The Satanic Verses
Todorov, Tzvetan
The passions unleashed by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses seem at first glance to be a perfect example of what the novel itself identifies as postmodern sensibility, that of a society...
...On the one hand, the ayatollahs see Rushdie as a blasphemer in the pay of Zionist imperialism, participating in the occidental plot against the Third World...
...Rushdie's homeland, besides the English language, is neither India nor England but, as for all great writers, in literature alone...
...Indeed, this is not the obligation of the novelist, who depicts rather than asserts...
...A death sentence on a foreign citizen is illegal...
...Because Rushdie's remarkable novel is neither an insult to the devout nor an incitement to violence...
...Having finished the book, I find consolation in the fact that "affairs" such as the one it provoked are one of the book's principal themes...
...Torture, and who today insures Rushdie's survival...
...Writers who signed various petitions supporting Rushdie also invoked the freedom of opinion and the right of expression...
...His minister of culture, Jack Lang, is quick to add, "Every book should have the right to be published and distributed...
...In the book, this position is equally represented, but it is not certain whether it is considered to be the voice of wisdom...
...The writer, Baal, embraces it by declaring, "I recognize no jurisdiction except that of my muse" —which does not prevent the city's leaders from cutting off his head...
...the fact that the two, the book and the affair, have become inseparable is not necessarily a bad thing...
...Here, once again, Rushdie is not didactic...
...The world is made up of heterogeneous components, or, as he says, incompatible ones: "Ghosts, Nazis, saints all alive at the same time...
...Certainly, if we are trying to establish historical truth or submit evidence in a courtroom...
...Rushdie himself must stay in England if he wants to survive, not to mention write and publish...
...Everyone regrets these deaths...
...However, the exhibition's management compelled them to remove it: the Protocols have been banned since 1988...
...Will the book's destiny invalidate the story told in the novel...
...The measure is certainly excessive...
...The position of Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, seems to me worthy of attention here...
...It is no accident that it is democracy, of the European and North American type, that guarantees authors the right to write novels freely: democracy and the novel have the same conception of truth as a condition of inquiry, not as dogmatic certitude...
...The two protagonists are accustomed to change because they are both actors, but they practice it in two opposite ways...
...The question is worth posing, especially if we insist that the writer not only enjoy freedom but also assume its responsibilities...
...He chooses to renounce his past, to scorn Indian moeurs, and to venerate the English and cosmopolitan culture...
...Albert Cardinal Decourtray, president of the Confederation of French Bishops, wished to make it known that he reserved his "solidarity" not for Rushdie but "for all those who, in dignity and prayer, suffer as a result of this wound" inflicted by the infamous book...
...He declares that "fiction is fiction, facts are facts...
...Saladin, whose family name is Chamcha (an indirect descendant of Gregor Samsa, the hero of The Metamorphosis) is a man of a thousand accents, able to imitate any voice, including that of a ketchup bottle in a television commercial...
...But should publication have been postponed to avoid them...
...Being an Indian novelist living in London is therefore an almost ideal situation—save for several million Muslims calling for your death...
...A Khomeini who claims to purify morals by bloodshed is not (was not) any less criminal than a Stalin who sent assassins all over the world to eliminate ideological or personal enemies...
...The former's head is surrounded by a halo, reminiscent of that of saints, and the latter watches with apprehension as small horns grow on his forehead and his feet are transformed into goat hooves...
...An episode during the affair illustrated this state of things...
...However, in December 1988 he interrupted, on his own initiative, the republication in serial form of his novel The Children of Gebelawi, which represents the three prophets as neighborhood toughs...
...inside all of us there are "more channels than a cable or satellite mogul ever dreamed of...
...In the novel this position is upheld by Billy Battuta, the unscrupulous producer who is making a film about the Prophet...
...whereas it is the impact of the text on its readers that is in question in blasphemy or defamation...
...if they are banned, it is not because what they say is not true (as is the case of all fiction) but because they cause evil...
...It is also obvious that they contravene what they themselves proclaim to be their deepest convictions: the defense of individual rights on one hand, Christian charity on the other...
...It is not surprising, then, that an ayatollah in Iran, a cardinal in France, and a rabbi in Israel all came out, with more or less vehemence, against Rushdie...
...This interdiction spread to other countries with large Muslim populations (Kenya, Senegal, and so on...
