One way of addressing the vexed problem of defining the grotesque would be to consider it, as J. P. Stern does the question of realism, in terms of Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances.¹ But as Freud observed of the supernatural in his essay on “The Uncanny”, the grotesque too affects us very differently in different social and aesthetic contexts.² Most theories of the grotesque see it as in some way defamiliarizing or transgressive of traditional boundaries. But as Popper pointed out, theory always precedes observation, and different theorists tend to privilege the aspects of the grotesque that fit their aesthetic or ideological convictions.³ Bakhtin's emphasis on Rabelais' “grotesque realism” of the body and his notion of the carnivalesque have been criticized for advancing a “prescriptive model of a socialist collectivity”, and displaying a “nostalgia for origins”.⁴ Kayser by contrast emphasizes the disturbing, uncanny, nightmarish side of the grotesque in Tieck and Hoffmann, who in many ways herald the alienated psychological grotesque of modernists like Dostoevsky, Joyce and Kafka that McElroy has explored.⁵ Harpham assimilates the grotesque to deconstructive theory, arguing that “all grotesque art threatens the notion of a center by implying coherencies just out of reach, metaphors or analogies just beyond our grasp.”⁶ While Kristeva, Russo and Creed privilege various aspects of the “monstrous feminine” in different media.⁷

Several aspects of this body of theory are pertinent to Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, which of all his novels is perhaps the richest in the sheer profusion of its grotesque effects. In the first place, as a self-conscious, parodic metafictive text, not a little influenced by Grass and Pynchon, the entire novel might be said to be grotesque in the sense that it transgresses traditional generic boundaries.⁸ Like his mimic-man hero and star of the TV Aliens Show Saladin, and Gibreel his alter-ego, who has graduated from Indian village clown parts to become the screen idol of the “Theologicals” in the roles of Hanuman and Ganesh, Rushdie too as fabulist moves in and out of different narrative masks. And The Satanic Verses is by turns oriental tale, dream vision, migrant saga full of Dickensian eccentrics, Joycean exploration of father/son relationships and Lawrentian analysis of the obstacles to love between the sexes, drawing extensively on both high art and popular culture in its pursuit of the grotesque. The extent to which this transgressive principle is taken structurally can be gauged by comparison with Bulgakov's Hoffmannesque fantasy The Master and Margarita. In this three-tiered novel, the invasion of Stalinist Moscow by the devil figure Woland and his macabre accomplices is counterpointed against realistic, demythologized scenes from Christ's Passion, dreamed or written by the Master of the title and his beloved Margarita, which function as a norm.⁹ In The Satanic Verses Saladin and Gibreel's exploits in London and Bombay are similarly removed in time from Gibreel's dream visions of Mohamed/Mahound's life, but these do not have the normative function of the Jesus sequence in Bulgakov, and both the novel's time frames are surreally invaded by the grotesque and the fantastic.

This is not to say (and this is my second general point) that Rushdie is creating pure pastiche—indeed as Brennan and others have shown in detail, unlike much merely playful western metafiction, The Satanic Verses is a typical post-colonial metafictive text in that it is very much sociopolitically engaged.¹⁰ But I would argue that, as in his earlier novel Shame, which presents shame and shamelessness, repression and the return of the repressed, as two sides of the same coin, the conceptual schema underlying the contemporary and intertextual allusiveness of The Satanic Verses is relatively simple. When the novel was banned in India in 1988, Rushdie protested in a letter to the Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi that it “isn't actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay.”¹¹ And the centrality of the Mahound, Imam and Ayesha episodes does not invalidate Rushdie's general claim that the novel is concerned with more universal issues. Put perhaps too simply, The Satanic Verses is a very Blakean polemic against the errors not just of Islam but of “all Bibles or sacred codes” which divide heaven from hell, soul from body, man from woman, self from other and race from race, and propagate closed, essentialist “grand narratives” (p. 537) rather than open, pluralist narratives like Rushdie's.¹² The bodily grotesque tends therefore to be a negative rather than a positive sign as in Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais. In terms of Harpham's theory of the grotesque as something decentering and destabilizing, The Satanic Verses is generically a hybrid, but argues single-mindedly for cultural pluralism.

