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

260Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsous references in the same direction. For example, the theme of identifyingwith monster figures is prominent in Chamcha’s hit success, The AliensShow. This popular TV show is characterised as an entertaining crossbreedingbetween “The Munsters,” “Star Wars” and “Sesame Street.” With its“Ridley” character, a terrifying alien “who had an obsession with the actressSigorney Weaver,” and the mentioning of such names as Arnold Schwarzenegger,Rutger Hauer and the film Blade Runner, the darkness and complexitiesof the contemporary science fiction are highlighted in the novel’sencyclopaedic field of references. ‘Alienation’ is one of the concepts thatThe Satanic Verses thematises; “The Aliens Show” even has “the Alien Nation,”“a team of Venusian hip-hoppers and subway spray painters and soulbrothers.”33The Satanic Verses is clearly not interested in any stable and harmoniousidentity that could act as a buttress for a fixed ideology, or, for example,centralised government. The typical character in this novel is an alien, inseveral senses of the word: he is a foreigner, a person displaced into anotherculture; he is a stranger for himself as for the significant others; in short,alien is a concept that emphasises how people inhabit different worlds, evensimultaneously. As the dream sequences (those which relate to the Islamictradition) have been separated from the rest of the novel, the context builtby the text itself has been lost. The Satanic Verses consists of nine chapters,five of which are located in contemporary London; the main plot forms thebulk of the novel, and the two by-plots (the stories of Mahound and Ayesha,the butterfly girl) are framed by it. In other words, the perspective intothese religious episodes in non-Western cultures is built from a position ofmarginality in the West. The concept of alienation can consequently be appliedto The Satanic Verses in many ways. Everyone in the novel is “other”:the characters are seeking or questioning their identities themselves, or areotherwise estranged by narration. This could be dubbed “double marginality”;the novel simultaneously separates itself from the Western context byadopting the marginal perspective of the immigrant groups, and distancesitself from other traditions by mixing religious elements with modern scepticism.The frame of reference, nevertheless, is dominantly a contemporaryWestern – urban and secular – reality.The textual, social and cultural aspects of the hybridity in The SatanicVerses intersect in the construction of identity: the novel explicitly discussesthe idea of a single, unified identity, and also challenges it in its own textualpractice. This opposition of unity versus plurality is linked with the angelic/demonicdivision, and thereby to the novel’s key thematics. The epigramfrom The History of the Devil by Daniel Defoe, read in the context thatthe title of the whole work is concerned with the “Satanic” pole, accentuatessome of the ideological context for the novel’s demonic elements.33SV, 62 (quotation), 268.