10 . The Satanic Verses and the Demonic Text
نویسنده
چکیده
In his essay “In Good Faith” (1990), Salman Rushdie discusses the reactions his novel, The Satanic Verses (1988; “SV”) has evoked around the world. According to Rushdie, his novel has been treated as “a work of bad history, as an anti-religious pamphlet, as the product of an international capitalistJewish conspiracy, as an act of murder,” everything but literature, a work of fiction. Rushdie is especially mystified by the claims that when he was writing The Satanic Verses he knew exactly what he was doing. “He did it on purpose is one of the strangest accusations ever levelled at a writer. Of course I did on purpose. The question is, and it is what I have tried to answer [in this essay]: what is the ‘it’ that I did?” A critical reader is faced with the same question; furthermore, the novel itself seems to question ‘I’ as well as ‘it’: it tests the limits of ‘authorship’ – the idea of an unified, fully conscious and purposeful author. Both in the analysis of the novel, and in making any comments on the uproar following its publication, the complex role of de-contextualisation should be given careful attention. Writing is dangerous, as Jacques Derrida has noted. Derrida emphasises the radical iterability of any written communication; it must “remain legible despite the absolute disappearance of every determined addressee in general for it to function as writing, that is, for it to be legible.” In a sharp contrast to the idea of writing as a means to convey the intended meaning, writing is (sometimes, as in Rushdie’s case, very em-
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