This gives rise to a third general issue: the extent to which our response to grotesque characters, episodes and images in Rushdie is affected by our sense that they belong within a conceptual schema. In his discussion of the kind of fantasy that entails an invasion of the real world by the supernatural, Todorov argues that as soon as we suspect that the uncanny or inexplicable events may cohere on a higher allegorical plane, our responses alter and the hesitation between natural and supernatural explanations which he regards as the mark of true fantasy evaporates.¹³ Something analogous may often be said to occur with the grotesque as well. To take an obvious example, Saladin's transformation into a devil or satyr and his humiliation in the Black Maria disturb us, but they do so on an intellectual plane, because we recognize them as emblematic of xenophobic racism and police brutality in general. And when he cries out “I am not a freak”, tension is diffused by the officer's comic retort: “Just that you look like one” (p. 252). When the Elephant Man (mentioned later in the novel—see p. 275) is cornered in a public lavatory and makes a similar plea, our visceral response is more powerful because we recognize that his deformity is real, not allegorical.

Analogously, there is little sense of the uncanny in Gibreel's macabre opening romance with the ghostly Argentinian ex-colonial Rosa Diamond, because we construe his donning of her dead husband Henry's clothes allegorically, as the mimic-man's impulse to avoid the kind of racism meted out to Saladin by adopting the ways of his former colonial masters. In an authorial aside, Rushdie comments that “the grotesque has me, as before the quotidian had me, in its thrall” (p. 260). And his frequent shifts in storytelling mode and often incongruous clustering of intertextual allusions for satiric or black-humorous effect, tend to require imaginative dexterity and to subvert the establishment of the kind of unity of mood we encounter in, say, Marquez. A good example would be the opening scene in which “Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha” are seen grotesquely locked together head to crotch in their “angelicdevilish fall” (p. 5) or sky-dive from the exploded plane, just prior to their separation by the police. In what Charles Schuster might regard as an exemplary threshold situation, Rushdie invokes the fall of Milton's Satan, Blake's deconstruction of it as a “fall into division”, and Alice's tumble down the rabbit-hole—in the migrant context, death of the old self, exile, psychic and cultural division and rebirth into a strange new world.¹⁴

There is a Shandean exuberance to Rushdie's syncretist imagination and many of his grotesqueries do seem purely playful, but I should like to focus on those that seem more closely related to his central themes. The archetypal disaster alluded to in the title of The Satanic Verses occurs when Mahound becomes a Urizenic patriarchal tyrant by rejecting the female principle represented by Uzza (Beauty), Manat (Fate) and mother-goddess Al-hat, “Allah's opposite and equal” (p. 100) as a temptation of the devil, and insists on submission to his parodically exaggerated book of rules (p. 364). His twelve wives, or their doubles, are confined within a labyrinthine oriental brothel named “The Curtain”, Baal the poet finds the call for satire (that litmus-test of a democracy) has dried up, and is eventually beheaded, the carnivalesque fair at Jahilia declines, and Hind the mayor's pleasure-loving wife becomes a demonic warrior maiden who remains eternally young as the city decays. But Rushdie makes clear that these tendencies are not confined to Islam by including caricatured fanatics of various persuasions, some of whom display the protean or metamorphic qualities which are the hallmark of his magic realism. There is the hijacker Tavleen, “grenades like extra breasts nestling in her cleavage” (p. 81), who makes “Saladin Chamcha want to argue” with her, “unbendingness can also be monomania, he wanted to say, it can be tyranny, and it can be brittle, whereas what is flexible can also be humane, and strong enough to last” (p. 81). There is the American creationist Eugene Dumsday, “a humble foot soldier … in the army of Guard Almighty” (p. 75), crusading against Darwin's evolutionism, whose tongue lands in Saladin's lap when Tavleen silences him with her rifle butt.¹⁵ There is the caricature of Khomeini, the Imam, engaged (like Mahound before him) in mortal struggle with “a powerful woman, his enemy, his other” (p. 206), the Queen of the Night (p. 215).¹⁶ He is part Nobodaddy, part oriental genie, part celebrant at Bulgakov's Witches' Sabbath, as he “slings his beard over his shoulder, hoists up his skirts to reveal two spindly legs with an almost monstrous covering of hair, and leaps high into the night air”, before riding Gibreel like a magic carpet through the moonlight toward his “idea” of Jerusalem—from Rushdie's point of view, the “Babylonian whore” (p. 212).¹⁷ Later he is transformed into a monstrous, yawning hell-mouth which, like the Iran/Iraq war, swallows up the people passing through the palace gates. And there is the epileptic, butterfly-devouring Indian girl Ayesha, who leads her village pilgrims into a sea that will not part, releasing their butterfly souls which then regroup as a giant figure (Gibreel, we later learn—p. 457) over the horizon.¹⁸ In all these cases grotesque figures evoking very different imaginative and cultural worlds are thematically linked.

