Authority, Self, and Community in The Satanic Verses

Abstract

If Midnight’s Children challenges the idea that individuals can represent a nation, The Satanic Verses goes further, destabilizing not only its characters’ representations but also the very notion that there is an absolute truth to represent. The status of “fact,” of objectively verifiable truth, is assigned in the novel almost entirely to internal, personal experience, while the physical truths central to Nabokov’s novels and even Midnight’s Children become unstable. While Saleem’s insistence on “memory’s truth” in Midnight’s Children marks his unreliability, The Satanic Verses seems to validate Saleem’s position, treating “fact” as provable only through personal experience. Michael Gorra, noting how Saleem asks us to take his autobiography literally, says that Midnight’s Children is “a world without metaphor.”¹ In The Satanic Verses, however, proliferating viewpoints render even such subjective literalism difficult because the “incompatible” truths of the novel cannot be reconciled.² It is easy to call this instability prototypically postmodern. More complicated and productive is the problem of how such postmodern privileging of subjective truths helps Rushdie and his readers construct viable real-world communities, rather than leading—as postmodern narratives like Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) do—to a rejection of meaningful communion and communication.