, and if you dare violate any graves that she protects, beware you will be cursed. To the right is Allah and what does he look like? You will have to go on this ride to see. You will be given a choice, shall you go with the goddesses, or shall you go with Allah? To the left or the right, and why can't it be in between? What would the world have been like if Islam submitted to three goddesses and a god? What if the ancient tribe of Quraysh didn't stop circling the Ka'bah in Mecca with chants to the three goddesses only to submit only to Allah? What if those who submitted never would have destroyed the temples of the goddesses? Should have, would have, could have, there are too many haves in those questions that it bores me, now onward to the more theoretical part of the thrill ride for the brainy. Trust me it's a scream!

The Goddess al-Lat

From the temple you will slide down a giant golden slide to view a large movie screen that we cosmopolitan infidels of the West shudder in fear when seeing the now dead Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with his manly finger of righteousness pointing to the heavens as he sermons "Death to America with love!" Beside him is an automaton of Maggie the Bitch. Margaret Thatcher will spout how the winner of the Man Booker Prize shows how the Commonwealth of Nations can write quite well. Then Maggie will start arguing with the giant screen of Khomeini. She looks quite dour as she waves her fist at him. Although, rumors are that General Aladeen is jealous that the Irananians get all the attention, and he yearns to replace the gigantic screen of Khomeini to advertise the Republic of Wadiya instead. Iran's current leader the handsome international playboy of the Middle East, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is rumored to have purported in a Hustler Magazine gossip column that "General Aladeen needs to learn that being a religious dictator doesn't have to be an actual dictatorship, all you have to do is know the right people that know how to give the right type of death sentences to foreign nationals." I wouldn't know whether if the story is true or not because I don't read Hustler Magazine because I don't like the advertisements.


We spent millions of dollars on this amusement park ride. You will then enter a plastic spaceship designed by Japanese anime and manga students. After the spaceship lands you will be beyond all the rainbows, beyond Saturn's rings, deep in a land called The Transit Lounge. A transitional world of liminal space. The things that inhabit the liminal space can be individuals or groups. If they are individuals then they stand outside society like footy hooligans and prostitutes. Life after death is not fair, Spoono's dreaded buddy Farishta mutates into an angel and Chamcha mutates into a freakish demon in the "in-between" world. See Chamcha the goat-man! The West sees his subhuman goatiness as so grotesque that he has to be hidden in an attic like a terrorist, but he was perhaps quite scarier before the mutation if you ask me. Being a Muslim man that is in love with being English but detests his former Indian identity is never easy to view. Don't run away when you see Chamcha magically mutate right before your eyes into a goat-man, and as his penis pulsates bigger and smaller, his horns will grow and retract. But hey, I know what you are thinking, it ain't that kind of ride. 


Bollywood womanizer with bad breath Gibreel Farishta is so revered and romanticized, being rich and all, that he is exulted to the same league of the holy men, he is as holy as the ascetics, he might even be higher than those Jains that walk around naked covered in ashes and refrain from sex, and oh, that Bollywood lad Farishta is so spiritual, because India is nothing but the land of spirituality and hashish, thus Farishta's mutation grants him a halo (especially since he returns home to mother India to revive his acting career). Growing an elephant trunk would have him permanently typecast as Ganesha, but his mutation that the industrious west creates as a stereotype, which dehumanizes as well as exults, doesn't quite help Farishta's acting career. Yes sir, some have said that seeing the Angel Gibreel on a movie screen moralizing about the sins of mankind was just a bit too kitschy in an era when the Hindu gods and goddesses have onscreen powers more dazzling than Superman, Batman, and the Jedi all combined.


While in The Transit Lounge refreshments are served for a price. While there you will see an African woman's black skin mutate into translucent glass but will be shattered by the Nazi amusement park employees. See the African wild woman trying to pick her shattered life off the floor probably in the way Humpty Dumpty tried to frantically put his shell back together again before giving up. Religious fraternities, ethnic minorities, social minorities, Non-reservation Native Americans, transgender and immigrant groups are all betwixt and between and all of them exist in the freak show of The Transit Lounge. A liminal space becomes a liminal state when one is between wakefulness and sleep. In the surreal world of The Transit Lounge you are in the dream of somebody else. Who dreams the dream for other people's dreams? Perhaps it is Farishta's dream when he is 'halfway to sleep" (113). Perhaps it's the Angel Gibreel's dream, because "Gibreel in his dual role is both above-looking-down and below-staring up" (114).  Angels are everywhere in The Transit Lounge as they are intermediaries in the liminal space between heaven and hell.