Given Rushdie's interest in the multiple selves that the experience of migration so often engenders, it is not surprising that his use of doubling should be both central and sophisticated. His metafictive techniques tend of course to undermine the kind of ontologically disturbing effect that Hoffmann achieves with his grotesque, uncanny doubles in The Sandman. But The Satanic Verses is very much concerned with the alienation from self and from society that both Kayser and Bakhtin associate with the inward-looking psychological grotesque from the Romantic period on.¹⁹ The Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship between the angelic soul Gibreel and Saladin the mutated body, “each man the other's shadow” (p. 426), has both patriarchal and (as mooted earlier) post-colonial implications, in that Gibreel's unpardonable sin is to dissociate himself not merely from his bodily but from his racial identity. The abject Saladin as satyr, confined in the attic of the Shaandaar Café, embodies both this self-loathing and society's suspicion of the racially other, and as racial tensions mount in London he grows (like Alice) eight foot tall and becomes the focus of rumours about witchcraft cults. The danger of projecting such paranoid “schizophrenic” (p. 351) states onto reality, and seeing people as angelic or infernal others, is exemplified by Gibreel himself when he feels the “universe fork” and takes the “left hand path” (p. 352), on making his Christ-like come-back as an actor, heralded by the fanatical Maslama as a six-toed John the Baptist, and haloes suddenly become as popular as devil masks.

To a degree these angelic-devilish divisions within Gibreel/Saladin, which combine the symbolic with the psychological grotesque, are mirrored in their relationships with their western female partners. If the Hind, Queen of the Night and “Curtain” scenes allude to the abject status of women under Islam and its violent potentialities, here Rushdie explores the insidious ways race-consciousness can distort relationships even in a modern marriage. Pamela's attraction for Saladin has been that she (and especially her voice) epitomized the upper-class Englishness his postcolonial soul has always longed for, yet they agree on nothing and she cuckolds him (he is in this sense too a horny devil) with his friend Jumpy Joshe. Alleluia Cohn, the mountaineering blonde, and Gibreel are sexually compatible, but she finds his schizophrenic soul beyond her. These doublings are triangulated further when Saladin begins to play Iago to Gibreel's Othello, “believing he saw” in him “the embodiment of all the good fortune that [he], the Fury-haunted Chamcha so singularly lacked” (p. 429), and sowing the seeds of destruction in a way befitting the return of the repressed. Even more complex fracturings within Gibreel are suggested in an apocalyptic passage reminiscent of Blake's Milton²⁰ where Rushdie seems to be foreshadowing two alternative outcomes to his metafictive story. Gibreel

