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

286Demonic Texts and Textual DemonsThe Satanic Verses is a commentary on certain features of this condition;it simultaneously participates in the disintegration of subjectivity, andbecomes (through what has become known as “The Satanic Verses affair”)engulfed in it. The novel and its author have become subjects of “abusevalue”: parts of the novel and the public image of the author have becomedislocated, and pejoratively rearranged by one faction, and yet, sanctified byyet another. 116 There is bleak irony that the author of a major work demolishingtraditional ideas of “authority” has to publicly defend his “original intentions,”or that – after writing the most vicious things about British policebrutality – this author has to resort to those same authorities and policeforces he has attacked, in order to save his life. One cannot avoid the feelingthat the demonic imagery and unresolved, ambiguous conflicts Rushdie gavevoice to have greatly contributed to the “irrational” intensity and scale of responseThe Satanic Verses has encountered. Salman Rushdie wrote about thedemonic conflict inherent in the polyphony of our simultaneously postmodernand traditional, secular and religious, Eastern and Western, reality –and the global reaction proves how painfully accurate his aim was.An analysis of the demonic aspects in The Satanic Verses reveals an impressivearray of polyphonic techniques. The dislocation of religious or politicalmaterial combined with radical transformations of important symbolicfigures opens Rushdie’s text to the ambivalent effects of dissemination –characterised in Derrida’s writing by “the possibility of the ‘death’ of theaddressee, inscribed in the structure of the mark […].” 117 In Rushdie’s case,his writing has, in fact, turned into an infernal machine that continues toproduce new meanings, even against its author’s publicly pronounced intentions.The intertextual structure of the novel has the characteristics ofBarthes’s “plural or demoniacal texture;” 118 it even applies the blasphemouslogic of dramatic reversals and juxtapositions essential in Bakhtin’s andKristeva’s formulations of dialogism and intertextuality. The ambivalentcharacterisations of subjectivity as a heterogeneous and internally conflictingconstruction also contribute significantly to the organisation of The SatanicVerses as a demonic text.To conclude, I point towards the extensive possibilities of the demonic figuresand discourses, many of them realised and reshaped by The SatanicVerses. The dualistic mythical opposition between the angels and the devilsis in innovative ways transposed into the polyphonic context of a multicul-116 “When I am described as an apostate Muslim, I feel as if I have been concealed behinda false self, as if a shadow has become substance while I have been relegated to theshadows. [...] Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene and other writers have written abouttheir sense of an Other who goes about the world bearing their name. There are momentswhen I worry that my Other may succeed in obliterating me.” (Rushdie 1992,406.) <strong>Note</strong> the Gothic and demonic connotations in Rushdie’s description of his ownsituation.117 Derrida 1971/1982, 316.118Barthes 1977, 160; see above, chapter three (page 102).