"Satanic Verses for Metaphysicians"

 

by Fabrizio Trifiro'

 

 

 

 

 

 

In what follow I will trace what I think to be the main tenets underlying Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. These are the few stable convictions that we can get from this novel, the few firm points in a novel that develops through irreconcilable conflicts, continuous metamorphosis and contradictory hybrids. But it is exactly in the structure of this very dynamics that we can find those fundamental beliefs that constitute the leit motive of the novel that I intend to point out. These beliefs as I’ll try to show stem from and gather around the recognition of the impossibility for us to reach any metaphysical standpoint on which to ground once for all our lives, our values and beliefs.

This attitude against the metaphysical thought, the thought that long for “the view of the world from nowhere”, for the “God’s eye point of view”[1], is an attitude that has been shared, even if in different forms, by many intellectuals since Nietzsche. This attitude is ultimately based on the recognition of the impossibility of the task of getting out from our skin, the impossibility for us to transcend our human condition with all its different, contingent, conflicting desires and values, and have a grasp of the way things are in themselves. If we want to transcend our perspectives in order to obtain the “absolute conception of the world”[2], than of the two one: either we abandon all of our beliefs and values, throwing in this way the baby together with the water, because it would mean to abandon the thought itself; or otherwise we try to show how our or someone else’s perspective is in fact the absolute one, the one which present us with the way the things really are. It is this second horn of the dilemma that philosophy in its history have tried and still try to undertake without any success. As the intellectual tradition stemming from the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein have tried to show, the problem with the metaphysical attempts to justify our beliefs and values is that at the end of the day we do not have any other reality unto which to match those values and beliefs than the one that our own very beliefs and values present us with. The problem is that our attempts of justification have an end and this is the bedrock constituted by our basic convictions and attitudes toward the world, beyond this rock bottom we cannot go. “The track of the human serpent is overall”[3] used to say James recalling the nietzschean rhetorical question, “Is living not precisely evaluating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different?”[4] We cannot but presuppose our values and beliefs in making evaluations and assertions, therefore every claim to Truth, every claim that a particular system of values and beliefs is the True one, the one spoken by the voice of God -or of one of his messengers- is only a deceiving attempt to eternalise a particular historical human set of values and beliefs[5]; and given different such sets there is no impartial way to prefer one to another, there is no way to say that some of such sets, some language, some verse, is satanic or divine. “If the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, not yet false”[6] wrote Wittgenstein, in fact “at the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not grounded”[7].

This same position is shared by Salman Rushdie, even for him in fact “the time of revelation”, the attempt to step outside the foundations on which we live and to revelate the true way the things are “is long gone. Don’t ask to clear things up one way or the other”[8]. What finally finished Rushdie with metaphysics is exactly the recognition that it’s not possible to tell the difference between the Good and Evil -in the metaphysical, capital letter, use of the terms- and that every attempt to claim to have the ‘Good news’ is a deceiving -or self-deceiving- attempt to secure some point of view from criticism. “What finally finished Salman with Mahound is the question of the women; and of the Satanic verses”[9]. Here is Salman recounting:

 

“In Yathrib the women are different, here in Jahilia you’re used to ordering your females about but up there they won’t put up with it...If she [a woman] want to get rid of her husband she turns the tent round the face in the opposite direction.....Well our girls were beginning to go for that type of thing, getting who knows what sort of ides in their heads, so at once, bang, out comes the rule book, the angel stars pouring out rules about what women mustn’t do, he starts forcing them back into the docile attitudes the Prophet prefers”[10]

 

What Salman noticed was that the beliefs and rules pretended to correspond to the God’s ones were suspiciously too similar to the beliefs and rules which were useful for the man who pretended to be the Philosop...uhm...the Prophet of God:

 

“Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman. This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person whom organization and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of the highly corporate, if non-corporeal God”[11]

 

“What has been sufficient to furnish the foundation-stone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto been constructing” Nietzsche suggests is “some popular superstition or other from time immemorial, perhaps some play on words, a grammatical seduction, or an audacious generalization on the basis of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts”[12].