...According to him, defending human rights is "repeating colonial discourse, which legitimized the domination of other peoples and cultures by exporting the civilization developed in Europe...
...He projects himself as the spokesman of nationals of the former British Empire currently living in England...
...However, the aforementioned immigrants were insulted by him and burned his book in public...
...Is freedom of speech worth, in this case, fifty lives...
...By its very existence, this novel militates in favor of novels, of plurality, of the rights of individuals to question traditions...
...The Satanic Verses is also a book about the nature of good and evil...
...The Protocols are definitely fiction...
...it is the horizon common to all quests for truth, including those conducted by way of the novel...
...But a writer of fiction is also engaged in a quest for truth—even if it is of a different nature...
...But the answer, on my part, would be negative—since I read the book...
...Mohamed Arkoun, professor at the Sorbonne and occasionally at Princeton, characterized the expressions of indignation aroused by Khomeini's fatwa (Islamic legal ruling) as overreactions "based on an entirely unacceptable ideological postulate...
...The choice is perhaps a little more complicated than it appears...
...The latter, in turn, decided to display The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the famous anti-Semitic forgery...
...TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY SALLY BOYLE 100 • DISSENT...
...On the other, Rushdie himself wants "to give a voice and a literary flesh to immigrant culture...
...If there were deaths in the streets of Islamabad or Bombay, they should not be attributed to the book, but to fanaticism and to the hate of the instigators of these demonstrations...
...And is it "scientific" to claim that the affirmation of human rights must be thought of "in the larger terms of the rights of God...
...Gibreel, specialist in the incarnation of Indian gods, already protean, nevertheless represents continuity, loyalty to India, and contempt for the foreign...
...One is tempted to add: ayatollahs who issue death sentences against writers who displease them...
...What can be said about these declarations...
...The attack on this right represents "absolute evil" for President Francois Mitterrand (Chirac's successful rival...
...but their guilt is much more clearly established than that, for example, of Mrs...
...Arkoun, however, does not have any political excuse...
...They probably prevented other deaths...
...Politicians are not expected to know how to analyze books but rather how to choose their aides...
...It is true that the destructive power possessed by these tyrants is not the same (although the ayatollahs must not be underestimated...
...it is absurd to pretend that there is nothing in common between the religion represented in The Satanic Verses and historic Islam, or between Rushdie's fictional prophet, Mahound, and Mohammed, or between his verses and those of the Koran...
...It is, among other things, a personal reinterpretation of Islam, full of nuances and ambiguities, which should only provoke interrogation and meditation...
...Reading the Novel in this Context The Satanic Verses makes us live the confrontation between the one and the many, between the community, in which collective truth is compulsory for the individual, and the society, in which each individual can search for truth in her or his own manner, between monolithic religion and infinitely varied literature, between prophets and poets, between The Book and books, between armed 98 • DISSENT Notebook militants and unarmed man...
...Banned in India, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia shortly after its publication in England (in late September 1988), the Rushdie novel attracted world attention after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence against its author and its editor in February 1989, complete with a reward of $3 million dollars, in the great tradition of bounty hunting...
...they are worried about the effect of their words, not the truth of them...
...Rushdie was infinitely right to publish his book...
...These two ideas confront each other not only as orthodoxy and heresy but also as the two main characters, Gibreel and Saladin...
...Rushdie refuses to believe in a manichean vision of the world, where evil is a substance entirely foreign to human (or divine) nature...
...I am not sure, on the other hand, that the Indian and Pakistani authorities were wrong to ban (for the time being) its distribution...
...Does a doctrine's origin in time and space—say, eighteenth-century Europe—provide "scientific" refutation of its universality...
...At a book fair in Geneva last April, Rushdie's book was not taken off the shelves, despite protests by the Iranians...
...But it would be naive to rest with this declaration of neutrality...
...They do not want to alienate the French Muslim population...
...Is that to say in essence that good and evil have become indiscernible, that everything is indifferently "angelicdevilish" or satanic-angelic...
...Thatcher, amiably designated in the book as Mrs...
...The particular opposes itself here not to universality but to the mixture of several traditions, the agglutination of fragments, the hybrid patchwork...
...In the same letter to Gandhi, Rushdie insists on the difference between fiction and history: mustn't one at least leave every liberty to the imagination...
