"Exile and Migration : The examination of technological modes of perception through the novel "Satanic Verses", in terms of identity disorientation."

by Kostis Velonis

In this text I will attempt to examine the particular condition of exile and migration in Salman Rushdie’s novel, as an experience that is distinguished from its traditional definition. I would like to demonstrate more specifically the relation of current notions of migration with the technological models of memory, insisting in two ways of reproduction of the past, that of photography and that of cinema.

Exile and the narratives of despair

The mythological establishment of the exiled persona is already referred to in the epigraph of this novel in which Satan is depicted by Danniel Defoe’s book as a vagabond in an “unsettled condition… that he is without a fixed place, or space...”1 Migration as a concept is remarked as a painful subject translated within the frame of eschatological conditions in which migrant is interpreted as despaired, lost in a confronted and sometimes hostile place. The return to his privileged area of living is its main priority, and traditional narratives in fairy tales are built in relation to the enormous difficulties that heroes meet in the name of their destiny, that is always connected with a specific topography in their origin. But commonly the exiled was misunderstood, not only by the foreign part but also by its native land, for the necessity of the maintenance of social coherence. Geographic migrations confuse the establishment of power that is based upon the national identity. So the reason for which the persona of Satan is that of an exiled, is justified within the norms of monotheistic religions. But if the concept of the exiled was used to characterize devil in Christian and Islamic discipline, in Greek mythology it is much more complicated, the migrant is interpreted within the frame of a human tragedy, as a fact of rough and bad fortune. A paradigmatic model of this specific hermeneutic remains the myth of Odysseus for whom through his journeys there is always a permanent nostalgia, for his promised land. But the ideal home, that of an absolute emancipation of a specific place, is always related to the intention of the exiled to be recognised as someone that celebrates its return, in Satanic Verses this admiration can be found in the characters of Mahound and Imam. In these cases, similar to many migrants, the return to the native land is blessed by God. The divine recognition is the most important, or at least the divine protection of the migrant neighbourhoods in the foreign land2.

The migration in modernity/neo-migration

 My purpose here is to point out the change of focus from an immigration that is not so much an act produced by restrictions of historical determinations of the term to an option that appears omnipresent by current improvements of Western societies the Satanic Verses

The migration traditionally connected with extremely unfavorable conditions such war, poverty and political expatriotism etc. has met with modernity’s desires, for an expanded cosmopolitanism. Native home, considered to be attached with the past, has been the haunting image of a modernism that required the detachment of place from its historical witnesses3.

 In western societies, migration has been established according to a policy of an adventurous liberalism. Within this specific framework of values, entertainment and cultural superstructures have displayed a zeal for the secret of financial “success”, accelerating this promised target with diverse strategies of “chase”. But the chase provides a geographical and cultural displacement.  The definition of a term such as “post-migrated” literature could finally clarify the recent experiences of migration denoting the Eurocentric term of “postcolonial” and helping us to comprehend S.Rushdie’s concept of immigration beyond the stereotypical classifications of Muslim/Indian/British identities. This particular understanding of immigration serves as an instructive model of perception and hermeneutic of the reality in Satanic Verses. Though the “migrant’s-eye view”4 Rushdie keeps the “great possibility that mass migration gives the world”5 speaking about the necessity of impurity and hybridism, providing a statement about the intermingling of the established identities6.

Photography as medium of the establishment of memory

In Satanic Verses, the pathos and the peripeteias of Indian Muslims in Britain as immigrants are within the inscription of a vast repertoire of ideas and references in which the exile is frequently filtrated by the technological devices of Media languages. It is obvious that Rushdie’s interest is related with media such as T.V and Cinema, insisting in the rare cases that involve photography, and the properties that are invested in this medium, elucidating the way the writer interprets the notion of immigration.