The three Arabian goddesses are there in The Transit Lounge waiting to entertain all of you with belly dances, along with all the other intermediaries as animatronics. You will see fantastic creatures on Mount Coney that looms menacingly sublime in the middle of The Transit Lounge. Rushdie is influenced by The Wizard of Oz, so as to appease the ticket paying masses, The Transit Lounge has been designed to be halfway between Oz and Verses, you will see monkeys with wings, trees with faces, munchkins, melting witches, a wizard and speaking lions, and you will also see a manticore, a throbbing goat-man/devil, Allah, djinns, a lecherous speaking wolf, angels and winged Goddesses as fantastical creatures galore!


Theorist Mikhail Bahktin is right-o when he says that Rushdie is carnivalesque. Indeed-o in regards to the Fatwa, what Khomeini actually did was make Rushdie even more famous, and readers bought the New York Times #1 Bestseller to read what all the fuss was about. The spirituality of the novel was ignored. Islam is criticized and celebrated as a powerful religious faith in The Satanic Verses, but many curious minds want to know... Curious minds bought The Satanic Verses to analyze the blasphemy, and any spirituality that the novel espouses will always be overshadowed by the controversy. So as you exit The Transit Lounge, look out for the amusement park employees, many that are actual illegal aliens as they make the amusement park more profitable, they are dressed in real saris and turbans beating effigies of flaming Salman Rushdie's with wet mops. Some have accused the set designer of making a poor replica of Salman Rushdie saying he looks quite weedy like a scarecrow. Throwing shoes at any of the Salman Rushdie effigies is against amusement park regulations.


Mahound's faith in Allah is so great that when Abu Simbel the Grandee of Jihilia's wife named Hind challenges Mahound for Allah to concede by having the three Arabian goddesses become daughters of Allah, or to be subservient intermediaries, or lesser than a male god (115), he faces his people and tells them that the acceptance of the three goddesses was an error, and that God is one. Mahound's faith in Allah is strong enough that he even fights the Angel Gibreel in the nude even after the angel cops a feel (125). It is the nature of the author to express the shadows between darkness and the light where novelty is created in the novel. As you make your way past the park employees, make sure you buy some gift shop souvenirs in The Transit Lounge airport that will fly you to no place like home on Bostan, Flight AI-420. Enjoy the movie that will be playing on the flight that will put your minds into a liminal state. We will play the film The Wizard of Oz paired with the film soundtrack of The Wall album by Pink Floyd. Far below the amber-scotch clouds you will see nothingbutsea.


The liminal effects will be strong enough just as in the novel where Rushdie invents hybrid words as butterfly words metamorphose, “Notsleep” (114) is not just a stylized way of writing, words are morphing, becoming new, and in many cases are actually better as one word rather than three or four words. We must thank the immigrants that improve and reinvent the English language.


Three terrorists will have a debate as they hold all of you as hostages. Two males and one female, and the female will say, "Even if the English language is becoming mongrel and diverse, we must examine the holy trinity of what the first world thinks about being purely English, or even purely European, or purely all-American, the analysis of three stereotypes that western society targets us people from the third world are: stinky, primitivism, and threatening. In the name of the father of stereotype number one, we from the third world are thought to STINK and they say we are unclean for we do not shower and must use deodorant, the smell of manure and wild nature mixed with exotic spices of cardamom and curry follows us everywhere we go. In the name of the son of the three stereotypes, a primitivist stereotype that targets we the third world immigrants as ANIMALS, some of my subhuman sisters have hooves and some of my brothers have tails. In the name of the holy ghost of western stereotypes about we the third world exiles, immigrants, refugees, etc. are that we are DANGEROUS and must be kept confined in a sanatorium should we infect the rest of their society with our mongrel ways. (171) Stink Animals Dangerous S.A.D.


This ride is scary, watch out for the bomb that the hijacking terrorists will detonate, I hope that you don't panic when you unexpectedly drop from the sky in a simulation of falling from a plane, and please don't vomit, amusement park rides are not for the wary. Vertigo can be uncomfortable and thrilling simultaneously. This amusement park is a simulacra of heaven and hell. Funtoosh! "Life always changes after the fall" and everybody knows that Shaitan knows that, and that is why The Great Satan, we the people of the fallen United States are just one of many leaders of world change. Being a devil's advocate by questioning power has never been easy. Now if you excuse me, I'm on my way from Six Six Six Flags to Coney Island.


