The Invention of Truth Salman Rushdie Be

Quaderni
della ricerca 9
The Invention of Truth

Salman Rushdie
between Truth
and Make-believe
Giuseppe De Riso
UNIVERSITÀ DI NAPOLI L’ORIENTALE
Dipartimento di Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Comparati
Dottorato in Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Comparati
Quaderni della ricerca - 9
The Invention of Truth

Salman Rushdie between
Truth and Make-believe
Giuseppe De Riso
In copertina: Image courtesy of Martina Piccirillo
([email protected])
University of Naples L’Orientale

Department of Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies
Doctorate in Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Studies
Quaderni della ricerca – 9
Series editor
Rossella Ciocca
Editorial Board
Guido Cappelli
Guido Carpi
Federico Corradi
Augusto Guarino
Salvatore Luongo
Alberto Manco
Paolo Sommaiolo
A double-blind peer review process was used

to evaluate the volume
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

International License
UniorPress
Via Nuova Marina, 59 - 80133, Naples
ISSN 2724-5519
ISBN 978-88-6719-266-3
The Quaderni della ricerca series was established within the
PhD programme in Literary, Linguistic and Comparative Stud-
ies to disseminate the scholarly work of the board of doctoral
teachers and the selected proceedings of the Graduate Confer-
ences organised by PhD students. The series serves as a reposi-
tory for research conducted within the doctoral programme that
examines the intersections of culture, literature, language and
aesthetics from an interdisciplinary, transcultural and compara-
tive perspective. The overarching aim of this scientific project is
to explore the potential for intercontinental globalisation in the
West by examining the interplay between medieval and early
modern traditions with contemporary cultures. The main focus
of the research encompasses contemporary forms of literary ex-
pression, entertainment and communication, as well as the re-
construction of cultural genealogies that provide insights into
the historical circumstances of the present.
Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ
Truth loves to conceal itself
Contents
Chapter I
Introduction. Reading Metaleptically 11
1.1 Rushdie’s aporia 11
1.2 Playing on duplicity and hyphenation 20
1.3 Opalescence, metaxy and palindromes 22
Chapter II
Dialogic Imaginations. Opalescence
and Tentative Acceptance in Midnight’s Children 27
2.1 A story rooted in history, myths and inconsistencies 27
2.2 Reliable fabrications: a narrative of bias and doubting 39
2.3 Opalescent writing and tentative acceptance 47
Chapter III
The Profane and the Sacred. A Palinodic Approach
to the The Satanic Verses 75
3.1 Mirrored perceptions 75
3.2 Challenging textual authority: the emergence of the new 89
3.3 Metaxy and palinodic storytelling 101
Chapter IV
Oh, I am fiction’s fool. Contaminations
and Palindrome Storytelling in Quichotte 115
4.1 Contaminations between media and reality 115
4.2 Converging narratives 122
4.3 Mistaken beliefs 126
Bibliography 133
List of key words and concepts 149
Acknowledgements 153
About the author 155

Chapter I
Introduction.
Reading Metaleptically
...it’s very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to
give evident, and undeniable proofs, of the certainty of
undoubted matters of fact.
Suppose anyone shou’d say, there never was such a
scene of action, as the Trojan War, grounding his bold
affirmation, on the seeming impossibility, of some of
the material circumstances, which attended it...; how
cou’d we convince him of his gross mistake, when so
many fables, being interwoven with the Body of the
History, are so readily, and so universally believ’d? ...
how could we demonstrate the whole account is true?
Origen, Contra Celsum
1.1 Rushdie’s aporia

“Think Different” was a catchphrase from an old Apple advertisement for
one of its most popular computer lines. It was used in 1997 to promote the
company’s products and brand identity, and the exhortation not to conform but
to think differently was accompanied by a series of television commercials,
billboards and print ads featuring illustrious personalities and iconic figures,
mostly innovators from history such as Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein
and Martin Luther King Jr, who had made a difference or challenged the sta-
tus quo.1 The presence of Mahatma Gandhi among these personalities could
not escape one of the best interpreters of our generation, Salman Rushdie. In
“Gandhi, Now” (2003) the Anglo-Indian author was not so much concerned
with the use of his image for publicity purposes, but with the subsequent ad-
aptation of the figure. It was ironic that a major American computer compa-
ny had appropriated Gandhi to promote cutting-edge electronic technologies
that the real man would never have approved of. Rushdie criticised the way
Gandhi’s historical meaning was emptied and replaced with content from a
1
The campaign aimed to encourage people to think creatively and set new standards of excel-
lence. It was designed to distinguish Apple from its competition in the technology industry by
positioning it as a company that valued innovation and originality. The advertisements were highly
successful and contributed to the establishment of Apple as a leading brand in the industry.
Chapter 1. Introduction. Reading Metaleptically
completely different context and a message that was in direct opposition to

the character to whom it was attributed. In a sense, Gandhi had been trans-
formed into something else, something completely new and different. Gandhi
had been practically reinvented:
Such is the present-day power of international big business. Even the greatest of
the dead may summarily be drafted into its image campaigns. Once, a half-century
ago, this bony man shaped a nation’s struggle for freedom. But that, as they say, is
history. Now Gandhi is modelling for Apple. His thoughts don’t really count in this
new incarnation. What counts is that he is considered to be “on message,” in line
with the corporate philosophy of Apple. (Rushdie 2003, 100, emphasis is mine)
Rushdie here describes Gandhi’s historical achievements and representa-

tion with an ironic phrase: “that […] is history.” Through the process of rewrit-
ing meanings in industrialised and globalised societies – which Guy Debord
(1995) called ‘societies of the spectacle’2 – false realities are created that render
history irrelevant in the sense that what was once real is now untrue. Truths
may hold some meaning in a particular time and place, but they can also be
repurposed to mean something quite different, even diametrically opposed, in
another context. Since postmodern societies are fundamentally ahistorical,3 ev-
erything can be appropriated, distorted, and rewritten as one sees fit.
Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract, ahistorical, postmod-
ern, no longer a man in and of his time but a free-floating concept, a part of
the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used,
distorted, reinvented, to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with his-
toricity or truth. (ibid., emphasis is mine)
Rushdie contrasts the unstable and ephemeral nature of postmodernism (which

seizes images and symbols, crushes them, tears them apart, and then empties them
of their essential content depending on the circumstances) with the verifiability
2
Guy Debord’s concept of ‘societies of the spectacle’ refers to a social condition in which people’s
experiences and understandings of the world around them are mediated by the images and messages
they consume through mass media, especially television. It is characterised by the commodification of
all aspects of social life, including culture, politics and even personal relationships, as well as a false
sense of unity and consensus among the people when in actuality they are isolated from one another.
3
Postmodern societies are considered ahistorical, or lacking a sense of history, for a number
of reasons, such as emphasis on the present moment and a loss of interest in the past, which is
often attributed to rapid technological and social change. Another reason is that they are marked
by fragmentation and the feeling that there is no shared sense of history or cultural identity.
12
Giuseppe De Riso
and provability of historical facts. In our example, Rushdie notes, the truth was
to be derived indirectly from the involuntary comedy of a Westernised Indian and
former lawyer who, having returned to a primitive lifestyle, now urges us to use
computer text editors half-naked and with a pencil in hand, and more generally
to adopt a lifestyle clearly at odds with that depicted in the Apple advertisement.
According to Rushdie, this ‘posthumous’ Gandhi is boring, flat, unlike
the ‘real’ Gandhi, whose contradictions made him much more fascinating.
He points out that Gandhi was an inspiration and a source of strength for
protesters against apartheid in South Africa and South America.4 Rushdie fur-
ther notes that although he was not afraid to challenge the most powerful and
oppressive empire in history, the British Empire, he slept with a lamp nearby
because he was afraid of the dark; he led a life of asceticism, yet its poverty
equally burdened public resources and depended on the financial support of
patrons like Ghanshyam Das Birla;5 his fasting prevented riots and massacres,6
but he once advised the workers of his capitalist protector not to strike against
the harsh conditions they endured at his hands. Rushdie argues that, accord-
ing to Gandhi, passive resistance and constructive nonviolence were crucial
to India’s independence. However, the brutality of Nazism, which weakened
Britain’s control over the subcontinent, and violent protests within India had
the same, if not greater, impact on this achievement. Most importantly, in
constructing Indian identity, Gandhi preferred to be inspired by the religious
tradition of the people and the fragmentary body of ancient narratives ‘about’
India rather than by the official history ‘of’ the country.7 And just as Gandhi
4
He was able to accomplish this due to his philosophy of non-violence, which he called
satyagraha or ‘truth power,’ along with his belief in the potential of civil disobedience to
bring about social change. There is no need to resort to violence in order to resist injustice and
oppression, according to Gandhi. Several protesters against apartheid in South Africa and South
America were inspired by his thought.
5
Gandhi was not a wealthy man and had no regular source of income, so was financially depen-
dent on the support of patrons like Ghanshyam Das Birla at certain stages of his life.
6
During his campaigns for social and political change in India, Gandhi used fasting as a form
of non-violent resistance. His belief was that it was an effective means of demonstrating the
sincerity of one’s cause and appealing to the conscience of one’s opponents. Gandhi, for exam-
ple, used fasting in 1947 to protest against the communal violence that broke out after India’s
partition, contributing to its cessation.
7
Gandhi’s life and work were shaped by his spiritual beliefs and by the cultural and religious
traditions of India. He drew on these traditions in his work and writings, often using stories
and symbols from Indian mythology and spirituality to convey his ideas and values to others.
13
used myths and traditional stories to make Indian history, Apple now entered
the story with a powerful advertising campaign that used Gandhi’s myth and
personal history: “These days, few people pause to consider the [...] ambigu-
ous nature of his achievement and legacy [...] These are hurried, sloganizing
times, and we don’t have the time or, worse, the inclination to assimilate ma-
ny-sided truths.” (ivi, 101)
Yet, not only is Rushdie not afraid to talk about the historical and actual
Gandhi, but he claims that right for himself. To hell with historicity, he ex-
claims indignantly about Apple’s business practices. Although he acknowl-
edges that it is impossible to separate Gandhi’s story from the fiction about
him, and to distinguish Gandhi’s voice from the indistinct buzz of the common
people talking about him, he implies that he somehow knows the ‘real’ Gand-
hi, the one who must be carefully protected from the fictional reinventions,
mystifications, and distortions that have followed over the years.
Gandhi used similar methods of reclaiming and adapting ideas in his ef-
forts to gain independence from Britain, which makes it difficult to fully un-
derstand his legacy and personality. Of course, the issue is not that reality does
not exist. Reality is very much there. The problem is that Rushdie claims to
possess a true historical understanding of Gandhi while simultaneously ad-
mitting that he cannot distinguish between the real and simulated aspects of
his life. The author bases his understanding of Gandhi on personal preference
rather than objective truth, implying that truth is determined by the selective
interpretation of facts. In his argument, the author chooses one version of
Gandhi as the ‘true’ one and discards the others.
Rushdie’s approach of arbitrarily selecting one version of the truth as the
real one contains a logical flaw, hidden in the prudence of the intellectual,
which is acknowledged but not fully addressed when he says “The real man,
if it is still possible to use such a term after the generations of [...] reinven-
tion.” In order for the paradox to continue, the author must not be aware of
his own subjective choice, as acknowledging it would force him to consider
the distinction between reality and fantasy and potentially lead to a sense of
meaninglessness. Like Saleem in Midnight’s Children (2021c), Rushdie may
also fear absurdity above all else (22). The central theme of this volume is pre-
cisely the relationship between truth and fiction as represented in Rushdie’s
writing, with a particular focus on how the author handles this tension.
The distinction between reality and fantasy in art, or between reference
and absence of reference, has always played an influential role in the artistic
creative process and in theoretical discussion (Doležel 1980). Literary critics
of the early to mid-20th century tended to be sceptical of the idea of literary
14
Giuseppe De Riso
verisimilitude. Followers of Gottlob Frege’s8 philosophy (Mendelsohn 2005),

for example, argued that literary propositions are neither true nor false in and
of themselves, but that they are either true or false depending on the circum-
stances in which they are made. Similarly, structuralists9 and some poststruc-
turalists10 did not consider the concept of truth useful when it came to liter-
ature (Mukařovský 1977). Over time (Heintz 1979; Pavel 1976), the view
developed that a literary statement can be true in the fictional world in which it
is expressed even if it has no historical or material equivalent.11 In the context
of the play, the statement that Hamlet is mortally wounded by Laertes is true
despite the fictional nature of the story. The result is that literature is imbued
with a degree of truthfulness that overlaps and blurs with historical reality so
that it eventually becomes a part of it. 20th century novelists were particularly
interested in exploring the contamination between truth and reality. Modernist
literature, as explained by McHale (1987), sought to uncover the most authen-
tic truth and therefore placed a strong emphasis on understanding knowledge.
However, the inability to arrive at a clear and certain truth led novelists to
8
Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher known for his contributions to the development of
modern logic and philosophy of language. Frege argued that propositions consist of two com-
ponents: the sense and the reference. The sense of a sentence is the meaning or content of the
statement, while the reference is the object or thing to which the sentence refers. A sentence’s
truth or falsity depends on whether it’s reference corresponds to reality, according to Frege.
9
The concept of truth in structuralist thought is often viewed from a relativistic perspective,
which means that it is viewed in relation to the structures and systems in which it is situated.
What is considered true in one system or structure may not be considered true in another. In the
structuralist approach to language, the truth of a statement or sentence is not determined by its
correspondence in an external reality, but by its place within the language system.
10
Truth, according to poststructuralism, is a construct of the social, cultural, and historical
context in which it is produced and consumed rather than an objective reality. In addition, it
contends that there is no single, universal truth, but a multiplicity of truths that are shaped by
the various discourses and practices in society. Poststructuralists thus also challenge the idea of
objective knowledge and the notion that it can be detached from the subject who produces it. In
their view, knowledge is always shaped by personal and collective perspectives, prejudices, or
interests, and therefore cannot be understood in isolation from them.
11
In such fictional worlds, the veracity of a statement or sentence is not determined by its cor-
respondence to external reality, but by its place in the fictional world the author has created. A
statement or sentence can be considered true in the context of the fictional world, even if it is not
true in the real world. For example, a character in a fantasy novel may make a statement about
the properties of a magical object, and that statement may be considered true in the context of
the fictional world of the novel, even if it is not true in the real world.
15
focus on issues of existence, trying to determine what is real and how it can
be distinguished from what is not. Because of this difficulty, constructivist
approaches paradoxically evolved into panfictionalism12 in the second half of
the 20th century. Panfictionalism regards everything as fiction and as a mean-
ingless, often humorous game of constant contamination. Some critics argue
that postmodernist novelists like Rushdie use quotations and cross-references
instead of plot to try and convey deeper meaning to the reader. This book
examines how Rushdie’s novels explore the relationship between reality and
fiction and the literary techniques and devices he uses to suggest that reality
is always more complex and multifaceted than its historical and adapted ver-
sions, which are irreversibly influenced by each other.
As an author, Rushdie is undoubtedly in the late stages of his artistic and
literary career. So far he has published fourteen novels and a collection of
short stories (East, West, 1994). With Elizabeth West, he co-edited Mirrorwork
(1997), an anthology of contemporary Indian literature, and he co-authored
The Best American Short Stories, considered by many to be the best anthology
of American short stories of 2008. The author is a member of the British Royal
Society of Literature13 and has won a number of major literary awards, includ-
ing the Best of the Booker14 in 2008, the Whitbread Award for Best Novel15
(twice), the Writers Guild, the James Tait Black, the Aristeion for Literature,
and was named Author of the Year in England and Germany. His interviews
12
The term panfictionalism, which was coined in the 1980s, refers to the idea that all fiction, re-
gardless of genre or form, is fundamentally interconnected and that the boundaries between dif-
ferent genres are permeable and fluid. Therefore, it challenges traditional notions of genres and
the classification of literary works into categories such as science fiction, fantasy, or realism.
13
As one of the oldest literary societies in the world, the British Royal Society of Literature (RSL) was
founded in 1820 by George IV. It has a number of objectives, including supporting and promoting the
writing and reading of literature in all its forms. It also awards a number of prestigious literary prizes.
14
Prize awarded to Rushdie on 10 July 2008 for his Midnight’s Children (1981), which had al-
ready earned him the Booker, obtained in the same year of the novel’s publication, and the even
more resounding Booker of Booker award in 1993. The Booker Prize is a prestigious literary
award presented annually to the best original full-length novel written in English and published
in the United Kingdom. The prize is named after its sponsor, the Booker Prize Foundation, which
was established in 1968 with a donation from the Booker McConnell Foundation, a multination-
al food distribution company. The Booker Prize is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious
literary awards in the world and has a reputation for honouring the best contemporary novels.
15
The Whitbread Award for Best Novel is a literary prize awarded annually by the Whitbread
Book Awards, established in 1971 to recognise excellence in British and Irish literature.
16
Giuseppe De Riso
with newspapers and TV around the world, his speeches at conferences, and his
writing that can be classified as nonfiction have extended his influence from the
literary to the academic landscape and launched some of the most productive
critical debates of recent decades (Ciocca 2017). Rushdie is a highly produc-
tive and diverse writer whose work spans several decades and encompasses
various literary trends and movements. Even though it would be easier to cat-
egorise and understand his writing retrospectively, even now we can see how
Rushdie’s writing has generated numerous interpretations, often resulting in
conflicting definitions and new areas of critical analysis. Rushdie is known for
his sharp, sarcastic irony, which is a characteristic of postmodernism (Bădules-
cu 2014; Fletcher 1994; Hutcheon 1986, 1987; Krishnaswamy 1995). He also
writes with the thoughtfulness and introspection of modernism (Grant 2012;
Riquelme 2013; Spenser 2010; Walkowitz 2006), and is skilled in using the il-
lusions and techniques of magical realism (Aldea 200; Arva 2008; Bassi 1999;
Faris 2002, 2004; Hart, Ouyang 2005; Roh, Gunter 1995; Rosenberg 2001;
Warnes 2005). He is seen as sincerely committed to postcolonial issues (Ball
2003; Laudando 2013; Marzec 2007; Mishra, Salgado 1995; Morton 2007;
Warnes 2009), and is recognised for his portrayal of migrant life, although
he has also been criticised for being a privileged ambassador of cultural and
ethnic hybridity. Theorising translation as a form of transgression (Bădulescu
2011; Mann 1995; Prasad 1999; Ramone 2013; Rundholz, Kirca 2021; Rush-
die 2003), he has explored the impact of linguistic contamination and globali-
sation (Crăciun 2019; Mendes 2012) as a poet of ‘borders’ (Mitchell 1989) but
also as a chronicler of the frontier (Ashcroft 2016; Needham 1994).
While Rushdie is often referred to as a postmodernist writer, it is difficult
to place him firmly in either the modernist or postmodernist literary move-
ments of the 20th century. Surely, he began writing during the height of the
postmodernist period. Drawing on Vladimir Nabokov, McHale claims in his
now classic reading that postmodernism is characterised by an ontological
dominant,16 that is a focus on ontological questions, or the nature and essence
of the world and its relationship to other worlds. Postmodernist literature often
explores the instability and uncertainty of reality and how our understanding
of the world is influenced by language and other cultural systems. Postmod-
ernist writers frequently challenge traditional forms of representation, disrupt
16
In literary theory, the concept of literary dominant has been mainly employed by Russian-born
American novelist and literary critic Vladimir Nabokov to refer to the central theme, idea or
motif that shapes and organises a literary work, its driving force source of meaning.
17
conventional ideas about truth and meaning, and draw attention to the sub-
jectivity and contingency of our perceptions and experiences. This emphasis
on ontological issues is seen in the way postmodernist literature experiments
with form and genre. It often emphasises the role of the individual subject
and how our understanding of the world is shaped by language, culture, and
history. Overall, the focus on ontological questions in postmodernist literature
reflects a broader shift in intellectual and cultural attitudes towards the nature
of reality and our place in the world. It encourages readers to think critically
about the ways in which our understanding of the world is constructed and
mediated. In the words of van Huyssteen (1997):
Typical of postmodernism is its scepticism concerning the central role as-
signed to reason and rational thought. Over against indubitable truth-claims,
an overconfident faith in science, and a metaphysical way of reasoning, the
interrelatedness of truth-perspectives, ethical pluralism, and cultural relativism
is typical of the postmodern perspective. (187)
Conversely, McHale observes that modernist literature was characterised

by an epistemological dominant, which means that it was primarily concerned
with the transmission and acquisition of knowledge. According to McHale,
modernist literature is characterised by a scepticism towards traditional forms
of knowledge and a distrust of grand narratives and metanarratives or overar-
ching frameworks for understanding the world. Modernist writers often chal-
lenge and deconstruct these narratives by attempting to expose their underly-
ing assumptions and biases. In doing so, they draw attention to the subjective
and provisional nature of knowledge and the ways in which it is shaped by
culture, history and individual experience. This emphasis on epistemological
issues is evident in the way modernist writers break with traditional modes of
representation and challenge the conventions of realism. As well-documented,
modernism was strongly influenced by the psychoanalytic theories that were
emerging at the time, which contributed to gaining insights into the elusive
nature of the human mind as not purely rational in its processes. One of the
major themes of modernism is the idea that language is an inadequate and
unreliable means of understanding and representing the complexity of the hu-
man psyche. Writers often portray the psyche as fragmented, multidimension-
al and resistant to straightforward representation. They also explore the ways
in which language is shaped by the individual psyche and how it can be used
to express and convey our innermost thoughts and feelings. Modernist writ-
ers recognised the ambiguous relationship between the psyche and language,
the latter serving as a mediator between the inwardness of emotions and the
18
Giuseppe De Riso
outwardness of the material world. For this reason, writers often focused on
thoughts and sensations in order to penetrate into the uncharted psychic terri-
tories of their characters, where the co-existence of diametrically opposed or
contradictory personality traits is possible in the same individual. Modernist
novels ultimately aimed to reconcile the diverse and conflicting aspects of the
psyche with an increasingly elusive and incomprehensible material universe.
As a result, modernist literature was concerned with defining knowledge and
its limits, with the individual’s role in the world, and with how knowledge
changes as it is perceived and described by its many recipients (Huyssen 1986,
Butler 1994, Berman 2011).
The distinction between dominants reflects a subtle shift of emphasis rath-
er than a dichotomous separation. McHale’s observation that epistemological
questions came to the fore in modernism does not mean that ontological issues
were neglected, quite the contrary. They merely receded into the background,
just as epistemological questions serve as a backdrop against which ontolog-
ical concerns are posed in postmodernist literature. In hindsight, according
to McHale, the transition from one to the other was inevitable, since episte-
mological inquiries naturally lead to ontological issues and vice versa. These
variations seem to reveal the fluctuations in individual and collective sensibil-
ity when we try to understand the world or our environment. The preoccupa-
tion with a particular subject generates a force that gradually shifts the focus
to an opposite or complementary one, and many of these fluctuations can be
seen throughout developments of art and literature.
Postmodernism inherited modernism’s interest in the human psyche. This
interest, however, was woven into a period of globalisation and the most rap-
id technological advancements in human history. Additionally, the advent of
digital technologies has resulted in the emergence of new forms of expression
and art, a dramatic shift in our communication and working modes, as well as
the creation of permanent virtual worlds in which people can reinvent them-
selves and interact within a variety of communities where traditional notions
of race, gender, and class can be discarded or repurposed. Postmodernism has
taken up the challenge of understanding how everything and everyone can be
affected by events and circumstances that are geographically and historically
distant from them. It has had to adapt to both the convergence and divergence
of cultures, as well as to operate in a dynamic environment in which every-
thing can be about whatever one chooses. Consequently, the literature and art
that have developed under its aegis are primarily concerned with expressing
ontological claims, developing skills that can handle multiple (even contra-
dictory) perspectives, and ethical pluralism, or the ability to deal with con-
19
flicting moral standards and suspend judgement between different points of

view.17 Postmodern consciousness has further complicated the search for truth
and made it ephemeral by exposing modernity to a multiplicity of conflicting,
symmetrical or mirroring realities.
1.2 Playing on duplicity and hyphenation

The mixing of elements and perspectives is a hallmark of Rushdie’s entire
narrative production since his first novel, Grimus (1975). It was published six
years before Midnight’s Children, in 1975, a time when postmodernism was
at its height and some would even argue nearing its end. According to Fawzia
Afzal-Khan (1993), the novel is a “mishmash of myth, fantasy, and science
fiction” (144), an opinion that explains why the novel has gone largely unno-
ticed by critics and the general public. In his review of The Ground beneath
Her Feet (1999), titled “Losing The Plot”, in April 1999, Peter Kemp of The
Sunday Times referred to Grimus as “a ramshackle surreal saga based on a
12th-century Sufi poem and copiously encrusted with mythical and literary al-
lusion, nosedived into oblivion amid almost universal critical derision.” In the
same review, Kemp compares The Ground Beneath Her Feet to a collection
of quotations rather than a coherent whole. Rushdie’s writing has often been
accused of being too fluid and full of allusions that detract from the coherence
of the text. Although Afzal-Khan believes that this avoids the ‘petrifying’ ef-
fect of myths, many feel that the abundance of mythological and scholarly
quotations sometimes makes it difficult to follow the thread of his texts. In
most cases, this is achieved by combining different elements, some of which
are antagonistic and can come from sources as diverse as mythology, comics,
epics and science fiction.
Although Grimus’ naivety is obvious, it is a natural starting point for Rush-
die as it contains many elements, concerns and interests that are essential to
understanding his later works. Among these is the coincidentia oppositorum,
the meeting or reconciliation of opposites.18 The novel is a chaotic mixture of
17
A fundamental principle of ethical pluralism is the importance of tolerance, respect, and
dialogue in resolving ethical conflicts and promoting understanding and cooperation among
different groups and cultures. As well as promoting critical thinking about one’s own ethical
beliefs and values, it promotes an openness to different perspectives and ways of understanding
the world.
18
Coincidentia oppositorum, also known as ‘meeting of opposites,’ is the concept that opposing
ideas, phenomena, or forces can exist simultaneously and be reconciled or integrated into a
20
Giuseppe De Riso
many elements, characterised by the proximity of opposites or contrasting fea-

tures. The protagonist of the story is Flapping Eagle, a Native American from
the Axona tribe. His mother died during childbirth, which is why he is called
Born from Dead, a nickname that juxtaposes death and birth as if life emerged
from the former. Death is not only the end of life, but also the source of it.
His father died soon after, leaving him in the care of his 13-year-old sister,
Bird-Dog. In his tribe, people are generally dark-skinned and short in stature,
while he has a fair complexion and is quite tall. Furthermore, the protagonist
is born a hermaphrodite19 who takes on male characteristics as he ages. Axo-
nas distrusted him because of his mutation, believing he was an abomination
or a black magic prodigy. As a result of his displaying both male and female
characteristics, Flapping Eagle was originally named Joe-Sue, a combination
of a male and female name. His sister presents a similar ambiguity. She is a
klutzy cook but an experienced huntress, i.e., she is incapable of doing what
her tribe expects of a woman, namely preparing food, but excels in a male
prerogative, hunting. As a hunter with breasts, Bird-Dog was anathema in her
society. Performing manly chores, she was known as the ‘manly sister’ as she
combined supposed opposites.
Due to their unfortunate parental circumstances, as well as their sexual
and body duplicity, Flapping Eagle and his sister are disliked and ostracised
by the rest of their tribe. Despite not being expelled from their community
of origin, the siblings are outcasts and marginalised, reduced to quasi-Pariah
status. They are neither inside nor outside their community. For this reason,
they eventually decide to leave it and migrate to a place where they could
establish new relationships and live fully integrated, without being discrim-
inated against. Afzal-Khan refers to Flapping Eagle as a ‘peripheral’ hero,
similar to the character Omar Khayyam in Shame (1995). Moreover, in many
whole. In philosophy, it is often seen as a way to bridge the gap between dualistic and monistic
worldviews, which view reality as consisting of either two opposing forces or a single, unified
force. As a way of bringing together seemingly opposing or contradictory elements, coinciden-
tia oppositorum is often used in literature and art.
19
The idea of coincidentia oppositorum can be applied to the figure of the hermaphrodite as
a person or being who has both male and female qualities or characteristics. A hermaphrodite
represents the idea that seemingly opposite or contradictory elements can coexist and be re-
conciled within one individual. Hermaphrodites have a long history in literature and art, and
have often been used as symbols of unity, wholeness, and complexity. Many cultures view the
hermaphrodite as a symbol of balance and integration. As a symbol of fluidity and complexity
of gender and identity, the hermaphrodite challenges rigid and restrictive gender roles.
21
ways his birth is similar to that of Saleem from Midnight’s Children, who is
not an orphan but appears to have been born as the result of circumstances
out of his control, dictated by timing and destiny. While Saleem considers his
to be a fated event in history, it is death that defines Flapping Eagle’s origin.
Both children share a fateful connection: temporal factors predominate over
biological or territorial ones.
There is a strong sense of ambiguity surrounding both characters in that
they seem to be constantly caught in a tension between two polarities, where
one element appears to oppose or contradict the other. Other characters, too,
often have more than one given name in the novel. Grimus (an anagram of
the mythical bird Simurg) is also known as Sispy. The United States is also
referred to as Amerindia. Bird-dog’s name is self-given, the real one is never
revealed. In Western culture, the hermaphrodite is considered to be the ar-
chetypal example of coincidentia oppositorum. Grimus presents a protagonist
who is at all levels a prototype for both Rushdie’s characters and his writing
style, as he combines duplicity through processes of hyphenation.
1.3 Opalescence, metaxy and palindromes