In Chapter IV, the figure of fanatical Imam is based on the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini described by Rushdie as a refugee for whom “Exile is a dream of glorious return...a vision of revolution”7 an exile “which must not be confused with, allowed to run into, all the other words that people throw around: émigré, expatriate, refugee, immigrant, silence, cunning” 8. The desire for return, tranforms the current place in a position of  freeze,  permitting only the development of out of the borders belonging place. Exile as Rusdhie claims is “a ball hurled high into the air”, it can be “translated into a photograph; denied motion, suspended impossibly”⁹ above the native earth of the exiled. In his metaphor for the freezing of time in Khomeini’s case, Rushdie is using photography to notice that stillness is not only a technical device that allows us an access to “what we have previously seen but what it is possible to begin seeing. They open our eyes”¹⁰. Khomeini is against the pictures but “some representations, however, are permitted to remain…keeping...a small group of postcards bearing conventional images of his homeland”¹¹⁹. Within this hermeneutic, photography keeps always the secret, the hidden information, of a private view, in opposition to the cinema that transforms the private into public, turning the personal to a recognisable phenomenon ready for any commentary. And from this special condition of a forced expatriation, exile is always a situation that is fed with theories of conspiracy, in the sense that there is always a plan for an ephemeral ground used as a platform of preparation for the “real” site. In this specific relation to the exiled, photography functions as an index of memory-and in this specific witness, past is interpreted as an uncompleted plot, which remains to be completed. The writer in the Imaginary homelands starts his discourse with an old photograph that hangs on a wall of the room in which he works. In this snapshot there is a house, and in opposition to the remark of L.P.Hartley’s novel Go between, that the past is “a foreign country”, Rushdie concludes that photograph reminds him that “it’s my present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time” ¹².

In this way, the writer is identified slightly with Imam.

For him this snapshot becomes the privileged referential point of information, constructing narratives from the represented spatiality of the fragment in which any simulacrum is culturally determined, providing a chimera of memories. Photography has a mnemotechnical property, knowing that the fundamental cause of the construction of narrative is memory the melancholic “that has been”(ça –a-été) of Roland Barthes. Photography in its archival status does not question the past in the end, but is a demanding hypomnema for a questionable future, which is a way of returning to the past. In the last chapter, a young woman “was taking Polaroid’s snapshots of Changez (Saladin’s father) with his visitors” 13 . A few hours before he dies, his father, with Saladin at his bedside, “was enjoying himself hugely”. As the writer remarks the “light in eyes” existed because the “dead man refused to lie down and let the living have all the fun”14. This manifested gladness from the side of the dying in the moment of its capture by photography, could display at least a reaffirmation of the insistence of its living identity. In this way, photography becomes the agent of a classification of the presence at the same time that this presence is used as a factor of nostalgia, projecting the past of the lost person. If the “world is the place that we prove real by dying in it” ¹⁵, then in the case of Saladin’s father, photography is the place where we prove death by living in it.

But is every return to our home a reestablishment of the past? In Rushdie’s novel, the return is always coming with changes. After the long journey, the correspondence with native land happens within the context of interaction between the new identity and the established place. In this way the return to home is not associated with the impossibility of escape from the past, there is always a revaluation, an expansion of self in the origin.

            The notion of immigration in the cinematographic structure of the Satanic Verses

We can clarify the procedures that determine the evolving character of migration from the statically viewpoint of the photograph to the moving image of the cinema.

In cinema we are confronted with a modifying presentness that does not facilitate so much the process of meditation upon the image as it seems to be possible in the case of photography, its temporal based structure enforce its spectacular effect as an artefact of entertainment.

Rushdie, beyond any attempt to indicate a content of the cinema rhetorics in the Satanic Verses, has build the structure of plot adopting cinema structure. For Satanic Verses cinema  is a condition with which the viewing experience is constructed. Within the aesthetics of movies Rushdie replaces travel with travelling, the view from above with a plongée shooting, the indication of the events with a parallel plot structure similar to the parallel montage. Movie as mobility is the progressive vehicle of a disordered identity from which the classifications are also fragile, from film-fiction to the documentary to the short –fiction of the adverts, these  audio-visual genres are not depicted in the novel only as references of the media representations but they function as  morphogenesis of the novel’s structure.

Rushdie’s achievement is that in a discipline determined by its autonomy such as literature when language obtains a meaning in the making of sentences, audio-visual media characteristics are used in order to intervene its syntaxis. Within the codes of Mediascape historical hermeneutics of Islam have been simulated to the popular Mass Media productions, emerging proper dis-analogies or insisting on the clichés of the traditional modes of representation.

