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.