In Snakes and Ladders, a game referred to in Midnight’s Children, ladders
are positive because they lead upwards, while snakes are negative because
they lead downwards. This game has a moral aspect as it illustrates the fact
that human existence is characterised by dualistic tendencies. However, the
game lacks a fundamental human feature, which can be summarised as the
ambiguity that the narrator believes connects all things, the inherent ambigui-
ty of existence.20 In the words of Booker (1990):
...this Nietzschean – Whitmanesque mode of accepting contradiction might
serve not only as a central theme of Shame, but of all of Rushdie’s fiction. That
fiction consistently embraces contradiction, privileging the plural over the sin-
20
“All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can
hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the
corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it’s more than that; no mere carrot-and-
stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up
against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of
the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable op-
positions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the
polarities of knees and nose... but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial di-
mension, that of ambiguity – because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down
a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake.” (Rushdie 2021c, 212, emphasis is mine)
22
Giuseppe De Riso
gular, the polyphonic over the monologic. One of the clearest ways in which it
does so is through the careful construction of dual oppositions, like the snakes
and ladders of Sinai’s children’s game, only to deconstruct those oppositions
by demonstrating that the apparent polar opposites are in fact interchangeable
and mutually interdependent.
The most obvious way in which Rushdie launches his attack on dual thinking
is through the use of paired characters. All of the most important characters
tend to be shadowed by doubles in Rushdie’s texts. (978)
In Midnight’s Children, Booker argues that Saleem and Shiva share a num-
ber of characteristics that make them essentially interchangeable (e.g. that
they were born at midnight on 15 August 1947 and being switched at birth
by Mary Pereira). There is, in fact, an oscillatory movement in the narrative
that allows Saleem to ‘function’ as Shiva, or Shiva to take Saleem’s positions,
depending on the circumstances. Many characters in Rushdie’s later novels
are linked by this recurring pattern, including Iskander Harappa/Raza Hyder
and Harappa/Maulana Dawood in Shame, Gibreel Farishta/Saladin Chamcha
and Gibreel/Mahound in The Satanic Verses (2011), Noman Sher Noman/
Max Ophuls in Shalimar the Clown (2006), or Ismail Ismail/Sam DuChamp
in Quichotte (2019). In addressing Rushdie’s ambiguity, this volume aims to
highlight the oscillatory, hence ‘metaleptic’, mechanism that breaks through
the static nature of binarism. Rushdie’s “pervasive tone of uncertainty” (Couto
1982, 62) allows him to create an “internal dialectic” (Rushdie 1995, 242) ca-
pable of “holding [the] large numbers of wholly irreconcilable views” (ibid.)
that bind binarisms together.
I intend to examine the aesthetic canons and narrative devices that enable
Rushdie to become both master and recipient of his own contradictions in
his attempt to describe how multiplicities interact. In addition, I will discuss
literary, theoretical, and religious themes that Rushdie explores at the intersec-
tion of reality and fiction as he weaves and unravels paradoxical connections
between them and human history. Rushdie uses writing to ask himself and the
reader whether truth and fiction should be considered as two separate and op-
posing realms. This question often involves careful consideration of language.
Rushdie is indeed a writer who emphasises language’s ability to create sign
systems whose subjects survive by naturalising and becoming flesh through
human performance.
The critical insights offered here may contribute to interrogate Rushdie’s
comprehension of the Orwellian decoupling between meaning and signifier,
between sign and referent. This can help us understand the reinforcement of
the illusion of subjective sovereignty, the use of violence on an ethnic or racial
23
basis, and the recent consolidation of nationalism on a global scale, the delegit-
imization of knowledge in social networks, and the spread of mistrust fueled
by irrational emotions and feelings to protect us from unpleasant realities. By
looking at Rushdie through this lens, we may gain a deeper understanding of the
diminishing trust in democratic institutions, the recent delegitimization of estab-
lished knowledge in favour of unexamined snippets of information that claim
equal or greater value, and also how certain political systems can rely on the
validation of ‘post-truth regimes’ in which emotions sabotage logic and reason.
More generally, it means recognising the reasons Rushdie’s work will endure.
Following this introductory chapter, the rest of this book is divided in three
main parts. The second chapter highlights Rushdie’s ‘postmodern’ humour as
his most significant literary device. Midnight’s Children combines myths from
various religions with the author’s own childhood memories to create a nar-
rative with multiple layers of meaning. As Kortenaar (2004) notes, it should
be remembered that Saleem’s story is a fictionalised recreation of Rushdie’s
youth in Bombay, when he lived in a house called Windsor Villa on Warden
Road overlooking the Breach Candy Swimming Pool. The term ‘recreation’
has been used here since Rushdie is not interested in providing an authentic
autobiographical account of those years. As a matter of fact, the main differ-
ence between Saleem and Rushdie is that, despite wandering around Pakistan
and Bangladesh, Saleem never actually moves to a Western country. Unlike
Rushdie, he is also able to return to Bombay, where he was born and raised
and where he can work at his ayah’s factory while “pickl[ing] his memories
and write his memoirs.” (Kortenaar 2004, 7)
According to Linda Hutcheon (1989), the author/character and India/West
specularities give rise to the novel’s intertextual plots: “They are, on the one
hand, from Indian legends, films and literature and, on the other, from the
west – The Tin Drum, Tristram Shandy, One Hundred Years of Solitude and so
on.” (62) Dipesh Chakrabarty (1992, 2009), however, criticised this remark,
pointing out that in highlighting this duplicity, Hutcheon only cites references
that she is familiar with and can identify in a Western context, leaving out
those that relate to Indian culture. According to the scholar, this ignorance is
only partially concealed by the omission, since it comes to light indirectly.
Kortenaar further notes that:
Hutcheon and Chakrabarty are both wrong if they assume that the doubling of
Rushdie’s references is symmetrical. Hutcheon names only the intertexts that
need to be identified because, while very conspicuous, they are left unstated by
the novel itself. She leaves unglossed the references to the Quran and to Hindu
mythology because they are already explicit: Ganesh and Mount Sinai, Gabriel
24
Giuseppe De Riso
and Kali are directly invoked by Saleem. The references that the novel does not
gloss, which are all Western, do not belong to Saleem but to Rushdie. (2004, 7)
While Chandrabarty’s critique is certainly accurate, it is perhaps overly

harsh given Rushdie’s desire to avoid procedural accuracy in order to create a
pastiche in which all the ‘flavours’ or ingredients are deliberately difficult to
reassemble.
Matters are further complicated when one considers that Rushdie, playing on
the ambiguity of his irony, masterfully incorporates into his narrative an indeter-
minate series of oversights and errors (whether they relate to historical events or
to myths and legends prevalent in various cultures) difficult for any scholar to
detect. To expose them explicitly would require encyclopaedic knowledge. With
varying degrees of awareness, Saleem recognises the limitations of his memory
and the ‘impurities’ it contains, and warns the readers of the tricks it might play
on him. There is a point in recognising that Saleem is not an unreliable narrator
simply because his memory has gaps or inaccuracies, but that he is an interested
party in the story which he influences and is influenced by. In fact, he may wish
to orient it by omitting details or arranging others to create a perspective that is
primarily convenient for him, so he can be the first to accept it.
I want to illustrate how Rushdie wants the reader to constantly doubt Sal-
eem’s reliability as a narrator, not only because of his accuracy of recollec-
tion, but also because of gaps, errors and contradictions that reveal a reflective
quality, drawing on Roman Ingarden’s (1973) concept of opalescent narrative
elements, which arises from the narrator’s possible biases and leads to a web
of otherwise unsuspected narrative paths. I will show how Rushdie uses iro-
ny to construct a dialogic framework of doubt in which many key elements
can have different qualities depending on the reader’s point of view. A close
examination of the text reveals that the ambiguity of magical realism allows
the reader to vacillate between belief and disbelief and to consider several
hypotheses at once. As with the narrator and author of the story, readers will
ultimately only remember the narrative they chose to believe.
By exploring what might have been possible and what might still be, Rush-
die proves himself a versatile writer, able to hold multiple versions of the world
at once. The Satanic Verses, his fourth novel which I discuss in the third chap-
ter, demonstrates this not only in narrative and structural terms, but also in
the extremely polarising perception that the novel generated among critics and
audiences. With disarming irony, Rushdie describes the vacillation between
certainty and doubt that characterises the perspectives of the two Indian-born
migrants Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, as well as his own contradic-
25
tory sentiments in relation to religion, nationalism or any prevailing orthodoxy,

questioning where and whether a principle of authority can be sought in their
respective narratives. In this way, he creates a text with three intertwined nar-
rative strands, each converging on the traces of a dualistic opposition between
Gibreel and Saladin, faith and nationality, historical reality and dream.
My contention is that Rushdie displays a renewed aesthetic sensibility that
makes him a pioneer of metamodern writing as defined by Timotheus Vermeu-
len and Robin van der Akker (2010). I will focus in particular on the concept
of metaxy to show that the dualisms that characterise the novel are not based
on the static opposition common to binarisms. Two levels of reality (the his-
torical and the dreamlike) coexist and interact simultaneously throughout the
narrative, according to a rhythmic movement of affirmation and negation, i.e.
a principle of ‘palinodic’ narrative development that defies chronology and
linear progression. Following Josh Toth (2017), it is argued in this context that
the narrative of The Satanic Verses is ‘historioplastic’ because it relies on the
unlimited pliability of the narrative material in both spatial and chronological
terms. Rushdie is able to address instances that are typical of both modernism
and postmodernism, approaching the notion of metamorphosis or intercultural
transformation from a dynamic perspective that takes into account the poten-
tial of the migrant subject to be both one thing and its opposite.
Accordingly, the concluding section of this volume examines Rushdie’s
writing as an expression of a palindromic relationship between art and life that
does not subordinate one to the other but allows both to emerge in response
to reciprocal influences. Thus, past and future can contaminate each other.
Interestingly, many clues in Quichotte indirectly address Rushdie’s realisation
that his novels gave him glimpses, hints and visions of what his future would
be like. Through art, he was not only exploring his past and his inner self, as
he had always believed since Midnight’s Children, but also his future without
being aware of it. In the process of writing his latest novel about the fictional
character Quichotte, protagonist and author Sam DuChamp realises that what
he has written is also what his future holds. Through Quichotte’s tragicomic
search for his beloved Salma, amidst a thousand television quotes and accom-
panied by Sancho (the son he envisions having in the future with Salma), Sam
realises how much love he has lost in his life and is determined to reclaim it
with some success. Sam thus gains a palindromic, or reciprocal, perspective
on life and art and realises that he has unknowingly created his own future
through his artistic inventions. It is a humbling insight that unites Sam and
Rushdie himself, a writer who finally realises that the foundations of his life
rest on the invention of his past works and stories.
26
Chapter II
Dialogic Imaginations.
Opalescence and Tentative Acceptance
in Midnight’s Children
Rather than being innocent victims of suspicion, literary
works are active instigators and perpetrators of it. That
we have learned to read between the lines has every-
thing to do with the devices deployed in modern works
of art: unreliable narrators, conflicting viewpoints, frag-
mented narratives, and metafictional devices that alert
readers to the ways in which words conceal rather than
reveal.
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique
Who would want to believe that they never met again,

never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe
that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? [...]
No one will care what events and which individuals
were misrepresented to make a novel. I know that there
is always a certain kind of reader who will be com-
pelled to ask: But what really happened?
Ian McEwan, Atonement
2.1 A story rooted in history, myths and inconsistencies

Midnight’s Children is Rushdie’s first major novel. The story of Saleem Sinai,
while chronologically Rushdie’s second literary work, is undoubtedly his first
notable novel, often considered his masterpiece. A recurring sense of humour
is no accident in this work. Rushdie uses irony to explore the relationship be-
tween fact and fiction with different techniques. In general, narrative is char-
acterised primarily by a strongly allusive tone. There is no overt playfulness,
as references are mostly indirect, transversal or undefined.
Claire Colebrook (2004) explains that irony is a mode of speech or ex-
pression in which the opposite of what is actually meant is said or implied,
often in a humorous or satirical way. Since irony generally contradicts what is
intended, it is an extremely flexible tool to mock something or someone, and
it can also be an effective means of criticism and dissent. She clarifies that
Chapter 2. Dialogic Imaginations. Opalescence and Tentative Acceptance in Midnight’s Children
the word originates from the Greek word εἰρωνεία, eirōneía, which means
‘dissimulation’ or ‘feigned ignorance’, and was originally used in Plato’s So-
cratic dialogues1 to describe Socrates’ ambiguous ability to simultaneously
tell the truth and lie, or, more precisely, to lie and pursue his true intentions.
Irony combines truth and lies by definition. Colebrook argues that irony can
be ambiguous and paradoxical, as it often says one thing and implies another,
making it difficult to determine what the speaker is truly trying to convey.
It presents us with the fundamental difficulty of finding out what the author
really thinks and how to ensure the sincerity and authenticity of the discourse.
It is unclear whether the author’s statements are true or false and how much
information is being conveyed.
Brian McHale (1987) contends that postmodern irony emerges from the
reinterpretation of the relationship between author and God in terms of a
quasi-divine or demiurgic power. According to McHale, the idea of the poet
as a divine being arose after the Renaissance, when people lost their under-
standing of humanity’s place in the universe. The orderly view of the world
of poets like Sidney eventually gave way to a new perspective influenced
by the philosopher Blaise Pascal.2 This new understanding recognised the
gap between the limited capacity of the human mind and the vastness of the
universe, which is impossible to fully grasp. To compensate for this short-
coming, humanity began to paradoxically treat the universe as something
that could be controlled and manipulated, a toy subject to its whims, rather
than as something infinitely vast and mysterious. The human mind eventu-
ally became larger than the universe from which it emerged. From this point
of view, postmodern irony results from humanity reducing the universe to a
game it controls and plays in the face of complexities it cannot understand,
1
A series of philosophical conversations recorded by Plato in which the philosopher Socrates
discusses with various interlocutors. In the Socratic dialogues, irony is often used as a method
to question and challenge conventional knowledge and traditional forms of authority. Irony is a
tool Socrates uses to expose contradictions and inconsistencies in his interlocutors’ arguments
and to make them question their own assumptions and beliefs. It involves rhetorical questions
and apparent agreement with the opponent’s position to expose contradictions and weaknesses.
For example, Socrates may seem to agree with an interlocutor’s position and then ask a series
of questions that expose their inconsistencies or logical fallacies.
2
According to Pascal, the complexity of the world and the vastness of the universe are beyond
human comprehension. Humans are faced with the reality that there is so much we do not
understand and may never fully comprehend as a result of this gap, and this should serve as a
reminder of our limited knowledge.
28
Giuseppe De Riso
explain, or contain. With the realisation that the universe is infinite and be-
yond human comprehension, artistic consciousness begins to play with it.
Until everything was closed and hierarchically comprehensible, the universe
was something to be taken seriously, and one had to respect everyone’s role
in it, their position, their nature, and their means of cognition. After realis-
ing that they could not comprehend reality, writers stopped creating fictional
worlds and began to show their creative abilities in other ways. As one of
the most influential writers of postmodernism, Rushdie uses irony as one of
these devices.
Consider, for example, Saleem’s approach to telling his own story. He is
born at midnight on August 15, 1947, when India gained its independence from
the British Empire. For this reason, he is endowed with the power to intercept
people’s thoughts and connect them. Before reaching that point, however, Sal-
eem says that if he wants to tell his story, he must go all the way back to the
beginning, to the moment when his grandfather, Aadam Aziz, returning to
Kashmir after studying medicine in Germany, fell in love with Naseem Ghani:
“I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it
really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as
my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.” (Rushdie 2021c, 22, emphasis is in the
original) Going so far back in time indicates a desire for precision in the nar-
rative. This stance gives the impression that the narrator is trying to provide
as much historical and situational background as possible, probably to avoid
ambiguity and confusion. Saleem seems to promise that he is performing a
particularly difficult feat of memory for the sake of verisimilitude. In the same
breath, however, it is noteworthy that he uses the word ‘remake’ to refer to his
work of narrative reconstruction. In doing so, he is subtly saying that he will
do the opposite of what he has just implied. In fact, a remake is the process of
enriching old material with new elements.
From this point on, Rushdie intersperses a series of humorous allusions,
the meanings of which can be inferred only from the contrast between what
is said and what is implied. Saleem recounts how in 1915, while praying,
his grandfather Aadam hit his nose on the ground, whereupon three drops
of blood flowed from his nose and crystallised into rubies. That day he met
Naseem, who would later become his wife. The three drops of blood are men-
tioned again after the couple is married, when the sheet on which Aadam and
Naseem sleep after their wedding night is stained with three drops of blood,
symbolising the bride’s virginity and fertility. The name Aadam clearly refers
to the Christian myth of Adam and Eve. It gives narration a mythological basis
for the union of the two ‘original’ characters in the story.
29
The congealing drops of blood also symbolise the origin of human life, as
the Qur’an states that an embryo is a clot of blood.3 The drops, then, represent
the origin of life itself, for from Aadam and Naseem’s love will come three
daughters: Alia, the firstborn, Mumtaz and Emerald.4 With the Bible and the
Qur’an, the two sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions, Rushdie crosses two
myths of origin. Midnight’s Children is also inspired by Rushdie’s own child-
hood memories of growing up in Bombay: “The novel I was planning was a
multigenerational family novel, [... and it] needed to be [...] deeply rooted in
history, [...]. And, because it was to be a novel of Bombay, it had to be rooted
in the movies as well, movies of the kind now called ‘Bollywood’ [...].” (ivi,
8) The novel weaves together memories, history, myths, religion, and legends
of the Indian subcontinent and beyond. It is also important to note that by
intertwining his own memories with those of Saleem, the author creates a
postmodern pastiche5 that blends reality and fantasy in a humorous manner.
This approach sprinkles subtle hints that may initially go unnoticed or even
escape the reader altogether; eventually, the latter begins to grasp a narrative
composed of many layers of meaning. A statement is one thing, but its impli-
cations are quite another, and the reader will soon realise that one plot cannot
be unravelled without understanding the other. Rushdie’s narrative as a whole
can only be understood by recognising how the humour evolves as it jumps
between levels or blends them together. For every piece of information, there
3
The blood clot mentioned in the Qur’an refers to a passage in Surah Al-Muminun in which
God speaks of the creation of human beings: “And indeed, We created man from a clot of blood.
Then We placed him as a drop of sperm in a safe repository. Then We made the sperm into a
clinging clot, and We made the clot into a lump of flesh, and We made the lump of flesh into
bones, and We clothed the bones with flesh. Then We developed him into another creation. So
blessed is Allah, the best of creators.” (Qur’an 23:12-14) In this passage, the Qur’an describes
the process of human creation, which begins with a clot of blood and goes through various
stages of development until the final creation of a human being. Some interpretations suggest
that the clot of blood refers to the earliest stages of human development, when the fertilised egg
begins to divide and develop into the various organs and systems of the human body.
4
They will have two more sons, Hanif and Mustapha, for whom the reference to the three drops
of blood obviously does not seem to be relevant.
5
Pastiche is a term that refers to the imitation or incorporation of elements from various sour-
ces, often in a humorous or ironic way. In the context of postmodernism, pastiche involves the
use of elements from various artistic, cultural, and historical sources in a way that challenges
traditional notions of authenticity and originality. It is often characterised by not committing to
a particular style or genre, but playfully experimenting with different forms, conventions, and
elements from different time periods and cultures, as well as mixing of high and low art forms.
30
Giuseppe De Riso
is always a slightly different interpretation, depending on how well we are

able to discern its possible references. Humour in Rushdie’s work creates a
kind of multiple exposure6 that allows the reader to mix different elements of
the narrative and gain a whole new perspective. The author can use narrative
confusion to introduce absurd, even ridiculous, elements. Saleem’s initial re-
quest to the reader sets the tone for the narrative that follows:
Please believe that I am falling apart. I am not speaking metaphorically; nor
is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for
pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug
– that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, sub-
jected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by
spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams [...] I ask you only to accept
(as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six
hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious
dust. This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (ivi, 61,
emphasis is mine)
Leaving temporarily aside the dualism with the Indian nation expressed
in this passage, the reader is asked to accept an impossible event, namely
that Saleem’s body is crumbling and cracks can be seen in his skin. Saleem
makes it clear that his decay is not metaphorical, but literal. Fearing that the
end is near, he has begun to write down his story. By writing, he is trying to
preserve his memory and give meaning to his life so that it has not been in
vain. For some readers, this may be a tall order. Saleem also shares his story
with Padma, his present lover. Padma is the one who allows the story to be
told, and that is why she plays such an important role. She does not passively
accept the narrative, but actively contributes to its development with her ques-
tions, reflections, and even her doubts. As we will see later, she performs an
indirect auctorial function. Saleem’s particular physical condition allows him
to tell his story as a survivor’s struggle against time: “Now, however, time
(having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-one years
old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits [...] I must work fast,
6
Multiple exposure is a technique in photography and cinematography that involves superim-
posing multiple images or frames to create a single composite image. Here I use the phrase
metaphorically to describe the layering or intertwining of different narrative strands, themes,
or perspectives in a text. I also wish to highlight the relationship of different characters or
events within a narrative and to explore the overlap and interplay of various time periods or
perspectives.
31
faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning [...] something.” (ivi, 22,

emphasis is mine)
Whether this battle will be successful also depends on Padma’s contri-
bution. Saleem compares himself to Sherazade, the heroine of the Arabian
Nights. She hides the end of her daily tales from the Persian king Shahryar
in order to seduce him and make him learn them the following night. Thanks
to the meticulously planned interruptions of her stories, she survives and pre-
vents the death of other slaves. Padma is an eager listener too. She is fasci-
nated when Saleem interrupts his narrative and then resumes. She urges him
to continue his story. As Padma listens to the narration, she interferes with
questions, comments, and doubts. Therefore, she will prove to be a crucial
part of Rushdie’s ironic treatment of Saleem’s memory.
Taking a closer look at one of Saleem’s errors in remembering events will
help us better understand this theme. Ganesha, one the most revered deity in
Hinduism, is the son of Shiva7 and Parvati.8 He is the god of beginnings and
the remover of all obstacles. He has a human body with an elephant head
and a pronounced belly. Ganesha’s love for sweets is the reason for his big
belly.9 The elephant head, on the other hand, was actually the result of a mis-
understanding. According to legend, one day Parvati asked Ganesha to guard
her shower. When Shiva saw him, he mistook him for a lover or an intruder
7
The figure is named after an important Hindu deity. In Hindu mythology, Shiva is often de-
picted holding a trident, which represents the three gunas (qualities or attributes) of creation,
preservation and destruction.
8
Hindu goddess Parvati is the consort of Shiva. Many influential symbols and stories are related
to Parvati in Hindu mythology. She represents Shakti, the divine feminine energy that is the
source of all power and creation, and is often depicted as a loving and devoted wife. The god-
dess of fertility and fertility rituals, Parvati is also linked to the power of creation and growth.
9
Especially laddu and modak. The former is a spherical sweet made of milk, sugar and flour,
the latter is a kind of sweet dumpling from the state of Maharashtra, served mainly during the
festival dedicated to the god, Ganesh Chaturthi. There are other meanings associated with the
figure of Ganesha. The whole tusk symbolises the existence of the one truth. The imperfection
of the material world is represented by the broken tusk. In this way, the two tusks symbolise the
coexistence of truth and imperfection. The lotus stands for purity: being in the world without
being consumed by it. The noose he holds in one hand represents the ability to approach desires
and remove obstacles. The accompanying mouse stands for the desires that we must control and
not give free rein to. Ganesha also controls Muladhara, the first chakra located between the anus
and the genitals at the base of the spine. In this space lives Kundalini, the divine energy that lies
dormant in man. It is reasonable to assume that Ganesha is probably the most revered deity in
Hinduism because of this feature.
32
Giuseppe De Riso
and cut off his head. Parvati then rebukes Shiva and sends him in search of
a head to replace the old one, but he can only find the head of an elephant.
Midnight’s Children picks up an old story about Ganesha, which explains why
he has a broken tusk. Legend has it that when Vyasa began the Mahābhārata,10
he asked Ganesha to write it according to his dictation. Ganesha agreed on
the condition that Vyasa recite it in its entirety in a single continuous stretch,
without pausing or interruption. Vyasa also agreed that he should not continue
each time Ganesha came across a verse he did not understand. However, as
the Mahābhārata is a very long and complex work, Ganesha’s pen broke while
he was writing, and not wanting to give up his task, he broke one of his two
tusks to continue.
This is only one of the many stories that provide an explanation for the bro-
ken tusk; there are many others that contradict each other. In another variant
of this story, for example, Vyasa soon found himself in need of a break. Rather
than stop dictating, he began to tell a story within the story of the Mahābhāra-
ta, which Ganesha continued to write down. This story within-the-story went
on for so long that Ganesha found himself in a difficult position. He knew that
he could not stop Vyasa from dictating. To resolve this situation, Ganesha is
said to have used his divine powers to create a demon called Vika-Purusha to
act as a buffer between Vyasa and Ganesha. Vyasa dictated the Mahābhārata
to Vika-Purusha, who then dictated it to Ganesha, who wrote it down. In this
way, Vyasa could take breaks when needed, while Ganesha could fulfil his
promise to write down the entire Mahābhārata in one piece.
Not surprisingly, the stories about these deities have been taken up and
revised by other religions, such as Buddhism. Uma Krishnaswamy (1996)
clearly states that in Indian mythology, tales and legends sometimes contradict
each other, resulting in a disorganised or confused picture. She recalls, for
example, how Ganesha is created by Parvati as a small child in the story “Ga-
nesha’s Head”, while in another known as “In the Beginning” he is an adult
before anything else is present in the universe: “Again, this can be best un-
derstood by remembering that these legends were not all written down at one
time but evolved over many generations of people and across a geographical
area of more than a million square miles.” (Krishnaswami 1996, x)
10
The Mahābhārata is an ancient Indian epic that tells the story of the Kuru dynasty and the
conflict between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of
ancient India, the other being the Rāmāyaṇa. The Mahābhārata is also one of the longest epic
poems in the world, with over 100,000 verses.
33
Juxtaposing different versions of the same story can also lead to a time
paradox. When all the stories about Ganesha are considered together, no co-
herent picture emerges. He may appear as an adult in one story in which he
is portrayed at a younger age, while in another, chronologically sequential
story, he is portrayed as a child. Ganesha has at least 108 known names. He is
sometimes depicted with two arms, sometimes with four, and sometimes with
ten. Saleem’s tale also exhibits this kind of factual and chronological inconsis-
tencies. Because of the distinctive features of his nose, Saleem is called Snot-
face,11 Snotnose, Snoop, The Nose, Cucumber-nose, Pinocchio, Goo-face;
because of his head, he goes by names such as Mapface, Stainface, Piece of
the Moon, Baldy; when he loses his memory, he is called Buddha. He refers
to himself as a basketed ghost and a would-be saviour, among other things.
Throughout Saleem’s narrative, we learn to accept the possibility that a thing
might have happened differently than it is described. Moreover, the characters
are often presented as having fantastic or mythological qualities related to the
particular deities or supernatural beings to which they refer, but without nec-
essarily implying complete identification with them.
To give a few examples: in Saleem’s family, it is the nose that enables
Saleem and his grandfather to detect danger, just as in the myth of Ganesha,
whose trunk symbolises his ability to recognise, ‘sniff out’, and distinguish
good from evil, danger from safety. Likewise, Ganesha’s belly is so large
because it contains the whole world, just as Saleem describes himself as a
container for as many stories as there are people in the Indian nation.12 As
his work progresses, Rushdie draws indiscriminately on mythology, stories,
and official histories from India. A more constant feature of Rushdie’s work
will be the ambiguous integration of elements from his life with the lives
11
The nickname derives from the fact that Saleem has a particularly runny nose, which his
mother finds annoying and amusing. Throughout the novel, Saleem is addressed by his family
and friends with this nickname, and it becomes an important part of his identity. Although it is a
somewhat derogatory nickname, Saleem accepts it and even sees it as a source of pride. Saleem’s
runny nose is a symbol, among other things, of his fluid identity and the fluid nature of the story.
12
“And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles
places rumours, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallow-
er of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed mul-
titudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet
with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the centre, clutching at the dream
of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence
the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before
anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.” (Rushdie 2021c, 22)
34
Giuseppe De Riso
of his characters, and this will become increasingly important until his final
book, Quichotte (2019). Rushdie has never written a purely autobiographical
work. Rather, he uses factual data and his own personal memories, even if
inaccurate, to play with his characters. Rushdie acknowledges that in writing
Saleem’s story he was inspired by places, people, and situations from his own
memory, and that he and his character share some similarities. He modelled
Saleem’s family on his own, but with some crucial differences that, oddly
enough, helped him understand his own relatives better than ever when writ-
ing the novel. Still, the two characters do not quite align:
But in spite of these echoes, Saleem and I are unalike. For one thing, our lives
took very different directions. Mine led me abroad to England and eventually
to America. But Saleem never leaves the subcontinent. His life is contained
within, and defined by, the borders of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Also, in
case there’s any doubt, I was not swapped at birth with another baby. [...] As
a final proof that my character and I are not one and the same, I offer another
anecdote. When I was in Delhi to do one of the first Indian readings from Mid-
night’s Children, I heard a woman’s voice cry loudly as I walked out onto the
stage, ‘Oh! But he’s got a perfectly ordinary nose!’ (Rushdie 2021c, 17)
As mentioned earlier, at a certain point in the novel Saleem makes a refer-

ence to the legend that Ganesha copied the Mahābhārata under the dictation
of the Sage Vyasa. In the version told by Saleem, however, Ganesha sat at the
feet of the Indian poet Vālmīki, rather than Vyasa, and wrote the Hindu epic
Rāmāyaṇa, instead of the Mahābhārata, according to his dictation. For almost
any Indian Hindu reader, Saleem is making a glaring error. Rushdie certainly
intended this oversight, which can be justified in part by Saleem’s Islamic
background. In his own words, it was “a way of telling the reader to maintain
a healthy distrust.” (Rushdie 1991e, 32)
The error is revealing because it allows us to see how Padma’s presence
conceals a religious reference to Ganesha’s writing of the Mahābhārata, a
foundational Hindu text. As a result, new meanings are given to the narra-
tive’s dialogical nature. It is equally important to understand the context in
which he places this mistaken reference, as he laments the absence of Padma,
the narratee of his story and his “necessary ear” (Rushdie 2021c, 224), some-
times sleeping at his feet (ivi, 311), without whom he feels that a balance has
been disturbed and cracks in his body are spreading ever faster.13 It seems that
13
“It has been two whole days since Padma stormed out of my life. For two days, her place at
the vat of mango kasaundy has been taken by another woman – also thick of waist, also hairy
35
Saleem associates his deterioration with the possibility of not only writing,
but also telling his story. Without Padma, Saleem’s destruction accelerates.
Through storytelling, Padma’s ear becomes essential for Saleem to write and
survive. Ganesha’s broken tusk thus has a dual significance: on the one hand,
it connects Padma and Saleem with Ganesha and Vyasa. On the other hand,
it illustrates once again the extent to which unacknowledged inventions and
misunderstandings contribute to the ‘remaking’ (ivi, 22) of Saleem’s story, as
well as India’s history:
Other men have recited stories before me; other men were not so impetuously
abandoned. When Valmiki, the author of the Ramayana, dictated his master-
piece to elephant-headed Ganesh, did the god walk out on him halfway? He
certainly did not. (Note that, despite my Muslim background, I’m enough of
a Bombayite to be well up in Hindu stories, and actually I’m very fond of the
image of trunk-nosed, flap-eared Ganesh solemnly taking dictation!) (ivi, 224)
Not only is Saleem mistaken without the reader realising it, but Rushdie
plays on this fallacy by claiming that he is familiar with these stories because
he grew up in Bombay and has a strong connection to them. In fact, he claims
to be particularly fascinated by or attached to the image of Ganesha. By saying
that he is sure he is right and citing his own childhood as proof, Rushdie subtly
pokes fun at Saleem’s misconception. Those who do not have Saleem’s back-
ground, as is likely to be the case with most readers who come from outside
India and are unfamiliar with the subject, would not think of disagreeing with
Saleem, questioning him, or even suggesting that he might be wrong, espe-
cially when he is so confident and knowledgeable about the subject. Once one
becomes familiar with Rushdie’s irony, however, Saleem’s claim that he is an
expert should be a warning sign that one is in fact dealing with a deception.
This is also indicated by another clue, namely the possible contamination of
his Muslim background with the prevailing Hindu culture in Bombay.
Inconsistencies like this abound in the novel. For example, Saleem com-
plains that Mumbadevi, the city’s patron deity, is in decline because no festival
day is dedicated to her, although actually there is one. Consequently, Saleem
is either telling the truth and the calendar of the India he is reporting on is not
of forearm; but, in my eyes, no replacement at all! – while my own dung-lotus has vanished
into I don’t know where. A balance has been upset; I feel cracks widening down the length of
my body; because suddenly I am alone, without my necessary ear, and it isn’t enough. I am
seized by a sudden fist of anger: why should I be so unreasonably treated by my one disciple?”
(ivi, 224)
36
Giuseppe De Riso
the real one (if so, we should consider him in a different time dimension than
we are), or he has made a mistake that calls his memory into question.14 Sim-
ilarly, Saleem claims that the Pakistani army surrendered to Sam Manekshaw
on December 15, 1971, when in fact it was Jagjit Singh Arora.15 It should be
noted that Saleem is neither particularly stupid nor indifferent to India’s his-
tory. Nevertheless, he is clearly unreliable as a narrator, which means that we
cannot always take his statements literally or as fact.
Saleem himself is aware of the possibility of errors in the narrative, and he
warns the reader about them. He can also see disbelief in Padma’s face, but
reassures her: “Padma, if you are a little uncertain of my reliability, well, a
little uncertainty is no bad thing.” (ivi, 212) Saleem points out that he cannot
remember all the details, that his memory has many gaps, and he urges the
reader not to overlook certain facts simply because they may be wrong or
historically inaccurate. Historical accuracy is neither his goal nor his priority.
14
The passage reads as follows: “As for Mumbadevi – she’s not so popular these days,
having been replaced by elephant-headed Ganesh in the people’s affections. The calendar of
festivals reveals her decline: Ganesh – ‘Ganpati Baba’ – has his day of Ganesh Chaturthi,
when huge processions are ‘taken out’ and march to Chowpatty bearing plaster effigies of
the god, which they hurl into the sea. [...] but where is Mumbadevi’s day? It is not on the
calendar.” (ivi, 141)
15
“Sometimes, mountains must move before old comrades can be reunited. On December
15th, 1971, in the capital of the newly liberated state of Bangladesh, Tiger Niazi surrendered
to his old chum Sam Manekshaw.” (ivi, 540) Pakistan’s invasion of East Bengal (present-day
Bangladesh) in 1971 was a military operation within the framework of the Bangladesh Lib-
eration War, a conflict between the Pakistani government and the Bengali national movement
in East Pakistan. It arose from long-standing political, cultural and economic differences be-
tween East and West Pakistan, which had been united as a single country in 1947 but sepa-
rated by more than 1,000 miles. In 1971, tensions between the two regions reached a tipping
point when the government of West Pakistan, led by General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan,
launched a military campaign against the Bengali national movement in East Pakistan. The
campaign, which involved the deployment of Pakistani troops and paramilitary forces, was
aimed at crushing the Bengali nationalist movement and consolidating control over East Paki-
stan. The war began on December 3, when Indian forces, aided by the Bangladeshi indepen-
dence movement, launched a coordinated attack on East Pakistan. The invasion was character-
ised by human rights violations, including the indiscriminate killing of civilians, widespread
rape and sexual violence, and the forced displacement of millions of people. Pakistani forces
in East Pakistan were quickly overwhelmed, and on December 15, the Pakistani army surren-
dered to the Indian and Bangladeshi forces. This effectively ended the war, and East Pakistan
declared its independence as the new nation of Bangladesh. It is estimated that the Bangladesh
Liberation War cost the lives of between 300,000 and 3 million people, making it one of the
deadliest conflicts in modern history.
37
His most important end is getting his story across, a story in which inventions
have the same dignity as objective facts:
...a little confusion is surely permissible in these circumstances. Re-reading my
work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma
Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the
actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to
die at the wrong time. Does one error invalidate the entire fabric? Am I so far
gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything
– to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a
central role? Today, in my confusion, I can’t judge. I’ll have to leave it to others.
For me, there can be no going back; I must finish what I’ve started, even if, inev-
itably, what I finish turns out not to be what I began. (ivi, 248, emphasis is mine)
The moment Saleem realises that he was wrong about Gandhi’s assassina-
tion, he does not seem to care any further and claims that he is only interested
in the development of his story. The story must go on, despite everything.
Critical reflection inevitably raises several questions at this point. Firstly,
there is the epistemological aspect, which is: how are we to understand the
things Saleem tells us if we cannot trust his reconstruction of the historical
events in India or the fictional events in his life? Saleem is described as an
unreliable narrator by Rushdie in his essay titled “‘Errata’: Or, Unreliable
Narration in Midnight’s Children” (1991). Here, Rushdie recounts that many
people have approached him to point out the many inaccuracies in Saleem’s
narrative, including the use of nonexistent ranks for the Indian Army and the
reference to certain bus routes in Bombay. During a trip to Bangalore, a person
who noticed the exchange between Vālmīki and Vyasa asked him the follow-
ing question, “If you’re going to use Hindu traditions in your story, Mr. Rush-
die [...] don’t you think you could take the trouble to look it up?” (ivi, 30) The
person who asked him this question was convinced that Rushdie was the one
who had made the mistake, not Saleem. An author who plays with inaccura-
cies in this way is, of course, aware that he runs the risk of being misunder-
stood. Nevertheless, Rushdie has noted that readers who recognised Saleem’s
errors took pleasure in pointing them out to him. There was a “reader’s delight
at having ‘caught the writer out,’” he says (ibid.).
Rushdie has admitted, however, that while he intentionally lets Saleem
make mistakes, the narrative also contains some errors of his own making.
And that he is not sure which mistakes belong to which character. One of
Rushdie’s errors, for example, was to write that before the Amritsar massa-
38
Giuseppe De Riso
cre16 Brigadier R. E. Dyer had entered Jallianwala Bagh at the head of fifty
white troops. Only later did Rushdie discover that although there were indeed
fifty troops, they were not white. After discovering the error, he endeavoured
to correct it and remove it from the story. Over time, however, his position
changed. The author felt that the error was not really his, but Saleem’s. He
even went so far as to say, “its wrongness feels right.” (ibid.)
In the same essay, he also admitted that he intentionally inserted errors
in passages that did not contain any, and that he accentuated the inaccura-
cies he noticed during the revision process. This is because his original intent
for Midnight’s Children changed during writing. Rushdie’s underlying initial
intention was a Proustian one, to recapture the lost time of his childhood in
Bombay through the lens of memory and migration. As the novel was being
written, however, it evolved into an exploration of the workings of memory
and migration. In more detail: “my subject changed, [sic] was no longer a
search for lost time, had become the way in which we remake the past to suit
our present purposes, using memory as our tool.” (ivi, 31, emphasis is mine)
2.2 Reliable fabrications: a narrative of bias and doubting