Source: Rushdie, Salaman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008

Related articles

• Satanic Verses, part 2: Rushdie falls victim to Indian politics (independent.co.uk)

Theory from the Nation's Edge

Hi, again. You'll recall that our theoretical reading for Tuesday's class is Homi Bhabha's "Dissemination: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation." It's a demanding piece of scholarship, as you've no doubt discovered, but it'll reward your attention, and it should certainly enhance your reading of The Satanic Verses. If you can at least read the first three sections carefully (that would be "The Time of the Nation," "The Space of the People," and "Of Margins and Minorities"), that would be great. You'll also undoubtedly want to check out the end of the essay, which in just a few short pages provides a smart reading of parts of The Satanic Verses ...

Rushdie, Ray, and Ideas of India

The Satanic Verses reading proceeds feverishly apace, I'm sure, but given that we won't be able to afford any time on Tuesday night to return to Pather Panchali and given that there may be some comments you may still be inclined to offer, I figured we at least need another empty jar added here with this posting; fill it up, if you see fit. The most basic question to ask, of course, is wonder through what contexts we can talk about this film productively in a course on Salman Rushdie? How is Ray entering our conversation on "nation as narration"? The film (and its two sequels) are based on a 1928 novel, as I mentioned, but given that Ray's career as a filmmaker began during the heady years of nation-building under Nehru, it seems we're invited to consider this film in some of the same contexts through which we framed Midnight's Children. Do we get any sense for what Ray's vision of national identity is based on this film? Does he have an identifiable politics, based on this film? If not, does that mean his work (at least in this film) borders on a kind of irresponsible aesthetiticism, that he might be someone who is unwittingly catering to a Western desire to gaze at Indian poverty and see India placed within a familiar narrative of abjection (Rushdie rehearses that argument briefly in his essay on Ray in Imaginary Homelands, via the comments of that Bombay actress, Nargis)?

Imagine, though, being forced map out a conversation between Pather Panchali and Midnight's Children: how would you do it? What openings would you provide to begin such a conversation? And given that it's a film of undeniable visual (as well as narrative power), what images & moments are still lingering (and perhaps expanding) in your thoughts? I found myself transfixed by the old (ancient!) auntie, Indir, for example, and wondering if we might nearly talk about her in some of the ways we talked about Tai the Boatman in Rushdie's novel. She seems to stand in for a kind of rupture, for something very significant (the oral tradition? a rural ideal being threatened by modernity and the lure of the urban?) that is dying (and it's so interesting, too, to think about the composition of her death scene: her body is discovered by Durga and Apu in a bamboo grove that is teeming with life). Certainly we sense that is a film about the collision of worlds, of the old and the new, and this is probably nowhere more apparent than in the train scene, which could be the single most famous sequence in Ray's entire body of work. Those electricity pylons in the paddy fields, the eerily singing wires, the approaching steam engine, that black smear of smoke in the sky -- that last detail, for whatever reason, made me think back to "the cloud of the disaster" (80) that links the Muslim mob and the Ravana gang (and portends the advent of communalism) in Midnight's Children. Anyway, how do you all respond to this train scene (or others)?

A Breather

I hope the Ray film tonight will have the desired effects: that it will have given you a chance to catch your breath, to gather up and perhaps even synthesize some of the trailing strands of conversation from our previous class meetings, and to catch/derive some new permutations and colors of those strands via what the film itself offers. And then there's the imposing reading load for next week: it's probably the most demanding week of the semester in that regard, as I have warned, and if you've been able to get a start on the Bhabha essay and/or the novel during this "off" week, so much the better!

If you have any spare time, or if you want some interesting background audio emerging from your computer as you work on other things, you might check out these two videos. The first is this 8-minute video clip discussing Rushdie and the fatwa ("and how they shaped multicultural Britain"), almost exactly twenty years later. The second is Rushdie's 2006 speech to the American Jewish Congress regarding reforming Islam. He talks amusedly about those people who come up to him and tell him they have "read that book of yours" -- "and you always know which one they mean," he notes. He also relates, about fifteen minutes into the talk, the story of the Satanic Verses and its connection to the Koran, and then proceeds to explain why this episode interested him relative to his project in writing the novel you're currently reading.

See you tonight!

