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The Satanic Verses 193
a meditation on the spiritual and tangibly physical obstacles that divide
people of different races, religions, and cultures. The clash between Good
and Evil, in literature and real life, and, moreover, the difficulties in easily
discriminating between the two, seem to be the underlying issues in this
black comedy. To this effect Rushdie introduces an interesting twist in
the choices he provides to his two main characters. As he explains,
The Satanic Verses is the story of two painfully divided selves.
In the case of one, Saladin Chamcha, the division is secular
and societal: he is torn, to put it plainly, between Bombay
and London, between East and West. For the other, Gibreel
Farishta, the division is spiritual, a rift in the soul. He has lost
his faith and is strung out between his immense need to believe
and his new inability to do so. The novel is ‘about’ their quest
for wholeness. (1991: 397)
Rushdie does not shy away from offering outrageously critical (as well
as poetic) contemplations on the human condition and that elusive
quest for “wholeness” in the pastiche reality of the postmodern world.
Using the techniques of magic realism, Rushdie never seems to settle
completely on a particular view point, but creates a mosaic of “truths”
and observations. Thus, the insistence of the omniscient narrator in
the novel, which sets the tone of the novel,
Once upon a time—it was and it was not so, as the old stories
used to say, it happened and it never did—maybe, then, or maybe
not [ . . . ] (1998: 35)
A world of possibilities and multiple meanings is set into motion by
this invocation, with its ambiguous “maybe’s.” Who speaks and what
is said are relatively clearly delineated choices in The Satanic Verses;
what is more interesting, though, remains in the silences between
these choices. Thus the magic transformation in which Gibreel
acquires a saintly halo, while a pair of hornlike protrusions grow on
Saladin’s head, does not settle the question of who is who, or what—or
who—is Good and Evil. In an act of spiritual rebirth, each character
has to define themselves against the backdrop of a world which favors
easy—if incorrect—answers rather than accepting an ever-changing,
pluralistic world devoid of certainty. The narrator asks: