Part of that Power, not Understood

by Rolf-Peter Wille


Satanic verses. An attempt at synopsis might seem foolish indeed: Satan is lustily singing his verses in brilliantly versatile, vainly imaginative--in short, diabolic--tunes, and readers who just manage to "hear" a satirical criticism of Islam, or a social critic of either India or England or both, or whatever interesting message they believe to hear, appear to have fallen under his seductive spell, like--by the way--so many of the characters inside those verses. All great ideologues here, all fanatics and believers, be they prophets, Imam, mountain climber, are inspired by satanic verses. Satan, who may be the narrator of this novel--and I am surprised that no Satanist has complained about this blasphemy yet--has an unlimited repertoire of evil tunes, but he is not just singing them himself. He mainly works his charm through a "double agent" in the form of two Indian men falling out of the air, Satan’s "empire in the liquid waste," and onto proper London ("Those bastards down there won’t know what hit them."). Farishta and Chamcha hurtle "downdown," embracing "head-to tail" and, ever after, their lives intertwine in the most fantastic web not unlike those of the Monk Medardus and Count Viktorin in ETA Hoffmann’s "The Devil's Elixirs" (1816). And not just their lives. Reality magically mixes with dream, the present causes the past, the profane the sacred; a Bollywood actor metamorphoses into an archangel, prostitutes pretend to be the wives of the Prophet (including a "dead" one catering to the "necrophilia of her lovers"), devils are redeemed. But, strange enough, hell is not the result of this satanic manipulation; it is life--and quite a spicy one too, as you could have guessed.

Chamcha or Samsa? Saladin Chamcha is brutalized by the London police in "Gregor Samsa" like fashion after his hellish metamorphosis into a stinking (scape)goat, but--unlike Kafka’s Samsa [Franz Kafka "The Metamorphosis" (1916)] who dies as a beetle--Chamcha’s transformation and isolation are only temporary.

Who is this devil then? He is, like Goethe’s Mephistopheles, "Part of that Power, not understood, Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good." (as quoted in Part 7 of the "Satanic Verses"). The devil as antithesis. He is also the satirical poet Baal clashing with the dogmatic Mahound (the fictitious "Prophet") in Part 6 of the novel. "Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive." says Baal before he is executed. Mahound replies, "Writers and whores. I see no difference here." Who should feel insulted now? Upon careful reading everything becomes less clear: The "Prophet" is not always dogmatic, but sometimes quite practical. The poet is not always heroic. He is also a coward and his service can be bought. And the whores are quite nice and the most moral and loyal beings in this dream sequence. Satan, having no certain abode, is everywhere and he works Life, be it good or bad.

"Who art thou, then? --Part of that Power, not understood, Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good." This is also the epigraph of Mikhail Bulgakov's novel, "The Master and Margarita," (1930s). Rushdie’s dream sequences ("Mahound," "Return to Jahilia") remind me a lot of Bulgakov’s "Pontius Pilate" and "The Execution," though it cannot be denied that Bulgakov’s simpler prose is far more concentrated and also projects a more compact vision. Rushdie--or whoever his narrator may be--has the annoying tendency to squeeze into his sentences too many attributes, too many metaphors; all of them colorful, all of them amusing items…, yes…, but his Muse does not always bother to compose them into solid counterpoint. In the dream sequence "Return to Jahilia" the poet Baal complains that "his verses [not Rushdie’s but Baal’s] were full of loss: of youth, beauty, love, health, innocence, purpose, energy, certainty, hope. Loss of knowledge. Loss of money. The loss of Hind. […] How did one map a country that blew into a new form every day? Such questions made his language too abstract, his imagery too fluid, his metre too inconstant. It led him to create chimeras of form, lionheaded goatbodied serpenttailed impossibilities whose shapes felt obliged to change the moment they were set, so that the demotic forced its way into lines of classical purity and images of love were constantly degraded by the intrusion of elements of farce."

Of course it is understood that the prose here somehow satirizes its own content. But there are far too many examples of such "Baalism" in Rushdie’s own rhetorical (de)construction. As a reader I face a dilemma: Either I read prestissimo, I read superficially, I miss most of the tidbits. Or I have to read molto rubato, sample each "Delhi Delhi deleteriously" delicious dish [my style approaches Rushdie’s here] on the buffet table, spicy Mumbai or Ellowen Deeowen (London), and probably end up inside a bathroom and outside the novel.

Large sections of the "Satanic Verses" do have a steadier tempo though. The strongest composition in the novel is without doubt the utterly unforgettable tale of Titlipur, the rich poor town of the magic butterflies, whose inhabitants follow the fanatical girl prophet Ayesha on a beautifully horrible pilgrimage through India and the Arabian Sea towards Mecca. This story is told in Part 4 ("Ayesha," starting with the 5th "chapter") and continued in Part 8 ("The Parting of the Arabian Sea") and--though this is another one of Farishta’s compulsive dreams--the story could very well be read independently.