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

284Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsagery can act as an ambivalent recognition of ties with religious and politicaldiscourses, and simultaneously as a revolt against these influences.THE POSTMODERN UNCONSCIOUS“Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational andconscious one,” Rushdie writes. 110 The Satanic Verses transgresses or unsettlesin numerous ways the limits between fiction and its various others: religiousTruth, revelation, and historical or political texts. In this process it becomesa prime example of a demonic text; it systematically violates culturallysensitive limits and categories. It applies the demonic tradition to makethe reader aware of the long history of heterogeneity and ambiguity in ourcultures – Judaic, Christian, Islamic, and many other cultures have all madeuse of the demonic in different ways. This novel is filled with conflicts: collisionsand contradictions are its lifeblood. In it the personage of the authornarratorelevates himself into godhead; he declares freedom of choice for hischaracters, and at the same time playfully intervenes with their lives. Itschoice of subject matter seeks out the most potent conflicts; it debunks thesanctity of its author’s childhood religion by demystifying the Holy Scriptureof this religion. The novel also clearly signals its approval of secularismin its juxtaposition and handling of the two alternatives that Gibreel andChamcha represent; Chamcha is able to adapt himself, but the religiousdreams of Gibreel are ultimately madness and lead to failure and suicide. Thedemonic ambivalence of the novel’s “double protagonist” (“GibreelsaladinFarishtachamcha,” as he is called in the beginning) is thus partly resolved;this solution is nevertheless only relative, not a complete resolution. The SatanicVerses is a novel of subversion: the “High” position (angels, prophets)is challenged, and the “Low” aspect (devils, blasphemers) is encouraged. Asit strives (in Baal’s words) “to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments,”this novel is so deeply entangled in those symbolic structures of religious-politicaluse of power it examines, that there is also a self-ironic dimensionin the narrator’s question: “Who am I?” The identity of the novel isloaded by the tension between the noncommittal nature of the fiction andthe needs for political commitment.Such Western critics as Linda Hutcheon and Brian McHale have analysedThe Satanic Verses as a representative of a heterogeneous text – a typethat problematically situates itself at the borderline of metafiction and actualhistorical processes and controversies. Hutcheon names this type as “historiographicmetafiction”; McHale thinks that The Satanic Verses highlightsthe limit between fiction and reality in its play with historical persons andevents. 111 Another interpretation would see the novel strongly contestingany such division between “real” and “fiction”; it operates in a postmodernintellectual setting that considers all truths as constructions, and therefore,110 “In Good Faith”; Rushdie 1992, 408.111Hutcheon 1988, 5; McHale 1987, 87-88.