Saleem’s unreliability serves Rushdie’s purpose, for history and stories are in-
terwoven, that is, history contains many imponderables and details that can be as
infinitely varied as the accounts that reproduce them. His irony is based on his
disillusionment with the possibility of achieving an objective and truthful account
of the facts, and that any comparison or reconstruction of history is bound to con-
tain errors or inaccuracies. It can be seen, then, that the epistemological question
posed earlier leads to another of an ontological nature, namely, does Saleem’s
India become invalid as a result of its errors? Furthermore, how much concern
should we have over the possibility that Saleem may deliberately manipulate the
narrative in order to appear to be the protagonist? Saleem, and Rushdie through
him, eventually admits that he’ll “have to leave it to others.” (Rushdie 1991, 31)
16
On 13 April 1919, the Amritsar Massacre, also known as the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre,
took place in Amritsar in the Punjab region of India, which was then part of the British Indian
Empire. On that day, a large crowd of unarmed civilians, including women and children, had
gathered at the Jallianwala Bagh, a walled garden in Amritsar, to protest the arrest of two In-
dian independence activists. As the crowd rallied peacefully, a British army regiment under the
command of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer opened fire on the crowd, killing hundreds and
wounding thousands. The international community strongly condemned the massacre as a trau-
matic and devastating event for the Indian people. It is considered one of the most significant
and tragic events in India’s struggle for independence from British rule.
39
From this point of view, a specific passage in the novel appears to be partic-
ularly significant. When he wants to expose the secret affair between Homi Ca-
track and Commander Sabarmati’s wife Lisa, Saleem cuts letters from newspa-
per headlines and hides an anonymous note under the Commander’s clothing.
He describes this behaviour as “my first attempt at rearranging history.” (ivi,
379) In the same way that Commander Sabarmati immediately hires a private
investigator to ascertain the truth when his wife’s fidelity is questioned, Saleem
challenges his readers to question his own words and consider all possibilities,
the potential chances that “had always made me a little afraid.” (ivi, 284) This
is no longer just a matter of distinguishing the true from the false, but rather of
recognising oneself as an active participant in the making of the story, rather
than just a recipient. If mistakes and inconsistencies in his tale no longer mat-
ter, as long as they are woven into a story that is perceived as coherent, then
perhaps it makes more sense to focus on the narrative devices that call us to act
like Saleem does, which is to manipulate, bend, sort, and rewrite the elements
of the story in ways that make sense to us. This is doubly important because,
as already mentioned, this operation concerns not only Saleem but at the same
time the Indian nation in search of the meaning of its own history:
As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences. Similarities between this
and that, between apparently unconnected things, make us clap our hands de-
lightedly when we find them out. It is a sort of national longing for form – or
perhaps simply an expression of our deep belief that forms lie hidden within
reality; that meaning reveals itself only in flashes. Hence our vulnerability to
omens ... when the Indian flag was first raised, for instance, a rainbow appeared
above that Delhi field, a rainbow of saffron and green; and we felt blessed.
Born amidst correspondence, I have found it continuing to hound me ... while
Indians headed blindly towards a military débâcle, I, too, was nearing ... a ca-
tastrophe of my own. (ivi, 435)
The way Saleem, the “perennial victim” (ivi, 348) who “yearned after a
place in the centre of history” (ivi, 457), reinvents his story by establishing ar-
bitrary relationships between seemingly contradictory information is (as with
many other characters inhabiting the Indian and his story) a banal expression
of a contradictory attitude that binds all humanity more or less consciously:
the desire to “claim a place at the centre of things” (ivi, 348), to make sense
of a world beyond our grasp, to identify ourselves as protagonists of a story
much larger than ourselves and transcend our limitations. This mechanism
enables us to identify ourselves as individuals and to participate in the ‘affec-
tive economy’ of the gaze and language envisioned by Jacques Lacan (1977,
40
Giuseppe De Riso
1991).17 In Saleem’s case this allows to fill the “hole in the centre [...] which
was my inheritance from my grandfather Aadam Aziz [and which] was occu-
pied for too long by my voices.” (ivi, 284) After discovering that he can act as
a catalyst and facilitator for the nightly meetings of the midnight’s children,
Saleem finally feels valuable and is able to free himself from the humiliations
he has suffered during the day: “awake I was obliged to face the multiple
miseries of maternal perfidy and paternal decline, of the fickleness of friend-
ship and the varied tyrannies of school; asleep, I was at the centre of the most
exciting world any child had ever discovered. Despite Shiva, it was nicer to
be asleep.” (ivi, 332)
By admitting that his use of memory is not limited to reporting facts as they
occurred, and that he may even deliberately tell a story that corresponds to his
desire to be the protagonist in a certain way, it is clear that his story may also
serve other purposes. What might these be? Saleem explains at the beginning
of the novel that his existence is a search for meaning. After discovering that
he has telepathic powers that can connect a group of 1001 magical children, he
tries to use this faculty to provide other super-powered children with the oppor-
tunity to use their abilities for the benefit of their country. In this way, Saleem
could fulfil the role of “mirror of the nation” (ivi, 371, 615) that he believed
Nehru18 had assigned to him by writing a letter to all the children born when
India gained independence, recognising their role as harbingers of a new era
and inextricably linking the fate of the nation to their dreams and aspirations.
This is in contrast to Shiva, the child with whom he was exchanged at birth
by Mary Pereira, who is bent on destruction. Shiva’s first angry objection to
Saleem during one of the midnight conferences is a consequence of his in-
17
Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who developed a theory of the human psyche
strongly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s work. In Lacan’s theory, the gaze and desire play an
important role in the development of an individual’s sense of self and their relationships with
others. According to Lacan, the gaze is a crucial element in the development of self-consciou-
sness, as we become aware of our own image through the gaze of others. Desire, in turn, is a
fundamental aspect of human experience driven by the lack or absence of something. It is also
closely linked to the concept of the ‘Other,’ which represents the outside world and the expecta-
tions and desires of others.
18
Jawaharlal Nehru was one of the leaders of the Indian independence movement and is con-
sidered the architect of modern India. After receiving his education in England, he returned to
India and worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi and other leaders to achieve freedom from
British rule. After India’s independence in 1947, Nehru became the country’s first Prime Min-
ister, serving until his death in 1964. He played a key role in shaping the country’s foreign and
domestic policies.
41
ability to find a meaning for his own existence, or at least for the events that
determine it without our assistance. Still ignoring the fact that Saleem had
unwittingly ‘stolen’ his life by being switched with him at birth, Shiva chal-
lenges Saleem’s meta-narrative convictions regarding what meaning can be
derived from their magical powers by emphasising the fundamental principle
of history and all narratives for him – chaos: “What purpose, man? What thing
in the whole world got reason? For what reason you’re rich and I’m poor?
Where’s the reason in starving, man?” (ivi, 220) When Indira Gandhi’s Emer-
gency derails Saleem’s dreams and strips him of any meaning at all, he tries to
succeed at least through writing. In Rushdie’s own words, Saleem:
is no dispassionate, disinterested chronicler. He wants so to shape his material
that the reader will be forced to concede his central role. He is cutting up his-
tory to suit himself, just as he did when he cut up newspapers to compose his
earlier text, the anonymous note to Commander Sabarmati. The small errors
in the text can be read as clues, as indications that Saleem is capable of distor-
tions both great and small. He is an interested party in the events he narrates.
(Rushdie 1991e, 31, emphasis is mine)
Saleem is obviously emotionally invested in the events; Rushdie does not

present him as an objective narrator. He may be distorting and instrumental-
izing the events without being aware of it. As Rushdie, his own author, obvi-
ously could do through him.
In Saleem’s story, there is another narratee besides Padma whose status
as addressee is rarely acknowledged, but whose presence should not be over-
looked: Saleem’s son Aadam, born to Shiva and Parvati but raised by Padma
and Saleem. The child, who will be one of the characters in The Moor’s Last
Sigh (1995), is an invisible listener, for he is projected into the future when
Saleem imagines himself as already dead:
I said: ‘My son will understand. As much as for any living being, I’m telling
my story for him, so that afterwards, when I’ve lost my struggle against cracks,
he will know. Morality, judgment, character ... it all starts with memory. ... and
I am keeping carbons.’ [...] I say yet again, ‘Memory’s truth, because memory
has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes,
glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its hetero-
geneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever
trusts someone else’s version more than his own.’ (Rushdie 2021c, 310, em-
phasis is mine.)
Saleem’s hope to make amends for his failures and that of his generation is
embodied in Aadam, the child with elephantine “flapping ears” (ivi, 647), who
42
Giuseppe De Riso
represents a new generation of midnight’s children born on June 29, 1975, the
day Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency. Saleem projects onto his son the
same expectations of greatness and social redemption that had been imposed
on him and the previous generation of midnight’s children by his father and
the nation as a whole.
In this context, it is worth remembering that the misfortune of Saleem’s
father, Ahmed Sinai, is in some ways the result of his failure to seek historical
truth through narrative reconstruction:
He was never a happy man. He smelled faintly of future failure; he mistreated
servants; perhaps he wished that, instead of following his late father into the
leathercloth business, he had had the strength to pursue his original ambition,
the re-arrangement of the Quran in accurately chronological order. (He once
told me: ‘When Muhammed prophesied, people wrote down what he said on
palm leaves, which were kept any old how in a box. After he died, Abubakr and
the others tried to remember the correct sequence; but they didn’t have very
good memories.’ (ivi, 125)
Using Ahmed’s unhappiness to foreshadow one of the central themes of The

Satanic Verses (1988), the novel that would earn Rushdie the fatwa (the death
sentence by a section of the Islamic world), Saleem notes that, according to Is-
lamic tradition, Muhammad received the revelations that make up the Qur’an19
over a period of 23 years, beginning at the age of 40. These revelations were
written down by Muhammad’s followers on various materials, including palm
leaves, animal hides, and bones.20 After Muhammad’s death in 632 CE, his
companions, including the first caliph Abu Bakr, attempted to compile the
written revelations into a single, orderly text. This was a challenging task, be-
cause the revelations had been written down on a variety of materials and in
different orders, and furthermore, the integrity of the text had to be preserved.
Abu Bakr assigned a group of scribes the task of collecting the written revela-
tions and compiling them into a single text. They worked to put the revelations
in chronological order and to verify the authenticity of the written records.
19
Qur’an means recitation, or text to be read aloud, and is considered the literal word of God.
It is important to know that the Qur’an is not a book in the conventional sense, but a collection
of 114 chapters or suras arranged roughly in descending order. Each sura consists of verses or
ayat, which are also arranged in descending order of length.
20
This is similar to the Cumaean Sibyl who wrote the words of Apollo on oak leaves, which
were then confused by the wind and were therefore unable to provide any information to the
people who questioned her.
43
The resulting text became known as the Mus’haf and formed the basis for the
Qur’an as we know it today. In the passage quoted above, Rushdie subtly pokes
fun at the way the Qur’an was handed down, and thus at the accuracy of the
sentences it contains. The original support on which they were transcribed is
also susceptible to benign and malicious errors. In the present analysis, what
is of significance is Ahmed’s desire to find the truth, to find meaning in his life
through writing, by reconstructing the correct order of the sacred texts of Islam.
His failure to do so would ultimately lead to his unhappy marriage and violent
death. The fact that the Qur’an was written under dictation is perhaps another
humorous reference to the way Ganesha wrote down the Mahābhārata.
According to Rushdie in the preface to a later edition of the novel, Mid-
night’s Children, despite its surrealist elements, should be considered a histor-
ical novel, that is, a novel that attempts to answer the big questions about the
relationship between the individual, history, and modern societies: “Are we
the masters or the victims of our time?” (Rushdie 2021c, 9) he asks. In this
context, it is also noteworthy that Saleem is so convinced of the reciprocal
relationship between his personal events and those of official history that he
feels in some sense ‘responsible’ for the great historical events of his time.
These in turn would take place for the very purpose of changing Saleem’s
life and that of his family. Saleem confesses, among other things, that he is
directly responsible for the partition of the state of Bombay on 1 May 1960,21
which resulted in Gujarat and Maharashtra being formed and linguistically
separated, and for the bloody invasion of East Bengal by Pakistan in 1971.22
He also insinuatingly links Nehru’s death to that of his grandfather, as if they
were causally linked (both of them died of heart attacks).23 Conversely, he
21
“In this way I became directly responsible for triggering off the violence which ended with
the partition of the state of Bombay, as a result of which the city became the capital of Ma-
harashtra.” (ivi, 403) Maharashtra and Gujarat were split into two separate states in 1960 as a
result of a political and linguistic realignment of Indian states. Previously, Gujarat and Maha-
rashtra were both parts of the Bombay Presidency, an administrative region that covered much
of western and central India.
22
“I remained responsible, through the workings of the metaphorical modes of connection, for
the belligerent events of 1971.” (ivi, 508)
23
“One last fact: after the death of my grandfather, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru fell ill and
never recovered his health. This fatal sickness finally killed him on May 27th, 1964.” (ivi, 405)
Jawaharlal Nehru died on May 27, 1964, at the age of 74, due to a heart attack. He had been
in poor health for some time, suffering from various ailments including diabetes, high blood
pressure, and heart problems.
44
Giuseppe De Riso
claims that the Indo-Pakistani war was waged with the tacit intention of de-
stroying his family.24
The assumption of being responsible for history is a statement that may
seem absurd at first. Even Padma is described as perplexed by this consid-
eration and lapses into “unscientific bewilderment” (Rushdie 2021c, 349)
in the face of it. Saleem therefore takes his time in clarifying his position,
starting from Nehru’s statement to children born on India’s Independence
Day that their lives would be “the mirror of our own.” (ivi, 348) Saleem won-
ders how to interpret this claim: “in what terms, may the career of a single
individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation?” (ibid.) By oscillating
between two qualities that can be located in as many pairs of terms, active/
passive and literal/metaphorical, Saleem explains how he has interpreted the
Prime Minister’s assertion and claims to feel connected to history. A key
word isn’t to be found in one of the terms or in a pair of terms in particular,
but in the ‘both/and’ that connects them: “this is why hyphens are necessary:
actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and pas-
sively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world.” (ibid.) The two
pairs illustrate not only how culture and history affect Saleem’s fictional life,
but also how Saleem’s actions can change culture and history in literal and
metaphorical ways.
This is in line with Rushdie’s belief that we all participate in the course and
development of history. Human beings and fictional characters alike. As we
will try to discuss in the following chapters of this book, even an imaginary
personnage like Saleem can assume an incisive part of the responsibility for
historical developments, especially when we understand how blurred the line
is between a ‘real’ person and a fictional character. Rushdie makes it clear,
however, that if Saleem is truly to blame, it is because he takes himself too
seriously, that he holds himself solely or primarily responsible for the Indian
tragedies.
... people get the history they deserve. History is not written in stone. It isn’t
inevitable or inexorable. It doesn’t run on tramlines. History is the fluid, mu-
table, metamorphic consequence of our choices, and so the responsibility for
it, even the moral responsibility, is ours. After all: if it’s not ours, then whose is
it? There’s nobody else here. It’s just us.
24
“Let me state this quite unequivocally: it is my firm conviction that the hidden purpose of the
Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 was nothing more nor less than the elimination of my benighted
family from the face of the earth.” (ivi, 487)
45
If Saleem Sinai made an error, it was that he took on too much responsibility
for events. I want to say to him now: we all share that burden. You don’t have
to carry all of it. (ivi, 11, emphasis is mine)
Other important ethical questions follow then from this considerations:

what responsibilities do characters and stories bear in shaping the course of
history? How much and what kind of responsibility do authors, readers, listen-
ers, and reporters share? Immediately, we anticipate that these questions will
not be answered in this volume, not least because there seem to be no answers
in Rushdie’s work. Rushdie’s awareness that it is impossible to find defini-
tive and accurate solutions to these questions is at the heart of his humour.
As a writer, he is conscious from the beginning that he cannot complete the
investigations he undertakes, like a translator who, following Derrida (2001),
is aware of the impossibility of translating a text completely from one lan-
guage to another.25 Therefore, he uses humour to raise doubts, hypothesise al-
ternative interpretations, and compare as many realities as possible rather than
provide authoritative explanations or solutions. Through his masterful use of
irony, he creates a sense of uncertainty that keeps the reader open to different
scenarios and engrossed throughout the novel and beyond.
Rushdie’s work is characterised by an awareness of the fractures that
mark history and stories, the processes that connect them, the boundaries
that divide them, and the methods by which they are transgressed and con-
taminated. Knowing that it is impossible to adequately describe or approach
the problem directly, he resorts to irony to make mistakes, sprinkle hints,
and make more or less direct jabs or jibes. Saleem’s story is composed of a
series of tales drawn from an extraordinary number of life experiences, as
many as there are millions of Indian lives, along with facts, places, events,
25
Jacques Derrida’s essay “What is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” is a reflection on the nature
of translation and the problems that arise when trying to translate one language into another.
Derrida argues that translation is always a complex task and that it is impossible to translate
one language perfectly into another. He contends that translation involves loss and that every
translation is in a sense incomplete. He also discusses the concept of ‘fidelity’ in translation,
which refers to the extent to which a translation accurately reflects the meaning of the original
text, distinguishing it from faithfulness, i.e. how much a translation is repurposed by the tran-
slator. Both concepts are problematic because it is impossible to determine the ‘true’ meaning
of a text and that any translation is inevitably influenced by the context, language and culture
of the translator. As such, translation is a dynamic and ongoing process involving negotiation
and interpretation, and its relevance depends on its ability to engage with the complexities of
language and culture.
46
Giuseppe De Riso
rumours, hearsay, and unverified stories, in a complex web of the ordinary

and the extraordinary. Rushdie uses memory as a tool to explore the known
and the unknown. On the one hand, Saleem sees writing as a way to preserve
memory “from the corruption of the clocks” (ivi, 62) or from the voracious
“maw of the darkness.” (ivi, 129) From the beginning, he asks us to believe
seemingly impossible things, namely that his body is cracked like a pot, a
wall, or a road. Conversely, Saleem assures the reader that he also wants to
give voice to doubt, ambiguity and suspicion, which he calls “a monster with
too many heads.” (ivi, 133)
Like a cook preparing chutneys, Saleem recognises that through memory
he creates a heterogeneous but coherent vision of history. Memory, then, is
about finding coherence in heterogeneity, a vision that provides balance and
stability and satisfies the palate, as a chutney can. This is why memory is not
objective but partial, adapting to the ‘taste’ of those who savour it. In order to
deal with History and the multitude of minor stories that make it up, one must
also know the taste of the person(s) passing it on or transmitting it: what gives
them pleasure, what interests them (and what they will tend to emphasise or
highlight), what makes them suffer (and what they will therefore tend to dis-
card, reduce or hide). Despite Saleem’s desire to pass on the truth about his
life, these considerations must also help us understand what he really means
when he declares that he wants to pass on ‘his’ story.
In a nutshell, Saleem acknowledges that the act of remembering itself should
serve as an objective recollection of past events among a jumble of facts, fading
memories, and hearsay. At the same time, he also admits to being biased in his
recollections. Midnight’s Children, as with much of Rushdie’s work, explores
contradictions and limitations of memory to illustrate how it can simultaneously
function as an instrument of invention ‘and’ recording. It creates as it records,
almost like a daydream. As Saleem attempts to convince us that his memory
is omniscient and all-knowing (ivi, 133), we should become more doubtful of
his ability to use memory and what he is really trying to convey... and conceal.
Rushdie’s writing gradually teaches us to doubt what we read.
2.3 Opalescent writing and tentative acceptance

Rushdie repeatedly implies that Saleem is unreliable, that the number of
invented elements is greater than he is willing to admit. Many of his clues are
provided by Saleem’s humour, which lends an air of playfulness to his narra-
tive. However, once one begins to question the veracity of what he is saying,
many puzzling doubts and possibilities become apparent. Saleem admits that
he, like his mother and grandfather, was good at seeing ghosts, and that this
47
ability is especially intensified during beginnings and ends, times when emo-
tions are stronger: “Like my grandfather at the beginning, in a webbed corri-
dor in a blind man’s house, and again at the end; like Mary Pereira after she
lost her Joseph, and like me, my mother was good at seeing ghosts.” (Rushdie
2021c, 133) It is possible that his mother’s premature senility, which causes
her to see ghosts, is due to her regret over missed opportunities and anguish
over past misunderstandings, from losing her unfulfilled love for Nadir Khan,
to the exchange of her biological son when Shiva and Saleem were still in
their cradles. Although the dual-identity mother, who was born Mumtaz Aziz
but had her name changed to Amina Sinai, has always maintained that the
exchange did not affect her in any way, many years later, when “all kinds of
ghosts welled out of her past to dance before her eyes” (ivi, 133), she confides
the following wish to the same peepshow man she had rescued after publicly
declaring that she was pregnant: “Well, let me tell you this: I wish I’d under-
stood what your cousinji meant- about blood, about knees and nose. Because
who knows? I might have had a different son.” (ivi, 133)
There is an obvious connection between ghosts and missed futures, pasts and
present moments in all of Rushdie’s work. But even if they exist only virtually,
as regrets or pure potentiality, they are still capable of shaping reality. The more
we age, the more opportunities we miss, the more disappointments we experi-
ence through unfulfilled hopes, the more these ‘ghosts’ find a way to communi-
cate with us and influence our lives. Aadam’s unhappiness, as we have seen, was
closely related to his inability to pursue his own aspirations because he allowed
himself to be intimidated by the will of his family and especially his father. In
the ongoing catastrophe that is history itself, not only women but also men be-
come victims of the patriarchal system made up of male traditions and authority.
At this point, history begins to appear in the form of phantasms: not only as
an objective account of what happened, but also as a multifaceted vision, a se-
ries of intersecting or overlapping perspectives that border on all the alternative
histories that never happened, the stifled aspirations, the broken dreams, what
was never spoken or written, the signs of desire that can be discovered in the
form of looks, sighs, and actions that seem to happen (or not happen) for one
reason but hide another. These are the unrecorded or spectral stories whose pres-
ence lives on in official history through iridescent reflections that mirror their
shapes. If we know how to pick up clues, make connections, and trace links, we
can both reconstruct the fragments that show us what else is missing, and look
at it from an angle that reveals new colours, the things that might have been or
might be considered to exist: “All stories are haunted by the ghosts of the stories
they might have been” (Rushdie 1995, 117), Rushdie writes in Shame.
48
Giuseppe De Riso
The epistemological uncertainty in Midnight’s Children, a characteristic

feature of modernist fiction arising from the unreliability of the narrators, is
reflected in the intermingling of different interpretations that Rushdie endows
with equal ontological dignity thus highlighting the coexistence of different
realities typical of postmodernism. The consequence of such ontological plu-
rality is that epistemological inquiry and ontological affirmation constantly
oscillate. Therefore, ambiguous sentences can project dubious objects and sit-
uations not only temporarily, but permanently as well.
Drawing on McHale (1987), I am referring to Polish philosopher Roman
Ingarden’s (1973) definition of opalescent writing precisely to describe the
in-between state of the story’s logical structure: its amphibian existence as nei-
ther true nor false in a limbo between belief and disbelief. Ingarden’s concept
of opalescent writing refers to a style of writing characterised by the absence
of clear and unambiguous meaning and instead marked by a shimmering, am-
biguous quality. By encouraging readers to think critically and creatively, it
allows them to engage with the text on a deeper and more personal level and
to draw their own interpretations and meanings from it. According to Umberto
Eco (1979), classical logic knows three categories: necessity, possibility, and
impossibility. Real-life propositions and fictional worlds fall into the first and
second categories, respectively, because they require the suspension of belief
and disbelief. Eco, however, excludes the possibility of worlds belonging to
the third category, that is, impossible worlds where both true and false prop-
ositions exist simultaneously. In his view, tertium non datur, there can be no
middle ground. Contradictory worlds in which something can be true ‘and’
false at the same time are impossible, subversive critiques of how worlds are
built. The notion of opalescent, or iridescent, writing contradicts the last state-
ment. In opalescent writing, the objects represented are arbitrary and lack the
fullness of real objects. Iridescence allows what Ingarden calls the metaphys-
ical qualities of the text (the grotesque, the sacred, the tragic, the sublime, the
horrific, the comedic) to appear not as separate layers, but as a function of the
object or world that presents them all simultaneously:
...the proper effect of such narrative constructions (be they sci-fi novels or
avant-garde texts in which the very notion of self-identity is challenged) is just
that of producing a sense of logical uneasiness and of narrative discomfort. So
they arouse a sense of suspicion in respect to our common beliefs and affect
our disposition to trust the most credited laws of the world of our encyclo-
paedia. They undermine the world of our encyclopaedia rather than build up
another self-sustaining world. (Eco 1979, 234)
49
Rushdie uses this technique to ensure that all aspects of the novel remain
essentially dubious and indeterminate. Depending on which truths one choos-
es to believe, characters and situations may gain or lose certain qualities as
readers progress through the narrative or retrace their steps. In essence, Rush-
die asks his readers to do the dirty work for him, to assemble the elements
of the narrative as they see fit, to compose their own story, as Saleem must.
Midnight’s Children works precisely because it contains a series of characters,
objects, and events that can take or lose certain functions intermittently or al-
ternately. If there were no bi- or poly-functionality, they would cease to exist.
Suspicion and doubt are not limiting, but linguistically and semantically em-
powering because they provide the ideal conditions for the creation and explo-
ration of possible worlds and multiple scenarios that coexist simultaneously
in the same narrative. If, as postmodernist novelist Ron Sukenick (1985) has
argued, “the essential trope of fiction is hypothesis, provisional conjecture, a
technique that requires the suspension of belief as well as disbelief,” (99) then
reading Rushdie requires just that: the embrace of multiplicity, the continuous
movement from one state to another.
The humour that makes Midnight’s Children stand out is precisely of this
sort: it does not treat the narrative as an unequivocal reconstruction of the
past. It is not about finding out that something remembered as true was in fact
false, or that something that did not happen actually did. Rather, it is a mat-
ter of accepting that much of what is false, imagined, opaque, or invisible is
nevertheless contained in what did happen, because the latter is the result of a
compromise with an enormous amount of uncovered truth. Rushdie is primar-
ily interested in what might be called the residual or ‘waste’ in official history.
He is also interested in examining the extent to which so-called fiction or false
realities are informed by truth. Ultimately, it is doubt rather than certainty that
impels the reader to inquire, to suspect, to uncover what has been buried, to
discover what has been hidden from view, to consider interactions that have
yet to be explained or acknowledged. As a masterful writer, Rushdie always
leaves room for alternative interpretations of his works, which would not be
possible if there were only one way to look at the plot.
Speaking of the announcement of his own birth, Saleem realised that he
had been in the background of his story up to that point. In describing events
concerning his parents and grandparents, the author referred to a series of sit-
uations that he could not personally have witnessed, “all of it foreshortened by
my high-in-the-sky point of view.” (Rushdie 2021c, 114) With the announce-
ment of his birth, Saleem felt excited at the thought of finally being able to
relate something that directly affected him. This, however, will not greatly
50
Giuseppe De Riso
improve his reliability as a narrator, as is already anticipated in the chapter

that immediately follows the announcement, the section devoted to the suspi-
cion and slanted storytelling. Here we can also appreciate the significant role
Padma plays as she is the only character listening to Saleem’s narrative. The
remarks she makes to him as she listens, and more generally her reactions
to the content of the narration, are a particularly useful aid to understanding
Rushdie’s humorous way of framing Saleem’s story.
This is evident in the following quote, in which Padma forces Saleem to
‘interrupt’ his tale because she is concerned about the claims that his body is
breaking down. She then calls in a doctor, one Dr. N. Q. Balliga, to determine
his condition. As it happens, Saleem is forced to suspend his reminiscing of
the past for a brief moment and is brutally thrown ‘back’ into the present.
Saleem regrets that he acted like a puppeteer who, feeling sure in his autho-
rial position, exposed the threads that might make him untrustworthy and his
narration invalid: “I must interrupt myself. I wasn’t going to today, because
Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-con-
scious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding
the strings; but I simply must register a protest.” (ivi, 117) Despite the fact that
his lacerating physical condition is constantly reaffirmed, it is never observed
by any third character, or used to develop a situation in the novel. As a matter
of fact, when Saleem is examined by Dr. Balliga, he explicitly states that there
are no cracks to be seen on Saleem’s body. This infuriates Saleem:
...the charlatan, whom I will not deign to glorify with a description, came to
call. I, in all innocence and for Padma’s sake, permitted him to examine me. I
should have feared the worst; the worst is what he did. Believe this if you can:
the fraud has pronounced me whole!
‘I see no cracks,’ he intoned mournfully, [...] his blindness [...] the inevitable
curse of his folly! Blindly, he impugned my state of mind, cast doubts on my
reliability as a witness, and Godknowswhatelse: ‘I see no cracks.’
In the end it was Padma who shooed him away. ‘Never mind, Doctor Sahib,’
Padma said, ‘we will look after him ourselves.’ On her face I saw a kind of
recognition of her own dull guilt ... exit Baligga, never to return to these pages.
(ivi, 117)
There are no signs of cracks in Saleem’s body, so the doctor declares him
whole. For this statement, Saleem calls him a charlatan, not a doctor or a man
of science, but a ju-ju man, a kind of sorcerer. Baligga’s position is completely
delegitimized. His is a voice that directly contradicts what Saleem is saying,
undermining the very reason he is telling his story. As a result, even a physical
description of this doctor is denied because it would make him a character in
51
the story and ‘glorify’ him as such. Saleem completely disallows this character
to have any role to play in the narrative; in fact, he repudiates him because he
contradicts the very foundations of Saleem’s narration. A stupefied Saleem even
challenges the reader to “believe this if you can.”26 Saleem deems the doctor’s
refusal to acknowledge his cracks to be utter nonsense, an outrageous claim that
one should not even consider for a moment. However, the reader knows better.
It cannot be an accident if Rushdie takes the trouble to mention this, but serves
precisely to leave the reader with the sense that something is not quite right with
Saleem’s narrative. It should also be remembered that Saleem’s memory was
impaired in the past after he was hit by a spittoon following an explosion. There
is a possibility that he did not recover it in its original state. His memory may
contain holes or be damaged. There is also a chance that Saleem does not even
fit on his head anymore, as he might have lost a few screws in the meantime.
We see the many-headed monster of suspicion in action before our eyes.
This anecdote from Baligga may seem like only an amusing digression, but
it has profound implications for the overall economy of the narrative. An ele-
ment of apparent common sense, namely that a human body cannot crumble
like a jar, is rejected and presented as absurd. In contrast, the absurd is consis-
tently presented as true and plausible. A dangerous menace to the coherence
of the story, the doctor is literally thrown out of the narrative, out of the pages,
never to return. Padma’s reaction provides no insight into Saleem’s mental or
physical state, just as we are not told the real reason she sent the doctor to him.
Padma could have known about the cracks on Saleem’s body and complained
to the doctor about them. Most likely, she cannot see them either and she
called the doctor to determine Saleem’s mental state and not his health. This
may explain why she dismisses Baligga with a general statement such as “we
will look after him ourselves,”27 which neither confirms nor contradicts what
the doctor said. Or why Saleem can notice a guilty expression on her face.
As Rushdie’s irony plays on the edge of juxtapositions such as this, he
creates a space in which contradictory qualities can coexist within the same
element. This happens in a number of interesting ways and is of considerable
importance. There is a subtle irony that passes off common sense as absurdity
when Saleem complains about the doctor’s testimony, because the specialist’s
failure to diagnose Saleem’s condition is not accompanied by evidence that
refutes the doctor’s credibility. As readers, we are asked to ignore the closest
26
As in the above quotation.
27
As stated in the previous quote.
52
Giuseppe De Riso
thing to an objective refutation of Saleem’s narrative in order to accept his

version of events as such. Because the emotional influx triggered by Saleem’s
story has completely taken over the plot, it is easy for Dr. Baligga to be pushed
out of the narrative without anyone noticing.
When Padma asks him the exact day of the 1957 general election, Saleem
finds that he has moved the date after his birthday.28 It is obvious that Saleem
has made the day dependent on his birthday. But “although I have racked my
brains, my memory refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events.” (ivi,
326) Although aware of the error, Saleem does not correct it, probably out of
concern that it will undermine his narrative. It is Rushdie’s art to humorously
manipulate the reader’s emotions to determine how much attention such a clue
receives and how it is felt to relate to the overall plot.
Before dismissing Baligga, Saleem makes a general remark, which reads
as follows: “But good God! Has the medical profession – the calling of Aad-
am Aziz – sunk so low? To this cess-pool of Baliggas? In the end, if this
be true, everyone will do without doctors.” (ivi, 101) This reflection, sincere
for Saleem but ironic for Rushdie, anticipates the cynical growth of distrust
of science and, more generally, of institutions, which has exploded in recent
years and which he will continue to expand, especially in his recent literary
work such as The Golden House (2017). We tend to delegitimize anyone who
contradicts what we believe and want to live by. In this particular case, Saleem
compares the current state of the medical profession to a sewer or cesspool
and concludes that if this trend continues, everyone will have to do without
doctors. In the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic of recent years, this consid-
eration seems an ominous sign of how fiction can invade and ‘pollute’ reality,
leading to disastrous results. When reality becomes a vehicle for unpleasant
feelings, it must be delegitimized, removed, and rewritten, as Umberto Eco
predicted. The extent to which we adhere to a message or a ‘fact’ does not
depend directly on the reliability associated with it, but rather on the extent to
28
The 1957 general election in India was the second general election to be held in the country after
independence in 1947. It was held on 26 February 1957 and was contested by more than 1,500
candidates from over 200 political parties. The Indian National Congress, led by Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru, won a decisive victory and a comfortable majority with 371 seats in the Lok
Sabha (the lower house of the Indian Parliament). The Bharatiya Jana Sangh, a right-wing political
party, came second with 35 seats, while the Communist Party of India came third with 15 seats.
This unexpectedly made the Communist faction a strong opposition party with around twelve mil-
lion votes. The 1957 election was seen as a significant milestone in India’s post-independence
history as it was the first time that a single political party won a clear majority in the Lok Sabha.
53
which it validates the narrative we want to believe. This becomes especially