...Finally, The Satanic Verses is, and is above all, a book about identity and change, loyalty and treason, particular cultures and contemporary universal mixing of races...
...and Rushdie is even more correct when he writes, elsewhere, "I resort to literature to explore the highest and lowest points of human society and human spirit...
...However, after Gibreel's death, Saladin decides to settle in India and to return to his past...
...To which one could perhaps add: It is no accident either that the most compelling novels are written nowadays by authors born in Asia or Africa, Latin WINTER • 1990 • 99 Notebook America or Eastern Europe...
...It is not true, therefore, that people have the right to distribute any book...
...Would Saladin have seemed more true to life by staying in England...
...Yet at the end of the book Gibreel, who takes himself to be an archangel, perishes and Saladin, the humble sinner who is so human, escapes and starts a new life...
...Saladin seems to prevail over Gibreel, Lucretius over Ovid, and the beginning and the end of the book proclaim that the old must die so that the new can be born...
...If they had only read the book . . .; but no: I will say by way of shortcut that those who are capable of reading The Satanic Verses from cover to cover are not capable of calling for death in city streets...
...You have] set your words against the Words of God...
...Rushdie seems to suggest this occasionally...
...In France, the ban won the support of a small part of the Muslim population and the "understanding" of several public figures...
...No law can admit the principle of freedom without accompanying it with responsibility: I have the right to insult my neighbor, but he has the right to have me charged with defamation...
...Should Ovid's metamorphoses be favored, in which forms change but the essence always remains the same, or that of Lucretius, in which change brings death to the old self...
...Literature is certainly an exploration of the world...
...Since the publication of Rushdie's book, dozens of people in India and in Pakistan have died in demonstrations against it...
...The death penalty is barbaric...
...The passions unleashed by Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses seem at first glance to be a perfect example of what the novel itself identifies as postmodern sensibility, that of a society capable only of pastiche, which cultivates "the image instead of the reality...
...Other times he corrects himself: "There were real monsters in the world — mass-murdering dictators, child rapists...
...More than postmodern distortion, the affair is an illustration and a test of what the book itself tells us...
...His position is, he says in the same interview, "scientific" (this term appears four times) and, more specifically, "semiological" (six times...
...Today, in the countries where the book appears in translation, the situation is a little different, but still peculiar: it is impossible to read it without the recent controversy in mind...
...Not that their monstrosity is inhuman, far from it...
...Rushdie seems to oppose fidelity to a tradition (be it as varied as that of India), to the omnivorous nature of London, to the cosmopolitan eclecticism of today, to the sort of mental "zapping" that we have learned to practice...
...Now, universality does indeed exist, even if it does not directly appear in Rushdie's book...
...Jacques Chirac, mayor of Paris and unsuccessful candidate for France's presidency in 1988, declared that he had "no esteem for Rushdie nor for people who use blasphemy to make money...
...Millions of Muslims condemned the book without having read it, and hundreds of writers defended it, I believe, under these same conditions...
...Rushdie himself, in his letter addressed to Rajiv Gandhi after the book was proscribed in India, asks for the "right of free expression...
...They never even opened the book, nor did their advisers, which is more serious...
...Should Rushdie have done as much...
...He commented on the fatwa in these terms: "Instigating murder is a crime and the Imam Khomeini should be punished for inciting Muslims to kill Rushdie...
...But, as Rushdie remarks in his novel, fanaticism does not depend on the quantity of power at one's disposal...
...To call for murder— because that is exactly what this implies—is a crime...
...In any case, the distinction between fiction and history concerns the relation of the text to the world...
...WINTER • 1990 • 97 Notebook Rushdie's friends make but one argument: the right to free speech...
...Theocracy, when animated by the conquering spirit, is pretty much the same as modern ideocracy, or totalitarianism...
...Chirac and Decourtray are acting as politicians...
...The prophet in the book says to a character named Salman, who dared to modify the sacred text: "Your blasphemy, Salman, can't be forgiven...
...We judge Khomeini's fatwa to be illegal...
...At one moment Rushdie takes over the narrative—to tell us that he refuses to pronounce judgment openly about the heart of this conflict...
...it is still true that poets—in spite of what Baal might say, and, under other skies, Baudelaire —are not miraculously exempt from the common jurisdiction...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