 But any network of production based on sacred storytelling could easily offend the authentic figures if the simulation is far from the established narratives of religion. Mohammed presented as “Mahound” is defined by its lifestyle, a macho male figure that sleeps with an extremely high number of women after his wife’s death, described as a “businessman-turned prophet Mahound” responsible for the founding of one “of the world’s great religions”. Within the limits of Bombay slang and within the reference of blasphemy of the prophet’s  reincarnation as the Indian film star Gibreel  Farishta, the media are reinforced as a factor of articulation of the whole representation of the world, a  stubborn mirror that introduces the consequences of the history16, through its own dimensions and properties.

Any representation codified by the filtration of mechanic, electronic, and digital tools troubles and excludes the traditional narrative that is codified as a discourse of reality. In the means that Rushdie deals out its narratives from the manifestations of popular representations, what is constituted is a disillusionment fact, a fact in its fictioness, with its caricature absorption of fragments from recent and older History attached with minor histories of media events, a magma of the consequences of the parallel networks of entertainment.

But as it equally happens at Midnight’s Children-a later novel of Salman Rushdie- the vocabulary of a specific discipline -that of Hindi movie- is present not only in its thematic reference but also in the structure of the narrative form. From this point we could also easily apply Propp’s analysis into the constituent part of these narratives that are similar with the morphology of folk tales, but always within the context of parody and the consequences of a pseudo-narrative that is never serious to itself 17.

Instead of responding to the question about the sources of that novel, in the demonstration of the reproduction of simulations through diverse kinds of contemporary and older stories (adverts, newspaper reports, T.V dramas, Bollywood and Hollywood movies), we could conclude that all these references correspond to the proliferation of time beyond their iconic output. The movement of these images is appropriated by the consequences of time that neutralizes the perception. The Deleuzian cinematic time-image has the same properties with language in the sense that perception is provided by a symptomatological reflection between the reproductive nature of the medium and the received data of the viewer18. Photography in opposition, because of absence of time, is determined by its iconic approximation to a reproductive fragment of reality.

Fiction of links

The satanic verses provide a fiction of links, decentering the reader from the linear naturalized aspect of the conventional narration. This plot becomes a bricolage of modes of representation including older and current legitimized recites. In other terms we can distinguish a force of re-imagination, rewriting of the history. The fiction of links is relevant with the transformative places that are adapted to the journey-narratives of the novel. But there is a kind of affinity with

the filmed flaneries in highways in the American movies or with the “Strassenfilm” category of the Expressionist days of German cinema, an affinity in which any cinematographic inscription of the journey seems to reveal: the beginning of a journey without a specific target, a wandering that has not emphasized in a particular place19. Especially in Wenders movies the heroes behavior in front of all these voyeuristic travelling does not change in the way that someone would expect, as a result of displacement of ephemeral geographies 20.

The journey in satanic Verses using the terms of Virilio, corresponds to a kind of “domiciliary atopia in the urban absorption’s of towns and suburbs” 21, similar with the falling down of the heroes onto the wider area of London on the first pages of the novel. This journey inscribed into a complex temporality by the combination of the falling and the flying, under and upon, outside and inside encloses a cartographic entity, embracing the horizontality of “écoumène” (οικουμενη in Greek).  The center and the supplement in both cases as an extension or as a complement (in the Derriddian terms) have stigmatized Rushdie’s language. Language for Rushdie is the output of a delirium pushing the words outside the limits of their established meaning. Is it possible the desire of delirium to amplify the ways of our understanding, something that could be associated with Dharraaammm temporalities  (that is the sound in Hindi of something that has fallen), defining a cartographic trajectory? In Salman Rushdie’s novel the issue of limitless territory of human exploration in terms of the physical geography 22 is repeated.