moves as if through a dream, because after days of wandering the city without eating or sleeping, with the trumpet named Azreel tucked safely in a pocket of his greatcoat, he no longer recognizes the distinction between the waking and dreaming states;—he understands now something of what omnipresence must be like, because he is moving through several stories at once, there is a Gibreel who mourns his betrayal by Alleluia Cohn, and a Gibreel hovering over the death-bed of a pilgrimage to the sea, waiting for the moment at which he will reveal himself, and a Gibreel who feels, more powerfully every day, the will of the adversary, drawing him ever closer, leading him towards their final embrace: the subtle deceiving adversary, who has taken the face of his friend, of Saladin his truest friend, in order to lull him into lowering his guard. And there is a Gibreel who walks down the streets of London, trying to understand the will of God.

Is he to be the agent of God's wrath?

Or of his love?

Is he vengeance or forgiveness? Should the fatal trumpet remain in his pocket, or should he take it out and blow?

(p. 457)

The dénouement, in which the two mimic-men return to Bombay, is in fact appropriately double. And the Othello-like murder-suicide of Gibreel, Alleluia and Sosidian the stuttering producer, is counterpointed against the no longer self-divided Saladin's reconciliation with his dying father and reunion with his first Indian love, Zeenat Vikal. The Blakean or Bulgakovian view of woman as redemptress here and in Alleluia's attempt to wean Gibreel from his “Mad/Angelic/Divinity” (p. 435) might not please every feminist, but at least they are both liberated women.

What none of this accounts for is the sheer zaniness of The Satanic Verses—its affinities with say Brazil or Monty Python. And narratologically, Rushdie's many masks as fabulist and Gibreel's role as part visionary part voyeuristic camera eye, like the angels in Wenders' Wings of Desire, make for unusual flexibility. Some of the grotesque effects seem pure bravura, as when Zeenat's mother dies like a carved chicken, losing first one breast then the other (p. 53), or when the hijackers are described as “shootingstars” (p. 78) seeking television coverage, or when Alleluia climbing with her sherpas is likened to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Pamela watches vampire movies on TV (p. 182) and when she talks drunkenly of her indifference to Saladin's reported death, Jumpy reacts like a vampire stricken by the light (p. 173). In the Ayesha sequence, the giant banyan tree dominates the village of Titlipur like the plumbing in Brazil. But more typically the grotesque effects are thematically integral, even when, as with the comment on the ubiquity of Indian migrants, their heads turning up in Idi Amin's fridge (p. 54), the full resonances may strike us only gradually. Many are related to the theme of racism—Saladin's monstrous fellow detainees (p. 168), for instance, or Gibreel's surreal dream of a man trying to escape the prison of his glass skin (p. 34), or the seven-foot hybrid albino “Indian who has never seen India, East-India-man from the West Indies, white black man. A star” (p. 292). The Club Hot Wax houses effigies both of villains like Mosley, Powell and Thatcher, who believe in the “homogeneous, non-hybrid, ‘pure’” (p. 427), and of unsung heroes from alternate histories. The Granny Ripper, who leaves his victims literally heart-in-mouth, is assumed to be a black.

Episodes involving haunting too, defined at one point as “unfinished business” (p. 129), are integral, though often comically presented. Prior to leaving Bombay, Saladin sees his mother's ghost at the old family home of Scandal Point, in the person of an old retainer's wife who has inherited her clothes, and for whom his “giant” (p. 36) “gargoyle” (p. 64) father forsakes his new wife at weekends, courtesy of the retainer. He is horrified by what can be seen as a ghoulish clinging to the past—one of the things about India itself that makes him want to leave—but also as a tribute and an act of love, as later after his mimic-man experiences he comes to appreciate. Gibreel and Alleluia Cohn are both haunted by a sense of failure—Gibreel by the suicide of his mistress Rekha Merchant, Allie by a vision of the yogi mountaineer who failed to conquer Everest—which mimetically is linked to the failure of their relationship. Pamela, too, whose punning maiden name is Lovelace, is haunted by her parents' suicide. And Mahound, of course, the spiritual architect of so many of their troubles, is haunted by the self-deprecating Gibreel, onto whom he projects his legalistic visions as the voice of God (see p. 110).

