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

The Satanic Verses and the Demonic Text 267discontinuities, a willing re-invention; his preferred revolt against historybeing what makes him, in our chosen idiom, ‘false’? And might we thennot go on to say that it is this falsity of self that makes possible in Chamchaa worse and deeper falsity – call this ‘evil’ – and that this is the truth,the door, that was opened in him by his fall? – While Gibreel, to followthe logic of our established terminology, is to be considered ‘good’ by virtueof wishing to remain, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslatedman. 49It is consonant with the thorough irony of The Satanic Verses that Gibreel’s“goodness” is driving him crazy: his incapacity to change makes himan alien in the postmodern world, whereas Chamcha survives by endorsinghis ‘alienness’ and is also able to enter into a dialogue with his past. “Goodness”is defined as passivity; Gibreel is shown as incapable of differentiatinghimself from all the historical “voices” that speak through him. 50 The “evil”of The Satanic Verses should properly be understood as the demonic in theGoethean sense: it is the amoral dynamism in the universe, something thatoversteps all the divisions that our culture establishes in its attempts to separatethe selected “good” meanings from the flux of phenomena. 51 “Howdoes newness come into the world?” asks the narrator as Chamcha forcesGibreel to sing and fly during their fall. “Chamcha willed it [the miracle]and Farishta did what was willed.” 52 The division between good and evil, theangelic and the demonic, is translated into a division between passive powerand active will. The overall narrative attitude towards this “theory” embeddedin the novel is, nevertheless, one of ironic play and reversals; for example,the narrator continues his above analysis as follows:– But, and again but: this sounds, does it not, dangerously like an intentionalistfallacy? – Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea of theself as being (ideally) homogeneous, non-hybrid, ‘pure’, – an utterly fantasticnotion! – cannot, must not, suffice. No! Let’s rather say an evenharder thing: that evil may not be as far beneath our surfaces as we like tosay it is. – That, in fact, we fall towards it naturally, that is, not against ournatures. 53The narrator here construes self as something always and inherentlyhybrid: the immutable and pure ideal of ‘goodness’ thereby becomes something“unnatural” – thus Saladin’s father’s warnings about renouncing one’snatural identity, and of the conscious creation of self as “unnatural” have becomereversed. The immediate context of these two accounts of “unnatural”are different; such dislocations and changes of context are characteristic of49 SV, 427.50Cf. William Blake’s views on the “passivity” of good and the “active” character ofevil; above, page 243. (See also below, page 275.)51 The Satanic Verses refers to the intertwined nature of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ by quotingGoethe’s Faust; SV, 417.52 SV, 8, 10.53SV, 427. Italics in the original.