The 31st Jar

Wow, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, very Saleem-like, as I contemplate leaving Midnight's Children to move on down the road. The cracks widen beneath us, I guess. It seems like there is still so much to talk about, so many passages on which to touch down. Well, if anyone would like to help me fill up this 31st jar, have at it. (A brief announcement, too, by the way: the Homi Bhabha article is now available on the Moodle site, as is a repaired and complete version of the Bakhtin pages from "Discourse in the Novel")

Maybe we can deploy Saleem's recapitulatory tendencies -- you know, the way he's often given to stopping to summarize (for Padma, for us) and recount where the narrative has been to date ("Let me sum up" (196)) -- to help us deal with our own cracks and to counter the linear march of the semester (Midnight's Children recedes, The Satanic Verses advances, etc.). All of which to say, let us be thinking and conversing longitudinally and retrospectively. I find myself still thinking about that fabulous Methwold section early in Midnight's Children. I just by accident opened up to that gem of a sentence on the bottom of page 125: "Rose in lapel, cream hat held stiffly against his chest, center-parting glinting in afternoon light, William Methwold stares straight ahead, past clocktower and Warden Road, beyond Breach's Candy's map-shaped pool, across the golden four o'clock waves, and salutes; while out there, above the horizon, the sun begins its long dive towards the sea." This sentence seems to respond ironically to that bygone phrase of imperial glory, "the sun never sets on the British Empire." As such, it also nearly encapsulates volumes of literature written about the passing of the Raj, the period of British rule in India (literature infused with the same kind of nostalgia and self-righteousness that Methwold is expressing as he stages his own departure; see Rushdie's comments on this nostalgia in his "Outside the Whale" essay). It's extraordinary how Rushdie can take an entire literature, then, and reduce it down to one loaded, suggestive, beguiling sentence. You could use this sentence alone to initiate and govern an entire seminar paper; it makes us realize what we're up against in this course, trying to account for five novels when we can scarcely account for the richness of one.

We didn't devote all that much time last week to Saleem's disappearance into the buddha, when the narrative moves to Pakistan to interrogate purity: "Purity -- that highest of ideals! -- that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister's songs!" (377). Since this novel stands so aggressively against purity (in its technique and aesthetic, in its thematic preoccupations, in its approach to personal identity, to history, to political and religious sensibilities, etc.), it makes perfect sense that Saleem and the Brass Monkey should submit to its lures. Every epic needs its trip to the underworld, I think Rushdie has said, and it seems the Sundarbans obliges as the location for the "descent." Saleem escapes the threat, ultimately, and returns to history (and India), only to be pursued by two more apostles of (Hindu) purity, Shiva and the Widow. I can't help but think back to the alternative visions: most obviously the Midnight's Children Conference when it still represented a hybrid, multilingual "third principle," but maybe most movingly that episode from early in the novel when Amina symbolically cuts through "the cloud of the disaster" (80) (which links the Muslim mob with the Ravana gang) and rescues Lifafa Das, the peepshow artist, by opening her door just as the Muslim gang is about to set upon him. In other words, in defending the rights of this Hindu artist, who has the bad luck to be plying his trade in a Muslim area, Amina takes a stand against communalism and becomes a redemptive figure in this novel, a loving bookend to the monologic, purity-seeking efforts of the Widow at the end of the novel. And I guess in this sense Amina joins Tai as a kind of tie -- between generations, between locations, between religious faiths. She herself is a kind of third principle at this moment.

Another character who stands out to me in this regard, and what a relief he is when he appears, is Deshmukh, the "scavenging peasant" who whistles amidst "the terrible fields" (427) -- the killing fields -- and who describes himself as a "vendor of notions by trade" (428). It's the sobering yet clarifying Deshmukh (a distant echo of Tai the Boatman?) who helps return the buddha back to history and to Saleem, and who again espouses the alternative to the purity-seekers: "Ho sirs! Enough fighting has been already. Be normal now, my sirs. I beg. Ho God" (429). In this sense, could it be that this character/moment would be at least a partial answer to question #3 on Xhaty's/James's handout (i.e., "What ... keeps us from 'lifting away' and/or 'falling deeply into' the chaos or dream world of Saleem? Who in particular helps ground us in the story?")? I like Roger Clark's assessment (from Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie's Other Worlds) in this regard: "Deshmukh is a moving, down-to-earth character who brings the emotional content of Saleem's narrative back into the contours of space and time, back into this world of geography and history, location and memory. In this sense, he closes the door of an other world which is beyond logic, and ushers the reader back into a world which at least has the potential to make sense."