It is just some play of words, the seduction of the secrets of the language and its grammar what finally awakened Salman and decided him to test the Prophet:

 

“One night the Persian scribe had a dream in which he was hovering above the figure of Mahound at the Prophet’s cave on Mount Cone. At first Salman took this to be no more than a nostalgic reverie of the old days of Jahilia, but then it struck him that his point of view, in the dream, had been that of the archangel, and at that moment the memory of the incident of the Satanic verses came back to him as vividly as if the thing had happened the previous day. ‘Maybe I hadn’t dreamed of myself as Gibreel’ Salman recounted. ‘Maybe’ I was Shaitan’. The realization of this possibility gave him his diabolic idea. After that, when he sat at the Prophet’s feet, writing down rules rules rules, he began, surreptitiously, to change things..... Mahound did not notice the alterations. So there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. But, good heavens, if my poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation by God’s own Messenger, then what did it mean? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry?”[13]

 

The man has finished to sleep. “The ‘real world’ -an idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer.... Broad daylight, breakfast”[14].

In the last quotation form Rushdie we have the recognition of the very crucial problem that any metaphysical conception of truth and the world have to face: How can you distinguish any common word, any human language from that of God? or, which is the same, How can you say that a particular language is the one spoken by God, the one that represents reality as-it-is-in-itself?. You simply can’t. We do not have at our disposal the model upon which to check the fidelity of our languages to the divine one. Let’s say that every time we open the mouth we pollute, adulterate, God’s words, the track of human serpent after all is overall. In our talks we cannot but refer to beliefs and values which ultimately are not grounded in some metaphysical reality but in the contingent and changeable forms of life in which we are involved -that’s to say that we find always our contingent, changeable values and beliefs to close the way to the metaphysical reality.

Then what does it mean?. It means that Salman touched the secret of language, that “language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true”[15]. It means that everyone can write the book that gives meaning to things; that’s divine poetry is just another human poetry, “that there are gods but not God!”[16], that it’s up to us to create the language with which to talk and think of the world and of ourselves. Salman makes us face the fact that at the end there are only “language games”[17], that all we have ever done when we have changed these games has been some sort of playing with words -and worlds- and not some kind of tracking the movements of a divine reality, and that all we can continue to do is to play with them, that is, to continue in that work of fusion, translation, interpretation, invention that “bring newness to the world”. To say this it is not to say that we can believe nothing true, false, good or evil anymore and that we cannot but talk nonsense. If there is no God anymore it does not mean that there are not even gods anymore. It is just to say that we cannot talk of truth or goodness but within some particular human language, that when we express opinions, evaluation and meanings, these are always embedded in some particular -neither true nor false, neither satanic nor angelic- point of view; it is to say that there is nothing a priori that avoid us to play with any language game, transform and hybridise them, bringing new ideas into the world.

“How does newness come into the world”[18] asks Rushdie after Gibreel Farishta started to fly and sing during their metamorphycal-metaphorical fall from their past; “Which was the miracle worker? Of what type -angelic, satanic- was Farishta’s song?.

Who am I?

Let’s put it this way: who has the best tunes?”[19]

Well let’s answer. Who is posing the question “Who am I?”, who is in this case the one who has the best tunes, who stand in the privileged point of view for deciding how the things go and for distinguishing satanic from angelic music? It’s Rushdie himself, the very person who is posing those questions. Here he is playing the allegory of the poet, the man who has the power of description and redescription, the power “to push his way out from the white”[20] giving forms to things (putting black on white, as it were, ink on paper); the nietzchean creator, the god “who creates the quality of good and evil in things” [21], the man that creating and singing new verses contribute to bring newness into the world and to fly away from the old forms of life; the man who get “to bend the language to shape it, to let it be our freedom”[22]. But Rushdie is also playing the wider allegory of all of us creatures living in a world without essences: in such a world any of us can play the role of that who has the best tunes and the role of the poet, the man who brings change and difference into the world.