Film and the postmodern identity

The process of movie projection is an unstoppable chimera of dreams and illuminations upon the surface of the screen. The viewer as a subject is identified with the screen, becoming a mirror image. In Chapter II, Gibreel dreams the story of Mahound, introducing us to the city of Jahilia, “whose point of view is sometimes that of a camera and at other moments, spectator”23. There is a clear definition that when Gibreel is a camera “he hates static shots...floating up on a high crane looking down”2⁴ shooting at the actors, the characters of the plot. Gibreel , the viewer that has been identified with the camera “is no longer a mere spectator but the central player, the star”25

The relation of the viewer within the boundaries of the dream machinery of cinema is based in a situation of disappearance between real and virtual. Sometimes you feel the ultimate exploration of the cinematographic simulacra, especially in the story of Mahound, when Gibreel dreams a scene in terms of the cinema vocabulary, and his own identity is presented as someone’s with the screen behind him. The nostalgia in films such as Mother India is within the frame of a new narrative, from the perspective of the viewer-subject, in which the identification with the camera or even with the characters reconstruct the self identity, that sometimes has a contradictory aspect/result with the narrative of its own origin, inaugurating a new found relationship of the immigrant with its origin and his identity.

The filmic devises in Satanic Verses provide a plethoric information about the distinct positional conditions of the self: Through the linguistic variety of the writer the represented character is not enclosed in itself but a character in its various selves. The representational features of this splitness is guaranteed in the description of dreams and flashbacks that happen continuously one after the other, leaving a limited space for the initial narrative. These tropes of representation provide enough information for the whole covering of autonomous chapters and play a vital role in the actual constitution of the Self in heroes’s lives. If the dream is important for the referent character, then flashback for the reader can negotiate temporally disturbed roles within the context of selfhood.

Reading the novel, we can argue for what has been known as a «Multiple Personality Disorder» an identity defined from different personalities which form the self26

 S.Rushdie is thinking about himself without using the first person, but through the characters in a reflexive game with the knowledge of himself. Fragments of self-references are dispersed without reference to his own ego. Such an option is analogous to the limitation of vision, from which the self is unable to see itself, it’s own perceptive sensory data. From the perceptual restrictions to the rhetoric of narratives, the self-recognition is succeeded through others. There is a mirror analogy between self and others, from which the self is formed only if it can be reflected on others. In this case cinematic experience seems to have a responsibility in the establishment of the self in a schizophrenic mirror stage, contributing to the formation of a heterogeneous ego. Through the legitimated world of cinema characters, we sense an ethos of migration from the personas of actors, accepting for example “Peter Sellers as a French detective, and a French actor as Lord Greystoke”^27. In Rushdie’s novel the basic principles of developmental psychology are in crisis. In some cases, what we call autonimy and introspection is misunderstood, the heroes have difficulties to recognise their own names and their own structure towards themselves.                        24

S.Rushdie in this case offers his heroes a productive nihilism, in a sense that denies the boundaries of identities in Muslim societies, the collective solidarity determined by the religion is in opposition with the solitude model of the Rusdhian heroes. Their fleeting identities become offensive for the brotherly criteria of religious communities.

So, the identity is not within the protected borders of modernism and its main strategies, identity is simply absent, and wandering, through the fragile line of media world, full with travestied characters and anti-heroes. The self as a plan of fragmented desires of a number of movies and models of imitation have a transitory identity the same as the city in which the heroes are presented. London, is mainly a city that is represented through the fugitive instincts of its heroes beyond the connotation of Goddardian Alphaville as a negative utopia, a place of martyrdom. In the name of a dehumanised Paris (the shooting of Alphaville has taken place in Paris) London could be possibly associated with the way that the neighbor metropolis is filmed, as a passage, a transition from one point to another.