problematic when storytellers must convince the audience that what is being
said is true. Since Padma is Saleem’s ‘necessary ear’, he tries in spite of him-
self to respond to her demands or to dispel her doubts in order to continue the
narrative. Similarly, sage Vyasa interrupted his own narration so that Ganesha
could understand and accept everything he said. Our analysis of the dialogic
nature of the narrative will show that it becomes increasingly taxing when it
requires the consent and agreement of the listener.
The example just given is useful to introduce the analysis of a more signif-
icant passage contained in the same section of the novel, titled “Many-headed
monsters”. In the story, the phrase refers to mobs, violent crowds, and suspi-
cions. The analogy to mobs is justified, of course, by the fact that mobs consist of
hundreds or thousands of people, each of whom has their own individual head,
but also because they are animated by a variety of histories and motives, as well
as a set of grudges and resentments that form a collective flow. When it comes
to suspicions, the comparison is logical because we are dealing with multiple
hypotheses and scenarios at once, many of which are difficult to identify or of
uncertain origin, much like the often unfounded rumours that fuel crowd outrage.
The metaphor of ‘many-headed monsters’ is effectively illustrated, howev-
er, when Amina receives a prophecy from RamRam about the birth of her son.
Saleem and Padma are inevitably confronted with the monsters lurking in the
narrative as they reflect on these moments. That passage is also key to under-
standing Rushdie’s humorous use of his unreliable narrator, opalescence and en-
suing doubts. Due to contradictions and blind spots in Saleem’s explanations, his
mother becomes a prime suspect and raises a series of alternative narratives that
could change his story. Saleem recounts his mother’s visit to RamRam, but short-
ly after reporting the seer’s words, he gives himself some pause for reflection:
But now, because there are yet more questions and ambiguities, I am obliged
to voice certain suspicions. Suspicion, too, is a monster with too many heads;
why, then, can’t I stop myself unleashing it at my own mother? ... What, I ask,
would be a fair description of the seer’s stomach? And memory – my new,
all-knowing memory, which encompasses most of the lives of mother father
grandfather grandmother and everyone else – answers: soft; squashy as corn-
flour pudding. Again, reluctantly, I ask: What was the condition of his lips?
And the inevitable response: full; overfleshed; poetic. A third time I interro-
gate this memory of mine: what of his hair? The reply: thinning; dark; lank;
worming over his ears. And now my unreasonable suspicions ask the ultimate
question ... did Amina, pure-as-pure, actually ... because of her weakness for
men who resembled Nadir Khan, could she have ... in her odd frame of mind,
and moved by the seer’s illness, might she not ... (Rushdie 2021c, 133-134)
54
Giuseppe De Riso
Saleem dwells on what he has just said. He tries to discover the truth about
what really happened and interrogates his memories for fragments of meaning
that might be helpful in reconstructing the facts. Saleem begins to think about
the many reasons that cast serious doubt on why Amina went to the slums in
the first place. It seems strange that Amina would travel to a notorious slum in
Delhi, a slum that could hold many dangers and traps for a supposedly unsus-
pecting woman like her, to speak with a self-proclaimed seer who could very
well have been a charlatan. It is possible that this event is one of Saleem’s un-
solved mysteries, which he desperately tries to hide or avoid in the narrative,
just like the one concerning Dr. Baligga, since his mother could have exploit-
ed the visit as a possible pretext or cover to contact her ex-lover Nadir Khan
and tell him that she was expecting a child, possibly from him.
Saleem also recalls the mysterious telephone conversations in which his
mother listened in silence for minutes to the words of mysterious wrong-dial-
ers, at the end of which “Amina Sinai resumed her recent practice of leaving
suddenly [...] on urgent shopping trips.” (ivi, 314) Saleem must thus choose
between the desire to believe that it is merely a coincidence and the terrifying
prospect that his mother is seeing her secret lover instead. Depending on his
choice, he will determine whether his mother is sincere or whether her be-
haviour is all make-believe. Both in and out of the novel, it is our choice as
much as his. Each of us is confronted with the same inner conflict when we are
asked to interpret reality, that is, when we are asked to discern how much of
the people and institutions around us is real and how much is fictional.
The problem is not so much his mother’s infidelity, but the ghostly pres-
ence of a hidden truth that causes a rift in the story about Saleem’s upbringing.
Saleem admits that at this point in his story he is faced with many questions,
ambiguities, and doubts, and he cannot contain the many-headed monster of
distrust that lies between him and his mother. As in the case of Baligga’s denial
of Saleem’s broken body, suspicion weaves its way into the narrative to cast
doubt on Saleem’s paternity, thus complicating his position as a child whose
life intersects with events and power relations related to Indian colonial history
under British rule and the religious turmoil between Hindus and Muslims fol-
lowing independence. According to Saleem’s narrative, he is the biological son
of Methwold and Vanita, the wife of Wee Willie Winkie. Thus, in the version
approved and accepted by the narrator, he is the last descendant of an illustrious
English colonial family. William Methwold, in fact, is also the name of the mer-
chant and official who was the principal architect of the negotiations that would
eventually lead to the acquisition of Bombay as a strategically important port
by the East India Company in 1668. Saleem, then, would be the hybrid result of
55
the territorial and sexual appropriation that the English made on Indian soil, the
perfect hero candidate chosen by fate to be born on India’s Independence Day,
making him inseparable from the story of his nation’s redemption. In this chap-
ter, however, a doubt is raised that can shake the entire narrative, namely that
Saleem could actually be the son of Nadir Khan and thus would have come into
the world as a result of his grandfather’s shattered dream of an India controlled
by the Islamists, for it was from that shattered dream that the murder of Mian
Abdullah resulted, which in turn led Nadir Khan to the house of Aadam where
he and Mumtaz fell in love. The two possible fathers represent two opposing
figures in India’s colonial power dynamics, the charismatic native insurgent and
the foreign land-owning colonialist, which lead to two very different genealo-
gies. Doubt would contribute to his obsession with the search for beginnings,
which he displays at the outset of his novel. Saleem’s origins oscillate between
the two extremes represented, on the one side, by his grandfather Aadam, who
was a follower of Mian Abdullah, and, on the other, his father Ahmed, who was
Methwold’s business partner and from whom he also received his house.29
The uncertainty, however, opens up the possibility for Saleem to invent his
own past, and for Rushdie to play ironically with the mix between what Sal-
eem knows and what he thinks he knows, between what he chooses to tell and
what he may have left out. Padma firmly rejects the suggestion of suspicion,
insisting that Saleem’s mother is innocent. Saleem would also like to dismiss
these doubts, but he is unable to do so and must discuss them further in what
I consider one of the crucial passages in the whole novel:
‘No!’ Padma shouts, furiously. ‘How dare you suggest? About that good
woman – your own mother? That she would? You do not know one thing
and still you say it?’ And, of course, she is right, as always. If she knew,
she would say I was only getting my revenge, for what I certainly did see
Amina doing, years later, through the grimy windows of the Pioneer Café;
and maybe that’s where my irrational notion was born, to grow illogically
backwards in time, and arrive fully mature at this earlier – and yes, almost
certainly innocent – adventure. Yes, that must be it. But the monster won’t
lie down ... ‘Ah,’ it says, ‘but what about the matter of her tantrum – the one
she threw the day Ahmed announced they were moving to Bombay?’ (ivi,
134, emphasis is mine)
29
Joseph Campana delves into this kind of ambiguity about Saleem’s origins in his dissertation
entitled Charting the Development of the Artistic Imagination While Undermining the Writer’s
Story: Meta-fictive Contemplation and Narrative Indeterminacy in Salman Rushdie’s ‘Mid-
night’s Children’, Umi Dissertation Publishing, 2012.
56
Giuseppe De Riso
Padma, too, begins to wonder why Amina was initially opposed to her
husband’s proposal to move to Bombay. Amina complained that she had just
gotten used to her home and that if she left, she would have to change all her
habits and start over. Padma wonders if this was the expression of excessive
zeal in the marriage or a disguise to hide the fact that she was continuing
her secret affair with Nadir. Saleem confesses that he has a nagging doubt
in the back of his mind about this, fueled by the question of why his mother
did not tell her husband about the trip to RamRam. Padma defends Amina
again, saying that perhaps she feared her husband’s wrath. No matter how
hard Padma tries to avoid misunderstanding and defend Amina’s image as a
faithful spouse, it is clear that the bills do not add up and we should recon-
sider the way the previous events were reported. The situation also raises
the question of how Saleem knows all the things he claims to know. If he
had listened to his parents’ arguments and disagreements, he could have
reconstructed those memories by piecing together the fragments of his rec-
ollection that were then connected, or better stabilised by the narrative he
accepted as true.
However, it is equally possible that these doubts are the product of the
narrative itself, that is, the grey areas, the blind spots, the subtext that was
always there, invisible, underestimated. These areas allow the narrative to
persist and be coherent as long as they remain unchecked. For Rushdie, the
invisible plays a crucial role in how subjectivities are constructed through dis-
course and grand narratives. He confesses that he was fascinated by the way
he himself preferred a false memory to truthful information when the latter
contradicted his larger story and that he transferred this desire to Saleem in
the novel:
I was interested to find that even after I found out that my memory was playing
tricks my brain simply refused to unscramble itself. It clung to the false mem-
ory, preferring it to mere literal happenstance. I thought that was an important
lesson to learn. Thereafter, as I wrote the novel, and whenever a conflict arose
between literal and remembered truth, I would favour the remembered version.
This is why, even though Saleem admits that no tidal wave passed through the
Sundarbans in the year of the Bangladesh War, he continues to be borne out
of the jungle on the crest of that fictional wave. His truth is too important to
him to allow it to be unseated by a mere weather report. It is memory’s truth,
he insists, and only a madman would prefer someone else’s version to his own.
(Rushdie 1991e, 31, emphasis is mine)
Acceptance of the invention is determined by its verisimilitude, that is:

“the ability of a discourse to be recognized as acceptable [...], according to a
57
series of signposts [...]. Subsequently, in order to be accepted by the reader,

truth itself needs to become plausible.” (Spiridon 2010, 32)30 In fact, accord-
ing to Saleem, after Mary Pereira revealed that Saleem had been switched at
birth, “never once, [...] did [my parents] set out to look for the true son of their
blood; and I have, at several points in this narrative, ascribed this failure to a
certain lack of imagination – [...] that I remained their son because they could
not imagine me out of the role.” (Rushdie 2021c, 436) He concedes, however,
that this was the narrative he wanted to believe. Another hypothesis he did not
want to consider, perhaps the most obvious, was that perhaps his parents’ love
was “stronger than ugliness, stronger even than blood.” (ibid.) Instead, all the
grotesque physical features he develops in the course of the narrative and the
magical powers he attributes to himself, as well as those Rushdie wants to
attribute to the Indian nation through him in the communal process of recon-
struction, may reflect Saleem’s doubts and uncertainty about his own origins.
As protagonist and author, Saleem gives them an allusive yet significant role
in his story and allows them to have an impact on it.
Saleem himself acknowledges that “Reality is a question of perspective;
the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems
– but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredi-
ble.” (ivi, 247) In this context, he gives the example of a spectator in a cinema
who gradually moves away from the last row of seats until his head is glued
to the cinema screen. During the process, the projected images, which appear
absolutely realistic and convincing when viewed from a distance, become so
large that even the smallest details take on grotesque qualities, similar to what
Gulliver experienced in the second book of Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Even-
tually, “the illusion dissolves or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself
is reality.” (ibid.) Saleem warns readers that his perception is influenced by
his perspective, so that the illusions in his field of vision may fall into place
as reality. Moreover, he will increasingly suffer from distortions and errors of
perspective as he gets closer to the images, that is, as he moves towards the
present events. It becomes gradually more difficult to distinguish illusions
from reality when the eyes are so close to the image. Despite all the distor-
tions created by proximity, they can appear perfectly logical and credible. As
a result of this closeness, anything unbelievable can be believed and accepted,
whether it’s the special powers of the midnight’s children or the grotesque
qualities of many other characters.
30
See also Habibi 2013.
58
Giuseppe De Riso
It would thus appear Saleem manipulates his own history to create the
conditions for his existence. Having cultivated an understanding of the fine
line between fiction and reality, Rushdie plays with the fact that even the
most unbelievable stories can be accepted if they ‘fit’ within certain emo-
tional and narrative parameters, or at least do not violate them. In particular,
I am referring to the notion that authenticity can be defined in relation to its
apparent opposite, inauthenticity, rather than as a contrast to it, as suggested
by Fritzman (2009). The primary concern is not just to provide readers or
listeners with a satisfying ending, but rather a more important issue is at
stake: altering the story in a way that makes the imagined seem more genuine
than the actual, in order to legitimise the invention and gain acceptance of it.
Whether or not an event really took place is ultimately irrelevant to whether
its story is believed to be true.
As readers, we should be aware of Saleem’s efforts to shape the story to
suit his own desires, highlighting or hiding certain emotions or motivations.
As he himself acknowledges, he is confronted with many dissatisfactions and
will never be able to write a completely coherent and unquestionable story
that resolves them all.
The process of revision should be constant and endless; don’t think I’m satisfied
with what I’ve done! Among my unhappinesses: an overly-harsh taste from
those jars containing memories of my father; a certain ambiguity in the love-fla-
vour of ‘Jamila Singer’ [...] which might lead the unperceptive to conclude that
I’ve invented the whole story of the baby-swap to justify an incestuous love;
vague implausibilities in the jar labelled ‘Accident in a washing-chest’ [...].
...yes, I should revise and revise, improve and improve; but there is neither
the time nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sen-
tence: It happened that way because that’s how it happened. (Rushdie 2021c,
661-662)
Eventually, Saleem takes pains not to add to his suspicions by recalling the
compelling evidence his mother is said to have provided. This is the same evi-
dence he invokes elsewhere in the novel when his suspicions about his mother
resurface. Saleem recalls that they often received calls at home from people
who had obviously dialled the wrong number. He did not suspect anything at
first, but these memories also suggest that Amina had an unpleasant secret: “...
and a tiny seed of suspicion was planted in me, a tiny glimmering of a notion
that our mother might have a secret – our Amma! Who always said, ‘Keep
secrets and they’ll go bad inside you; don’t tell things and they’ll give you
stomach-ache! – a minute spark which my experience in the washing-chest
would fan into a forest fire.” (ivi, 238)
59
Saleem identifies precisely in the missing portions of his story the origin of
his irrational notion that his mother has committed infidelity, a conviction that
arises during the development of narration but whose effects are felt retroac-
tively as the story progresses. In other words, despite his attempts at self-de-
ceit, Saleem begins to realise that the first parts of his narrative are already
influenced by the rending doubts that will later arise from the unfolding of his
story. He would then incorporate into the narrative the resentment he may have
wrongly felt towards his mother for making him suffer these doubts as they
have always existed without him being aware of them (“maybe that’s where
my irrational notion was born, to grow illogically backwards in time, and arrive
fully mature at this earlier”).31 No matter how hard Saleem tries to construct
a narrative as coherent and free of contradictions as possible to fill the gaps
in his memory, there are always wrinkles where unspeakable doubts creep in,
furrows which can only be “smoothed out” (ivi, 32) with the passage of time.
History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish, and capable of being
given many meanings. Reality is built on our prejudices, misconceptions and
ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge. The reading of
Saleem’s unreliable narration might be, I believed a useful analogy for the way
in which we all, every day, attempt to ‘read’ the world. (Rushdie 1991e, 32)
Self-deception, suspicion and opalescence are narrative devices found in

several postmodernist works. Consider Ian McEwan’s Atonement, in which
Briony creates a happy ending that allows her to accept her story before her
readers do.32 In this respect, however, Midnight’s Children bears a striking sim-
ilarity with a novel in which we see, perhaps for the first time, an author help-
lessly surrender to the blending of reality and fiction. In Absalom!, Absalom!
(1936), William Faulkner explores racism in the southern United States through
31
As previously quoted.
32
In the novel, Briony Tallis is a young girl who becomes embroiled in a series of events that
ultimately lead to a tragic misunderstanding. One of the ways Briony manipulates the story is
through her own perception of events. As a child, Briony is highly imaginative and prone to
seeing things in a dramatic and distorted way. This leads her to interpret the actions of others in
ways that are not always correct. For example, she misinterprets the relationship between her
sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner and believes that Robbie is responsible for a crime he did not
commit, falsely accusing him. Throughout the novel, Briony struggles with guilt and the desire
to make amends for the consequences of her actions and the damage she has caused. In the end,
she tries to make up for her mistakes by writing a novel about her story. However, she attempts
to make things right by changing the true course of events.
60
Giuseppe De Riso
the memories of his characters. Like the protagonists in some of Henry James’
and Joseph Conrad’s novels, Quentin and Shreve are caught in a dialogic act of
remembering in order to reconstruct the past. Brian McHale suggests that they
“sift through [the] evidence” (1987, XX) to gather from witnesses with varying
degrees of reliability.33 McHale notes the only exception to this is Chapter 8,
where modernist poetics breaks down. Shreve and Quentin, completely capti-
vated by the story, try to visualise it from the perspective of Charles Bon (the
child rejected by Sutpen34). They compare their hypotheses, but as soon as they
reach the limits of their knowledge about Sutpen’s murder, Quentin and Shreve
abandon all criteria of authority and plunge into pure speculation.35 The two do
nothing but invent, from the remnants and detritus of old stories and rumours,
persons who may never have existed, shadows of shadows, situations that may
never have occurred, but which serve to explain the story. Of all these hypo-
theses, one ‘must’ be true and represent the truth for the story as a whole to be
coherent, to make sense.36 At a certain point, it becomes necessary to ‘believe’
33
The epistemological uncertainty is a typical modernist device, and is expressed in the novel
by transferring the difficulties of seeking knowledge from the characters to the reader. Disjoint-
ed chronology, indirectly provided or ‘withheld’ information is intended to simulate for the
reader the difficulties Quentin and Shreve have in uncovering the truth.
34
Sutpen is the central character of the novel, a man driven by a desire for power and status. He
is an enigmatic, wealthy plantation owner obsessed with creating a legacy for himself and his
family. He marries Ellen Coldfield, a woman from a prominent local family, and they have two
children together: Henry and Judith. However, Sutpen’s pursuit of social status and wealth leads
him to make a series of selfish and destructive decisions that have far-reaching consequences
for his family and the community.
35
There are no longer any reliable epistemological tools or evidence to rely on to solve the mys-
tery of the murder, only a hypothesis about what might have happened. In order to circumvent
the unsolvable problems of the real world, both characters enter an imaginary world that allows
them to ‘solve’ the mystery and eventually reach a conclusion that can be applied to the real world.
36
As they ponder numerous hypotheses, an explanation finally emerges for why Bon, after
being killed by Henry, carried not the image of Judith, but a picture of his former family with
an octoroon. Among the multitude of possible explanations, Quentin and Shreve have decided
on the following hypothesis and are convinced that Bon had previously exchanged the photo
in order to make his wife believe he was a villain: “‘...why the black son a of bitch should have
taken her picture out and put the octoroon’s picture in, so he invented a reason for it. But I know.
And you know too. Don’t you? Don’t you, huh?’ He glared at Quentin, leaning forward over
the table now, looking huge and shapeless as a bear in his swaddling of garments. ‘Don’t you
know? It was because he said to himself, ‘If Henry don’t mean what he said, it will be all right;
I can take it out and destroy it. But if he does mean what he said, it will be the only way I will
have to say to her, I was no good; do not grieve for me.’ Ain’t that right? Ain’t it? By God, ain’t
61
a certain thing to be true, and this decision entails the partial concealment of
the fact that the full truth is neither known nor can be known.37 Bon ‘must’ have
been aware that in some way he had already been condemned to atone for his
father’s sins.38 In the economy of the novel, the decision of Shreve and Quentin
is linked, with appropriate distinctions, to Henry’s earlier rejection of the truth
about his half-brother, which his father had just revealed to him. Henry rejected
this truth not because it changed the nature of his relationship with Bon and
made them half-brothers, but because it entailed another implication, namely
that Bon had always known the truth and therefore his intentions had always
been malicious. This possible truth would call into question everything Henry
had believed to be true up to that point, so he categorically rejected it.39 He
refused to accept Bon as his half-brother in order to preserve their relationship,
even though he was aware of the ambiguity about his origins. He chose to be-
lieve the untruth because it did not negate ‘his’ story.40
it?’ ‘Yes,’ Quentin said.” (Faulkner 2011, 46) As a result, they yield to the weight of condition-
als in order to hide under Quentin’s reassuring “yes.”
37
Taking the lead from Jakobson, McHale concludes that with this decision Absalom! Absalom!
moves from an epistemological to an ontological dominant. In other words, it shifts from prob-
lems regarding knowledge to questions concerning being and existence. Possibly at this point,
Faulkner’s novel touches on and crosses the boundary between modernist and postmodernist
writing. Within a primarily modernist novel, this is a fully postmodern scene, one that clearly
illustrates the tension between reality and fiction.
38
As these hypothetical possibilities run rampant in their minds, they hear the ticking of clocks
announcing midnight. Quentin and Shreve conclude that the difficulty in capturing the past lies
not in its ‘weight’ or quantity, but in its fluidity, in the way information mixes and dissolves
into itself like a liquid: “a sort of hushed and naked searching, each look burdened with youth’s
immemorial obsession not with time’s dragging weight which the old live with but with its
fluidity: the bright heels of all the lost moments of fifteen and sixteen.” (Faulkner 2011, 46)
39
“So the old man sent the nigger for Henry,” Shreve said. “And Henry came in and the old man
said ‘They cannot marry because he is your brother’ and Henry said ‘You lie’ like that, that quick:
no space, no interval, no nothing between like when you press the button and get light in the
room. And the old man just sat there, didn’t even move and strike him and so Henry didn’t say
‘You lie’ again because he knew now it was so; he just said ‘It’s not true,’ not ‘I don’t believe it’
but ‘It’s not true’ because he could maybe see the old man’s face again now and demon or no it
was a kind of grief and pity, not for himself but for Henry, because Henry was just young while
he (the old man) knew that he still had the courage and even all the shrewdness too ...” (ibid.)
40
However, when he found out that his half-brother was half-black, he changed his mind. It
is only when racial factors enter his life that he decides to kill his half-brother to prevent his
marriage to his sister: “So it’s the miscegenation, not the incest, that you can not stand.” (ibid.)
62
Giuseppe De Riso
Similarly, when Padma complains that she has been misled about Saleem’s
birth, the origins of the storyteller, Saleem explains that it makes no differ-
ence: neither he nor his family members were capable of thinking beyond
their past or imagine life any other way. Truth was primarily defined by what
they believed to be true and how they were able to define themselves. Sal-
eem’s parents considered him as their son in every respect, and loved and
raised him as one of their own, regardless of the genetic data that is unknown
to us. In the same way, Saleem had always considered his adoptive parents as
such, despite the fact that they were not biologically his parents.
Saleem’s conclusion notwithstanding, Rushdie provides us with clues to
help us draw our own. A series of internal signals lure us into making connec-
tions between seemingly unrelated events. It’s Rushdie’s ability to spice up
the numerous references and connections that mark his magical realism. As
its name implies, magical realism is considered an intimately hybrid mode of
writing due to its fusion of often incompatible elements. This is why Rawdon
Wilson emphasises that magical realism is an especially effective literary style
for dealing with “the doubleness of conceptual codes” (Wilson 1995, 210)
in order to enfold “distinct kinds of fictional world [...] together.” (ivi, 222)
Rushdie’s magical realism differs from that of other writers, particularly Latin
American writers, in the irony that permeates his descriptions. Make-believe
is the reason why protagonists seem to possess almost supernatural abilities,
landscapes and inanimate objects seem alive and endowed with a conscience,
and crucial circumstances in the lives of his characters seem synchronised
with historical events. The key word here is ‘seem’: even in the cases where
Saleem’s magical actions seem most obvious, there is not a single situation in
the novel that could not be explained as Saleem’s invention. None at all. For
every magical event Saleem describes, we can always come up with an alter-
native and perfectly rational explanation.
The idea of make-believe is illustrated in part by the story of Aadam’s
‘planned’ affair with Naseem, orchestrated by her father, Mr. Ghani. After com-
pleting his medical studies in Europe, Aadam is repeatedly called to Naseem’s
house because the girl seems to have “quite [an] extraordinary number of mi-
nor illnesses” (Rushdie 2021c, 43). For reasons of decorum, Naseem remains
hidden behind a perforated sheet when Aadam visits Mr. Ghani’s house. This
is part of the tradition of purdah, followed by both Hindu and Islamic customs,
in which the female body is separated from that of the men by a curtain or veil
in their homes or by wearing clothing that covers the face and body in public.
As a result, Aadam can only visit Naseem’s diseased or aching parts. In reality,
Aadam’s infatuation with Naseem seems to be more of a delusion, as it is the
63
result of the controlled administration of ‘parts’ of Naseem’s body that stimu-

late Aadam’s curiosity and arouse his desire to see all of her, so that he believes
he is in love with her. It will be the beginning of an unsatisfactory relationship.
Aadam would almost certainly not have been convinced of his love for Naseem
if he had been able to visit her under normal circumstances, in full. As a result,
Aadam is more enamoured with his own mental creation or imago of Naseem’s
body and with the subsequent search for confirmation of his fantasies. Against
this backdrop, the perforated sheet serves as a threshold or boundary that shows
while it hides and hides while it shows, but in such a way that what is shown is
not entirely real and what is hidden is not merely imaginary.41
Naseem haunts Aadam as the spirit of a divided body, like Mother India.
Indeed, the rectangular sheet with a hole in it is clearly a representation of the
Indian national flag.42 In this sense, the circle within it represents the inner
void Saleem claims to possess along with the Indian nation. This emptiness
serves simultaneously as a representational and creative space. However, de-
spite his mother’s explicit indication that he is being deceived, Aadam is not
discouraged and continues to play along with the Ghani family until the two
lovers become engaged. Aadam’s infatuation is genuine and legitimate, but
it is nevertheless the result of “the magic of the sheet” (Rushdie 2021c, 45),
although technically it is not magic at all. Naseem and Aadam contributed to
this ‘magic’ through their collaboration and sentimental disposition. When
Aadam finally comes out to Naseem and they are officially engaged, Mr.
Ghani refers to the whole situation as a ‘tamasha’, basically a performance for
entertainment. The word comes from Urdu and means ‘digression’ or ‘walk’:
“Enough of this tamasha! No more need for this sheet tomfoolery! Drop it
down, you women, these are young lovers now!” (ivi, 50)
41
“So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting collage
of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began to haunt him, and
not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination, she accompanied him on all his rounds,
she moved into the front room of his mind, so that waking and sleeping he could feel in his finger-
tips the softness of her ticklish skin or the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of the ankles; he could
smell her scent of lavender and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a
little girl; but she was headless, because he had never seen her face.” (Rushdie 2021, 43)
42
The hole can also be traced back to a statement by Rushdie in which he reveals that giving
up the Islamic faith caused dissatisfaction in his family and left him with a “God-shaped hole”
(Rushdie 1991b, 439). A hole that, as he later clarified in an article for the Independent (2000)
written in response to another by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, referred not to the divine quality of
his ego but to art and literature. It should be noted that Saleem’s grandfather also had an inner
emptiness due to religion.
64
Giuseppe De Riso
I would like to draw attention to three particular literary devices Rushdie

employs to support the magic of make-believe: the anthropomorphising of
inanimate objects, temporal coincidences, and the endowment of characters
with grotesque qualities.
a) Anthropomorphising of inanimate objects

As Aadam examines Naseem through the perforated sheet, the anatomical
parts that seem to be affected by supposed diseases become more and more
erogenous: first the breasts, then the buttocks. He will always remember see-
ing a “compliant blush” (ivi, 45) when he touched them. The simplicity of this
example conveys very effectively the playful nature of Rushdie’s magical re-
alism, which transforms what is likely a blush from Aadam’s energetic touch
into a humorous blush that humanises Naseem’s back as if it were subject to
shame or modesty. A dialogue Aadam later has with Ilsa Lubin shows that he
truly believes he saw Naseem’s backside blush. Again, humour is used to blur
the line between the realistic and the magical.
The examples of anthropomorphising objects in this novel are endless.
The valley where Aadam prays at the beginning of the story “curved up
towards him” (ivi, 25) and “punched him on the nose” (ivi, 24), the moun-
tains of Kashmir “crowded round and stared” (ivi, 52) at him leaving his
home. All things that make Aadam feel “inexplicably – as though the old
place resented his educated, stethoscoped return.” (ivi, 23) When a car with
military personnel hits the spittoon some urchins were playing with, “blood
congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the
retreating power of the Raj.” (ivi, 71) Each of these elements contributes
to the illusion that captivates characters and readers “in [what is] only a
charade after all.” (ivi, 25)
Among all, the nose obviously stands out. Not only Saleem’s magical pro-
tuberance, which enables him to communicate telepathically with the other
magical children of India, but also that of his grandfather. By a remarkable co-
incidence, Saleem’s “colossal apparatus” (ivi, 27) connects him to his grand-
father and to the myth of Ganesha. In Saleem’s descriptions, we learn that
his nose, like his grandfather’s, is endowed with Ganesha’s magical ability to
detect danger. It is a coincidence that confirms Saleem’s birth right in Sinai’s
house and his status in Indian mythology. In many ways, the nose’s mysteri-
ous properties give the impression that they are the result of fate, which makes
the significance of its characteristics all the more powerful. However, it is
important to note that the alleged magical properties of the nose are never true
magic, as they cannot be verified or traced to verifiable events. It is the tone
65
in which the narrator describes the nose that gives it its ‘magical’ properties,
for it makes what would otherwise be considered ordinary coincidences seem
extraordinary.
For example, Rushdie attributes prophetic qualities to the nose, the ability
to foresee what will happen. This is always a discourse effect resulting from
Rushdie’s propensity for making unsubstantiated connections between seem-
ingly unrelated things. As soon as Aadam learns that Naseem, whom he has
not yet met, is ill and needs his medical assistance, his nose begins to itch. It
is itching again just before he meets Naseem, as if to warn him of the decep-
tion of the perforated sheet which the blind Mr. Ghani had planned. On April
13, 1919, the day of the Amritsar massacre, Aadam’s nose itches harder than
ever. Amidst the crowd of people that are about to be killed by the soldiers, he
sneezes providentially saving his life before the soldiers open fire:
Aziz penetrates the heart of the crowd, as Brigadier R. E. Dyer arrives at the en-
trance to the alleyway, followed by fifty crack troops. He is the Martial Law Com-
mander of Amritsar [...] As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle
replaces the itch in my grandfather’s nose. The fifty-one men enter the compound
and take up positions [...]. As Brigadier Dyer issues a command the sneeze hits
my grandfather full in the face. ‘Yaaaakh- thoooo!’ he sneezes and falls forward,
losing ‘his balance, following his nose and thereby saving his life. (ivi, 59)
As a result of the imbalance caused by his sneezing, Aadam drops his med-
ical equipment on the ground. As he tries to pick it up, he dodges the bullets
that the soldiers are firing at the demonstrators at that moment. The weight of
the bodies pelting him causes the clasp of his bag to press hard on his chest,
leaving a bruise “so severe and mysterious that it will not fade until after his
death.” (ibid.)
As this passage shows, Rushdie has a unique ability to blend the magical with
the real. Saleem’s grandfather was probably saved by a simple sneeze that caused
him to bend over at just the right moment and drop the contents of his bag just
as he was about to be shot. Nevertheless, the constant references to the magical
properties of the nose in the story convince the reader that this could not have
been simply an accident or a stroke of luck. We cannot prove it, but we cannot
help but ‘feel’ that Aadam was saved by some magical property of his nose, im-
plied by the way the narrative is constructed. A bruise formed after the incident,
which will accompany him all his life and disappear only after his death, empha-
sises the fatal nature of the event. In Saleem’s constant allusions, Rushdie’s sense
of humour is evident as he makes perfectly plausible what would otherwise be
impossible and obscures more probable and rational explanations. The above
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Giuseppe De Riso
passage makes clear how the intersection of reality and fiction in the novel is only
possible through the unique coincidence of the grotesque and magic, humour and
horror. The act of writing fosters the reader’s ability to shift seamlessly from one
level of interpretation to another: from credulity to scepticism, from providential
beliefs to rational interpretations, from the mundane to the supernatural.
The use of literary devices such as the nose gives the writing its variable
polychromatic quality, making it iridescent or opalescent. The grotesque el-
ement of the nose serves to defend the genealogy – it is interpreted as the
foundation of the family as well as its eventual support or protection from
the horrors of colonialism and the dangers of suspicion that could undermine
or destroy it. The trick is to create the illusion that the nose just happens to
respond to important events in Saleem’s history only by chance.
b) Temporal coincidences
Rushdie’s humour is based on chance, understood in its double mean-
ing of overlap and occasion. It emphasises the illusory determinacy of all
the elements of the novel. Through the use of opalescent elements, sites of
convergence or confluence are constructed where multiple properties can be
simultaneously united or separated. By working at the boundaries of writing,
Rushdie’s humour allows for multiple perspectives to be considered and for
the same object to be given different and even opposing properties so that one
can create one’s own narrative space, time, and place. Throughout the novel,
Saleem makes many connections between his characters’ lives and events
in Indian history: “Such historical coincidences have littered, and perhaps
befouled, my family’s existence in the world.” (ivi, 46) Naseem and Aadam
first meet on the day that World War II ends; Saleem’s son is born on the day
Indira Gandhi declares the Emergency; at the same time Shiva bursts into
Saleem’s life, India conducts its first nuclear test, etc. The biggest coinci-
dence, however, is that Saleem was born precisely at midnight on the day
that India gained independence. The two are not even separated by a fraction
of a second.
The event, Saleem says, has him handcuffed to history. However, even
though “there’s no getting away from the date” (ivi, 20) Saleem introduces it
with the phrase “once upon a time.” (ibid.) This phrase is used in fairy tales to
emphasise that the persons, places and situations described are both imaginary
and timeless. The use of a vague expression such as this and the search for
precise details is a perfect example of oscillating between seemingly contra-
dictory approaches. Rushdie alternates between the fantastical elements of the
fairy tale, which take root primarily in the minds and memories of children,
67
and the chronicles of officially recognised or documented historical facts. Ac-

cording to Saleem’s narrative, history is defined both by the linear passage of
time and by the ceaseless devouring of all the stories from the past, present
and future that cross each of us in reality and in fantasy. Rushdie places Sal-
eem both within the linear unfolding of human history and as a product of the
imagination, in an indeterminate time of origin lost in the intricacies of desire
and fantasy. Saleem’s birth occurs at an irretrievably precise moment in time,
an accidental consequence and a fatal outcome of and for millions of Indians.
c) Grotesque characters
The way Rushdie blends historical events with imaginary Indian mythol-
ogy in his characters and in the circumstances they encounter is often evident
in their physical features. The physical characteristics they are born with or
acquire during their lives do not seem to be accidental or ends in themselves,
but are in a sense mirror images or simulacra of the religious myths or legends
that have been persistently pursued on Indian soil and beyond.
In particular, I would like to draw attention to the grotesque figure of Tai, the
ferryman, who foreshadows the importance of the nose in Aadam’s life and in
the lives of his descendants. Since Tai predicts many significant events, the read-
er is led to believe that he has the ability to see into the future. His predictions
go well beyond mere wisdom. He seems to possess some kind of metanarrative
knowledge or consciousness. Again, it is difficult for the reader to discern this:
Tai [...] who revealed the power of the nose, and who is now bringing my
grandfather the message which will catapult him into his future, is stroking his
shikara through the early morning lake ...
Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been plying this
same boat [...] forever. As far as anyone knew. [...] Tai himself cheerily admit-
ted he had no idea of his age. Neither did his wife – he was, she said, already
leathery when they married. [...]
He was the living antithesis of Oskar-Ilse-Ingrid’s belief in the inevitability
of change ... a quirky, enduring familiar spirit of the valley. A watery Caliban,
rather too fond of cheap Kashmiri brandy. (ivi, 28)
He is described as a hybrid of the mythological figure of Charon, a ‘watery