I could go on, but I fear now that I may be misleading you into thinking that the governing aesthetic of this blog is the long posting! As always, I hope to see more of you in these parts, trying to combat the fissiparousness of the texts and the semester, tying up loose ends, raising questions, citing passages, rehearsing possibilities for final papers, etc. I'll see you Tuesday night for Satyajit Ray's great film, Pather Panchali.

Fissiparousness, Prestidigitators, & Chutney

I've just emerged from the stunning Sundarbans section and I'm finding myself (once again) utterly captivated by this novel. The single most memorable scene for me this time around is probably the one where the Buddha (not yet Saleem again) and the "bisected" Shaheed are up "in the muezzin's roost." After the savage critiques of purity and religious fundamentalism, it's just an extraordinary moment when that mosque seems spontaneously to testify to the abuse that is occurring in its name: "Coming to the rescue, feet dancing on ants, the buddha bumped his elbow against a switch; the loudspeaker system was activated, and afterwards people would never forget how a mosque had screamed out the terrible agony of war" (434).

How are you all doing, I'm wondering, with the proliferating engagements with the actual events of the subcontinent's history and wars? In the second half, for example, you're learning a good bit about the nature of Pakistan's formation, the Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971, the independence of Bangladesh, the Emergency in India and Indira Gandhi's growing power and self-aggrandizements, etc. I guess this is why I thought John Keay's book on Indian history or one of the many books by Stanley Wolpert would be very helpful to you as a reference. I think there must be a great paper topic out there, too, involving the presence/role of Kashmir in Rushdie's writing. His family, of course, is originally from Kashmir, Midnight's Children begins in Kashmir in what often appears to be the register of mythic time, Aadam Aziz must return to Kashmir to die, etc. Kashmir also crucially informs, of course, "The Prophet's Hair" from East, West, and also figures prominently in a more recent novel (that we're not reading), Shalimar the Clown. What does Kashmir seem to represent in Rushdie's imagination?

And what else should be on our agenda, I wonder, including sections/moments/issues from the first half of the novel that we may not have properly covered last week? The Midnight's Children Conference, probably? The representation of Padma, as well as her role in momentum and success of Saleem's project? The importance of Shiva to the narrative?

Anyway, I hope you all are enjoying the novel, and are holding off your own cracks that will start to widen as the various demands of the semester start to claim you (your mental state may approximate that of the buddha's in the Sundarbans eventually!). I'll see you tomorrow ...

Edward Said Interview: Out of Place

Edward Said talks with writer Phillip Lopate about his book, Out of Place, a memoir of his childhood and formation into the itinerate conscience of the intelligentsia and figurehead of postcolonial politics that we know him as today.
(BOMB 69/Fall 1999, LITERATURE) 

http://bombsite.com/issues/69/articles/2269

"Edward Said has been for decades a major literary critic and, in academic circles, a pioneer of postcolonial studies. His seminal work includes Orientalism, Covering lslam and Culture and Imperialism. He is also a noted, sometimes controversial, political activist, championing the Palestinian cause. His own background, raised in a Christian Palestinian family in Egypt and Lebanon, with English and American cultural aspirations, led to a richly confused sense of identity and displacement, which he has now explored in a compelling memoir, Out of Place —perhaps his best book, certainly his most personal and least polemical. Having known Said casually for years as an exquisitely charming if somewhat testy man, I interviewed him at his Riverside Drive apartment (courtesy of Columbia University, where he is a distinguished professor), whose interior with its spectacular river views handsomely follows the curve of the building’s facade."

Open Sesame

Hey all -- I hope you're enjoying the weekend and the first half of Midnight's Children (hopefully not so much, though, that you are expectorating your own long red jets of betel-juice onto your apartment walls). "Expectorations" are actually relevant to the Bakhtin reading, which includes the by now familiar elaboration of the carnivalesque. It will also be appropriate as a follow-up to The Arabian Nights reading from last week, which was littered with its own exaggerated renditions of bodily functions and overturning of social and political hierarchies. There are also a few readings listed from Imaginary Homelands for this Tuesday, too, but I'm aware of the reading load for the week and I'm inclined to begin seeing these IH essays as supplemental (and nearly optional) readings (unless otherwise noted). I'll certainly be referring to them at times, and they will undoubtedly find ways of cross-pollinating effectively with the primary reading. By the way, given how densely allusive and frenetic Rushdie's narratives can be, you might think about beginning some manner of personal indexing initiative as you proceed through Midnight's Children and beyond; it's never too early to start hatching and tracking ideas for your final papers, and archiving page numbers and passages will be very beneficial to you as the reading piles up and the semester matures.