The themes of change, metamorphosis, revolution, plurality, constitute the common thread that runs throughout Satanic Verses that I wanted to point out. They all stem from, and point to, the a-metaphysical, anti-essentialistic conception of the world and of the self that I have been sketching. Let’s see how Rushdie interweaves this conception and these themes in the double belief on the continuing changing and conflictual nature of man and of the world.

“We are creatures of air, Our roots are in dreams And clouds, reborn in flight. Goodbye”[23], Gibreel wrote before abandoning his past in the search for a new satisfying life. For Rushdie we are like the “ceaselessly metamorphising hybrid cloud-creatures” that Gibreel and Saladin encounter in their revolutionary fall that takes place, not by chance, “up in the air-space, in that imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which made the century possible...the place of movement and of war, the most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuos, metamorphic”[24]; like those creatures we can undergone constant and radical transformations. We are what makes possible and what is made possible by the changing and conflicting world in which we live: “the modern city”, -Mahagonny, Babilonia, Alphaville, London- “the locus classicus of incompatible realities. Lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the omnibus...As long as that’s all... it’s not bad. But if they meet! It’s uranium and plutonium, each make the other decompose”[25]. That’s what maintains Otto Cone, the man who advised her daughter Alleluya -who attempted “to escape from the good and evil” reaching the Zarathustrian altitudes of Himalaya[26]- to never forget that “the world is incompatible...Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all live at the same time”[27], and let’s add -Rushdie would not disagree with this- in the same place, as for example in that peculiar omnibus which the human being is. We have two allegories here for our nature: London, the paradigm of the modern city, points to the presence within ourselves of incompatible elements, and the air-space, which points at the cloudy-instability of our selves. Our London-like nature and our cloudy-like nature - they are strictly interwoven: it is the very presence in the world and within ourselves of incompatible and struggling elements the motor of transformations; and both, incompatibility and change, have origin and point to the same basic conviction, that of the absence of any metaphysical constraints to our thoughts and lives.

It’s worth reporting at this point a comment on Ovid’s Methamorposhes that Rushdie gave in an interview:

 

“It’s one of my favourite books and after all this is a novel about metamorphosis. It’s a novel in which people change shape, and which addresses the great questions about change of shape, about change, which were posed by Ovid: about whether a change in forma was a change in kind. Whether there is an essence in us which survives transmutation, given that, even if we don’t change into, you know, cloven-hoofed creatures, there is a great change in everybody’s life. The question is whether or not there is an essential centre. And whether we are just a collection of moments, or whether there is some kind of defining thread. The book discusses that, I think, it uses the idea of physical metamorphosis in order to discuss that”[28]

 

Between Ovid’s comparison of our soul to a yielding wax which remains the same notwithstanding its continuos change of shapes, and Lucretius conviction that “whatever by its changing goes out of its frontiers brings immediate death to its old self”, Saladin, in the process of recovering from his diabolic metaphorphosis, “chose Lucretius. The inconstant soul, the mutability of everything, das Ich, every last speck. A being going through life can become so other to himself as to be another”[29]. It is this very heraclitean recognition that ‘everything is in flux’, together with the freudian rejection of the “utterly fantastic concept of the self as being homogeneous, non-hybrid, pure” [30], what helped Saladin to proceed in the way of his own self-reconstruction. This recognition and this rejection amount to the acknowledgement that man has not a fixed centre that constrains us in a particular form, that prevent us to change; that in man, borrowing the Sartre’s slogan, “the existence precedes the essence”[31] To say that the existence precedes the essence it’s to say once again that it is the contingent and ever changing forms of life in which we happen to live, the contingent and ever changing values and beliefs that we come to develop in our life, what determine the description that we give or we are given of ourselves and of the world, and not the other way round.

