Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Satanic Verses and the Demonic Text 259What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms– in short, a sum of human relations […]. [T]ruths areillusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphorswhich are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which havelost their pictures […]. 32The pathos and drama of such radicalism are both illustrated to thereader and distanced from him by the simultaneous effects of irony and fantastic-grotesquespectacle. The Satanic Verses discusses also contemporaryliterary theory in such sections as in the above metamorphic scene from the“medical facility at the Detention Centre.” Rushdie’s novel is overtly selfawareof itself as a literary creation, as an illusory representation or fabricationof reality in a linguistic medium. Edward Said’s influential study, Orientalism,was published in 1978, and Rushdie’s novel can be interpreted asmaking its own contributions to the discussion of how Western (dominant)culture constructs alien images of “others” in its discourses. The traditionaldistinction between fiction as an “object” for the theorising “subject” ishereby subverted; The Satanic Verses takes theory as its subject matter, andgives it a fantastic representation. This has double consequences: firstly, culturaltheories are given great importance and weight as they become capableof building reality as experienced by the novel’s characters; and, secondly,these same theories receive ironic shades of doubt, as they become mixedwith fantasy, and thereby fictionalised. As we can see, the principles of heterogeneityand crossing of discursive borderlines has “blasphemous” (or justproblematic) results in other fields besides those of religion.ALIEN SELVESDemonic elements are containers and vehicles for some very troublesomephenomena: the disintegration of identity, or psychic unity, the disintegrationof social groups, or breakdown of such divisions as truth/lie, good/evil,or man/animal. All these are rejected into the field of the demonic for obviousreasons. Life would become very complex if such basic categories werequestioned. However, this exclusion is not self-evident; nor has it ever beenabsolute. In all times people have had different ways to cope with this area.Telling stories about transgressive phenomena is one important way. Religiousnarratives have dealt with this phenomena by assigning demonic figuresthe role of obstacles and adversaries to be conquered. My previousanalyses have pointed out how Western horror culture has modified its perceptionof demonic elements and how their role has been re-evaluated andacknowledged as potential, or even essential aspects of subjectivity. Rushdie’stext is aware of this development, and makes this manifest by numer-32 Nietzsche 1980, 42-47. – This quotation is given prominent place in Edward Said’sOrientalism (1978/1987, 203), in the context of how “truths” about others are producedunder the conditions of one’s time and culture, some “system of truths,” or representations.