Are there any residual comments out there regarding The Arabian Nights, I wonder? It's such a quirkily fascinating entry on the schedule that maybe we won't quite realize its full value and place in the semester's program until we look back a bit retrospectively. I certainly value it as a work that offers art and storytelling as an alternative to violence. That's why, I guess, Scheherazade's particular response to paternal authority is so notable before the tales themselves get going; her father tries to invoke his authority (and the cautionary tale he tells her involves a punitive relationship between a man and his wife) and she responds by boasting she can tell stories to beat his. The power of the word ("Open Sesame!"), the power of the story, the power of wit, poetic skill and improvisation are valorized time and again in this work. As we consider pre-Islamic and early Islamic culture and society, too, this is a fact that resonates. Islam was just a few centuries old when the oral versions of these stories started circulating: it was a time, perhaps, when the religion's dogmas were not yet quite established, when there was cross-cultural understanding, when Christians, Jews, and Muslims weren't as given to making distinctions between their respective faiths. One suspects that such multi-dimensional pluralism may be an important part of the appeal of The Arabian Nights in Rushdie's adult imagination.

Our conversation about the interplay between the frame story and the nested tales also makes me that much more interested in the ethical dimensions of this text: not only is there Scheherazade's project to change and rehabilitated Shahrayar, but there's also the broader implications surrounding the tales' tendency to criticize tyranny, to extol forgiveness, to counteract self-centered identities, and to posit alternative societies and realities. Maybe this is a thread to which we can return when we get to Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Somehow, too, I think our discussion of the formal aspects of The Arabian Nights can profitably be carried further: the division of the work into nights, the various experiences and understandings of time in the tales, the competing ideas of linearity and simultaneity, the twin strategies of interruption and continuity, the forward movement and the recursiveness, the narratological rhythm, the narrative strategies that invoke such ideas as boundaries, transitions, perspectives, empty spaces, intervals, separations, connections, gaps, divergences and diversions, opposites and contradictions ...

I don't think we discussed the role of the verse/poetic material within the tales, either. This is another area where the translators become an issue: Lane mostly omitted the verses, Dawood eliminated them altogether, and Burton translated them into an inflated style. They were, in any event, according to Haddawy, "intended to heighten the action, raise the literary level, and intensify the emotional effect," and many of them trace back to the most prominent classical Arab poets. The Prophet Muhammad, by the way, is reported to have said that "verily eloquence includes sorcery," thus suggesting an uncertain line between writing a poem and casting a spell (and thus earning him a place in any history of classical rhetoric).

One last little aside, regarding the humor of The Arabian Nights: I chuckled when I encountered the title of "The Tale of the Second Lady, the Flogged One." Another tale that seems like it could resonate in the context of our course and Rushdie's work, too, is "The Tale of the King's Son and the She-Ghoul" -- the one where the King is amazed to consider that the head of the sage Duban will speak to him after being lopped off. The detached head does indeed speak, instructing the King to read the book, but the latter must lick his fingers to turn the pages of a book that has been poisoned and that contains no stories. Here it's the blank pages -- the absence of narrative -- that kills ...

101 Nights

Hi everyone. I don't know how many of you might be checking the blog yet, but I figured it was time for me to make a second appearance in these parts (as soon as things settle down just a bit more I'll aim to post more regularly). You should certainly plan to leave behind a textual trail here if you find yourself still ruminating (as I am) on aspects of the East, West stories and our conversation last week. First, an announcement of sorts: I think I've nearly already said something similar, but I think for Wednesday's class it will be sufficient to read about 101 nights. Thus, you should at least plan to read Hadddawy's introduction and up through page “The Story of the Two Viziers.” As I’ve said, I don't have a specific directive in terms of framing this reading, but in general we should be contemplating some of the contexts for The Arabian Nights, especially as part of a course on Rushdie. What do we need to talk about? I'm not sure myself, but it should be fun and as always we'll work through it together. Remember, too, the Hayden White essay on historiography and narrative (which gestures towards next week and Midnight's Children more than it pertains to the Arabian Nights) and the stray essays for the week from Imaginary Homelands. By the way, I have to cancel my office hours on Monday morning, unfortunately; I will try to reschedule them via additional hours later in the week, but do feel free to send me an email if you need to see me for some reason and want to set up a day/time.