If there is little here of the kind of uncanny effect that Todorov discusses, Rushdie's use of the grotesque to express alienated states such as migrants frequently experience clearly has affinities with Kayser's understanding of it. Moreover when one contemplates the total impact of The Satanic Verses, one is left with a sense that, in a world where God is dead, and his “management skills” (p. 92) never up to much when he was reputedly alive, the author finds life itself grotesque, and that the black humour is a form of whistling in the dark. Rushdie would seem to share Bakhtin's notion of the grotesque as liberating sociopolitically—and also perhaps from the anxiety of literary influence. But there is little sense in The Satanic Verses of the grotesque body as inherently redemptive, or that apocalypse will herald the new golden age that Bakhtin detects in Rabelais. Rushdie distrusts all forms of purism as anti-pluralist and potentially totalitarian. With the exception perhaps of the proprietress of “The Curtain” and the Imam's demonic emanation, the Queen of the Night, his portrayals of woman are less grotesque here than in Shame or Midnight's Children, but his sense of the link between patriarchy and the “monstrous feminine” is nonetheless astute.

Notes

1. J. Stern, On Realism (London: Routledge, 1973), pp. 28-29.

2. S. Freud, “The Uncanny”, Collected Papers, vol. 4., trans. J. Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), p. 405.

3. Quoted in G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 22.

4. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 19, 1-58, 303-67; see M. Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 61; and Harpham, p. 73, quoting Derrida.

5. W. Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. U. Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 68f. See B. McElroy, Fiction of the Modern Grotesque (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), pp. 30-69.

6. Harpham, op. cit., p. 43.

7. J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on the Abject, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); M. Russo, The Female Grotesque; B. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (London: Routledge, 1993).

8. S. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Dover, Del.: The Consortium, 1988). All citations are taken from the 1992 paperback edition. See U. Chaudhuri, “Imaginative Maps: Excerpts from a Conversation with Salman Rushdie,” Turnstile, 2.1 (1990), p. 37.

9. M. Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, trans. M. Glenny (London: Fontana, 1967). For the normative function of the Jesus plot, see J. Davies, “Bulgakov: Atheist or Militant Old Believer?: The Master and Margarita Reconsidered,” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, 6 (1992), pp. 25-33.

10. T. Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989); M. Fischer and M. Abedi, “Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World: Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses,” Cultural Anthropology, 5.2 (1990), pp. 107-59; and T. Asad, “Ethnography, Literature, and Politics: Some Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses,” Cultural Anthropology, 5.3 (1990), pp. 239-66.

11. M. Fisher and M. Abedi, op.cit. p. 110.

12. See D. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake (New York: Anchor, 1982), p. 34.

13. T. Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. R. Howard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 58-74.

14. C. Schuster, “Threshold Texts and Essayistic Voices,” in J. Davies, ed., Bridging the Gap: Literary Theory in the Classroom (West Cornwall, Conn.: Locust Hill Press, 1994), pp. 87-88.; and M. Bakhtin, Problems in Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. C. Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 170.

15. Dumsday was based on an American creationist called Duana Gish—see Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 (London: Granta, 1991), p. 368.

16. See J. English, Comic Transactions: Literature, Humor, and the Politics of Community in Twentieth-Century Britain (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 230.

17. This moonlit ride toward the Imam's demonic version of Jerusalem has echoes both of Bulgakov's novel, and of course of Blake.

18. For a discussion of other stock types in the novel, see English, op.cit., pp. 231-37.

19. W. Kayser, op.cit., p. 114; and M. Bakhtin, op. cit., pp. 45-47.

20. Rushdie parodies Blake's fall “outstretched upon the path” in the apocalyptic closing lines of Milton (D. Erdman, op. cit., p. 143) when he has Gibreel open “his eyes to find himself collapsed, once again, on Alleluia Cohn's doorstep …” (p. 355).