Caliban,’ and a kind of genius loci who has practically ‘always’ lived in the
area. Rushdie’s humour here is distinguished by the fact that he asks the reader
to take this statement literally and not as an exaggeration. Tai appears to be
an extremely old man who has lived so long that he cannot even remember
his age. With his endless babbling that makes others think he is crazy, he ex-
erts a strong fascination on Aadam. His “magical talk” (ivi, 30) has literally
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Giuseppe De Riso
enchanted Aadam and aroused his curiosity. When Aadam asks Tai about his
age, he replies that he met Jesus while he was staying in Kashmir:
I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. Smile, smile, it is your history I
am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. Once I knew where
there was a grave with pierced feet carved on the tombstone, which bled once a year.
Even my memory is going now; but I know, although I can’t read. (ivi, 31)
Tai claims that he knows everything and that the narratives he has in his head
are the truth, unadulterated by textual evidence. Tai is offended when Aadam
grins in his face for not believing him, claiming to be a reliable source: “It is your
history I am keeping in my head.” (ivi, 31) Aadam is aware that Tai is a drunkard
who speaks under the influence of alcohol, but both he and the reader cannot
help suspecting that he is to be taken seriously. Embedded in the inconsistent
history of a character based on the equally unreliable memory of his author, the
lone madman presents a new narrative frame that might prove him to be the only
reliable narrator. Rushdie uses the auctorial mise en abyme he has created here
to poke fun at Christianity by having Tai claim that Jesus died in Kashmir and
therefore was never resurrected. He claims that Emperor Shāh Jahān is mistaken-
ly associated with the figure of a gardener because he had the Shalimar Gardens
created. He refers to Alexander the Great as a familiar figure and discusses his
personal affairs with such ease as if they were recent events. Tai even mentions
the love affair Alexander had with Bagoas, a beautiful Persian eunuch, a piece
of historical anecdote that an illiterate man like him could not possibly know
about. Rushdie criticises official historiography for being riddled with so many
lies and inaccuracies that it fails to properly reflect historical events, and for being
constantly manipulated, much as writers manipulate their characters in novels:
Oh, you don’t believe? [...] God knows what they teach you boys these days.
Whereas I’ … puffing up a little here … ‘I knew his precise weight, to the
tola! Ask me how many maunds, how many seers! When he was happy he got
heavier and in Kashmir he was heaviest of all. I used to carry his litter … no,
no, look, you don’t believe again, that big cucumber in your face is waggling
like the little one in your pajamas! So, come on, come on, ask me questions!
Give examination! Ask how many times the leather thongs wound round the
handles of the litter – the answer is thirty-one. Ask me what was the Emperor’s
dying word – I tell you it was “Kashmir”. He had bad breath and a good heart.
Who do you think I am? (ivi, 32, emphasis is mine)
Having witnessed the events first-hand, he goes so far as to challenge Sal-

eem to verify the veracity of his claims. He pretends to know details such as the
69
exact weight of the Emperor and the last word he spoke on his deathbed. As he
makes these points, he cannot resist drinking his brandy, which underscores the
fact that he is a drunkard who cannot be taken seriously. And yet Tai is the one
who advises Aadam to trust his nose, because “it’s the place where the outside
world meets the world inside you. If they don’t get on, you feel it here.” (ivi,
33) It is Tai who predicts Aadam’s future alcoholism, or the one who mocks his
European upbringing, which would lead Aadam into conflict with his wife and
cause him to espouse ideas of autonomy and emancipation, eventually ending
up in his tragic death. Tai has the unique ability to predict important events in
Aadam’s life, as if he could see into the future. This adds credibility to his claim
that he knows everything that happened in the past and creates a sense of unease
where suspicion outweighs evidence. Tai differs from RamRam, the seer, in that
he seems to be a character endowed with extradiegetic or superordinate knowl-
edge that places him both inside and outside the narrative. He does not give his
age, because the exact date is not important. What ultimately makes him what
he is is what he knows, his ability to distinguish the true from the false.
It is Rushdie’s ambiguous humour that keeps readers on the border be-
tween reality and fiction, allowing them to interpret many details and events as
clues, symbols, metaphors, and allusions of and to other things. Make-believe
makes it possible for characters, objects, dates, and events to take on different
shades of meaning and evoke different metaphysical qualities that create alter-
native paths within the plot or even conflicting narratives. Factual information
is woven into a magical realist narrative that stimulates the reader’s imagina-
tion and intuitive abilities to identify obvious connections or arbitrary plot de-
velopments. Kalderon (2005) argues that make-believe involves participation
in the story and relies on a process he calls ‘tentative acceptance’ of narrative
content. Following Harman (1986), Kalderon distinguishes between tentative
and full acceptance of a statement:
Tentative acceptance, while distinct from full acceptance is a matter of degree.
The degree of tentative acceptance depends on the extent to which a person is
prepared to rely on the acceptance of the sentence in theoretical and practical
reasoning and the range of contexts in which a person does so rely. If, over
time, and over a wide range of contexts, a person comes to rely sufficiently on
the acceptance of the sentence in theoretical and practical reasoning, he may
come to fully accept that sentence. Thus, the distinction between tentative and
full acceptance is best understood as an approach to a limit. (Kalderon 2005, 2)
Tentative acceptance is a consequence of make-believe because it makes the

reader participate in the ‘props’ of the story, the ‘strings’ to which Saleem refers
70
Giuseppe De Riso
when Padma calls Dr. Baligga. Although Saleem repeatedly points out to the reader
that his account may be wrong and that he may not remember the events accurately,
he does not do so to discredit his narrative. Saleem wants the reader to understand
that they are participating in a process of tentative acceptance of what he is saying,
of pretending that certain things are true and false at the same time. It is an invita-
tion to actively participate in the construction of the story, to place oneself at the
boundaries of narration: neither inside nor outside of it as a neutral observer. For
this process to take place, collaboration and emotional involvement are required.
As Saleem approaches his 31st birthday at the end of the novel, he feels that
his life is coming to an end. With only a few days left until August 15, 1978, he
not only sees the cracks in his skin more and more clearly, but also perceives the
people in his life as ghosts or visions. This may be due to the hallucinatory delir-
ium of a mentally ill individual or the dissolution process of a dying person. At
this point, Saleem makes a series of meta-referential considerations by linking
his occupation as a cook to that of a writer, equating storytelling with the “joy
of cooking” (Rushdie 2021c, 157). As a result, the voices of Rushdie and Sal-
eem become less and less distinguishable. Saleem’s ability, according to Forsyth
(1996), is the most powerful of all: it is the power to tell stories. In Shame, this
power was expressed through Rani Harappa’s weaving of eighteen allegorical
shawls, through which “unspeakable things no one wanted to hear” (Rushdie
1995, 192) are told. Rushdie has elsewhere described it as the ‘chutnification’
of history (Rushdie 1982) and in Midnight’s Children is conveyed through the
metaphor of the ‘pickling process’ which has great figurative significance:
My special blends: I’ve been saving them up. Symbolic value of the pickling
process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of
India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million
spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will for-
give me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted
of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope
of the pickling of time! (Rushdie 2021c, 660)
Just as 600 million spermatozoa, and the potential lives they represent,
can be handled and mixed with a spoon invisibly to the naked eye, any cook
should be aware that a mixture of ingredients can produce an infinite variety
of possible flavours. A writer, like a cook, must have “above all a nose capable
of discerning the hidden languages of what-must-be-pickled, its humours and
messages and emotions,” (ivi, 661) making it possible to represent an infinite
number of memories, dreams, thoughts, and ideas. Saleem continues his meta-
phor by illustrating that both cooking and writing can be subject to the “in-
71
evitable distortions” (ivi, 662) of the process, which can lead to unwanted or
unwelcome changes and intensifications. What really matters, however, is that
each conveys meanings that give the story “the authentic taste of truth.” (ibid.)
Saleem is well aware of the “vague implausibilities” (ivi, 661) that might
raise questions and make one suspect that he “invented the whole story.” (ibid.)
As already mentioned elsewhere in this dissertation, he points out his resentment
toward his father’s regrets, as well as his incestuous love for his sister, which he
suggests might lead one to think that he invented the story of the exchange of the
cradles in order to make it acceptable to himself first. If one accepts this hypoth-
esis, one could argue, for example, that Saleem’s final castration, the sperecto-
my that deprives him and his nation of any hope of redemption, can be seen as a
piece of Oedipal fiction through which he reconstructs his family history. What
is ultimately at stake, however, is the possibility of storytelling to set in motion
a “process of revision [that] should be constant and endless.” (ibid.)
If we examine Saleem’s entire story closely, we find that the supposedly
magical elements are the result of Rushdie’s ironic use of props, a narrative
that could reflect a temporary loss of memory or sanity, or a desperate at-
tempt at redemption for a life that has failed, with no hope of recovery except
through rewriting. There is nothing in the novel that does not lend itself well to
logical explanation as opposed to the surreal account offered, or that does not
give rise to speculation as to whether the details that undoubtedly make the
novel magical are not in fact distorted to create the illusion. For every story
there is a counter-narrative, and every point of view is accompanied by a com-
peting perspective that might lead us to suspect that Saleem is not telling the
truth. And yet he swears to Padma: ‘I told you the truth’ (ivi, 211) In Rushdie’s
humorous allusions, the question of what is true or false is not so much about
separating fact from fiction, but about accepting the role that make-believe
plays in contaminating reality. From the beginning of this story, we are like
Aadam at prayer in a desolate valley in Kashmir, “trapped in a strange middle
ground, trapped between belief and disbelief, and it is all only a charade after
all.” (ivi, 25). As an artist, Rushdie is primarily concerned with the reader’s
decision to accept or suspend either one or the other, for it is this choice that
establishes the boundary between them and determines their relationship.
Despite the extensive knowledge we have today, it is impossible to gain a
clear understanding of reality because of the wealth of information available.
This is a paradox of the modern globalised information society: although we
now have more means of disseminating knowledge, such as audiovisual record-
ing instruments to document objective facts, an abundance of forgeries can be
spread more easily than ever before, confusing people, sowing doubt and dis-
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Giuseppe De Riso
cord and making a common perception of reality virtually impossible. Never has
it been so common for false information to be mistaken for truth. For Rushdie,
the ability to tell stories is one of the most characteristic features of the human
race. During a speech at Duke University on 12 April 2011, Rushdie made the
statement that “man is a storytelling animal,”43 borrowing a phrase that had been
employed by Graham Swift in Waterland (1983) almost thirty years before. As a
result, many myths and religious rituals were spread throughout history, which
helped people to make hardships more bearable, but which also led to wars and
divisions. One might assume that disinformation would be harder to spread at
a time when it is easier to dispove. However, this has not been the case, and the
proliferation of electronic media has made it increasingly difficult to distinguish
between reality and illusion. Contradictory ‘truths’ proliferate uncontrollably,
leading to chaos, confusion and endlessly multiplied viewpoints. Postmodern-
ism begins to manifest itself in literature when authors accept the idea that re-
ality is not univocal or universal and that there is no way to reach the truth. So,
they begin to play with their material and allow the reader to assemble some of
the narrative elements into their own stories. Since there can be no agreement
on what is real and what is not, it is also impossible to distinguish between right
and wrong from an ethical point of view.
Saleem must therefore take responsibility for shaping his own story (which
he knows will never be exclusively his) so as not to be crushed by it, and as-
sume the dual role of author and narrator:
‘I can find out any damn thing!’ I triumphed, ‘There isn’t a thing I cannot know!’
Today, with the hindsight of the lost, spent years, I can say that the spirit of self-ag-
grandizement which seized me then was a reflex, born of an instinct for self-pres-
ervation. If I had not believed myself in control of the flooding multitudes, their
massed identities would have annihilated mine... (Rushdie 2021c, 259)
He uses as a metaphor the leakage where his body crumbles under the
pressure of the 600 million stories of as many souls that populate India. He
can only fight back through storytelling, but more importantly through the cre-
ative power that comes with authorship. The act of writing one’s own story is
a means of not succumbing to the complexity and richness of the cultural and
material realities we encounter through history, media and myth. Saleem (and
through him Rushdie) uses writing to survive, much as Sherazade did. Padma
is Saleem’s ear that helps him believe in and make sense of his story so that
43
Reported on Brittlepaper.com. Refer to the sitography for the exact address.
73
it can become a human and historical legacy for his son. For stories to exist,
someone has to believe in them, just as subjects need to recognise themselves
in the gaze of others, according to Jacques Lacan. Saleem is overwhelmed by
the amount of stories that he encounters (or that enters his body, to use the
metaphor employed in the novel), and as a result, he feels like he is breaking
under the pressure of it all. He is unable to fully understand or make sense of
this information. However, Saleem finds a way to resist this complexity as a
storyteller, by using his own memories, history, and myths to create a personal
blend of truth and lies. Had he not taken control of the stories to create his own
narrative, he would have succumbed to history. How much of that narrative is
true is less important than the fact that it is ‘his’ story, one that he believes in
and shares with those he loves because, in this way, he is able to find meaning
and purpose in the midst of the complexity of the world around him. In fact,
this situation makes all other considerations irrelevant, and Saleem can ac-
cordingly conclude: “Believe don’t believe, but it’s true.” (ivi, 661)
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Chapter III
The Profane and the Sacred.
A Palinodic Approach to The Satanic Verses
This swaying, this swing in which confused material goes about
taking shape, is for me the only certainty of its necessity [...].
Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the

slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. [...]
Supposing a man always happy in his dreams, and miserable
in his waking thoughts, and that his life was equally divided
between them, whether would he be more happy or miserable?
Joseph Addison, Essay on Dreams
3.1 Mirrored perceptions

In the previous chapter, Rushdie’s concerns about Saleem’s role as narrator
were addressed. By combining his memories with his imagination, he creates
a narrative that allows him to revel in his own feelings and feed the illusion
that he is in control of his own life, despite his castration by Indira Gandhi.
Yet he also leaves open a number of possibilities for alternative accounts of
the same story, all of which can be just as valid as his own. This is largely due
to the humorous style in which he presents his story, resulting in the novel’s
characteristic opalescent style that challenges the reader to hypothesise and
determine which option is most likely. There is no doubt that Saleem’s parable
reflects the Indian national consciousness, which is a grand narration (Bhabha
1990, 1994) that mixes fact with fiction to maintain its own balance and sta-
bility. For a narrative to be viable, historical accuracy is only partly relevant.
Truth can be combined with fiction as long as the narrative is credible and
stable. Midnight’s Children explores cultural and social relations as hybrids
between fiction and fact through the metaphors of food and taste. Flavours
merge in the same way that people ‘merge’ through the exchange of feelings,
memories and information. “Like many millions of people,” Saleem points
out, “I am a bastard child of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and
white, leaking into one another, as a character of mine once said, like flavours
when you cook.” (Rushdie 2021c, 408) Contamination can only occur when
different, even opposing, characteristics interact.
In a short video on the BigThink website and YouTube (2015),1 Rushdie ex-
plains that he was a big fan of science fiction before becoming a writer. Growing
up and in his twenties, he read countless science fiction novels that were the
inspiration for Grimus. Rushdie believes that his first novel is more accurately
classified as fantasy fiction rather than science fiction: “Because I think that that
form, what might be better called speculative fiction, has always been a very
good vehicle for the novel ideas. You know if you have ideas that you want to
set in motion [...] fantasy fiction has always done that and always done it very,
very well.” (Rushdie 2015) As a writer, Rushdie viewed science fiction as the
most effective literary form for experimenting with new ideas and imagining
possible futures and worlds. Rushdie invented fantasy fiction as a genre that
combined science fiction and fantastic elements. He described it as a genre of
‘speculative fiction’ that allows new ideas to be explored more easily. Through-
out his career, Rushdie has been interested in the ways in which art and literature
enable the creation, formulation, and exploration of new ideas. Neither Rushdie
nor his writing is fundamentally concerned with realistic, didactic, or morally
explicit literature. What is important to him is to be able to imagine what might
yet be possible. In the words of Pradeep Trikha (2021): “The invented worlds
of Rushdie’s novels and short stories register largely failed attempts to move
beyond the bounds of the present; to imagine other pasts and futures that might
discharge the curse of similitude. For if there is fear in Rushdie’s fiction it is
the fear of repetitions of entrapment in self-perpetuating structure.” (1) This in-
vestigation also calls into question all that might have been, both in the present
and in the past. His writing develops within a consistent contradiction, a state of
serene chaos in order to intercept and confront ontological and epistemological
issues equally. Rushdie’s ability to blend fact and fiction has made his novels a
virtual space in which he explores the infinite possibilities and contradictions of
storytelling, as well as the process of change that ultimately makes things and
characters what they are. This may help explain a characteristic discrepancy
between Rushdie’s work and criticism of it. For example, although scholars tend
to call him a postmodernist, he describes himself as a modernist author. The gap
between Rushdie’s experience of his work and the public’s perception has never
been greater than after The Satanic Verses was published.
A major difference between the plot of this novel and Midnight’s Children is
that it is told from the perspective of two different characters, Gibreel Farishta
and Saladin Chamcha, both of Indian origin. At the beginning of the novel, the
1
“True Stories Don’t Tell the Whole Truth”. Refer to the sitography for the exact address.
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Giuseppe De Riso
two are travelling by plane from Bombay to London. Saladin is returning from
Bombay after visiting his father, and Gibreel is on his way to London in search
of Alleluia Cone, a mountaineer with whom he had had a three-day affair earli-
er. But a suicide hijacker blows up the plane over the English Channel. In spite
of plunging into the void, the two men miraculously land unharmed on the
surface of London. In the aftermath of the fall, Gibreel turns into an angel and
Saladin into a devil. However, the situation becomes increasingly implausible
for Saladin, and he attributes their survival to pure luck. He thinks that, due to
his holding tightly on to Gibreel waving his arms like bird wings, they were
able to slow down and land unharmed on the beach. Gibreel, however, does not
deny that the fall was a miracle, claiming that it was brought about by a combi-
nation of singing and flapping while falling. While Saladin displays a rational
attitude, Gibreel is dominated by faith and tends to believe in the supernatural.
It is extremely common in literature to find mirror oppositions such as
these. As an example, Booker (1990) recalls Vladimir Nabokov’s Sebastian
Knight and his doppelgänger V.,2 or James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and Leo-
pold Bloom3 or Shem and Shaun4 pairs. Rushdie himself cited Stevenson’s
Jekyll and Hyde dualism as an intertextual model for The Satanic Verses and
2
Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) features the shadowy and enig-
matic V., an author and critic who is obsessed with the work of Sebastian Knight, the novel’s
protagonist. As the story progresses, V. begins to blur the line between his own identity and that of
the writer he idolises. This leads to a series of increasingly strange and disturbing events as V. be-
comes more enmeshed in Sebastian’s life and begins to take on his personality and idiosyncrasies.
3
Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom are the two main characters in James Joyce’s novel
Ulysses (1920). Stephen Dedalus is a young artist and intellectual struggling to find his place in
the world. He is highly educated and has a deep love of literature, but is also prone to feelings
of isolation and alienation. Leopold Bloom, on the other hand, is a middle-aged man who works
as an advertiser. He’s more down-to-earth and practical than Stephen, but he also has a deep
inner life, struggling with his own identity and purpose. The lives of the two men intersect on
June 16, 1904, when they finally meet after attending to their own matters and strike up a con-
versation. Stephen, an intellectually curious young man, is initially sceptical of Bloom’s ideas,
but as the conversation progresses he becomes more receptive to his perspective. As Stephen
opens up about his own struggles and insecurities, Bloom offers him words of encouragement
and support, marking the beginning of their deep and meaningful relationship.
4
Shem and Shaun are characters in James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (1939), sons of the
book’s protagonist, HCE. They are named after two biblical characters, Shem and Shaun, known
as the ‘sons of Noah’. In the novel, Shem and Shaun represent opposing forces: the former is
associated with artistic and intellectual endeavours, while Shaun is more practical. Throughout
the book, the two brothers engage in a sort of battle for control of their father’s inheritance.
77
Chapter 3. The Profane and the Sacred. A Palinodic Approach to The Satanic Verses
other novels of his. A quote from Rushdie’s Shame reads: “as Mr. Steven-
son has shown in his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, such saint-and-monster con-
junctions are conceivable in the case of men; alas! such is our nature. But
the whole essence of Woman denies such a possibility.” (Rushdie 1995, 160)
This ironic observation refers to Sufiya Zenobia Hyder’s5 transformation into
a beast that rips off young men’s heads after she hypnotises and seduces them.
There is a constant theme of transformation in Rushdie’s many novels, in-
cluding Midnight’s Children: Saleem is employed by the Pakistani army to
hunt down enemies during the Indo-Pakistani war as a kind of human-dog, on
account of his prodigious sense of smell. In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie in-
directly suggests that transformation, or the passing from one state to another,
also plays a central role through the names he gives to his characters. As an
example, Saladin Chamcha’s bears a striking resemblance to Gregor Samsa6
from Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915). Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) observed that
physical transformations can metaphorically express the changes we undergo
during our lives: “Metamorphosis serves as the basis for a method of portray-
ing the whole of an individual’s life in its more important moments of crisis:
for showing how an individual becomes other than what he was.” (115) By
demonstrating the radical changes that can be undergone by the self, and the
ability to embrace qualities that are initially alien to it, the transformation pro-
cess challenges the concept of self as fully defined and immutable. It is no co-
incidence that both Gibreel and Saladin exhibit a certain degree of inherent du-
plicity and yet can be treated as a unity, since their qualities and characteristics
can only be understood from a complementary point of view. Throughout the
5
In the novel, Sufiya Zenobia Hyder, the daughter of Raza Hyder, embodies the concept of sha-
me. She was born a girl and not the son her father had hoped for, and her brain damage caused
by a fever has left her mentally disabled and a source of shame for her parents and sister. The
concept of shame, or ‘sharam’, in the novel encompasses a wide range of complex and mostly
unpleasant feelings for which there are no exact English equivalents, combining pride, mode-
sty, guilt and discomfort. Shame seems to manifest as an inner beast that consumes her as she
grows older. Although Sufiya eventually marries Omar Khayyam Shakil, the shame does not
subside and her transformation into a beast is its final manifestation.
6
Gregor is a young man who works as a travelling salesman and is the primary provider for
his family. One morning, he wakes up to discover that he has been transformed into a giant
insect. The transformation is a metaphor for Gregor’s feelings of isolation and confinement in
his monotonous and unfulfilling life. As an insect, Gregor is unable to communicate or connect
with his family and is completely reliant on their care. He becomes a burden and is eventually
rejected by them. Gregor’s transformation serves thus as a catalyst for the changes that occur
within his family and their relationships with each other.
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Giuseppe De Riso
story, the relationship between the two characters develops in response to each
other’s changing feelings about cultural, religious and emotional belonging.
At the beginning of the novel, Saladin returns to England after visiting
his father, Changez Chamchawala (another name that evokes the idea of
change), in Bombay. He had returned to perform in the play The Millionairess
by George Bernard Shaw. As a child, his father’s excessive strictness and the
numerous prohibitions he imposed on him were difficult for Saladin to accept.
One day Saladin found a wallet full of British pounds, but his father scolded
him for not earning it. He also recalls longing for his father’s lamp, an “avatar
of Aladdin’s very own genie” (Rushdie 2011, 47), that he was not allowed
to rub. Because of his father’s attitude, Saladin holds a grudge against him.
To break away from his father and Bombay, Saladin dreamed of moving to
London from an early age. He wanted to become a true Englishman because
that was precisely what his father did not wish for him. In fact, after Saladin
announced that he wanted to become an actor in London, Changez informed
him that he believed he was possessed by a demon.7 From childhood, Saladin
learned to change selves like one changes clothes. He found reassurance in
the transience: it wasn’t a problem if one Saladin was faulty, he could simply
replace it with another. A fixed, unchanging identity did not appeal to him.
Once in London, Saladin’s resentment was compounded by the fact that his
father forced him to use all the money he had found in the wallet to pay for
his studies, which made him worry about his financial situation. In a sense,
then, it was not his father who was paying for his studies, but the mysterious
person, presumably of English origin, who had lost his or her wallet. Saladin
has two love affairs. In England he marries Pamela Lovelace, with whom he
has a strained relationship because he cannot have children.8 Instead, in Bom-
bay he has an affair with Zeeny Vakil, a controversial writer whom he has
known since childhood. An “empty slate” (ivi, 72) is what Zeeny calls his face
when he isn’t acting or making voices. Out of jealousy, Saladin breaks up with
Zeeny when she gives Saladin’s father a tender kiss on the mouth.
7
“Changez Chamchawala’s reply came by express mail. ‘Might as well be a confounded gigo-
lo. It’s my belief some devil has got into you and turned your wits. You who have been given so
much: do you not feel you owe anything to anyone? To your country? To the memory of your
dear mother? To your own mind? Will you spend your life jiggling and preening under bright
lights, kissing blonde women under the gaze of strangers who have paid to watch your shame?
You are no son of mine, but a ghoul, a hoosh, a demon up from hell. An actor! Answer me this:
what am I to tell my friends?’” (Rushdie 2011, 58)
8
She also has problems because her parents were killed when she was a child.
79
As to Gibreel, he struggles between wanting and being unable to believe in

God. In Kanya Kumari,9 Gibreel had been involved in the shooting of one of his
many religious films in which he played a number of Hindu deities, when he was
simultaneously struck down by actor Eustace Brown’s fist and the sea water that
brings together three oceans at once. Kanya Kumari, also known as Cape Co-
morin, is located at the extreme point of the Indian subcontinent and is therefore
surrounded by three different seas: the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the
Bay of Bengal. There is also a time of year when the sunset coincides with the
appearance of the full moon on the horizon. Upon suffering the stroke, Gibreel
was plunged into a death-in-life state due to an unexplained internal haemorrhage
similar to the crumbling Saleem suffers in Midnight’s Children. As he struggled
with his illness, he pleaded with God for help, but to no avail. He concluded that
there was no God to protect or listen to him. Only after this disappointment did
a rapid and again inexplicable healing process begin. In the wake of his illness,
Gibreel was left without the faith in God he had previously held. After recover-
ing from internal bleeding, Gibreel loses faith in Islam, and no longer accepting
God’s benevolent intervention starts to revile Him with his behaviour.
If Saladin has a problem with his biological father, Gibreel has one with
the supreme father of the Abrahamic religion. And just as Saladin’s decisions
are the result of a lack of trust in his father, Gibreel’s depend on his lost faith in
God. He begins to eat pork as a sign of revenge against Islam. At one of these
meals, Alleluia Cone passes him by and scolds him that he should celebrate
his recovery. Gibreel immediately falls in love with her, so much so that he
decides to break off his previous relationship with the wealthy Rekha Mer-
chant. As a result, he begins a romantic relationship with Alleluia, an affair
that lasts only three days. She then leaves India and travels to London, but this
is enough to make Gibreel join her there.
Rushdie portrays Saladin and Gibreel as divided between London and
Bombay, love and sexual affirmation, faith and solitude, implying both a
worldly and a social division. The two characters oscillate between East and
West, Gibreel fleeing one love in order to pursue another, Saladin escaping
his family, his past, and his traditions in order to embrace the western me-
tropolis and its lifestyle. The novel describes their attempt to achieve unity
amidst the tensions between these different poles. In the end, only Saladin
9
The town of Kanya Kumari is located at the southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula in the
state of Tamil Nadu. The area was named after the Hindu goddess of the same name, who is
believed to have performed religious duties there.
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Giuseppe De Riso
survives by returning to his roots. Gibreel’s failure to find a woman to love