We have then as leit motive of Satanic Verses this anti-essentialist conception of the self which continuously affirm itself through two kind of interweaving patterns: the heraclitean-lucretian one which point to our changing, clouds-like aspect, and the freudian one which points to our inconsistent babilondon-like nature. Heraclitus and Lucretius abolishing the idea of fixity -that of the self included- paved the way to Nietzsche and Sartre and to our efforts at self-creation. Freud with the notion of the unconscious made proliferate selves within ourselves, “helping us to see ourselves”, as observed Richard Rorty, “as centerless, as random assemblages of contingent and idiosyncratic needs rather than as more or less adequate exemplification of a common human nature, and to open up new possibilities for the aesthetic life”. This life is, once again, the life dedicated at our self-construction, at the transformation, fusion, creation of new vocabularies.

 

Let’s turn now to a typical question that is posed to any anti-foundationalist position of the sort we have been sketching and that probably will already have been passed through the mind of the reader: ‘How do you deal with the conflict between different vocabularies, between people who maintain beliefs that cannot be reconciled, if you do not dispose of a neutral ground on which to stand in order to settle down the dispute? Denying such a neutral ground don’t you leave us without any defence from the bad guys, from the aggressors?’

Let’s go back to Salman the Persian and his epistemological joke. Salman is tremendously frightened by the possible reaction of Mahound. When Baal, to whom Salman was telling the story of the lost of his faith -the story of the women and of the satanic verses- asks him “‘Why are you sure he will kill you?’ Salman the Persian responded: ‘It his Word against mine’.”[32]. Baal does not need further explanations in order to understand why Mahond’s Word is a capital letter one and will win. Baal is a poet, he knows the secrets of languages, that at the end there is only persuasion and that the use of force is a form of it. Mahound’s word will win, as Salman says, “because his power has growen too great for me to unmake him now”[33]. Baal knows that between two conflicting ideas the stronger will win and that the strength of an idea is not the measure of its closeness to Truth but of his power of persuasion. Baal knows that in order for an idea to prevail over the others, in order to be the kind of idea that “will change the world”, “will bring newness into the world”, it’s better for it to be persuaded that things are as it says they are[34], it’s better for it to be hard, -”for all the creators are hard”[35]; it has to resist the temptation to follow “the path of the base compromise” [36], it has to be “the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze”[37], and the use of force is without doubt one of the most bloody-persuasive tools.

Here Rushdie joins the anti-foundationalist tradition that I’ve been following here. Given contrasting values and ideas there is no way for people supporting them to come on a rational agreement because what’s missing here is the very premise for any rational discussion, that is the sharing of a relevant common ground; in fact we have not at our disposal the True reality anymore. All that people with different principles can do is to reaffirm their own ungrounded conviction in the most possible persuasive way. Let’s take Wittgenstein for all:

 

 “Where two principles really do meet which cannot be reconciled with one another, then each man declares the other a fool and heretic.

I‘ve said that I would ‘combat’ the other man -but wouldn’t I give him reasons? Certainly; but how far do they go? At the end of reasons comes persuasion. (Think what happens when missionaries converts natives)”[38]

 

And as a brief look at the history of colonizations can teach us, at a certain moment ‘missionaries’ of new ideas had typically to turn to force and violence in order to spread their ideas. We are creature of air after all, “the place of movement and war”, we are the incompatible realities of the modern town, “the locus classicus of incompatible realities..... if we meet, it’s uranium and plutonium”. But there is not only dogmatism and war in Satanic Verses, there are also attempts to love, there are people sacrificing their ideas and needs in order to met those of another person, there is compromise and tolerance of plurality.

To the previous questions about how it is possible to deal with incompatible principles then Rushdie gives the following pragmatic answer: there are all the possible degree of persuasion at our disposal, from unforced to forced persuasion; but only persuasion -no appeal to metaphysical essences. It is up to us to choose whether to accept compromise, openness towards different vocabularies, tolerance or the way of purity, dogmatism and war.

Well, how do we defend ourselves from an aggressor? By fighting or escaping trying to find a refuge, as Salman the Persian and Salman Rushdie did.