Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

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Salman Rushdie
(2005), and The Enchantress of Florence (2008), as well as non-fiction
collected in The Jaguar Smile (1987), Imaginary Homelands (1992),
and Step Across This Line (2002). Despite the enormous variety of his
settings and plot lines, the common motif in all these literary works
is Rushdie’s questioning of reality, a preoccupation of what has been
christened “postmodern” literature. His fantastic representations make
a rather disconcerting point about modernity in all its aspects: social,
religious, cultural, and political.
Both Rushdie and his characters are often controversial in their
downright rejection of the permanency and stability our common
beliefs about life and fiction require. He poignantly speaks about his
iconoclastic views in the essay “In Good Faith,”
I am modern, a modernist, urban man, accepting uncertainty as
the only constant, change as the only sure thing. I believe in no
god, and have done so since I was a young adolescent. I have
spiritual needs, and my work has, I hope, a moral and spiritual
dimension, but I am content to try and satisfy those needs
without recourse to any idea of a Prime Mover or ultimate
arbiter. (1991: 405)
Raised in a liberal Muslim family in Hindu India, Rushdie has been
condemned as a religious deserter by his more fanatic enemies, who
read his more provocative novels, and especially The Satanic Verses, as
literally as they can. Rushdie’s move to the United Kingdom, a country
he so vehemently criticized for its foreign and immigration policies in
the ’70s and ’80s, led him to observe: “[ . . . I am] already a mongrel
self, history’s bastard, before London aggravated the condition” (1991:
404). Rushdie’s subsequent visibility on the cultural and academic
fronts adds to his portrait as a notorious modern literary figure who
thrives on polemics and controversy.
The Satanic Verses is a novel that celebrates the controversies that
made Rushdie famous so early in his career: irreverence for the Muslim
religion and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s racist
politics. The uncertainties that he values so highly are brought here
to their most conspicuous state: an utmost disbelief in the grand
narratives of religion and the questionable politics of Western—and
Eastern—society, seen through the prism of what cultural theorist
Jean-François Lyotard calls “the postmodern condition.” Rushdie