In Satanic Verses we discover that there is a symmetrical analogy between the growth of a city and the fragmented identity of the self. All these metaphors of London as Babylon and Alphaville demonstrate how the line between Self and the City have been erased. We can find equally related references in the recent postmodern history of cinema between Persona and the City as a synchronized unity28. Within the field of the geographical displacement there is a reflection onto the incorporation of the self with other identities. Futuristic movies that have kept their link with current postmodern spatiality of the Metropolis, display with uncertainty the fact of this urban pastiche, the modernizing transitions of skyscrapers are articulated  “into an intercultural scenario, recreating the third world inside the first”29. Polis within the complex juxtaposition of these intercultural differences, articulates disorientation as in the case of Gibreel wandering in the streets of a London with his A-Z guide. His identity is part of this hetero-polis, in which every concrete spatial point opens on to another through the infinite connections of urban scale. This metropolitan designation of an individual’s identity could be related with the symptoms of a topographical schizophrenia, from a located monad to a dislocated nomad. Cinema, from its own structure ceases to be a pure medium of expression and contributes to the process of “schizophrenisation” of the spectator. Rushdie offers a controversial discourse on the ethical definition of the term. Gibreel’s is described as “splitting of his sense of himself into two entities, one of which he sought heroically to suppress, but which he also, by characterizing it as other than himself, preserved, nourished, and secretly made strong”30. Gibreel at the end is commiting a suicide, but Saladin himself although the painful amalgam of transformations, attains a kind of conciliation with past and present in his return to Bombay, during the moments of his father’s death.

The identity as surface

Rushdie sees the language as the agent of rejection of meaning. In Satanic Verses, Depthlessness of the linguistic sign is a rhetoric that has a theological origin. The discourse of God is primarily the sacred text of Qu’ran. Grammar affirms the truthness of God accepting an absolute correspondence of language and the world that the first represents. The authority of the sacred text is related with the belief that language has to stabilize the meaning. Rushdie in order to construct an anti-theologian grammar concerning both the plot and the structure of the narrative, exposes Camera’s simulacra reinforcing the fusion of identities in which the reader as spectator is identified with the camera or within the frame of Cinematographic projection with characters of the spectacular plot. Then, language is in negotiation with its substance. The linguistic sign playing with grammar is floating to the surface. Exiled (with the exemption of the Imam) is moving to the surface within the cinematographic logic by which the visual trace appears onto the screen, enforcing the dreaming nature of its projection on the surface. In the case of Imam there is not a surface to the postcards that he keeps because they reafirm the temporal property of depth as  past and  destiny.

The writer recognises a surface knowing that temporal fragments on Cinema have not depths.

Satanic Verses finally have reacted to the common reception of language as a concept of depth and substance. Language in Salman Rushdie’s case is not anymore a tool of clarification in front of the phenomenal world, and cannot affirm that behind sensorial world there is a meaning that language can exchange.

In this way language insists versus common experience and becomes the field of “the link between the surface and the promise of the surface‘s own depth”31.

In a similar way, Rushdie ‘s view of photography remains within the strict interpretation of a modernist medium that brings the viewer to a kind of depthlessness embedded in a specific relation with the place and its historical connotations.  Photography is therefore associated with language within the ideal of substance, providing to the viewer awareness about past and history. Through the function of anamnesis there is always a space to perceive your identity looking a still. Rushdie as a screen player of a post-modern movie has defined a specific relation with the past in terms of its recollection, not wishing to insist in history but to the present, perceiving that memory is a suffered knowledge.  Cinema by its own structure, could also be defined by language but in a way that any referential event with reality is dealing with the disorientation of identity, at the same time that photography reaffirms it.

In Satanic verses the past is a pastiche that breakdowns the temporal order, stories, dreams and flashbacks are linked with the increased intensity of a schizophrenic. At the last sentence of the novel Zeeny Vakil’s demand at Saladin is “Let’s get the hell out of here” 32. Saladin response is immediate saying “I am coming” in the same way that the therapist in the last plan of the Element of Crime requires from detective Fisher to “wake up now”, and Fisher’s response is that he wants him to wake him up.  Schizophrenia in these literary and film narratives is used as a metaphorical implication of a risky journey. But always before the absolute otherness of self there is someone that claims to have knowledge and calls us to return to the temporal certainty, either a friend (Zeeny Vakil) or someone that represents power (therapist).  

In this paper I wanted to sketch out in a general way the issue of migration in Salman Rushdie’s novel of Satanic Verses as he is using it within the frame of cinema, which in opposition to photography becomes a point-similar with literary narratives- that is identified with the process of life itself. For this reason in Satanic Verses photography has an uncompleted history to display, in which the monochrome world of old-family snapshots can be replaced by the technological devises of Cinemascope and “glorious technicolor” 33.