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

272Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsinto the road of madness by his intervention. If considered as a device at themetafictional level, the inscription of an “author” as a figure into his ownfiction has also its ironies, or ambiguities. It confuses the distinctiveness offiction at its traditional limits: the fields of author, narrator and fiction startto overlap. This structural ambivalence corresponds to the confusing vacillationin the narrator’s self-definition – or, in his obvious unwillingness or incapacityto produce one. The narrator offers both his characters and thereader contradictory messages in a sort of demonic double-play: the questionof the narrator’s identity “will not be resolved here,” as he states. Thisworks as an indication of the interstitial quality of the novel, in general. Insteadof producing identities, it inquires into their possibilities and preconditions.This is at its most manifest in a chain of questions.There is a voice whispering in his [Mahound’s] ear: What kind of idea areyou? Man-or-mouse?We know that voice. We’ve heard it once before. 68The immediate reference here is to the discussion about doubt beingthe opposite of faith, and the sceptical doubts thereby being “devil talk” (thenarrator placed the question if he could be Shaytan himself: “Shaitan interruptingGibreel. [/] Me?”) The Prophet’s nagging self-doubts make this amodern self – and demonic (or the morally more neutral ‘daimonic’) in severalsenses of the concept.What kind of idea am I? I bend. I sway. I calculate the odds, trim my sails,manipulate, survive. 69Here, this question is repeated in the mind of Abu Simbel, the leader ofJahilia. It is further established as a signal of self-scrutiny, of meditation onthe moral ambivalence inherent in the constitution of a self.– Should God be proud or humble, majestic or simple, yielding or un-?What kind of idea is he? What kind am I? 70Abu Simbel’s offer to gain the souls of Jahilia in exchange for the recognitionof the three principal goddesses has caused a fracture in the certaintyof the Prophet’s mind. The Satanic Verses continues here to developthe connection between the human self and its ideas. This novel does notsearch for any “natural” or “authentic” version of subjectivity; human existenceis perceived and understood within the horizon of those ideas thatpeople themselves are able to conceive. Man is always an idea: a human creation,or fabrication – essentially a fiction.68SV, 95.69 SV, 103.70SV, 111.