As for the short stories that we now leave behind, well, despite the fact that they're considered (I suppose) one of Rushdie's "lesser works" (which says more about the scope of the major novels than it does the shortcomings of the stories), they offer us plenty to talk and think about, and certainly we got off to a good (if inevitably limited) start last week. I was grateful for your various comments, observations, and critiques, especially those that seemed so astutely to recognize the aesthetic and thematic characteristics particular to each of the three sections – I don’t know if I’ve quite noticed before how carefully Rushdie seems to have created that tripartite sensibility.

After class I regretted my own attempt to return to Radhakrishnan – not because there wasn’t still a lot of uncovered terrain in that essay, but because there ultimately wasn’t enough time to tease out the implications of some of the passages I read. And although we did, indeed, manage to touch down on each of the nine short stories, it occurred to me later that “Chekov and Zulu” probably warranted more attention, as did “The Courter,” I think. The title characters in the former story seem to be emblematic of the kind of estrangement that permeates most/all of these stories: by giving themselves these names, Chekov and Zulu are not ultimately doing anything to erase or ease the estrangement they experience and represent as foreigners in England: they're fragmented individuals, and on a linguistic level this is evidenced by their lack of a stable, coherent self to call upon. Even the sound of the names they adopt for themselves defies them: rather than the Star Trek characters they intended, their identities can be mis-categorized as either of a Russian or African nationality. To invoke language from structural linguistics, there is, we might say, a huge gap opened up between signifiers and signifieds in these stories. The courter/porter is another obvious example of the contingency of names and the instability of identity (though this can be seen to indicate a positive sense of hybridity & blending, a processual nature to identity formation, etc. -- the character of "Mixed Up" thus can be valorized in this sense as someone who symbolizes the rejection of pure origins). I always find myself wanting to talk about chess after reading “The Porter,” too. Not only is the game an alternative mode of communication for Mixed-Up and Certainly-Mary – cutting across various distinctions and boundaries (the way music does, too, perhaps) – but it becomes a kind of metaphor for characters (immigrants) who must be exacting tacticians and strategists to deal with the balance of (political) power, with their state of being unhomed, with the challenges of hardship and defeat in a foreign location …

And I remain very fascinated by the Columbus & Isabella story. One thing that's terrific about that story is the fact that its form (i.e., with shifting narrative voices that appear in wildly different registers: i.e., the serious narrator, the presence of seemingly gossipy court voices, the divided voice of Columbus himself) works in concert with the content: it's hard to identify who is speaking and to whom, and in that sense it makes the story itself a reflection of diasporic identity, Add to that the radical deconstructing of a Western historical figure we thought we know (it's interesting how many different Columbuses there are, you know? He's a hard figure to pin down in any responsible way given the mythos that surrounds him. If you want a humorous diversion along these lines, revisit this classic opening scene to an episode of The Sopranos) and you have a really stunning story. It's a story that complicates notions of east and west (e.g., it implies the subtext of the culturally and historically rich Islamic presence in Al-Andalus via the Moors; it makes of the undiscovered "New World" a kind of imaginary homeland, one that is exoticized in the imagination the way the East tends to be; it necessarily draws in issues of colonialism and tyranny, of religious (in)tolerance, of foreigners, etc.).

By the way, given that I recall someone seeming to ask about the sterilization context in “The Free Radio”: Indira Gandhi was convicted of electioneering malpractice and was banned from office in 1975. Instead of resigning, though, she chose to declare a national emergency (The Emergency, as it’s now referred to in the history books), which suspended the constitution. The Emergency ended up lasting about 18 months, and it was marked by massive troop deployments in the streets, the arrests of many thousands of political leaders, journalists, and students, imprisonments without trial, etc. It also included some particular insidious efforts by Indira’s son, Sanjay, who tried to effect slum clearances and far-reaching birth/population control through an aggressive sterilization program. This context dovetails a little with the question some of you raised about whether Rushdie may have given “the East” more of a free pass with his social/political/cultural criticism.

Anyway, that's plenty enough for now. Perhaps some of you may be inclined to pick up one of these threads and keep this particular conversation going. Those ruby slippers will undoubtedly be accompanying us for the rest of the semester. Cheerio and see you Tuesday.