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

280Demonic Texts and Textual Demonssomebody to blame.” Literature, the discourse of art (Foucault emphasised),was originally “an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane.”95 Even if the personal history of an author is the formative process inan artwork’s emergence, one should see how this process is also an outlet fornumerous determining influences that cannot be reduced to the author’sperson. The Satanic Verses invites meditations on the unconscious aspectsinvolved in the creation of fiction, and about the possibilities for the subjectalways being plural, and heterogeneous; knowledge about the author’s intellectualsetting can surely be suggested as an ethical norm, but – as the“Rushdie affair” so dramatically proves – texts are actually always “misread,”received as dislocated and somehow alien visitors in a context different fromwhat was originally intended. This uncomfortable horizon of demonic heterogeneityand conflicting realities is, of course, what The Satanic Verses isall about.All this said, there nevertheless remain questions to be answered regardingthe relationship of fiction with its other in the text. Why is the keycharacter in the “Satanic Verses” episode called “Salman”? “Your blasphemy,Salman, can’t be forgiven. Did you think I wouldn’t work it out? To setyour word against the Word of God,” announces the Prophet of fiction,prophetically heralding Rushdie’s own death sentence. 96 The poor scribe hadbegun to doubt the divinity of Mahound’s revelation, and started alteringthe words of the Qur’an he recorded. Salman is then, literally, the author of“the Satanic Verses”: he is shaking the faith in the Holy Scripture by provingthat writing is made by humans, and that it is subject to revisions and alterations.He doubts that the Scripture is really outside time and history, a revelationof the transcendent Word as the faithful have it – and this doubt, notthe total disbelief, is the “opposite of faith” (“Devil talk,” as the narratorputs it). The inscription of the name, “Salman,” into the fiction in this roleand manner, is thereby a powerful gesture of self-demonisation; the empiricalauthor is implicated in a discursive battle about the status of writing. TheSatanic Verses embodies in itself the conflict between the ideas of “fiction”and “Truth” and articulates it using demonic imagery.Salman saves his neck by betraying his friend, Baal, the satirist poet. Heis nominated as the “true enemy” of the Prophet, and the most violent conflictin the novel is imagined between these two operators of language. AsThe Satanic Verses connects with the tradition of great satirical novels, theconflict between satire and scripture is yet another way in which the noveldiscusses the status of its own fictionality at the face of an alternative (religious)mode of using language. 97 Baal is the representative of the author in95“Is Nothing Sacred?” (Rushdie 1992, 424); italics in the original. Foucault 1979, 148.96 SV, 374.97 Edward and Lillian Bloom have noticed in their study, The Satire’s Persuasive Voice,how satire’s intention to take a stand has always been in danger of becoming destructive,instead of being “righteous.” The traditional view of religious satire is based on the convictionapparent in pamphlets of such a writer as John Milton; they might be ferocious in