and to rediscover his faith in God starts the journey leading to his death. His
anguish is expressed in dreams in which he (re)experiences the events of
the Islamic revelation in the guise of the archangel Gabriel who advises the
‘businessman’ Mahound in the spread of a new monotheistic religion (which,
of course, stands for the Prophet Muhammad’s predication of Islam). The
events take place in the sandy city of Jahilia (which means ‘ignorance’10 in
Arabic and was used by the Arabs to refer to the pre-Islamic period). Jahilia
is depicted as a city in a state of spiritual and moral decay, where the ruling
authorities use religion and tradition to justify their repressive actions. The
city is also home to a group of people known as Jahilites, who are described
as ignorant and superstitious. It seems that Rushdie refers to the land in which
these dreams are set as Jahilia, not to demonstrate the falsity of Islam, but to
illustrate the state of dissolution that can be experienced by a soul that has
lost God.
When Gibreel passes from reality to dream for the first time, he remem-
bers his mother calling him Shaitan because he had been mischievous: he
had put meat intended for Muslims in snacks for Hindu customers, which
enraged them. First she rebukes him with demonic epithets such as Shaitan
and mischievous imp, then she embraces him calling him her angel (Farishta
means angel in Hindi, Persian and Farsi). The oscillation between his pre-
sent reality and the dream world is triggered by this childhood memory. After
that, he has sacred visions of the devil being cast to earth, of the three pagan
deities Lat, Manat and Uzza, and of Mahound. This narrative device makes it
possible for both contemporary London and the dream world to alternate and
co-exist. The transitions are not abrupt and do not contrast with each other.
They merge seamlessly, so that one leads to the other and then back again.
Even though the story switches back and forth between reality and dream,
they remain mutually constitutive, constantly interfering in each other. The
dream contains a number of characters (Mahound, as anticipated, but also the
foundling Ayesha11) who are directly influenced or inspired by Gibreel. There-
10
The Arabic word ‘jahiliyyah’ derives from the word root ‘jahil’ which means ‘ignorant’ or
‘uneducated’. In Islamic tradition, the period of jahiliyyah is considered a time of social and
moral decline, when the people of Arabia lived in a state of ignorance and were not guided by
the principles of Islam. It is believed that this period ended with the revelation of the Qur’an
and the emergence of Islam as a religion.
11
Ayesha of Titlipur is a young woman who belongs to the Jahilites. She is introduced into the
novel as a minor character, but she is eventually accepted as a prophetess who delivers messages
81
fore, Gibreel’s dreams cannot be separated from reality and reduced to mere
fantasy. His conscious life is deeply interwoven with the dream of Mahound.
Gibreel’s reality and his dream can be seen as two polarisations of the same
mind activity, each embodying a different set of capacities and needs.
When we are awake, conscious experience predominates and the senses
are most active, while psychic life is subordinate to the reception and organ-
isation of all information. In contrast, purely psychic activity predominates
in dreams and sensory input and is subject to its rules. Gibreel’s memory
and consciousness constantly switch back and forth between them. We saw
in Midnight’s Children that Saleem spoke of a resentment coming from the
future to condition the narrative from the beginning as it was initiated. It is
the contamination between material and psychological data that creates the
fluctuation, where a clear line between the two cannot be distinguished, but
a movement that comes simultaneously from an impulse in one direction fol-
lowed by a restoring force in the other.
A dream is the result of a struggle between the desire to believe and the
fear of doubt, according to Rushdie. In this sense, the dreams in which Gibreel
experiences the revelation of Islam are the most painful and have provoked
criticism in the Arab world. In these dreams he expresses his doubts about
God and the assumptions that prevent him from returning to faith, much as he
wishes to do so. These dreams make him experience visions of disbelief and
scepticism that undermine his firmest convictions. In Rushdie’s words, “[Gi-
breel] tries in vain to escape them, fighting against sleep; but then the visions
cross over the boundary between his waking and sleeping self, they infect his
daytimes: that is, they drive him mad.” (Rushdie 1991c, 413) Basically, Gi-
breel becomes insane as a result of his visions overtaking his waking reality.
So, just as in Midnight’s Children, we cannot assume that either narrative in
The Satanic Verses is entirely accurate and free of bias or inaccuracy. Unlike
Midnight’s Children, however, this time Rushdie hints from the beginning that
Gibreel may be insane or suffering from mental problems, for he starts to have
visions that can be interpreted as hallucinations. For example, when he crash-
es on London soil, he sees a ghostly image of Rekha Merchant on a flying
carpet. She had been his lover in India and in the meantime had committed
suicide with her son by jumping out of their flat precisely because their ro-
in the name of the Archangel Gibreel, although she suffers from seizures and is initially seen
eating butterflies. After predicting the cancer of Mirza Saeed Akhtar’s wife, she tells the village
that they must make a pilgrimage on foot to Mecca to cure her. After assuring the villagers that
the Arabian Sea will part so they can reach Mecca, they drown as they follow her into the water.
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Giuseppe De Riso
mantic relationship had ended.12 Saladin, however, is unable to see or hear her.
As always with Rushdie, we must decide whether we believe in a supernatural
element, namely that Rekha’s spirit appeared to Gibreel to torment him after
her death, or whether it is a pure case of insanity. Although the implausibility
of the situation may cause the magical element to somewhat overshadow the
possibility that Gibreel could be insane, Rushdie has nonetheless repeatedly
suggested that the most revolutionary men are often obsessed with visionary
ideas that make them seem mad.
Migrants also experience similar oscillations of belief and doubt when ad-
justing their old values to new cultures and traditions (Bhabha 1990, 1994).
Cécile Leonard (2022) supports the idea of oscillation by calling it a ‘free
flow’:
Most of Rushdie’s scholarship focuses on the transnational or cosmopolitan
quality of his novels, pointing out the free flow advocated by the author be-
tween India and the West.
[...]
The ritual of the plane then allows a liberating distance with geography and
gives birth to a metaphysical definition of the border. This membrane, as an
imaginary organism that can stretch out and mutate, becomes a counterpart for
terrestrial frontiers, rigid and constraining. In flowing in and out of imaginary
borders, the postcolonial subject assumes his role as a translated subject – ety-
mologically, of being ‘borne across’. (408, 411)
Rushdie observes in “In Good Faith” (1991) that “if The Satanic Verses is
anything, it is a migrant’s-eye view of the world,” (408) a view that expresses
“the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis” (ibid.) as
well as “problems of hybridisation and ghettoization, of reconciling the old
and the new.” (ibid., emphasis is mine) The experience of a different culture
can influence our perception of truth, stability, and certainty. Different cul-
tures may understand concepts differently; cross-cultural contact may make
another world seem more real than our own.
12
“‘You don’t see her?’ Gibreel shouted. ‘You don’t see her goddamn Bokhara rug?’
No, no, Gibbo, her voice whispered in his ears, don’t expect him to confirm. I am strictly for your
eyes only, maybe you are going crazy, what do you think, you namaqool, you piece of pig ex-
crement, my love. With death comes honesty, my beloved, so I can call you by your true names.
Cloudy Rekha murmured sour nothings, but Gibreel cried again to Chamcha: ‘Spoono? You
see her or you don’t?’
Saladin Chamcha saw nothing, heard nothing, said nothing. Gibreel faced her alone.” (Rushdie
2011, 18)
83
So, it seems fair to conclude that with Gibreel, Rushdie expresses two of
his fluctuating sensibilities: the first stems from the force of attraction and re-
pulsion that marks his relationship with the complementary figure of Saladin,
which reflects Rushdie’s psychologically unsettling experience as a migrant.
The second oscillates within the equally dualistic relationship between Gi-
breel and Mahound/Muhammad as they alternate between dream and reality.
In Midnight’s Children, the foreshadowing of this dreamlike mise en abyme
(where history and fantasy mirror each other) can perhaps already be dis-
cerned when Saleem compares his suspicion of being insane with Muham-
mad’s apparent feelings:
‘Muhammad,’ I said, ‘at first believed himself insane: do you think the notion
never crossed my mind? But the Prophet had his Khadija, his Abu-Bakr, to
reassure him of the genuineness of his Calling; nobody betrayed him into the
hands of asylum-doctors.’ By now, the green chutney was filling them with
thoughts of years ago; I saw guilt appear on their faces, and shame. ‘What is
truth?’ I waxed rhetorical, ‘What is sanity? Did Jesus rise up from the grave?
Do Hindus not accept – Padma – that the world is a kind of dream; that Brahma
dreamed, is dreaming the universe; that we only see dimly through that dream-
web, which is Maya. (Rushdie 2021c, 311)
The way Gibreel falls ill, besides representing a subtle allusion to the
possibility that his mental condition may be permanently affected by the
disease, is reminiscent of the incident in Muhammad’s life when he was
hit full in the face by a stone after his defeat at Mount Uhud.13 The force of
the impact was so great that his opponents believed the Prophet had already
died from it.
Not coincidentally, this novel has been the subject of a famous religious
controversy known as the Rushdie affair. The portrayal of Mahound as the
equivalent of Muhammad, the apparent status of his wives as prostitutes, the
association between Saladin Chamcha (a possible equivalent of Saladin, the
celebrated ruler and warrior who fought against Christians during the Cru-
sades) and the devil, as well as the use the name of the Prophet Muhammad’s
13
In the Battle of Uhud, which took place in 625 CE, the Muslims were initially successful against
the Meccans, but eventually had to retreat when some of the Muslim soldiers broke formation to
loot the enemy’s camp. As they retreated, the Meccans counterattacked and inflicted heavy casual-
ties on the Muslims. Muhammad himself was seriously wounded when a stone hit him in the face,
knocking out his teeth and causing him to lose consciousness. Despite his injuries, he managed to
rally his followers and eventually the Muslims were able to regroup and drive out the Meccans.
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Giuseppe De Riso
wife (Ayesha) with respect for someone who caused much destruction and
killed many people, are all considered offensive to the Islamic faith by many
Muslims. During the Crusades, it was common for Christians to use the name
Mahound in a pejorative and insulting way, equating it with Satan. A further
concern is that the narrator implies that the prophet uses this ‘devilish’ name
to win over his opponents.14
The most controversial part of the novel deals with an incident from the
life of Muhammad and the emergence of Islam, also known as the Gharaniq
incident. According to two Arab historians and at least four of Muhammad’s
early biographies,15 later almost universally rejected by commentators on the
Qur’an, Muhammad accepted three local deities (al-Lat, al-Uzzah and Manat)
as intermediate beings between man and God. In this way, he supposedly
hoped to overcome the resistance of the inhabitants of Mecca and convince
them of the truth of monotheism. This concession would have been a shrewd
political move, for Mecca depended on the pilgrims who visited the city to
worship these and many other deities. Having achieved his goal, the Prophet
later reportedly rejected the verses about the three pagan goddesses, attribut-
ing them to demonic influence. This retraction, however, cannot completely
erase earlier verses, which, though ‘under erasure’,16 continue to exist and
exert influence. Islamic scholars generally reject this hypothesis, as it invali-
dates the Prophet’s divine inspiration and casts doubt on the authenticity and
infallibility of his words.
14
“His name: a dream-name, changed by the vision. Pronounced correctly, it means he-for-
whom-thanks-should-be-given, but he won’t answer to that here; nor, though he’s well aware
of what they call him, to his nickname in Jahilia down below – he-who-goes-up-and-down-old-
Coney. Here he is neither Mahomet nor MoeHammered; has adopted, instead, the demon-tag
the farangis hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose
to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our mountain-climbing, proph-
et-motivated solitary is to be the medieval baby-frightener, the Devil’s synonym: Mahound.”
(Rushdie 2011, 104)
15
Written by al-Tabari, al-Waqidi, Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Saad.
16
To invoke a well known expression by Jacques Derrida (1976). The phrase ‘under erasure’
(also known as sous rature in French) refers to the practice of writing a word or term with a
crossed-out line. This practice is often used in philosophical or critical texts to indicate that the
word or concept is being used in a problematic, provisional or conditional way without fully
endorsing it. By drawing a line through the word, the author shows that they are aware of the
limitations or challenges associated with the word or concept, but still use it for the purpose of
argument or discussion.
85
In the novel, the visions of Gibreel also show Mahound being asked wheth-
er three pre-Islamic deities, Lat, Uzza, and Manat, could be incorporated into
the religion he was preaching. In consultation with Gibreel, whose inspiration
Mahound draws for creating his new cult, Mahound accepts to worship the
deities, believing that this will facilitate acceptance of his belief system and
convert the Jahilian people more quickly. After his religion is accepted by all,
he denies these statements and claims that they were dictated to him by Satan.
Although the inclusion of the three pagan deities has played a crucial role in
Islam’s narrative, Mahound, following Gibreel’s advice, attempts to “unwrite
[the] story” (Rushdie 2011, 134) by removing the “foul verses that reek of
brimstone and sulphur” (ibid.) from the book. In order for Gibreel’s story to
continue, he must bring it back first.17 The novel’s narrative arc is therefore
drawn by three strands of plot. The first two address Gibreel and Saladin’s
vicissitudes between London and India. The third concerns the dream that
reverses the roles and in which the archangel Gibreel (in London) takes on
demonic traits (as he is the one who proposes to Mahound that he accept the
compromise with Grandee Abu Simbel about the three goddesses), while Ma-
hound (in some ways the opposite of Saladin) becomes the herald of the true
faith, just as Gibreel eventually becomes in London.
In “One Thousand Days in a Balloon” (1991), which he wrote after spend-
ing 1,000 days in hiding following ayatollah Ruḥollāh Khomeynī’s fatwa18
(or death sentence) in February 1989, Rushdie acknowledges that the novel
focuses on the question of who should have authority over telling and retelling
17
“Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny
thing that’s a bit of a problem here, namely that it was me both times, baba, me first and second
also me. From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes
and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked.” (Rushdie 2011, 134)
18
Ruḥollāh Khomeynī was an Iranian cleric and revolutionary who served as Supreme Lead-
er of Iran from 1979 until his death in 1989. He issued the fatwa against Rushdie in 1989 in
response to the publication of The Satanic Verses. Khomeynī declared that Rushdie had com-
mitted blasphemy against Islam and called for him to be punished with death. The fatwa was
widely condemned by the international community and considered a serious violation of free-
dom of expression and human rights. Despite the fatwa’s condemnation, it was supported by
many Muslims around the world and was seen as a rallying point for those concerned about the
perceived disrespect for Islam in the Western world. In the Islamic tradition, a fatwa is a legal
opinion or ruling issued by an Islamic scholar or jurist in response to a question on a particular
subject. Fatwas can cover a wide range of topics, including religious practices, legal matters
and moral issues. They are not as binding as court rulings, but they are considered guidance for
Muslims who wish to follow Islamic law and tradition.
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Giuseppe De Riso
stories, and that the so-called Rushdie affair was essentially sparked by this
interest. Specifically, Rushdie is referring to the history of Islam:
Maybe they’ll agree, too, that the row over The Satanic Verses was at bottom
an argument about who should have power over the grand narrative, the Story
of Islam, and that that power must belong equally to everyone. That even if my
novel were incompetent, its attempt to retell the Story would still be import-
ant. That if I’ve failed, others must succeed, because those who do not have
power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it,
deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless,
because they cannot think new thoughts. (Rushdie 1991d, 448)
Indeed, there have been a seemingly endless number of violent protests

around the world in response to the novel, leading to the killing or attempted
murder of several translators and editors in various countries. The public
burning of the novel, as well as efforts to silence its author and those in-
volved in its publication, are unacceptable violations of human rights from
the viewpoint of western nations. As opposed to this, Rushdie’s text is per-
ceived by many representatives of the Muslim world as a direct attack on
their faith as it discredits both the story and the values upon which it is
based. In this way, Mäyrä (2005) argues that Rushdie has succeeded in pro-
voking a discussion on freedom of expression and its implications for inter-
ethnic and cultural exchange.
At the time of writing, Rushdie has also been reported to have been stabbed
in the neck during an event at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State
on 12 August 2022, where he was due to deliver a speech. The assailant, Hadi
Matar, charged onto the stage armed with a knife and lunged at him, trying to
execute the death sentence which was never really lifted by a limited branch
of the Islamic community. Matar has admitted that he has not read the whole
book, but only a couple of pages. In spite of this, he was absolutely convinced
that Rushdie attacked Islam. For him, it did not matter how or in what form.
He relied on what he had been told about Rushdie and the book, namely that
“He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief sys-
tems.”19 This confirms a statement Rushdie had made long before:
It has been bewildering to watch the proliferation of such statements, and to
watch them acquire the authority of truth by virtue of the power of repetition.
19
Steven Vago and Ben Kesslen reported the news in the New York Post of August 17, 2022.
Refer to the sitography for the exact address.
87
It has been bewildering to learn that people, millions upon millions of people,
have been willing to judge The Satanic Verses and its author, without reading
it, without finding out what manner of man this fellow might be, on the basis
of such allegations as these. It has been bewildering to learn that people do not
care about art. Yet the only way I can explain matters, the only way I can try
and replace the non-existent novel with the one I actually wrote, is to tell you
a story. (Rushdie 1991c, 411)
As Booker (1990) notes, even Khomeynī himself may not have read The
Satanic Verses and its author before sentencing him to death. This observation
raises a very important point. According to Rushdie, what he saw as slander
was accepted as truth by a section of the Muslim world, and both the book and
its author were judged on the basis of hearsay alone, and in some cases even
despised, without many people having read the book themselves. It made no
difference whether certain assessments of the book were true or false, regard-
less of the actual basis and arguments for those evaluations. At the end of the
day, what matters most is the feeling that people share with one another. This
feeling, however, has led to the creation of a second novel, which Rushdie
believes does not exist, but which has nevertheless become more real than the
original. There is one book imagined by a certain branch of the Islamic com-
munity that dominates the world’s attention, while the original is slowly being
forgotten or fading into obscurity.
In spite of this, there are still those who believe that the text is highly mis-
understood, especially in the field of art and academia. In Testaments Betrayed.
An Essay in Nine Parts (1995),20 for example, Milan Kundera notes how Rush-
die’s novel shows a certain tenderness towards Islam. Feroza Jussawalla (1996)
even referred to The Satanic Verses as Rushdie’s love letter to Islam, which
unfortunately resulted in its author becoming “a victim of cross-cultural (mis)
understanding” (54). How can such a disagreement about one and the same text
come about? If the same novel causes thousands of people to take to the streets
and feed angry mobs while calling for the death of the author, how can others
see in it a benevolent attitude towards those same people?
20
Gregor is a young man who works as a travelling salesman and is the primary provider for
his family. One morning, he wakes up to discover that he has been transformed into a giant
insect. The transformation is a metaphor for Gregor’s feelings of isolation and confinement in
his monotonous and unfulfilling life. As an insect, Gregor is unable to communicate or connect
with his family and is completely reliant on their care. He becomes a burden and is eventually
rejected by them. Gregor’s transformation serves thus as a catalyst for the changes that occur
within his family and their relationships with each other.
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3.2 Challenging textual authority: the emergence of the new

According to Kundera, Rushdie is keen to use the ‘not-serious’ to discuss
the dreadful, which is to deal with dramatic and important issues without tak-
ing them too seriously. In the novel, this is achieved right from the beginning
by Gibreel and Saladin surviving the in-flight explosion of the aeroplane, with
the first flailing his arms and hovering as if he were a butterfly, while the lat-
ter is squeezed into a grey suit with his arms “on his sides... a bowler hat on
his head.” (Rushdie 2011, 14) Like Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses
challenges the reader to accept impossible events, such as the fact that two
people can survive the explosion of an aeroplane and fall to the ground seem-
ingly unharmed. It also asks the reader to believe that the two are able to start
singing as they fall and compete with one another to sing louder: “let’s face
it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed
and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere
roaring around them, how could they? But let’s face this, too: they did.” (ivi,
17) Unlike Midnight’s Children, however, this time the narrator does not even
ask to be believed. His revelations (and there can be no doubt that he is indeed
a male) must be heard and accepted as true. In fact, the novel is teeming with
prompts to the reader, such as ‘listen’.
Taking into account Saladin’s ability to simulate multiple voices and the
fact that Gibreel’s “mouth got worked” (Rushdie 2011, 134), it becomes clear
that the problem of oscillation due to indeterminacy already exists as soon as
we try to determine who the narrator actually is and where or when he speaks.
This novel raises the fundamental and possibly unresolvable question of his
identity. Booker acknowledges that the narrator of The Satanic Verses is prob-
ably less revisionist than Saleem in Midnight’s Children and less destabilising
than the narrator in Shame (with his constant hints that what he is telling is a
fabrication), but no less devious. Right at the beginning, the narrator questions
his own identity – “Who am I? Who else is there?” (ivi, 15) – and constantly
challenges the reader to try and guess it.21 Unlike Saleem, the reader cannot
determine whether the narrator is angelic or satanic, on the side of good or
evil, or whether his words have benevolent or malevolent intentions. The fact
that this aspect has been mostly ignored is astonishing, for it alone would
be sufficient to absolve the work of insulting Islam, as it also destabilises
the voices that oppose the Prophet’s proclamation. Although one is instinc-
tively inclined to identify Gibreel as the narrator of the novel, some clues in
21
“Who am I? Let’s put it this way: who has the best tunes?” (Rushdie 2011, 21)
89
the novel suggest that he may in fact be Satan himself. There is an example
where Gibreel and a possible demonic puppeteer create a ventriloquist effect:
“To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent. I know; devil talk. Shaitan
interrupting Gibreel. Me?” (ivi, 104), or as described in the story of the fall
from the sky: “...great falls change people. You think they fell a long way? In
the matter of tumbles, I yield pride of place to no personage, whether mortal
or im-. From clouds to ashes, down the chimney you might say, from heaven-
light to hellfire [...].” (ivi, 144) It is clear that the narrator here identifies with
Satan recalling the moment when he fell from Paradise. From the beginning,
the novel is based on an irresolvable ontological confusion that merges the
narrator with the narratee, good with evil, truth with fiction, history with sto-
ries. Since a pivotal moment of the story is Mahound’s declaration that he was
inspired by Satan, even if only in a few verses, we cannot even be sure that
this does not happen in other parts of the narrative. Whereas the main question
in Midnight’s Children was whether Saleem intentionally or unintentionally
fashioned the narrative after his own memories and emotions, the main con-
cern in The Satanic Verses is not only to determine how much of the narrative
is authentic, but also how much of it has been contaminated by the possible
substitution of narrators. By juxtaposing the Ganesha/Vyasa and Saleem/Pad-
ma binomials, Midnight’s Children only tangentially touched on the issue, but
in The Satanic Verses it keeps the narrative caught in the ebb and flow of an
undying echo. In fact, the words Gibreel supposedly suggests to Mahound are
written down by a scribe named Salman, which clearly points to the author
in the flesh. He decides to slightly alter Mahound’s words of revelation in an
effort to test him, as he begins to doubt their validity. Upon discovering that
Mahound cannot tell the difference, he is dismayed:
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 that mean? What
did that say about the quality of the divine poetry?
...
The truth is that what I expected when I made that first tiny change, all-wise
instead of all-hearing what I wanted – was to read it back to the Prophet, and
he’d say, What’s the matter with you, Salman, are you going deaf? And I’d
say, Oops, O God, bit of a slip, how could I, and correct myself. But it didn’t
happen; and now I was writing the Revelation and nobody was noticing, and
I didn’t have the courage to own up. I was scared silly, I can tell you. Also: I
was sadder than I have ever been. So I had to go on doing it. Maybe he’d just
missed out once, I thought, anybody can make a mistake. So the next time I
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changed a bigger thing. He said Christian, I wrote down Jew. He’d notice that,
surely; how could he not? (ivi, 378-379)
Adding a third polarity to the Gibreel/Satan binomial,22 Salman realises

that he is able to substitute Mahound’s words with his own. Fearing the pun-
ishment that would await him if he made a confession, and perhaps intoxi-
cated by the power this situation gave him, Salman realised that he could no
longer avoid changing the information he was being given. There is some-
thing enthralling about the creative power of the word. An essential element of
Rushdie’s work is the attack on the monological authority of the text and the
language through which it is expressed. This harrowing understanding of how
language may be abused to fabricate truths accounts for Rushdie’s ironic lash-
ings on religion in general (as well as on homogenising notions of nationality).
They do not poke fun at those who identify with a religious affiliation or a
sense of national unity, but are meant to express the dismay of those who, like
him, have witnessed the arbitrariness of such power through the experience
of cultural dislocation and have lost the ability to fully immerse themselves
in one of these highly reassuring identity paradigms. Additionally, they serve
as a warning to those who assume responsibility for maintaining the integrity
of truth and virtue of the violence they, often unwittingly, perpetrate. It is
Rushdie’s contention in Shame that religious fundamentalism in Pakistan does
not come from below, from the population, but from above. It is imposed by
regimes through a rhetoric of faith based on “words of power, words which the
people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked.” (Rushdie
1995, 252) As we all know, history has proved that he was right. According
to Mäyrä (2005), The Satanic Verses can be interpreted as satanic not because
it seeks to reveal an anti-truth, but because it explores the difficult process of
identity construction in postmodern society in a deeply personal way: “The
most important single feature in this area [...] is the systematic juxtaposition
and blending of the religious and the profane, and the self-conscious commen-
tary about this process.” (Mäyrä 2005, 255).
Following Booker, Rushdie’s style is clearly inspired by Samuel Beckett23
to constantly confront the reader with the possibility that what is said may not
be true. The choice between what is real and what is not, between what is true
22
“Like shadows superimposed on shadows.” (ivi, 393)
23
Whose Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953) were a major source
of inspiration for Rushdie, as he himself acknowledged.
91
and what is false, prevents the reader from reaching, if not a final resolution,
at least a solid or safe conclusion. In the words of Booker:
Such either-or, yes-no choices are constantly subverted within Rushdie’s
overall assault on polar logic. This manipulative mode of narration is another
Rushdie trademark – his work tends to feature unreliable, intrusive narrators
who openly break the frame of the fiction to reveal the processes of compo-
sition, disturbing any attempts at a naturalistic recuperation of those fictions
[...]. (1990, 987)
Booker summarises the essence of the reflection we are conducting here,

however, when he writes that Rushdie challenges the authority of canonical
texts given an absolute degree of truth, demonstrating a relationship between
the immutability of their sacredness and their possibility for profane inno-
vation. Furthermore, his writing: “problematizes so simple an opposition as
that between the true and the false, the real and the not-real. The difficulty of
this distinction is highlighted by the way in which Rushdie’s self-consciously
literary fiction engages in a direct and intense dialogue with the social and
political issues of the real world.” (ivi, 990) It is precisely Rushdie’s intention
to challenge authoritarianism and dogmatism of all kinds so as to deconstruct
any simplistic binary opposition.
As mentioned before, while they pass through a series of clouds, one of the
most exemplary among protean objects, Gibreel and Saladin are transformed
into an angel and a devil respectively.24 The moment of the fall from heaven is
thus a time of transformation. As Cécile Leonard (2006) has noted, in several
of Rushdie’s novels there are characters who undergo a metamorphosis as they
make their way west. Something similar happens in The Moor Last Sigh (1995)
as well as in The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999). Rushdie himself admits in
essays and interviews that he was inspired by The Wizard of Oz and Alice in
Wonderland, where the act of crossing or, better, moving between two places
leads to change and transformation. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem undergoes a
similar transformation as he passes the historical point of India’s independence,
24
“...while pushing their way out of the white came a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly
metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures
pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged
cats, centaurs, and Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too,
had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid, as if he were growing
into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around
his long, patrician neck.” (Rushdie 2011, 17)
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gaining some powers and losing others along the way. Boundaries can take any
form: temporal, geographical, cultural. As Rushdie states in Step across this
Line (2002), life first emerged on land when a form of aquatic life crossed the
threshold represented by the surface of the sea and made its way ashore.
According to Kundera (1995), Rushdie demonstrates the lesson of François
Rabelais, namely that the author must make clear from the beginning what
kind of connection he or she wants to establish with the reader. By merging
the impossible with the surreal, it is Rushdie’s purpose to force readers to
consider the true nature of his humour, and there is a risk associated with ev-
ery answer. Kundera notes that humour in literature did not emerge until the
novel, and specifically with Cervantes. Earlier literature was largely devoid
of it. Following Octavio Paz, he argues that humour is the true literary device
of modernity, making everything it touches ambiguous. Moreover, Kundera
admits that humour is the main cause of misunderstanding between him and
his readers and that there is nothing more difficult than ‘explaining’ humour.
According to Kundera, humour involves suspension of judgement, which is
not a flaw but the essence of the novel:
Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its moral-
ity. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging
instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of,
understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readi-
ness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil. Not that
the novelist utterly denies that moral judgment is legitimate, but that he refuses
it a place in the novel. If you like, you can accuse Panurge of cowardice, accuse
Emma Bovary, accuse Rastignac – that’s your business; the novelist has noth-
ing to do with it. (Kundera 1995, 7)
Kundera sees the creation of an “imaginary terrain in which moral judge-

ment is suspended” (O’Mahoney 2011, 82), as the novel’s greatest achieve-
ment, since a fictional character can develop autonomously from an ethical
and moral perspective without necessarily expressing an absolute or universal
value. By denying this autonomy, the novel as a literary genre loses its very
essence. A key reason why The Satanic Verses is so effective in this regard is
that it offers secularism the opportunity to challenge traditional religious sen-
timents and orthodoxies. All of them, not only those belonging to the Islamic
faith. Once one understands what the novel is about, it is clear that Christian-
ity is no less challenged than Islam.
According to Rushdie, the novel is a space where preconceived judgements
can be set aside, creating characters who are not necessarily bound by absolute
93
values, unquestioned truths or strict ethical requirements: “The Satanic Verses

celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of
new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics,
movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the
Pure.” (Rushdie 1991c, 408) The main interest Rushdie shows in literature is
the possibility of producing new ideas and new ways of thinking, a response to
the Deleuzian ideal of thinking other-wise (1980, 1983, 1988),25 in the double
sense of thinking differently and from someone else’s viewpoint. In “In Good
Faith,” Rushdie states that The Satanic Verses and the case brought against
him had been used by racists and hypocrites to vilify Muslim and non-Muslim
Asian people. In that essay, Rushdie argues for the novel’s status as ‘novel’,
specifically as something that “seems to insist [...] to see the world anew.”
(Rushdie 1991c, 407) He also acknowledges the anger that can accompany
an attempt to introduce a new idea or perspective on the world: “I am well
aware that this can be a hackle-raising, infuriating attempt.” (ibid.) Indeed, it
is this anger that has been intercepted by manipulators to create a novel that is
something different from what Rushdie intended.
In “One Thousand Days in a Balloon” (1991), he compares the Islam he
believes exists today with his ideal Islam, which he imagines as an open
and tolerable Islam of the future. For a writer to allow the new to emerge,
he or she must engage in a tension between individual and collective de-
sire, between fantasy and reality. In doing so, the writer becomes a god-
like figure confronting both existing conditions and the tensions created
by worlds that are denied, hidden or merely potential. Again, Rushdie is in
line with the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in believing that
all stories originate in the tension between material and abstract realities.
In their work A Thousand Plateaus (1980), they speak explicitly of a book
as a machinic assemblage or multiplicity whose “signifying totality” (4), or
“plane of consistency” (ibid.) can only be traced in the connections it makes
25
Thinking other-wise, or penser autrement, is a concept developed by French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze that refers to the ability to think outside traditional categories and conventions
and to embrace creativity and difference. Deleuze believed that this kind of thinking is essential
to disrupt and dismantle dominant power structures and create new possibilities for social and
political change. For Deleuze, thinking other-wise means rejecting the notion that there is only
one, correct way of thinking and instead accepting a multiplicity of perspectives and approach-
es. This includes a willingness to question and criticise established ideas and to engage with the
unconventional and unexpected. Deleuze believed that this way of thinking could help individ-
uals and groups to free themselves from the constraints of dominant ideologies and create new,
more inclusive and democratic ways of being.
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Giuseppe De Riso
abstractly (i.e. virtually) with other assemblages on different levels of exis-

tence (molecular, biological, linguistic, cultural, financial, etc.). Therefore,
in their opinion, reading a book is not about searching for meaning or un-
derstanding it, but “what it functions with, in connection with what other
things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities
its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without or-
gans it makes its own converge.” (ibid.) Or more simply, they see a book (or
any other ‘object’ or concept) as a multiplicity based on multidimensional
relations for which the most important question is “which other machine
the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to
work.” (ibid.) According to Rushdie, by making connections between the
real and the virtual, authors are able to explore alternative worlds, scenarios
and situations, and to rethink the relationship between what exists and what
can be thought. The burden of artistic creation is unlike any other endeav-
our. We can only move forward as a species by voicing the unspeakable,
creating virtual spaces where new questions emerge, and re-imagining what
is already there.
The following passage from The Satanic Verses has attracted much atten-
tion in the postcolonial academic debate since the novel was published:
How does newness come into the world? How is it born?
Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?
How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what
deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking
crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?
Is birth always a fall?
Do angels have wings? Can men fly? (Rushdie 2011, 19)
Ultimately, Rushdie would answer the question himself: “Mélange, hotch-

potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the
great possibility that mass migration gives the world.” (Rushdie 1991c, 408)
The renowned postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha would pay homage to this
idea and develop it in “How newness enters the world”, the title of a chapter
in his seminal work The Location of Culture (2004).
We can discern here two key aspects of Rushdie’s fascination with con-
tamination as a literary device for thinking about the new: the first is the use
of language as a means of exploring the tension between the thinkable and
the unthinkable. The idea that language and art serve as a bridge between the
visible world of human societies and the potential worlds that remain hidden
or unrecognised aligns with Michel Foucault’s views on these topics (1972,
95
1978, 2002, and 2008a and 2008b). In his works, Foucault discusses how lan-
guage and art can reveal and bring to light these unseen or neglected aspects
of reality. Language can be used to give approval and support to certain ideas,
attitudes, and values, or to punish, harm, hide, or suppress others. The second
aspect to consider is that language and literature can both bring people and
cultures together and also create division between them. Salman Rushdie’s
writing style focuses on how literature can expose readers to new cultural and
ideological perspectives. The presence of opposing elements and the blending
of contrasting qualities can create openings for the emergence of something
new. Because of this insight, Rushdie has become a prominent figure in con-
temporary literary, academic, and intellectual discussions.
Rushdie himself implies that novelty is never completely new, but rather
is composed of combinations, translations, and connections. In his writing,
he is interested in examining how it persists through agreements, compro-
mises, and betrayals. In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie used the metaphor of
leakage and the making of chutneys to illustrate this concept. However, it is
more clearly demonstrated in The Satanic Verses through the way the dream
seeps into reality and vice versa. However, as in his previous works, Rushdie
makes this apparent already in the names he gives to things and characters in
the novel. The plane from which Saladin and Chamcha fall is named Bostan,
which is both a Farsi word for garden and the title of the great didactic poem
by the 13th-century Persian poet Saadi Shirazi, the Bustan.26 Details like these
are not insignificant. In Rushdie’s work every act of naming is densely packed
with implications. A fall from an aeroplane with such a name illustrates the
blending of elements from different religions. It contains a symbolic reference
to the Christian tradition in that the plane is comparable to the Garden of Eden
from which Adam and Eve were expelled, but also to Satan’s fall from heaven,
which according to Jesus in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 10-18) fell like light-
ning from the sky. At the same time, the term refers to a masterpiece of Islamic
26
Bustan (Persian for ‘orchard’) is a collection of poems by the 13th century Persian poet Saadi
Shirazi. It deals with a wide range of themes, including love, friendship, justice and wisdom.
Among the most famous poems in the book is “Bani Adam” (“Children of Adam”), which ad-
vocates equality for all people. An important theme running through the poems is the garden.
It is used as a metaphor for the natural world and the beauty it contains, a place of peace, tran-
quillity and contemplation which is often associated with the search for spiritual enlightenment
and wisdom. In most poems, the garden is described as a place of refuge from the stresses and
troubles of the outside world and find solace in nature. It is also commonly used as a symbol for
the soul or the inner self. Throughout the poem, the poet urges the reader to tend the ‘garden’ of
their own soul to discover the beauty and wisdom to be found within.
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Giuseppe De Riso
literature. Hovering over everything is the idea of the garden as a natural place
of fecundation and contamination. The plane carrying the two is referred to as
a seedpod that explodes with an originative ‘big bang’ in the sky, releasing the
spores (its occupants) it contains across the London metropolitan area:
...mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd,
there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, sev-
ered mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished
futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, be-
longing, home.” (Rushdie 2011, 15)
In this passage, the plane is being compared to an egg. Just as an egg con-
tains the mystery of life and eventually transforms into something new, the
plane is described as a pod or seed that transforms when it comes into con-
tact with a different cultural environment. This transformation is compared to
the process of insemination or natural replication, as the plane disseminates
its spores and produces something new. The transformation of Saladin into a
devil and Gibreel into an angel in the novel is described as being similar to
the transformation that migrants undergo when they ‘fecundate’ or enrich a
new culture. In both cases, the transformation allows for the emergence of
something new.
This highlights the problematic connection that exists between the lan-
guage and the production of newness. One specific example of this is the
arrest and abuse of Saladin by officers Stein, Novak, and Bruno. As a result of
this experience, Saladin realises that his body is undergoing a transformation
into a goat-like creature faster than he can process or understand. Saladin ex-
periences a profound disconnect between his own realisation of the advancing
transformation of his body into something monstrous and the seeming indif-
ference of the officials, who are not the least bit surprised by his appearance.
This situation is similar to what previously discussed for Midnight’s Children,
in which there is a difference between how Saleem perceives his own body
and how the other characters perceive him, including the doctor who visits
him for a check-up. Immediately afterwards, however, we are given an inter-
pretative key. After losing consciousness, Saladin wakes up in a hospital bed
and is visited by a manticore, who explains that many people, particularly
migrants, are being transformed into monstrous creatures as a result of the
way they are talked about by others. The manticore suggests that these gro-
tesque characteristics are simply the result of the way people talk about them:
“‘But how do they do it?’ Chamcha wanted to know. ‘They describe us,’ the
other whispered solemnly. ‘That’s all. They have the power of description, and
97
we succumb to the pictures they construct.’” (Rushdie 2011, 179, emphasis

