The Satanic Verses

Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1988

Where do I even start with Rushdie? He was confusing. He made me angry. He made me squirm in my chair and want to throw his book across the room in frustration. But, with just over a hundred pages left to read, I started to find him rewarding. I think this is a book you’d have to read twice, if you ever had the time. It wasn’t till near the end that I got the hang of who the characters were, and sorted out their backstories (more or less).Though I might have to go back and reread parts from the first ~300 pages, I think the most interesting things, in terms of my own research, happened in the second half, once Gibreel’s madness becomes focal.

At the start of the novel, as both protagonists fall from the sky, they also both feel that they are being taken over by something:

He [Saladin Chamcha] found himself surrendering to it, yes, go on, as if he were a bystander in his own mind, in his own body, because it began in the very centre of his body and spread outwards, turning his blood to iron, changing his flesh to steel... until it finally conquered him totally and could work his mouth, his fingers, whatever it chose, and once it was sure of its dominion it spread outward from his body and grabbed Gibreel Farishta by the balls” (9).

Thus, whatever possesses Gibreel, possesses Saladin as well, though only the latter ends up medicalized, since his displays of madness are more public and overtly violent/self-destructive, and since he is Indian, and not even trying to be English. Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that both men are possessed by the same angel/devil source, which leads to interesting questions about who gets to pass as sane, and who does not.

I think that the idea of Gibreel is a “mentally ill” person gets reinforced by the end of the novel (especially when he recounts his remorse for murdering Allie Cone and S.S. "Whisky" Sisodia, saying his sickness made him do it) (558-9); Saladin, however, who has reconciled with his now-dead father and with India, the country where he belongs (belonging to a place being another central theme in this novel) gets off scot-free-sane, even though he intentionally propelled Gibreel’s madness, which is itself a kind of violence (458).

Though I haven’t read any criticism of the novel yet, I’d be interested to see how others have read Gibreel’s madness. I think the book allows you to read it as the story of a schizophrenic, a story about how Schizophrenia, his “disease” affects his life and those of others. I think, it’s a bit ludicrous to read the novel in this kind of psychiatrized way, however. Why take such a rationalizing, medicalizing approach to a novel that is full of magic? Doesn’t it make just as much sense to believe that Gibreel really is being controlled by some God(s) or Devil(s) and a woman on a magic carpet? Obviously, Gibreel has suffered trauma, with his illness, his subsequent loss of faith––leading him to eat unclean meat (84)––as well as the suicide of his former lover Rekah (15). It is plausible that his mind has bent in reaction to these events, but then how do we account for the magical manifestations which are seemingly outside of Gibreel’s mind? How do we account for Saladin’s transformation into an imp/goat, a transformation which is witnessed not only by Gibreel, but by numerous other characters from the police and immigration officers on (162-3)? For the fact that some do see Gibreel’s halo? (146, 463). How do we explain that Allie Cone, reportedly sane, also sees visions (even after she is off of oxygen-deprived top-of-Everest) and that Gibreel, too, sees Maurice Wilson (Allie’s apparition), just before he kills her (205, 314, 457, 559)? Or that Gibreel’s consciousness, his fantasy life, seems to be able to leak out of him, and impose itself on the material world, as when Pamela’s hair turns white, like Allie’s and Ayesha’s (202, 233, 290) or when he makes the weather turn hot through his fantasy of London-as-Tropical-City (365-7)? This is not a realist novel. The only reason to take a realist/rationalist approach is that culturally, we believe that psychiatry is rational, while we believe that myth and magic are not. And I guess religion lies somewhere in the middle, with some believing in its realness and some not (as the story of Ayesha the prophetess’ pilgrimage demonstrates) (504). The idea of mental illness, like religious and mythical ideas, explain the unexplainable, and in The Satanic Verses I think these discourses are conflated in ways that offer a critique of both Religion and Psychiatry (97, 195).

The novel suggests that what you believe about yourself is the truth, so long as nobody forces you to challenge that idea: Allie makes this point when she tells the story of the schizophrenic who believed he was Napoleon failing a lie detector test when he said he was not Napoleon (348). The “delusional” reality of the deluded is no more or less real than the “sane” reality of the the sane. Allie is also critical of psychiatry, rebuking her mother’s suggestion that Gibreel be committed to a mental hospital, saying: “You’d throw away the key. Maybe you’d even plug him in. Burn the devils out of his brain: strange how some prejudices never change” (349). Allie’s point is clear: we still believe in devils, but now they are labelled diseases and treated with electric shock instead of exorcism. One discourse has simply overlapped another, palimpsest-like. Gibreel himself, though he questions his own sanity, does not refer to himself as diseased until after his medicalization, as which point, “he faced the fact of his mental illness with courage, refusing to play it down or call it by a false name” (350). He accepts his diagnosis as truth, but this idea of himself as a schizophrenic simply overlays his idea of himself as an angel, and justifies actions (like arson and murder) which are only just if you are an angel of vengeance, or a madman, but not if you are a sane human being.

Just as Gibreel believes himself to be an angel, and this belief bears out in the narrative to some extent, Saladin believes that he is English, and this is both affirmed and challenged in the narrative. Madness and how we conceptualize it is one of the main themes coming out in The Satanic Verses, and the immigrant experience is another. Madness and the immigrant experience are also connected in the novel. Saladin is able to “pass” as English because of his social position. He is willing to assimilate, to see England as a nation of victors, a Dikensian picture-postcard place where the kind of violence he experienced at the hands of the police and immigration officers does not happen (265, 38, 163, 181). Saladin idolizes the English literary cannon, as well as the queen and other monuments of Englishness (39, 175, 412). He sees himself as English, not Indian (262). He also sees himself as raceless (267) ], as a man of many voices, who can easily imitate an English accent or any other (60). He, like Gibreel, has many voices inside him, but he uses them in ways which work within the capitalist, biopolitical system, in ways which help him blend in, not stand out. It is not until he is debased as an animal, a “Paky,” an other, that Saladin realizes that he only gets to belong to England insofar as his otherness remains largely invisible (162). His horns come to stand in for his difference, much as the turban he is forced to wear to cover them up does (267). Though he is purportedly insane, Gibreel’s experience of disorientation, especially his experience of being lost on the tube when he first comes to London, is typical of other immigrant narratives (I think there was a similar incident in The Lonely Londoners) (207). The medicalization of immigrant otherness and disorientation is also critiqued by Jamshed “Jumpy” Joshi, who connects the Saladin’s “illegal detention” and the “medical experimentation in hospital” experienced by Saladin and the other part-myth people to other oppressive actions on immigrant health such as “Depo-Provera scandals, unauthorized post-partum sterilizations, and... Third World drug-dumping” (261). Although Jumpy relies on the rationalist discourse of science instead of the magical discourse of myth by using racist medical debacles to explain Saladin’s transformation, he also recognizes the sinister side of the medical system, which diagnoses and experiments upon vulnerable outsiders such as immigrants, who commonly experience “psychological breakdown, loss of sense of self, inability to cope” not because they are crazy, but because they are socially ostracized (261). Thus Saladin’s, and especially Gibreel’s, experiences of angelic/demonic otherness/madness work both as a kind of hyperbole of the immigrant experience in Britain, as well as a critique of the way in which one’s privilege or lack there of can mask or make one’s madness.