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 ...