is mine) Because of this, many creatures with both human and monster-like
traits are formed. Saladin witnesses several of these hybrid creatures while
he escapes the hospital, including people with features resembling animals
and insects.27 Language has the power to not only describe reality, but also to
influence and change our understanding and perception of reality.
As a result, migrants must often create false identities or disguises to pro-
tect themselves from negative or false portrayals of themselves: “most migrants
learn, and can become disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the false-
hoods invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.”
(ivi, 60) Many scholars, such as Homi Bhabha (1990, 1994), Gayatri Spivak
(1989), and Simon Gikandi (1996) have discussed how this process of creating
new identities is common among immigrants from South Asia and the Caribbe-
an who live in London and are trying to redefine their sense of self and what it
means to be English. In postcolonial criticism, this way of creating new iden-
tities is called mimicry, a concept that refers to the imitation or copying of the
dominant culture by a colonised or subaltern group, but with subtle differences.
Mimicry is often seen as a form of resistance or subversion, as the colonised
group appropriates and reshapes the dominant culture to assert its own identity
and agency. However, mimicry can also be seen as a form of assimilation or
internalised oppression, as the subaltern group may adopt the values and norms
of the dominant culture and internalise its ideology. In this sense, mimicry can
be seen as a way for the minority group to gain acceptance and social mobility
within the prevailing society, but at the expense of their own cultural traditions
and autonomy. Mimicry is often discussed in relation to power dynamics and
the way systems of control are maintained and perpetuated.
As language provides a means by which truth can be invented, the process
is based on the ability to hear and listen, or more precisely, on the willingness
27
“The great escape took place some nights later, when Saladin’s lungs had been all but emptied
of slime by the ministrations of Miss Hyacinth Phillips. It turned out to be a well-organized affair
on a pretty large scale, involving not only the inmates of the sanatorium but also the detenus, as
the manticore called them, held behind wire fences in the Detention Centre nearby. [...] There were
many shadowy figures running through the glowing night, and Chamcha glimpsed beings he could
never have imagined, men and women who were also partially plants, or giant insects, or even, on
occasion; built partly of brick or stone; there were men with rhinoceros horns instead of noses and
women with necks as long as any giraffe. The monsters ran quickly, silently, to the edge of the De-
tention Centre compound, where the manticore and other sharp-toothed mutants were waiting by
the large holes they had bitten into the fabric of the containing fence, and then they were out, free,
going their separate ways, without hope, but also without shame.” (Rushdie 2011, 182)
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to believe and to be believed: “A man who invents himself needs someone to

believe in him, to prove he’s managed it. Playing God again, you could say.
[...] Not only the need to be believed in, but to believe in another.” (Rushdie
2011, 60) There must be a mutual willingness or at least openness between the
speaker or narrator and the listener or receiver of information. The same pro-
cess of creation flows ‘backwards’ into the dream as well, as Gibreel inspires
Mahound the new religion, who admits to: “hav[ing] learned how to listen.
This listening is not of the ordinary kind; it’s also a kind of asking. Often, when
Gibreel comes, it’s as if he knows what’s in my heart. It feels to me, most times,
as if he comes from within my heart: from within my deepest places, from my
soul.” (Rushdie 2011, 116) Rushdie plays with the idea that even though some
beliefs may be impossible to prove or seem absurd, the founders of major world
religions were able to convince others to believe in their visions and ideas:
Any new idea, Mahound, is asked two questions. The first is asked when it’s
weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compro-
mises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to sur-
vive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool
notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will
almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but,
the hundredth time, will change the world. (Rushdie 2011, 346)
It is interesting to see how ideas and people are used interchangeably here.
As a polytheist who makes money from the pilgrims who visit the temples
and altars of Jahilia to worship the 360 deities recognised there, the Grandee
of Jahilia Abu Simbel28 reflects on his fear of Mahound and the preaching of
his monotheistic religion. He describes himself as the type of man who bends
and compromises to survive. For example, Abu Simbel decides not to accuse
his wife Hind, a pagan priestess, of adultery because he needs the derogatory
verses of the poet Baal, with whom his wife is having an affair, against Ma-
hound and his followers because “the pen is mightier than the sword.” (ivi,
113) Although Abu Simbel knows that his wife Hind is having an affair with
several lovers, he does nothing because her family is in charge and guards
28
Abu Simbel is probably also an ironic reference to the village by the same name in southern
Egypt, near the border with Sudan. It is home to two ancient temples built in the 13th century
BC by the pharaoh Ramses II. The larger of the two temples, called the Great Temple, is dedi-
cated to the gods Amun, Ra-Horakhty and Ptah, as well as to the Pharaoh himself. The smaller
temple is dedicated to the goddess Hathor and features reliefs depicting the pharaoh and his
queen making offerings to the gods.
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the temples. It is Hind who recognises herself as equal to Mahound and op-
posite to him. Equal in her refusal to bend, opposite in defending the pagan
divinities of the past against the novelty of Mahound: “‘Neither he [Baal]
nor Abu Simbel is your equal. But I am. [...] I am your equal,’ she repeats,
‘and also your opposite. [...] If you are for Allah, I am for Al-Lat. And she
doesn’t believe your God when he recognizes her. Her opposition to him is
implacable, irrevocable, engulfing. The war between us cannot end in truce.’”
(Rushdie 2011, 132) The significance of this passage lies in its emphasis on
the reciprocity of opposites, which depend on each other to be created, born
and at the same time destroyed or eliminated.29 Abu Simbel is thus presented
as a different ‘concept’ from that embodied by his wife Hind. He is not the un-
yielding one who stubbornly resists, but the one who bends and adapts to the
situation.30 Neil ten Kortenaar (2008) praises Mahound in the novel for stand-
ing up against the discrimination, misogyny and injustice of a corrupt polit-
ical class. To ten Kortenaar, Mahound represents a new and fresh approach
to challenging the status quo. However, other scholars such as Homi Bhabha
and Simon Gikandi see Mahound as representing the old, traditional ways. As
for Mahound, he is shown to believe that history has reached a critical point
where the old and the new must be separated, and that it is the responsibility
of the new to challenge the old.
More generally, the novel emphasises the idea that what is considered ‘real’
or obvious can be questioned or rejected. This is shown also through the char-
acter Gibreel flying through the city unnoticed, and in the contradictions and
inconsistencies in the teachings of religious leaders such as Mahound and the
founders of Christianity and Islam. These leaders use the concept of God to
justify actions that might otherwise be considered wrong: “God [was used] to
justify the unjustifiable.” (Rushdie 2011, 106) Abraham, for instance, is called
a bastard (ibid.) for abandoning his slave Hagar and the child he conceived
with her, Ishmael, in the desert.31 In the Bible, God himself encourages the
29
“‘You are sand and I am water,’ Mahound says. ‘Water washes sand away’ ‘And the desert
soaks up water,’ Hind answers him.” (Rushdie 2011, 132)
“What kind of idea am I? I bend. I sway. I calculate the odds, trim my sails, manipulate, survive.
30
That is why I won’t accuse Hind of adultery. We are a good pair, ice and fire.” (Rushdie 2011, 113)
31
“While Mahound climbs Coney, Jahilia celebrates a different anniversary. In ancient time the
patriarch Ibrahim came into this valley with Hagar and Ismail, their son. Here, in this waterless
wilderness, he abandoned her. She asked him, can this be God’s will? He replied, it is. And
left, the bastard. From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He moves in
mysterious ways: men say. Small wonder, then, that women have turned to me. - But I’ll keep
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Giuseppe De Riso
gesture, promising Abraham that out of Ishmael will come a great nation as he
is Abraham’s seed. In this passage, Rushdie ironically illustrates how Abraham
in the Bible uses God to rid himself of a slave girl that had become unwieldy
and who had provoked Sarah’s (Abraham’s wife) jealousy by bearing a child
to him. She had offered her slave girl to Abraham as a means of conceiving
a child when she was unable to do so. Although Muhammad, and thus the
Islamic tradition, is one of the descendants of Ishmael, this is not an ironic dig
at Islam. Rushdie’s sarcasm is aimed at the Abrahamic tradition as a whole,
which includes Judaism and Christianity. Having grown up in an Islamic fam-
ily, Rushdie naturally has more difficulty accepting the religious teachings of
this particular religion, with which he has a conflicted relationship.
3.3 Metaxy and palinodic storytelling

The Satanic Verses is a text characterised by ambiguity and duplicity on
both a symbolic and structural level. As Gibreel and Saladin plummet, the nar-
rator emphasises how the friction with the air and the speed of the fall almost
wakes them from their “delirious daydream” (Rushdie 2011, 17). Reality and
fiction are juxtaposed, real and false memories are distorted, historical reality
is contaminated with folk tales or hearsay, dreams and consciousness are in-
timately linked, all contributing to the necessary interplay between truth and
fiction that defines reality. There is a great deal more complexity to dualism in
The Satanic Verses than in Grimus and Midnight’s Children. The novel is char-
acterised by two key dualities: the relationship between Gibreel and Saladin,
and the contrast between their reality and Gibreel’s dream, which represents
the historical origins of Islam. The novel’s back-and-forth movement between
two polarities is an essential part of its structure and meaning.
Gibreel swings like a pendulum. At one moment he is a former believer
who has lost his faith, and at another moment he is the originator of the very
same religion he once embraced. In the narrative, the character of Gibreel
moves back and forth, to and fro, effectively creating a rhythmic motion that
prevents the reader from taking a static or fixed view of who he is or how he
comes by the information and knowledge that underpins his faith and indi-
viduality. Since the dream characters claim to be inspired by the ‘real’ angel
to the point; Hagar wasn’t a witch. She was trusting: then surely He will not let me perish. After
Ibrahim left her, she fed the baby at her breast until her milk ran out. Then she climbed two hills,
first Safa then Marwah, running from one to the other in her desperation, trying to sight a tent,
a camel, a human being. She saw nothing.” (ivi, 106, emphasis is in the original)
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Gibreel, and given that many of the events occurring in reality cannot be ra-
tionally explained, one can speculate that Gibreel’s dreams may not only be
an imaginative means by which he expresses his doubts about religions (all of
them) and especially about the preaching of Islam, but may in fact be Rush-
die’s take on the ‘true’ story (in a fictional sense, of course) behind the revela-
tion, or that it contains at least some degree of truthfulness. In a specular way,
the reality of Saladin and Gibreel would gradually become less and less real,
suggesting that it could be actually crowded with demons, angels and other
supernatural creatures. Gibreel himself is the one who questions the degree of
reality of his dreams, and, by extension, the degree of reality of his daily ex-
perience: “every time I go to sleep the dream starts up from where it stopped.
Same dream in the same place. As if somebody just paused the video while
I went out of the room. Or, or. As if he’s the guy who’s awake and this is the
bloody nightmare. His bloody dream: us. Here. All of it.” (ivi, 94)
As Neil ten Kortenaar (2004) argues, in Rushdie’s novel there is more mag-
ic in late 2nd millennium London than in 7th century Arabia. It is noticeable
that Jahilia lacks the transformations and elements of myth and religion that
are so abundant in the parts of the novel set in contemporary India or England.
There, myth and religion are debunked and demystified, leaving Islam without
magical or supernatural elements. Contemporary London, on the other hand,
is steeped in magic, its time governed by a divine authority. This imaginary
reality is imbued with the creative power of the word, as the constant biblical
references seem to suggest. From this perspective, Gibreel and Saladin would
represent the ‘real’ fictional world, a future world that Mahound dreams and
from which he draws inspiration to preach his new religion in the past (or
his own present). As in Midnight’s Children, the traditional linearity linking
past and future breaks down through a constitutive reciprocity between them,
making it impossible to determine with certainty who is the real figure and
who is the dreamer, which is the actual historical situation and which is the
invented one:
But when he has rested he enters a different sort of sleep, a sort of not-sleep,
the condition that he calls his listening, and he feels a dragging pain in the
gut, like something trying to be born, and now Gibreel, who has been hover-
ing-above-looking-down, feels a confusion, who am I, in these moments it be-
gins to seem that the archangel is actually inside the Prophet, I am the dragging
in the gut, I am the angel being extruded from the sleeper’s navel, I emerge,
Gibreel Farishta, while my other self, Mahound, lies listening, entranced, I am
bound to him, navel to navel, by a shining cord of light, not possible to say
which of us is dreaming the other. We flow in both directions along the umbil-
ical cord. (ivi, 121, emphasis is mine)
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An important part of Saleem’s narrative was that he admitted to retroac-

tively selecting parts of Indian historical reality from his broken memory and
fragments of his own imagination. In this way, he was able to construct a
narrative that was plausible and congenial to him, in an effort to shield him-
self from the fears and resentments he had suffered (or nearly so) at various
times in his life. This led to a flexible and recursive presentation of the story,
which found a new application in the oscillation between truth and invention.
Similarly, The Satanic Verses interweaves history and myth, religion and daily
politics as dreamlike reflections of one another. It is impossible to determine
Gibreel’s account unambiguously in terms of ‘origin’ or ‘end’, as well as of
its truth content. Apart from the impossibility of distinguishing between the
dreamed (imagined) and the real (historical) Gibreel, narrative structure also
makes it impossible to determine which diegetic thread, between dream and
reality, is chronologically prior to the other.
This is achieved in a different way to the postmodern pastiche of Mid-
night’s Children. Josh Toth (2017) suggests that the end of postmodernism is
signalled by the overcoming of the humorous “groundlessness”32 (ivi, 42) of
“the signifier’s game running its course.” (ivi, 56) By this he means the ten-
dency to focus on a sterile, endless play of meanings, where these are subject
to a kind of predestination determined by the system of meaning in which
they are situated. Toth points out that, while various post-structuralist and de-
constructionist approaches drew on the Lacanian concept of ‘inertia’33 (La-
can 1991, 190) which ultimately subordinates reality to the abstract imagos
of the symbolic order, Slavoj Žižek (2000) maintains that they are mutually
dependent: both define and transform each other. Consequently, according to
Toth, material reality is inherently ‘plastic’ for its “capacity to receive form
and [...] to produce form. Accordingly, [...] the symbolic – as an inescapable
narrative in which we all play our ‘parts’ – is no less restricted than the hand
32
The concept of groundlessness challenges traditional notions of objectivity and neutrality in
relation to knowledge and suggests that all understanding is ultimately subjective and culturally
specific. It also challenges the notion that there are fixed, universal values or moral principles
that can guide our actions, as these too are seen as socially constructed and culturally relative.
This means that knowledge and understanding are always provisional and subject to change as
they are shaped by the perspectives and experiences of those who hold them.
33
In the work of Jacques Lacan, the concept of inertia refers to the subject’s resistance to change
or progress. It is related to the idea of the status quo and the way in which the subject is interest-
ed in maintaining its present position or mode of being. This inertia can manifest itself in var-
ious ways, such as a reluctance to try new things or to question one’s beliefs and assumptions.
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of a sculptor before a piece of clay.” (ivi, 57) In this context, plasticity refers
to a property of cultural images that are not only capable of giving form to
reality, but also of being shaped by it. Toth uses the concept to overcome an
internal contradiction or paradox which characterises contemporary critique
of postmodernism. As much as it emphasises the dangers associated with the
irresponsible forgetting of the past, it simultaneously also asserts that the past
cannot be truly known. That’s why Toth speaks of historioplastic metafiction
(as opposed to Linda Hutcheon’s (1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989) historio-
graphic metafiction)34 to refer to a kind of metaliterary consciousness which
“shifts our attention to the infinite yet bound pliability of the past.” (ivi, 58)
The pliability of the past refers to the idea that our understanding and inter-
pretation of past events and historical figures are subject to change and are
influenced by the present context in which we interpret them. This concept
suggests that the past is not rigid or static, but rather shaped by the perspec-
tives and biases of those who interpret it. The pliability of the past is evident
in the way historical events are remembered, as different groups may have
different views on what is important or significant about a particular event and
how it should be remembered. It is also evident in the way historical figures
are portrayed and understood, as our understanding of their actions and mo-
tivations may change over time as new information becomes available or our
values and perspectives change. The concept has important implications for
the way we think about history and its role in shaping our present and future.
It suggests that our understanding of the past is always provisional and open
to revision, and that our interpretation of historical events and figures will
evolve over time.
Toth claims that this new consciousness manifested itself as an aesthet-
ic renewal in the late 1980s and early 1990s (the very period in which The
Satanic Verses was published). This represented a shift from a postmodern
to a metamodern sensibility, to use the terminology employed by Timotheus
34
Historiographic metafiction is a phrase coined by the Canadian literary critic Linda Hutcheon
to describe a particular kind of fiction that engages with historical events, figures and themes,
but also draws attention to its own status as a work of fiction and its relationship to history. In
her book A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), Hutcheon defines historiographic metafiction
as fiction that intentionally subverts historical representation conventions concerning events,
people, and places. It often incorporates elements of metafiction such as self-reference and
self-knowledge on the part of the narrator, as well as techniques such as intertextuality, pastiche
and parody, to draw attention to the constructed nature of the story and the ways in which it
engages with and reinterprets historical events and figures.
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Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker (2010). However, although there is con-
tinued scholarly debate regarding the end of postmodernism (Bourriaud 2009,
Eshelman 2008, Kirby 2009, Nealon 2012), there is even less agreement about
what metamodern might mean. Since postmodernism is rooted in disillusion-
ment with the possibility of understanding and playing a meaningful role in
the world, the supposed end of postmodernism would signal the return of
‘hope’, the belief that humans are capable of making a positive contribution
to society. The term metamodernism, in the words of Daniel O’Gorman and
Robert Eaglestone (2019): “identifies at the heart of contemporary culture a
persistent fluctuation between irony and sincerity, emphasising a dissolution
in the boundary between the two.” (23) It was theorised in 2010 by Vermeu-
len and van der Akker as a type of discourse “oscillating between a modern
enthusiasm and a postmodern irony” (1), a tension “between and beyond – the
electropositive nitrates of the modern and the electronegative metals of the
postmodern” (ivi, 4) that produces “a spacetime that is both-neither ordered
and disordered. Metamodernism displaces the parameters of the present with
those of a future presence that is futureless; and it displaces the boundaries of
our place with those of a surreal place that is placeless.” (ivi, 12)
In this volume, Rushdie is not intended to herald the end of postmodernism
or the beginning of the metamodernist era. However, using the idea that The
Satanic Verses relies on “an internal duplication, [...] constantly in a mode of
statement and retraction” as noted by Booker (1990, 987), it can be argued
that Rushdie seems to be an early interpreter of a new metamodern sensibility
which shifts its focus dynamically on instances belonging to both modernism
and postmodernism, and then declines such variations in a postcolonial, mag-
ic-realist way. In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie is able to incorporate different
artistic and literary concerns and styles without being confined to any partic-
ular category. As a writer during the height of the postmodernist movement,
Rushdie was also aware of how deconstructionist theories and the critique of
power could challenge the idea of a universal subject in a clear time and place.
More specifically, to Vermeulen (2010) a metamodern sensibility relies on a
new aesthetic perspective: “new generations of artists increasingly abandon
the aesthetic precepts of deconstruction, parataxis, and pastiche in favor of
aesthethical notions of reconstruction, myth, and metaxis.” (ibid., emphasis
is mine) Reconstruction, myth, and metaxis are aesthetic terms that relate to
ways of feeling, rather than external elements or processes. This is an im-
portant distinction: by definition, aesthetic refers to beauty or appearance. In
contrast, the term aesthetical refers to sensation, to what is felt through the use
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of sense organs.35 In this light, I intend to argue that Rushdie expresses the at-
tempted transition from parataxis to metaxis (μεταξύ, also metaxy in English).
Meta- (μετά) is a prefix that can be used to describe a number of different
things and carry a wide variety of meanings and connotations. It can mean
‘instead of’ or ‘otherwise’ when referring to qualitative changes in place,
nature, or order as is the case with terms such as metamorphosis, in which
one form is transformed into another and not merely acquired. Another very
common translation is ‘beyond’ or ‘after’, such as in metaphysics. The term
comes from the sequence of Aristotle’s works that Andronicus of Rhodes36
rearranged and labelled ‘metaphysics’ to emphasise the topics beyond physics
that Aristotle addressed in his texts. As a matter of fact, Aristotle referred to
this branch of knowledge as primal philosophy, i.e. everything that pertains to
what is beyond senses and matter. This made it a term that encompassed any-
thing that transcended physicality. It is because of this meaning that meta- is
more commonly associated with self-reflective behaviour in specialistic and
even in common usage to indicate ‘about its own category’, X about X. For
example, in literary criticism, a metaliterary text reflects on the text itself or
on the intertextual elements within it, metatheatre is a play containing another
play; in psychology, metamemory refers to remembering something through
another memory. The prefix can also replace positional terms such as ‘with’
and ‘between’. Vermeulen and van den Akker (2010) employ the prefix to
include all its meanings in it:
When we use the term ‘meta’, we use it in similar yet not indiscriminate fash-
ion. For the prefix ‘meta-’ allows us to situate metamodernism historically be-
yond; epistemologically with; and ontologically between the modern and the
postmodern. It indicates a dynamic or movement between as well as a move-
ment beyond. More generally, however, it points towards a changing cultural
35
It was the German philosopher Alexander G. Baumgarten (1750) who coined the term aes-
thetics to describe sensory knowledge and beauty. Aesthetics comes from the Latin æstética,
which comes from the Greek aistétikös meaning ‘sensitive’, ‘able to feel’, from aisthànomai ‘I
perceive’, ‘I feel with the senses’, while aisthésis means ‘sensation’, ‘feeling’.
36
Andronicus of Rhodes was a Greek philosopher and scholar from the 1st century BC. He is
credited with compiling Aristotle’s works into the corpus we know today, which includes the
Nicomachean Ethics, the Politics and the Metaphysics. Andronicus is best known for his arran-
gement of the latter, which he divided into three groups: the ‘major’ works, the ‘auxiliary’ or
‘secondary’ works, and the ‘minor’ works. This division was based on the content and quality
of the texts, with the major works considered the most important and influential and the minor
works less significant.
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Giuseppe De Riso
sensibility – or cultural metamorphosis, if you will – within western societies.

(Vermeulen and van den Akker 2010, 2, emphasis is mine)
With such diverse meanings, even in contradiction with each other, meta-
seems a prefix in constant flux or evolution, accommodating a variety of usag-
es that make it a territory of discovery and ongoing definition. However, if we
look at all of these meanings closely, we can see that they are all connected by
the idea of movement. ‘Meta-’ does not refer to a static position, but rather to
change and the process of moving from one point to another and back again.
This movement, no matter how many different extremes it occurs within, is
what ties them all together into a unified whole.
Liz Falconer (2011) notes that metaxy is a term used by Plato to describe
the condition of human spirituality between the human and the divine. In his
Symposium, metaxy is defined by the figure of the priestess Diotima, Socrates’
tutor, as the ‘middle way’, understood as a dynamic exchange between the ma-
terial world and the world of ideas through the facilitation of the demon Eros
(before Christianity the word demon had no negative connotation). Moreover,
Diotima uses the term37 to show how oral tradition can be perceived in dif-
ferent ways by different people. To Plato, metaxy pertains to an ontological
betweenness, a state not necessarily stagnant, but which can also be thought of
as a continuous movement or transition. For example, it refers to how tangible
things in the material world ‘participate’ in the perfection of the corresponding
ideas in the ideal world, and how the abstract world of ideas, even though it is
separate from the tangible world, still interacts with it.
This image is particularly helpful because the condition of in-between-
ness has mostly been seen as static conjunction. On the contrary, metaxy is
often associated with the idea of movement or change, as it suggests a state of
transition between two or more things. Unlike connection, which has a more
static connotation, metaxy implies a dynamic, interactive process of constant-
ly going back and forth. Therefore, oscillation and participation are the best
words to describe it. It is a condition of in-betweenness or mediation, a space
of tension, exchange or conflict in which different forces come into contact
and influence or shape each other. It can be used, for example, to describe the
mutual relationship between the material and the immaterial, the individual
37
In reference to Metis, the Titaness who in Greek mythology was the first wife of Zeus. She
was the mother of the goddess Athena, who was born fully grown and armoured from Zeus’
head. In some accounts, Metis was also the mother of Poros, the god of abundance also known
as Porus, or ‘wealth’.
107
and the collective, and the past and the present. There is no binary opposition
between the involved elements, but variations that allow them to flow into and
return to one another. One can only exist by ‘partaking’ of the other.
Indeed, Linds (2006) notes that metaxy has also been referred to describe
the condition of simultaneously belonging to two different and autonomous
worlds. Philosopher Augusto Boal (1995) further delves into the concept de-
fining it as “the state of belonging completely simultaneously to two different
autonomous worlds: the image of reality and the reality of the image. The par-
ticipant shares and belongs to these two autonomous worlds: their reality and
the image of their reality, which she herself has created.” (43) Gilles Deleuze
(1983, 1987, 1990) has argued that it is inherent in the human body to partic-
ipate in more than one reality because of its ability to feel and act abstractly
(i.e. virtually). It does not matter how much or how little the body is involved.
Reading a book, listening to a song, attending a play, reading a newspaper
article, watching a film or playing a video game are all examples of participa-
tion in different realities. Within this capacity, one can abstract, put oneself in
the shoes of others, daydream, and be affected intellectually and emotionally
by events that have not necessarily taken place in the physical world. It is
possible for our intellect to develop and experience more than one reality at a
time. For Rushdie, abstractions are ‘real’ in that they are part of the creation
of reality. Therefore, it seems now appropriate to return to one of the first
questions raised by Saleem and mentioned in this volume: can one dismiss a
story as false simply because it is invented, if it has material consequences?
Does it really matter how much one believes a story to be true, if one can still
be deeply affected by it?
Rushdie uses metaphors and terms from the world of cinema much more
extensively in The Satanic Verses than in Midnight’s Children to illustrate
how powerful the illusions created by the mind can be. According to Rushdie
himself, Gibreel acts as both camera and viewer, as both player and spectator.
He is both an invisible, ubiquitous eye constantly recording what is happen-
ing on the scene and any character inhabiting it. He chooses what to include
in the unfolding drama, and yet he also observes or suffers it as a spectator.
This reflects the dual role we play when we dream: active and passive at the
same time. Our mind selects the elements of the memories that make up the
plot of the dream in which we embody any character, but it experiences them
as if it were only a spectator, without any control or influence over them. In
an essay originally published in The Spectator in September 1712, “Essay
on Dreams”, Joseph Addison (1854) remarked that when the soul dreams,
free from the body, it “produces her own company [...] She converses with
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Giuseppe De Riso
numberless beings of her own creation, and is transported into ten thousand
scenes of her own raising. She is herself the theatre, the actor, and the behold-
er.” (Addison 1854, 480) Jorge Luis Borges (2015) adds in his Libro di sogni
(Book of Dreams) that it is also the author of the story it witnesses (Borges
2015, 5). Rushdie highlights a similar oscillation regarding the dream of The
Satanic Verses:
Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the camera and
at other moments, spectator. When he’s a camera the pec oh vee is always on
the move, he hates static shots [...] But mostly he sits up on Mount Cone like a
paying customer in the dress circle, and Jahilia is his silver screen. [...]
But as the dream shifts, it’s always changing form, he, Gibreel, is no longer a
mere spectator but the central player, the star. With his old weakness for tak-
ing too many roles: yes, yes, he’s not just playing the archangel but also him,
the businessman, the Messenger, Mahound, coming up the mountain when he
comes. Nifty cutting is required to pull off this double role, the two of them can
never be seen in the same shot, each must speak to empty air, to the imagined
incarnation of the other, and trust to technology to create the missing vision,
with scissors and Scotch tape or, more exotically, with the help of a travelling
mat. (Rushdie 2011, 119, emphasis is mine)
Oscillation refers to the repetitive fluctuation of a quantity between two

extreme values or points. It is not limited to the moment when it reaches one
of these extremes, but rather encompasses the entire range of motion. This
movement creates a force that works to restore balance or create tension as
it moves towards a point of equilibrium. As the object returns to this point,
its own momentum carries it beyond it, creating a new opposing force in the
other direction. The oscillation continues as it moves away from equilibrium
due to the increasing intensity of this restoring force. A metaleptic reading of
Rushdie’s work reveals how the narrative is characterised by the simultaneous
action of momentum and restoring force, which allows for the smooth tran-
sition between opposing qualities and states of consciousness. Rushdie’s art
is entirely founded on this tension. When discussing Rushdie’s metamodern
sensibility, the prefix ‘meta-’ does not imply static self-reflection, but rather
a dynamic balance between opposing concepts such as the global and local,
truth and illusion, doubt and conviction, knowledge and belief. These con-
cepts are interconnected and rely on each other, but also maintain their separa-
tion. It is important to recognise how each concept influences and participates
in the other.
Traditionally, literary criticism has focused on the idea that stories are
based on historical reality. This is achieved by prioritising the author’s per-
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sonal and biological history over the narrative, and by only considering the
way that literary works influence each other, rather than their impact on soci-
ety, the economy, or individuals. For example, literary criticism based on the
English literary canon might examine how Daniel Defoe’s novels reflect the
aspirations of the emerging English bourgeoisie because Defoe himself was
familiar with their concerns, or how Mary Shelley’s gothic romantic ideas
were inspired by experiments with electricity on animals and her own dreams.
Similarly, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) was
influenced by the burgeoning psychological theories of the time. In everyday
thinking, a work of the present can be influenced by past works, but not by
those that have not yet been created, so influences are thought to follow a
chronological timeline.
In contrast, The Satanic Verses focuses on how different stories influence
us and how we in turn affect them. Rushdie embodies a metamodern sensi-
bility in that he constantly balances the ontological aspects of postmodernism
with the epistemological concerns of modernism in his writing. This is re-
flected in the way that his literary devices often represent the tension between
multiple names, characteristics, nationalities, or emotions: “To be born again
[...] first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first
one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Takathun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t
cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh?” (Rushdie 2011,
14) Birth and death, joy and sorrow, love and sighing are not simple binary
oppositions, but rather oscillating movements in which the affirmation of one
polarity presupposes the returning of the other. Throughout the novel, Rushdie
gives numerous hints and clues based on the idea of reversal or inversion:
Five and a half hours of time zones; turn your watch upside down in Bombay
and you see the time in London. My father, Chamcha would think, years later,
in the midst of his bitterness. I accuse him of inverting Time.
[...]
January, 1961. A year you could turn upside down and it would still, unlike
your watch, tell the same time. (Rushdie 2011, 52)
Even the title of the novel is based on Mahound/Muhammad’s withdrawal

