Salman Rushdie’s mammoth 1996 “magical realism” fantasy is less well known for its actual content than for having enraged the fundamentalist Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini with the book’s supposed blasphemies. The cleric placed an assassination order on Rushdie, and though he was never attacked, other persons associated with the book’s publication met unpleasant fates.
Over twenty years after the controversy, SATANIC hardly seems like the sort of work capable of generating such friction. The title refers to a traditional narrative that asserts that during the period when the Prophet Mohammed was dictating the verses of the Koran, Satan—or, to use the more traditional rendering, Shaitan—attempted to interfere by corrupting the text with falsehoods. In Rushdie’s novel, two modern-day Pakistani Muslims, Gibreel and Saladin, find themselves caught up in an unexplained recapitulation of Islamic mythology. Gibreel sometimes morphs into an angelic being modeled on the traditional “Gabriel” of the Old Testament, while Saladin finds himself literally going to the Devil, taking on horns and hooves and a general goatish appearance. There’s no plot as such; just countless scenes of weird things happening to Gibreel, Saladin, their family members and various supporting characters. It may not be coincidence that both main characters are Bollywood actors, for often SATANIC seems like a bunch of barely connected scenes devised for a sprawling religious epic; a Mahabharata for the pop culture age.
I’ve not sought out any interviews in which Rushdie may have held forth on his aims in writing the novel. My own inexpert take is that the author hoped to do for Muslim culture what James Joyce did for Ireland: to create a long book stuffed to the gills with abstruse references from both canonical and popular culture. Late in the book, a character coins the phrase “I Sing the Body Eclectic,” punning on the title of a Walt Whitman poem, which in turn became better known as the title of a Ray Bradbury short story. Eclecticism is both the bane and the bounty of modern life to both Gibreel and Saladin, who in my view are barely distinguishable extensions of the author’s consciousness. In the modern world, there can be none of the cultural purity ascribed to the beginnings of Muslim culture (whether said purity actually existed or not). Thus, the modern world is not only one where Whitman rubs shoulders with Bradbury, but also one where one person is named for two Samuel Richardson characters while another’s name references Rider Haggard’s “She.” William Blake rubs conceptual shoulders with Superman and Wonder Woman; Bollywood Hindu epics share mind-space with that of Japanese arthouse-animator Yoji Kuri.
Beyond showing modern life to be an unrelenting Babel, I don’t think SATANIC accomplishes much in terms of its characters or plot-action. However, Rushdie’s foremost talent here is that of coming up with witty epigrams, even if they are all spoken by people who sound substantially the same. Rushdie often parodies the chauvinism of the Brits who once dominated India and much of the “Third World,” and he’s acutely aware of the history of American Civil Rights conflicts. That said, the author proves almost prescient in anticipating how the marginalized might seek to manipulate the dialogue about race in their favor:
What one hates in whites—love of brown sugar—one must hate when it turns up, inverted, in black. Bigotry is not only a function of power.
I don’t know what phenomena Rushdie might have beheld in the nineties that might have made him anticipate the eventual articulation of the “systemic racism” concept, which argues that only racism enforced by a majority counts as “real racism.” But I found epigrams like this one to be much more interesting than any of his attempts to describe the Joycean Babel of modern culture.
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