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

The Satanic Verses and the Demonic Text 277the only ones which are transgressed. The separate identities of fiction, theidea of an autonomous work of art, and authorship, are all called in question.Keith Wilson has evoked the classic quotation from Keats in the context ofRushdie’s Midnight’s Children:What Keats definitely offered as the nature and responsibility of his typeof ‘the chameleon Poet’ – ‘A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything inexistence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for[ming] andfilling some other Body’ – is inverted by Saleem into consideration of theother bodies, including all the pre-conception ones, that inform and fill, attimes to overflowing, the writer. The image of the writer as both masterand victim of public and private material, which he has been formed by inthe past and is himself attempting to form in the present, dominates Midnight’sChildren. 87As we saw, the position of narrator in The Satanic Verses is also ambiguousand polyphonic. Gibreel, as the image of a story-teller in the novel,cannot control the sources of his dreams: “this isn’t my voice it’s a Voice” –“God knows whose postman I’ve been.” 88 The narrator is alluding to his roleas the Creator, or author, of this fiction – and even making an appearance onits pages in the likeness of a novelist, perhaps as Rushdie himself – but hisrelationship to his creation is a curious mixture of involvement and detachment.The limits of fiction, and its autonomous identity (as a fantasy separatefrom empirical reality, and as an independent work of art) becomesblurred in many ways.One way that the autonomy of The Satanic Verses is undetermined derivesfrom its overflow of intertextual material. A comparison to Bulgakov’snovel serves as an illustrative example. The scenario and the fundamentalthemes are remarkably similar in The Master and Margarita and The SatanicVerses. In Bulgakov’s work the impulse that sets the story in motion is thearrival of Satan and his demonic entourage into the modern capital of SovietRussia. In The Satanic Verses the devil-shaped Chamcha (and Gibreel in hisrole as the angel of destruction) travel through London. Both novels consistof several intertwined stories, and both include an account of the origin of amajor world religion as one of these. In Bulgakov, this mythical-religiousdimension is the passion of Jesus (“Yeshua Ha-Nostri” in the novel); inRushdie’s text, the revelation received by the Prophet, Muhammad. Thecontrasting mixture of contemporary reality and mythical past, the secularand religious realities operate as the structuring principle in both works. Inaddition, the stylistic and thematic similarities are pronounced: some elementsin contemporary society are made grotesque by employing demonicphenomena. The bitter satire is counterbalanced by a similar philosophy ofrelativism: the demonic and the divine, light and darkness are seen as neces-87Wilson 1984, 24. See Keats 1970, 157. – “Master and victim” is Rushdie’s own expression;see Midnight’s Children (Rushdie 1982, 463).88SV, 112.