‘Ellowen, Deeowen’: Salman Rushdie and The Migrant’s Desire

Abstract

The Satanic Verses, the only one of Salman Rushdie’s novels to be set substantially in England, must be read within the paradigm established by his wider fictional project. Like his other novels, The Satanic Verses uses the discourse of migrancy as the launching pad for an attack on nationalism. And yet, this chapter will argue, for all his attempts to underscore the objective political validity of his anti-nationalist narratives, Rushdie’s work is severely constrained by its libidinal sub-text. Departing from India, or arriving in England, his fiction is, as Fredric Jameson might put it, private rather than public, poetic rather than practical, therapeutic rather than political.¹ In his ‘subcontinental’ novels and themes, for instance, the author’s private deliriums are more easily accessible to analysis. The emigre-hero’s guilty pessimism about the home he is leaving, his patricidal fantasies, his obsessive fear of maternal engulfment, each cast a distinct shadow on the ‘politics’ of his revulsion for the nation. In contrast, in The Satanic Verses, and incidentally, in the few England scenes of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, it looks as though England has finally made a politics out of Rushdian migrancy. The former novel, especially, seems redolent of British new socialism and ‘new social movements’. Drawing upon these sources quite explicitly, Rushdie identifies himself with the ideological forces that launched a powerful attack on conservative nationalism in the grim age of Thatcherism.