The Satanic Verses: The Rhetoric and the Dream
The Satanic Verses: The Rhetoric and the Dream

Summary/Abstract: I am inclined to trust Salman Rushdie’s claim, shortly after The Satanic Verses had been symbolically burnt in Bradford (14 Jan. 1989), that “that was not the book [he] wrote.” He wrote a tale only to discover that his readers’ “misreadings” produced another; a “framed” narrative that drove him to live in hiding and perilously precipitate declarations of apostasy. If Rushdie wrote the tale(s) he wrote (immigration, divided selves, dreams), the text produced its own tale (defamation, blasphemy) and confirmed its implied author in what Derrida calls, in another context, his “faithful unfaithfulness.” Let us believe, in spite of the controversies, that Rushdie’s intentions are liberating ones and that his authorial intentions, as he asserts in his apologia “In Good faith,” though a bit oddly, are the only trustworthy guide for the novel’s meaning.

• Details
• Contents