In college I wrote my capstone course’s final paper on Angela Carter’s Night at the Circus because I was enthralled by the idea of Magical Realism. The class was a Contemporary British Lit course and my professor, a true diamond in the small Midwestern college rough, assigned a lot of contemporary magical realism. As good as the class was I noticed that Rushdie was nowhere in sight. When I finally did pick up Rushdie’s the Satanic Verses it was for two distinct reasons and I was disappointed on both fronts. The first was because I hadn’t read much (if any) magical realism since taking said college course four years ago and the second was because the book’s reputation for controversy makes it seem like a relevant read in light of current events.
The Satanic Verses seems to be a series of dreams, or reincarnations, mythic retelling psych, or visions, or any/all of the above. I am not informed enough a reader to catch what is allusion, what is allegory, what is satire, and what are just purely imaginative riffs on reality. I know enough to discern that all of this is present, entertaining, and thought provoking but I also know that I’m missing something crucial. The allure of magical realism is that it pulls the energy and vibrant connotations behind mythology or theology and amalgamates them with modern themes grounded in realism, things like race or socioeconomics. The problem is I know next to nothing about Islam and did not read actively enough - which is to say I wasn’t googling for relevance every time I had an inclining to - in order to catch the connotations or implications that come from evoking its culture and traditions. This both is and is not Rushdie’s fault. Obviously I could have learned more about the topic at hand, the issue is that I was not inspired to. I think this is partly because Rushdie also belongs in the Hysterical Realism category. Those in this category - coined by James Woods who included DF Wallace, Zadie Smith, Rudie, and a few of their contemporaries - I’ve found are guilty of, at times, introducing armies of characters that stand to serve on the author’s whim. Maybe there is a particular societal indictment they wish to make on, say, police brutality. In the case of Rushdie, he created a character, complete with a cartoonish backstory, that perfectly illustrated talking points on the subject. The resulting character was too ridiculous to be real and too convenient to really be all that magical. The end result was that I was bored of these characters and didn’t care enough about them to inspire a more active read.
This translates directly into the second reason for my disappointment. It’s no secret that Rushdie received death threats emanating from the Ayatollah in Iran for this particular novel. In my experience it seems that some critical readers in the western world approach this book looking for an obvious and scathing criticism of Islam, or at least the beginnings of an argument. I, for one, am guilty of this. But Rushdie is a talented fiction writer, he exists in the world of representation and language as a craft, not telling one what to think. If it seems like a specious reason to be disappointed in a work of fiction that’s because it is. At the same time, Rushdie did receive death threats and had to go into hiding. While the Satanic Verses is irreverent, often lampooning the religion and the very idea that we can so conveniently make ancient ideas compatible with modern society, it is hardly groundbreaking as far as ideology is concerned. So what Rushdie was really threatened over was ability to write fiction, an ability you’d have to appreciate in order to find merit in the reputation preceding the death threat. This would have been the case had Rushdie’s merging of form and content really resonated with me, which it regrettably didn’t.
Of course, all of this is a huge injustice to Salman Rushdie and the Satanic Verses. Rushdie is a tremendously gifted fiction writer; his lyrical style can dance effortlessly from humor to tragedy and craft some of the most beautiful and fantastical passages I’ve ever read. All of which says nothing of his and his book’s obvious influence in some of my favorite authors, from Zadie Smith to Junot Diaz. The problem was the Satanic Verses did not scratch a particular itch. I think that if I had read Rushdie in the classroom with any number of resources at my disposal I would have written my college capstone course’s final paper on it instead of…well...this.
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