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

The Satanic Verses and the Demonic Text 279The repeated query of the narrator – Who am I? – could thus be givenseveral answers (“Mikhail Bulgakov,” “Franz Kafka,” “Gabriel GarcíaMárquez”), depending on which narrative or thematic element is in question.It is justifiable to read the novel’s polyphony as a deconstruction of theidea of an “author”; after all, the unity of an empirical author has been usedto secure some fixed, authorial meanings – those very same pursuits of pureand absolute truths that The Satanic Verses most vehemently opposes.Rushdie himself has attempted to clarify the plurality of his “empirical” selfby pointing out its numerous (and potentially conflicting) influences: amoderate Muslim home, a Christian nanny, friends among Hindus, Sikhs,Parsis, and the hotchpotch of Bombay with its movies, Hindu myths andSpiderman comics; “I was already a mongrel self, history’s bastard, beforeLondon aggravated the condition.” 93 It is hard to find support for the reestablishmentof the author’s intentions as conclusive criteria for the literarymeaning in The Satanic Verses, as Anthony Close has attempted. In his article,“The Empirical Author: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,” Close attacksmost literary theory since W.K. Wimsatt’s and M.C. Beardsley’s article“The Intentional Fallacy” (1946) by claiming that Rushdie’s predicament revealsits irresponsibility. Theoretical claims of how unimportant empiricalauthors are in conferring a text’s meaning gain a “grim frivolity” as Rushdieis sentenced to death because his intentions are not heard. Close argues that“meaning is centered on an egocentric zero-point,” and that one should renounce“implied authors” or “actantial roles” as needless hypotheses. Communicationis always of an “interpersonal nature,” and one should identifythe author “as a person with a specific profile and history, and with designswith his fellow men.” 94Close’s argument for the importance of the empirical author has ethicalappeal and humane value. However, his conception of literature disregardsthose distinctive features of textuality that The Satanic Verses so well illustrates.As discussed in chapters two and three, neither “work of art” or“self” offer shortcuts to some unproblematic unity. Both are contested ideasand continue to deviate radically from our common-sense notions undermore intense scrutiny. The reader of The Satanic Verses does not do justiceto the intricacies of this novel if he forgets how “ego” or “person” are theexact ideas it delights in unravelling. An interpersonal aspect is strongly presentin the novel, and it is a hard task not to discern the political and culturalviews upheld in the text. However, one should remember that it is in the interestsof such “readers” as Ayatollah Khomeini to equate the empirical authorwith “his” fiction. Rushdie quoted Michel Foucault’s essay “What is anAuthor?” in his Herbert Read Memorial Lecture in 1990, noting that accordingto Foucault, “authors were named only when it was necessary to find93 “In God We Trust” (Rushdie 1992, 377, 404); “Is Nothing Sacred?” (ibid., 425).94Close 1990, 251, 255, 256, 265.