of the satanic verses, and the narrator frequently confirms and denies the ac-
curacy of the narrative.38
38
“It was and it was not so,” “it was so, it was not so.” (Rushdie 2011, 46 and 48 respectively)
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Giuseppe De Riso
Gibreel learns about the Prophet’s life through the stories told by his mother,
Naima Majmuddin, who dies in a bus accident when Gibreel is 13 years old. As
an orphan living in poverty, Gibreel compares his life to that of the Prophet and
looks to him for inspiration or tries to imitate him. Like the Prophet, Gibreel also
rises from poverty by marrying his first wife, Khadja bint Khuwaylid.39 Rushdie
suggests that Gibreel becomes confused about the boundaries between his own
life and the fantasies his mother told him as a child. He changes his name to
honour her and begins his acting career as Gibreel Farishta, blending reality and
fantasy. Gibreel’s desire for maternal affection and his strained relationship with
his father may explain his jealous attitudes towards women. Gibreel, a devout
but sexually frustrated man, tries to escape his early period of poverty by seek-
ing financial security through a marriage of convenience. It takes him four years
to achieve success. During this time, he reads about classical myths, the origins
of Islam, and the early preaching of the Prophet, as well as newspaper reports
and other materials. In this phase of chaotic and quixotic absorption of myths
and stories from the East and West,40 he also learns about the ‘incident’ with
the satanic verses in Muhammad’s life. These stories, historical facts, myths,
legends, and unbelievable news from various sources not only capture Gibreel’s
imagination but also relate to his own life experiences. As a result, it is practi-
cally impossible to distinguish between a fictional narrative and one based on
historical events. Gibreel’s fascination with stories and myths was driven by his
inability to express his strong desire to love a woman. He gained fame and for-
39
Khadja bint Khuwaylid (also spelled Khadijah bint Khuwaylid) was a businesswoman and
the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad. She was a successful merchant and owned her own
business, which enabled her to support the Prophet financially and emotionally during the early
years of his prophethood. She was also the first person to convert to Islam and is remembered
for her devotion to the Prophet, with whom she was married for 25 years and had several
children together. After the Prophet’s death, Khadja played a significant role in preserving his
teachings and helping to spread Islam.
40
“Off-screen, he lived alone in two empty rooms near the studios and tried to imagine what
women looked like without clothes on. To get his mind off the subject of love and desire, he
studied, becoming an omnivorous autodidact, devouring the metamorphic myths of Greece and
Rome, the avatars of Jupiter, the boy who became a flower, the spider-woman, Circe, everything;
and the theosophy of Annie Besant, and unified field theory, and the incident of the Satanic vers-
es in the early career of the Prophet, and the politics of Muhammad’s harem after his return to
Mecca in triumph; and the surrealism of the newspapers, in which butterflies could fly into young
girls’ mouths, asking to be consumed, and children were born with no faces, and young boys
dreamed in impossible detail of earlier incarnations, for instance in a golden fortress filled with
precious stones. He filled himself up with God knows what [...].” (Rushdie 2011, 35)
111
tune by acting as deities like Buddha and Krishna in Bollywood films based on
the Puranas,41 as if he were reincarnating into a different deity each time. Before
becoming famous, Gibreel had no emotional or sexual success, but then began
engaging in libertinism, allowing him to love whoever he wanted. His illness
did not prevent him from becoming a playboy and he often quarrelled and rec-
onciled with the woman he was most in love with, Rekha. Initially depicted as a
religious person, Gibreel starts to lose faith in God after falling ill.
However, this effort to assert his economic, personal, and sexual identity
sets the stage for reversal. The accident leading to physical decline represents
a turning point. His new Western identity, supposedly marked by atheism and
unconditional love, becomes contaminated by religious dreams as he travels
on the plane. He rediscovers his faith in London and becomes a disregarded
prophet in one of the Western centres of Christianity. Gibreel manages to es-
cape his obsession with women by preaching in London and gradually gains
powers such as the ability to become luminous and fly. Unlike Mahound in
his dreams, however, he is neither believed nor noticed, and his powers are
treated as if they were not real.42
Similarly, in the second half of the novel Saladin realises that his lifelong
desire for the new represented by Englishness has backfired on him. “The
very world he had so determinedly courted” (Rushdie 2011, 268) rejects
him, turns him into a monster, and forces him, not without difficulty, to stay
with the Sufyan family, the owners of the Shaandaar Cafe. His greatest re-
sentment relates to the fact that he, who feared that a return to India might
corrupt his perfect English accent, has been so grotesquely and hideously
sent back to “the bosom of his people, from whom he’d felt so distant for so
long.” (ibid.) Gibreel is eventually led on a journey back to Indian culture,
41
The Puranas are a genre of Hindu religious texts that contain traditional stories about the
creation of the universe, the history of the world, and the lives and deeds of gods, goddesses,
and other supernatural beings. They are considered a part of the Hindu scriptures known as the
Shastras. There are 18 major Puranas and many more minor Puranas, and they are believed to
have been composed by Hindu sages over a period of several centuries.
42
“It really was incredible. Here appeared a celestial being, all radiance, effulgence and good-
ness, larger than Big Ben, capable of straddling the Thames colossus-style, and these little ants
remained immersed in drive-time radio and quarrels with fellow-motorists. ‘I am Gibreel,’ he
shouted in a voice that shook every building on the riverbank: nobody noticed. Not one person
came running out of those quaking edifices to escape the earthquake. Blind, deaf and asleep.”
(Rushdie 2011, 348)
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Giuseppe De Riso
reconciling with his father and rediscovering his love for Zeeny,43 and in
the process, abandoning the Western identity he had worked to establish
throughout his life.
The novel examines how opposite qualities can coexist within the same
character, and how the factors that lead to one state also create the conditions
for a return to a previous state, even as the character appears to be moving in
the opposite direction. In Gibreel’s case, the loss of his initial faith is followed
by a powerful renewal of faith. It is important to point out that Gibreel’s real
name is Ismail Najmuddin. Ismail is the name of Abraham’s son, born of the
slave Hagar, whom God had ordered Abraham to kill. In Arabic, Najmuddin
means ‘the star of faith’ or ‘the star of religion’. Interestingly, both his first and
last names would suggest that he is a strict believer. By constantly fluctuating
between rationality and madness, Gibreel’s existence resembles a dream, but
one that has the realism and lasting impact of reality. In The Satanic Verses,
both historical and fictional characters interact through stories of sacred and
profane recantations in a virtual geography that ranges from dream sequences
to official history. Linds (1998) compares this process to a kind of transubstan-
tiation, as described by Boal (1995), in that through this interaction texts and
images come alive and take on new meaning. Linds believes that artistic cre-
ation should not just represent an event, whether realistically or symbolically,
but should also deal with the interaction between the real and the virtual, and
the “interplay between the imagined and the actual.” (Linds 1998, 75) Specif-
ically, according to Linds:
Metaxis occurs in the artist’s body and is embodied. Self and mind are woven
through the entire human body and through the web of relationships in which
that self takes shape. Then we play with the reality of the images before us. The
protagonist must forget the real world which was the origin of the image and
play with the image itself, in its artistic embodiment. The protagonists must
practice in the second world (the aesthetic), in order to modify the first (the
social). (Linds 1998, 74)
In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie demonstrates that the border between two
elements is not about separation, but about understanding change. Transi-
43
“Undefeated (and, it appeared, unattached), Zeeny’s re-entry into his life completed the pro-
cess of renewal, of regeneration, that had been the most surprising and paradoxical product
of his father’s terminal illness. His old English life, its bizarreries, its evils, now seemed very
remote, even irrelevant, like his truncated stage-name. ‘About time,’ Zeeny approved when he
told her of his return to Salahuddin.” (Rushdie 2011, 545)
113
tions allow us to see how Gibreel and Saladin, angel and devil, real Islam and
Rushdie’s imagined Islam, are both one and the other simultaneously, and all
the variations in between. Just as in Shame a real and an imaginary Pakistan
coexist, or, as Sufiya Zenobia is “two beings occupying the same air-space,
competing for it, two entities of identical shape but of tragically opposed na-
ture.” (Rushdie 1995, 236) According to Booker, “if two ‘tragically opposed’
identities, two incompatible and contradictory alternative realities, can occu-
py the same space, then clearly the very notions of ‘identity’ and ‘reality’
are called into question.” (1990, 990) Reading Rushdie metaleptically means
understanding how History absorbs and transforms the infinite stories we tell
and receive every day. Storytelling draws from history through processes of
representation and reconstruction, creating autonomous worlds whose images
circulate freely. It is the release or liberation of the stories that allows them to
influence all others.44
In conclusion, metaxy may be traceable even when considering the process
of translating the title of the novel from English to Arabic and then back to
English. It has been observed by Daniel Pipes (1990) that:
Rushdie’s title in Arabic is known as Al-Ayat ash-Shaytaniya; in Persian, as
Ayat-e Shetani; in Turkish, Şeytan Ayatleri. Shaytan is a cognate for ‘satan’ and
poses no problems. But, unlike ‘verses,’ which refers generically to any poetry
of scripture, ayat refers specifically to ‘verses of the Qur’an.’ Back-trans-
lated literally into English, these titles mean ‘The Qur’an’s Sa-tanic Verses.’
With just a touch of extrapolation, this can be understood to mean that ‘The
Qur’anic Verses Were Written By Satan.’ Simplifying, this in turn becomes
‘The Qur’an Was Written By Satan,’ or just ‘The Sa-tanic Qur’an.’ (116-117)
The novel’s title seems to embody the transformative power that enables
it to undergo a surprising but also tragically ironic transformation through
cross-cultural contamination. This irony is hinted at in many aspects of the
novel and is also reflected in the way Rushdie’s own life has been transformed
by the same ambiguity he used to create his art. He acknowledges this in
Quichotte, the last novel discussed in this volume.
44
It may be useful to remember Saleem’s words here: “Because the feeling had come upon me
that I was somehow creating a world; that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bod-
ies I occupied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the whole rich variety
of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was somehow making them happen ... which is to
say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the
land as the raw unshaped material of my gift.” (Rushdie 2021c, 259)
114
Chapter IV
Oh, I am fiction’s fool.
Contaminations and ‘Palindrome’ Storytelling in Quichotte1
Happiness [...] is a perpetual possession
of being well deceived.
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
4.1 Contaminations between media and reality

We have previously discussed some key aspects of Rushdie’s novels, in-
cluding the iridescence that superimposes different qualities on the same char-
acter, object or situation, and the metaleptic oscillations that disrupt traditional
cause-and-effect relationships. Rushdie’s writing is argued to transcend the
simple combination or conflation of two or more cultural or thought systems,
usually Eastern and Western, as is often discussed in postcolonial criticism.
Rushdie’s worlds violate the concept of tertium non datur to create “semiotic
worlds suspended between existence and non-existence” (Doležel 1980, 23).
An indication of how two seemingly opposing milieus (i.e. reality and fic-
tion) can intersect and still lead to a coherent outcome can be found in George
Orwell’s 1984 (1949), in which a useful key for our considerations can also be
found. Memory plays a crucial role in shaping and controlling the present in
the novel. The act of remembering and forgetting are closely linked and hap-
pen at the same time. When an event becomes part of the past, it is considered
a fact because it is difficult to question its truth. However, in order to shape
reality, these facts must align with a specific perspective or belief system. It is
important to find a balance between forgetting facts that may be inconvenient
or harmful, and remembering them at the appropriate time. This may involve
manipulating facts or introducing fictional elements when historical facts do
not support the desired present. For the construction of memory to occur, there
must be a balance between fact and fiction, so that even those who manipulate
history can appear credible to others by believing in their own manipulation.
It is imperative to believe what you say in order to lie convincingly. A funda-
mental paradox of history is the ability to sincerely lie, a process that involves
accepting two opposing concepts at once, regardless of their contradictions.
1
This chapter is partly based on an essay I previously published in Italian. See De Riso (2021).
Chapter 4. Oh, I am fiction’s fool. Contaminations and ‘Palindrome’ Storytelling in Quichotte
Known as doublethink2 in Orwell’s novel, this involves accepting one thing

alongside another that denies it. It is essential to use these concepts selective-
ly, as necessary, if they are to function properly. In order for fiction to work as
a tool of deception, its manipulations must not be recognised or acknowledged
by the collective memory. They must remain invisible. Truth is a belief that a
story is true, or, equivalently, the belief that a story is true is what contributes
to its validity. In Orwell’s society, this process is so perfectly executed that
there is no escape from it, it leads to a complete suspension of history. In es-
sence, doublethink is the suspension of disbelief in its finest form.
For Rushdie, Orwell’s doublethink is not something alien to humans. He
recognises its role throughout human history, the tendency to mix reality with
invention and to manipulate both depending on the situation. There is no
doubt that doublethink plays an important part in the making of human his-
tory; in 1984 it is entirely coherent, allowing for the creation of a completely
ahistorical reality that suppresses new, innovative, or unexpected ideas and
events, preserving itself in a perpetual echo. In the real world, though, human-
ity, strives for this ominous enclosure but never fully achieves it. The impor-
tance of hybridisation, for Rushdie, lies in its disruption of this fatal pursuit.
The emergence of the new short-circuits the process of achieving Orwellian
circularity and ensures the survival and continuation of history by introducing
the unexpected errors and the anomalies that prevent it from being terminated
or consumed by coherent absurdity. That’s why it is crucial to examine the
cracks, leaks, inconsistencies and transgressions that are at the core of Rush-
die’s work. The paradox of the writer, to Rushdie, is striving for the perfect
suspension of disbelief without ever achieving it. In his texts, he attempts to
convey this oscillation between convenient remembering and forgetting, be-
tween historical fact and invention, between lying with conviction and sincere
belief. Saleem in Midnight’s Children believed that the prophets of major re-
ligions changed the world by combining the believable and unbelievable and
by presenting the unbelievable in believable contexts. According to Rushdie,
their lives were like dreams in the sense that in dreams, the brain modifies
what we have actually experienced according to absurd or impossible rules
in order to achieve its own mysterious goals. Dreams draw on our everyday
behaviours, but they can also contain their own creations.
2
Doublethink refers to the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind at the same
time and accept them both as true. By constantly changing their own statements and rewriting
history, the Party, the authoritarian government in the novel, uses doublethink as a method of
control and manipulation.
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Giuseppe De Riso
Hanna Meretoja (2017) has examined One Thousand and One Nights to
discuss the ethics of storytelling and the importance of stories for human
development. The evocative tales Scheherazade3 tells King Shahryar delay
her execution and ultimately save her life. For Meretoja, storytelling is the
art of survival. As Paul Aster asserts, stories are the nourishment of the soul
(Hutchisson 2013), and this is expressed by Rushdie’s use of food as meta-
phor for his literary style. But believing in and telling stories, she warns,
also holds dangers. In the Western imagination, Don Quixote and Emma
Bovary4 represent the danger of reading too much fiction. In recent years,
the debate on the ethics of storytelling has been one of the most heated in
literary studies. It focuses on the question of whether narrative is beneficial
or harmful to human societies. The topic is extremely timely, especially now
that the digital world has opened up a range of new narrative spaces. Social
media platforms can be a breeding ground for the spread of false informa-
tion and conspiracy theories that can have serious and even deadly conse-
quences, as seen with the COVID-19 pandemic and the attempt to overthrow
the government through the storming of the Capitol by supporters of Donald
Trump.5 Language not only describes reality in a fictional way, but also has
3
Scheherazade is the main character in One Thousand and One Nights, also known as The Arabi-
an Nights. In the story, Scheherazade is a young woman who becomes the wife of King Shahryar,
who has a habit of marrying a new virgin every night and having her executed the next morning
to prevent infidelity. After his first wife cheated on him, he became disillusioned with women
and a cynic who no longer trusts anyone. Scheherazade, however, succeeds in winning the king
over by captivating him with her tales. She tells him a series of stories over the course of 1,001
nights and delays her execution until her life is spared. The stories she tells are a collection of
myths, legends and fairy tales from the Middle East, India and Africa and are known for their ex-
otic and fantastical elements. One of the most famous tales that Scheherazade tells King Shahr-
yar is the story of “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp”, known for its theme of the power of desires,
which also influences the relationship between Saladin and his father in The Satanic Verses.
4
Emma Bovary, the main character in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856), is
often seen as emblematic of the dangers of reading too much fiction, as her unrealistic expecta-
tions and desires are shaped by the romantic novels she reads. Emma is disillusioned with her
everyday life and marriage and begins to seek excitement and romance through extramarital
affairs and frivolous spending, which eventually leads to her financial and social ruin. Her ob-
session with romantic novels and her desire to live their idealised stories lead her to make poor
choices and pursue unattainable goals, ultimately causing her own downfall.
5
When lawmakers met in Washington DC to certify Joseph Biden’s election victory, then-Pres-
ident Donald Trump apparently called on right-wing extremists to storm Congress on 6 January
2021 to change the election result (as reported by Jude Sheerin for BBC in July 2022. Refer to
the sitography for the exact address).
117
the power to shape and influence it. When we understand how language
mediates between History and stories allowing them to work together, we
realise that the mirror we hold up to nature can also be passed through.
In Rushdie’s work, art and life are intertwined in complex ways that defy
straightforward chronological continuity or causality. Stories of the past and
the future are connected in a dynamic network, knowledge is not simply
passed down from generation to generation as a given. Reading The Satanic
Verses metaleptically means to recognise these interactions, which in the
novel are not unidirectional but palinodic.
Quichotte (2019), Rushdie’s last work at the time of writing this volume,
is particularly notable in this regard. The novel is loosely based on Miguel de
Cervantes’ Quixote (1605-1615). The underlying theme of Quichotte is recon-
ciliation, both between the characters in the story and between different genres
and literary styles. When viewed from a metaleptic perspective, the novel also
explores the relationship between life and art. Quichotte is structured similarly
to The Satanic Verses, with two narrative threads that are interwoven irregu-
larly throughout twenty chapters: the first follows the Quichotte who gives the
work its title, the second the character of Sam DuChamp.
Quichotte, whose real name is Ismail Ismail,6 is a pharmaceutical salesman
born in India and living in the United States. Due to his travelling work, he has
rarely been able to settle permanently in a fixed abode, but has mainly lodged
at the “temporary addresses” (Rushdie 2019, 10) of the motels he stayed in
during his travels. There is no doubt that Ismail was a lonely person who spent
much of his time watching “mindless television” (ibid.) while surrounded by
yellow light in his lodgings. Ismail’s only form of entertainment consisted of
TV series, soap operas, reality shows, news programmes and contests. His
whole life was spent constantly glued to the television, which was an indis-
pensable companion for him. Thrilled by the endless stream of stories dis-
played on the small screen, Ismail has spent more time in front of it than with
real people. Due to his excessive consumption of television, he falls into a
state of madness where the content on the box becomes his entire focus, over-
shadowing his real-life relationships and experiences. As a result, he begins to
prioritise fictional TV characters and situations over the people he has encoun-
tered in reality. In his mind, these characters become his authentic friends, and
the experiences he has had with them become a significant part of his memory
6
In the novel, however, he is more often called in the Americanised form Ismail Smile or,
alternatively, Smile Smile.
118
Giuseppe De Riso
and emotional life. This condition is described in the novel as the “unreal real”
(ivi, 11), a powerful contamination of reality with the imaginary, leading to
an inability to distinguish between embodied reality and the abstract reality
perceived through television:
He fell victim to that increasingly prevalent psychological disorder in which
the boundary between truth and lies became smudged and indistinct, so that at
times he found himself incapable of distinguishing one from the other, reality
from ‘reality’, and began to think of himself as a natural citizen (and potential
inhabitant) of that imaginary world beyond the screen to which he was so de-
voted [...]. (ibid.)
The above quotation illustrates, among other things, how one and the same
word, ‘reality’, contains and unites two opposites: reality and fiction, truth and
make-believe. As well as the fact that it is fiction that is disguised as reality, or
intended to appear as such.
Despite their thirty-year age difference, Ismail falls in love with Salma R.,
a former actress and current television presenter who is campaigning for the
rights of minorities. Salma had moved to the United States to achieve the goal
of becoming “the Beloved” (ivi, 46) of millions of Americans. Although Is-
mail’s love for Salma is described by the narrator as “an infatuation which he
characterised, quite inaccurately, as love” (ivi, 11), it is so strong that he sets
out to declare it to her. Meanwhile, Ismail writes her romantic letters under
the pseudonym Quichotte, which comes from an opera by Jules Massenet7 that
he loved as a child. Just as the musical work is loosely based on Cervantes’
masterpiece, Ismail also seems to be “a little loosely based [him]self.” (ivi,
13) The amusing connection the author makes with Massenet and Cervantes
creates the resonance between different characters, situations and media from
which Ismail’s transformation into Quichotte emerges, and defines the novel
as a whole.
In the case of Quixote, his amorous project fitted into the treatises on love
that appeared in sixteenth-century Italian literature. He was influenced by the
mixture of elements from Jewish mysticism, Christian theology, and Neopla-
tonic philosophy found in Marsilio Ficino’s De Amore (1494) or Leo Ebreo’s
Dialoghi d’amore (1535). The latter had such an influence on Cervantes’ writing
7
Jules Massenet’s Quichotte is an opera in five acts composed to a French libretto by Henri
Cain, based on Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. It was first performed at the Opéra de
Monte-Carlo on 25 January 1910.
119
that he was quoted directly in the introduction to Don Quixote. Likewise, in a

society heavily influenced by the fictional world of television, it does not seem
improbable for the protagonist to decide to journey and confess his love to a
stranger. Just as Cervantes’ Quixote’s perception of reality was shaped by chi-
valric literature, Rushdie’s Quichotte interprets reality through the lens of mod-
ern TV conventions, where it is common for two strangers with little in common
to date and marry, similar to a reality show. Quichotte’s is a time of parodic
contamination between analogue and digital media, where anything can happen:
It was the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, he reminded himself. He had heard
many people say that on TV and on the outré video clips floating in cyberspace,
which added a further, new-technology depth to his addiction. There were no
rules any more. And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could
happen. (ivi, 14)
For Quichotte, the TV screen acts like a porous membrane that allows the
interaction between what is on one side of the screen and what is on the oth-
er. As long as something has been shown on TV, it is perfectly plausible in
Quichotte’s world. And if Quixote could ask any peasant to accompany him
on his journey, it takes a simple wish for Quichotte to get a companion to join
him on his journey: Sancho, the black-and-white son he dreams he will have
with Salma. Having arrived from a future that exists only in his father’s imag-
ination, the boy tries to help his would-be father attain his goal of being with
Salma, setting the stage for his own existence as well:
‘Sancho,’ Quichotte cried, full of a happiness he didn’t know how to express.
‘My silly little Sancho, my big tall Sancho, my son, my sidekick, my squire!
Hutch to my Starsky, Spock to my Kirk, Scully to my Mulder, BJ to my Hawk-
eye, Robin to my Batman! Peele to my Key, Stimpy to my Ren, Niles to my
Frasier, Arya to my Hound! Peggy to my Don, Jesse to my Walter, Tubbs to my
Crockett, I love you!’ (ivi, 24)
The humour in the first part of both Quixote’s and Quichotte’s adventures
is largely based on their belief in the codes of chivalry and television, respec-
tively. During their journey, they both believe that their actions are guided by
a higher power or supernatural force that intervenes in their lives and helps to
guide them in their endeavours. This belief in a higher will or occult guidance
is a central part of their worldview. On the other hand, the work of Providence
was fundamental to the sentimental fulfilment narrated in the ‘romances’ that
inspired Don Quixote (Dentith 2000). However, the comedic character of the
situations experienced by the two protagonists on their separate love journeys
120
Giuseppe De Riso
differs significantly. In Cervantes, the humorous misunderstandings Alonso

Quijano got into were often of a terminological nature: the lowly nobleman,
who reinvented himself as a knight, looked around him through the lens of the
chivalric stories he had read, using terms and meanings from those fictional
worlds to make sense of the material world. This led to comical results as he
misapplied those terms and misunderstood the people and things he encoun-
tered. He deceived himself due to his reliance on decontextualized language
from a forgotten world.
In Rushdie’s case much of the comic effect is derived from Quichotte’s im-
pressive ability to understand and navigate, at least it appears, the conventions
of television. Quichotte uses these conventions to correctly interpret the other-
wise random signs that fate sends him as he pursues his dream of finding love.
However, other characters mock Quichotte’s unwavering belief in the fateful
nature of love, seeing it as foolish or unreasonable. Quichotte’s serious and
sometimes self-righteous demeanour contrasts with the irreverent disbelief of
his son, Sancho, who mocks his father’s belief in a higher will, despite the
absurdity of his own ‘birth’. The tension between Quichotte’s solemnity and
Sancho’s irreverence creates comedic scenes in which Quichotte’s claims of
predestination are met with humorous disbelief. The wise sayings that Quixo-
te was imparted by his squire are balanced here by Sancho’s biting comments,
which Quichotte always handles with ease. The echoing references to the con-
tent of the television environment from which and in which they propagate
further add to the comic effect. In the following passage, for example, Sancho
responds to Quichotte’s highfalutin musings about attaining his love with a
sarcastic joke that smacks of an advertisement. Quichotte then responds with a
memorable line from Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme’s film The Silence
of the Lambs (1991), regarding the latter’s practice of cannibalism:
‘Do we also have to give up our desire for, and attachment to, the woman we
love?’ ‘The Beloved is exempt,’ Quichotte explained mildly, ‘because the Be-
loved is the goal. These other burdens, however, must be shed.’ ‘Even an occa-
sional glass of Grey Goose and tonic?’ ‘Even fava beans and a nice Chianti.’
(Rushdie 2019, 147, emphasis is mine)
Hannibal Lecter (portrayed by Anthony Hopkins in the film) utters this

line to intimidate Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) as part of a dialogue in which
each character tries to assert control over the other. If for Rushdie “Cervantes
went to war with the junk culture of his own time,” (ivi, 263) then his San-
cho and Quichotte are constantly in tension with TV series, cinema films,
TV commercials, songs, reality shows, and even Rushdie’s own writing. In
121
this case, the use of satire, pastiche, and burlesque is not just for the purpose
of creating humour, but also to convey a message by discussing something
else. The comic elements in the novel freely move between different semantic
fields, resulting in the formation of new meanings as unexpected connections
are made. Reading something triggers spontaneous inspirations in the reader
that seem to have nothing to do with it. Due to the porous and flexible defini-
tions and categories present in the novel, readers may have surprising insights
that seem unrelated to the text. Rushdie uses satire to take aim at a variety of
social, political, and economic issues with a smug and masterfully allusive ir-
reverence that is far more shrewd than the irony present in The Satanic Verses.
It can be argued that Quichotte represents the final stage of Rushdian’s
metaliterary reflection on how fictional characters and situations can interact
with reality. A key theme of the novel is how the author’s imagination shapes
his everyday life and flows back from there into his writing. This reminds one,
of course, of the kind of ‘historiographic metafiction’ that Canadian scholar
Linda Hutcheon (1989) theorised most forcefully in the year Rushdie was sen-
tenced to death, only to be reborn as Joseph Anton, and which is now echoed
in his latest novel in ‘pliable’ form.8
4.2 Converging narratives

The literary device Rushdie employs to achieve his goal is Sam DuChamp,9
a spy novelist. In fact, Quichotte is the main character of the novel Sam is
writing and which we read as he is writing it. In its author’s intention, the nov-
el tries to bridge the gap between high and low culture (Rushdie 2019, 36) by
combining different literary styles and genres. Like Quichotte, Sam is unable
to distinguish between real and imagined events. According to the author, he
developed an incurable “mental disorder” (ibid.) due to too much contact with
the artistic and intellectual environment he spent time in as a child:
And because of such intensive and prolonged childhood overexposure to creative
genius of all types, Brother too, like his incipiently crazy Quichotte, fell victim to
a rare form of mental disorder – his first, paranoia being the second – in the grip
of which the boundary between art and life became blurred and permeable, so that
at times he was incapable of distinguishing where one ended and the other began,
and, even worse, was possessed of the fool’s conviction that the imaginings of
creative people could spill over beyond the boundaries of the works themselves,
8
See also Anderson 1998; Bennett 1985; Jameson 2003; Jencks 1991; Olson 2001.
9
In the novel, he is frequently referred to by the name Brother.
122
Giuseppe De Riso
that they possessed the power to enter and transform and even improve the real
world. (ivi, 36, emphasis is mine)
Sam is gradually able to recognise himself in Quichotte’s events and to admit

that through his own character he can speak indirectly about his own life. Above
all, through writing he expresses his desire to reunite with his son, Marcel, and
his sister, whose name is not mentioned in the novel, since he has lost both of
them due to misunderstandings. The search for Salma thus reflects Quichotte’s
attempt to reconcile with his sister, from whom he has been separated for forty
years. His relationship with Marcel is clearly reflected in that with Sancho.
He had been thinking about her, about everyone he had lost but mainly about
her, weighing the benefits of putting down the burden of their quarrel and mak-
ing peace before it was too late against the risk of triggering one of her nuclear
rages, and unsure if he possessed the courage to make some sort of approach.
If he was honest with himself he knew it was up to him to make the first move,
because she had a deeper grievance than he did. (ivi, 38-39)
This is undoubtedly the author’s most important insight, but it is not the only
one. As mentioned earlier, the stories of Quichotte and his author alternate in a
similar way to the alternation between reality and dream in The Satanic Verses. In
this novel, the metanarrative flow is unique because it reverses the plot develop-
ments of the two main characters. Unlike Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha,
whose stories alternated with the former’s dream, here the narratives of Sam and
Quichotte intertwine, each developing in opposite directions, one leading ‘into’
the other’s. Indeed, unbeknownst to their author, Quichotte’s fictitious search for
love foreshadows the future ‘real’ events of Sam’s family and contributes to his
own death. By contrast, the tensions in Sam’s real life, which had brought about
Quichotte’s creation in the first place, ultimately lead to his character’s fatal ‘birth’.
The idea of narrative reversal is first hinted at with a significant reference
to cinema, in which the lives of Sam and Quichotte are described as a rewind-
ing of an old film by the great Indian comedian Raj Kapoor,10 himself an imi-
tation of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. The funny movements of a great comedian
reminiscent of those of another, even more famous comedian, represent the
contamination between India and the United States, Hollywood and Bolly-
wood, East and West. The rapid backward movement adds to the cartoonish
10
Raj Kapoor is also referred to as the Charlie Chaplin of Indian cinema. He acted in over 150
films, many of which he also produced and directed. He was a pioneer of the Indian film indus-
try and is credited with helping to bring Indian cinema to an international audience.
123
effect. The same seems to be true for Quixote and Quichotte. In the sequel to
Quixote, the errant knight and Sancho interacted with characters who already
knew them from having read the first part of the novel. For the protagonist to
recover from madness and come to terms with himself, meta-referentiality
was crucial.
Similarly, halfway through Quichotte’s narrative, a government spy man-
ages to connect Sam with his son after reading what the former has written
about his new book. He then learns that Marcel is the head of Legion, an
organisation of hacktivists whose efforts are coordinated by him via You-
Tube videos in which he shows himself wearing the Don Quixote mask from
the 2002 Broadway revival Man of La Mancha. Sam’s consternation at how
closely his own life mirrored those portrayed in his novels, and conversely,
how closely his characters resembled reality, is underscored by his use of the
phrase ‘reverse rendition’ from the title of his seventh novel. A possible criti-
cal reading can be derived from this clue:
I’m no critic, sir, but I estimate that you’re telling the reader that the surreal,
and even the absurd, now potentially offer the most accurate descriptors of real
life. It’s an interesting message, though parts of it require considerable suspen-
sion of disbelief to grasp.
[...]
‘Oh my God,’ Brother said, ‘it’s the plot of my seventh book.’ ‘Reverse Ren-
dition,’ Lance Makioka said, actually clapping his hands in delight. ‘I hoped
you’d recognise the similarity. We’re all big fans.’ [...] The world Brother had
made up had become real. (ivi, 205, 210-211)
The relationship between Sam and Quichotte is characterised by momen-

tum rather than causal connections based on chronological linearity. As the
narrative unfolds, Sam realises that his relationship with Quichotte is not sim-
ply a one-way projection from the author to his fictional creation, but rather an
interactive dynamic in which both characters are actively involved. This rela-
tionship involves an interplay between truth and fiction, past and future: “He
was learning, for example, that just as a real son could become unreal, so also
an imaginary child could become an actual one, while, moving in the opposite
direction, a whole, real country could turn into a ‘reality’-like unreality.” (ivi,
201-202, emphasis is mine)
Upon learning that his sister has suffered abuse at the hands of their fa-
ther, just as Sam had imagined for the character of Salma in Quichotte, the
writer’s worldview is shattered and his certainties are called into question.
This event echoes the real-life experiences of the author, Salman Rushdie,
124
Giuseppe De Riso
whose ex-wife, Padma Parvati Lakshmi, revealed that she was sexually
abused by her stepfather when she was only seven years old. The revelation
forces Sam to confront the fact that his own life has been an illusion and
that his previously held feelings of aversion towards his sister were based
on misguided motives:
It was bewildering at such an advanced age to understand that the narrative of
your family which you had carried within you – within which, in a way, you
had lived – was false, or, at the very least, that you had been ignorant of its
most essential truth, which had been kept from you. Not to be told the whole
truth [...] was to be told a lie. That lie had been his truth. Maybe this was the
human condition, to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding
of actual truths. (Rushdie 2019, 273)
Aristotle (2019) referred to this type of revelation as agnition, which

transforms the truth that a character has always held. Sam’s world dissolves
before his eyes as Quichotte’s fiction comes to life through him. He realises
that his life was already governed by the rules of writing before becoming a
writer himself. When he began Quichotte, he was already straddling the line
between reality and fiction, linking his life to the world of art in an insepa-
rable way:
Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it
didn’t understand it wasn’t real. And then he had been writing about an imag-
inary girl in an imaginary family and he had given her something close to
Sister’s fate, without knowing how close to the truth he had come. Had he, as
a child, intuited something and then, afraid of what he had guessed, buried the
intuition so deep that he retained no memory of it?
[...]
He sat at Sister’s bedside, deafened by the echo between the fiction which he
had made and the fiction in which he had been made to live. (Rushdie 2019,
27, emphasis is mine)
Quichotte’s absurd dream of love is shattered when Sam and his sister
reconnect. Salma, who is a minority rights activist and has the same profes-
sion as Padma, was sexually abused by her maternal grandfather. This trauma
explains her addiction to drugs produced by Quichotte’s family and leads to
their tragicomic meeting. The revelation of Salma’s abuse marks the turn to-
wards a tragic denouement in the story. Their first encounter is more comical
than romantic, as it is a secret meeting between an opium addict and a drug
dealer that puts Salma’s life in danger due to an overdose. Salma is repelled by
Quichotte’s resemblance to her abusive grandfather, whose memory she has
125
tried to avoid all her life. The reversal of circumstances confirms the tragic
trajectory for the protagonists. During the second half of the novel, Sam expe-
riences some of the strange situations that he had previously only imagined for
Quichotte and Sancho, which now come to life with full dramatic force. Sam
realises that Quichotte was the way that art and life found to reveal the truth
about his family relationships to him. Additionally, the story contains hints
that foreshadow the author’s downfall and demise:
When his heart trouble began – he thought at once of Quichotte’s youthful
arrhythmia – he understood that his book had known about it all along, even
before he had any symptoms. Everything he had written about the malfunc-
tion of time began to make sense. He had sketched out scenes in which time
accelerated or decelerated, in which it became staccato, a series of pounding
moments, or in which it seemed to skip a beat. As the laws of nature lost their
authority, time would lose its rhythm. He already had that worked out. And
now in his own body his fiction was coming to life. [...]
Had this whole performance [...] really been a way of talking about the immi-
nent end of the Author?” (Rushdie 2019, 323, 325, emphasis is mine)
Sam’s death, which marks the end of his imagination, coincides with an
apocalyptic event in Quichotte’s world. In an attempt to save himself and Sal-
ma, Quichotte passes through a portal to another world. Upon entering, they
become so small in the author’s room that they cannot even breathe the air.
Both Quichotte and Salma suffocate in front of a distressed Sam, who is ex-
periencing a heart attack.
4.3 Mistaken beliefs

Quichotte and his author are ultimately linked by their tragic fate, which is
the result of the intersecting narratives within the novel. Many characteristics
or events described in Quichotte and in other novels by Sam come from his
past or develop into his future. Quichotte is convinced of the divine nature
of his love and never doubts that he knows how to achieve it, just as Sam
believed he was justified in slapping his sister when she left home for a man
sixty years her senior (as depicted in Quichotte through the age difference
between Ismail and Salma). Quichotte’s seemingly innocent madness reflects
Sam’s deep sense of guilt. Despite denying any connection to his character,
Sam’s conscience plays a crucial role in Quichotte’s story. It acts as a ‘dae-
126
Giuseppe De Riso
mon’11 or guiding force, influencing Quichotte’s decisions and contributing to

his dramatic development:
But the old fool? He resisted the idea that Quichotte was just his Author with
a pasteboard helmet on his head and his great-grandfather’s rusted sword in
his hand. Quichotte was somebody he had made up with a nod (okay, more
than a nod) to the great Spaniard who had made him up first. Granted: his
creation and he were approximately the same age, they had near-identical old
roots, uprooted roots, not only in the same city but in the same neighbourhood
of that city, and their parents’ lives paralleled each other, so much so that he,
Brother, on some days had difficulty remembering which history was his own
and which Quichotte’s. Their families often blurred together in his mind. And
yet he insisted: no, he is not I, he is a thing I have made in order to tell the tale
I want to tell. Brother – to be clear about this – watched relatively little TV.
(Rushdie 2019, 201)
It is the author’s ancient error that influences the protagonist negatively

and leads him to make a tragic mistake. Aristotle’s concept of ‘hamartia’12 in
his Poetics refers to the mistake that the hero makes and its role in the devel-
opment of his character (Bremer 1969). The term is difficult to interpret, as it
encompasses both guilt and error, which scholars have not always understood
in terms of causation. Harsh (1945) and Greene (1950) suggest that Aristotle
believed that actions with tragic outcomes were the responsibility of the per-
petrator, at least in part. Some scholars, such as Butcher (1895), have argued
that it is “one great flaw in an otherwise noble personality,” (298) while others,
like D. W. Lucas (1968), have described it as a ‘flaw’ in the soul of the tragic
intellect. Regardless of the specific interpretation, hamartia is generally under-
stood to refer to a moral failure or flaw in the personality or character of the
hero. Van Braam (1912) has a different interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of
hamartia, believing that it refers to an intellectual error, a mistake made out
of necessity or opportunity rather than a personality flaw. According to this
interpretation, the error is characterised by blameless suffering resulting from
wrong decisions made without moral responsibility.
Despite their ignorance of the reality around them and the intertextual con-
nections that bind them together, Sam’s and Quichotte’s tragic fate is ultimate-
11
At least as defined by Bremer (1969) and Dawe (1967), referring, in turn, to a doctoral dis-
sertation by J. Stallmach. See also Stump and Crossett (1983) and Golden (1978, 1992) and on
this subject.
12
From the verb ἁμαρτάνω, hamartánō, to miss the target.
127
ly the result of their mistaken belief that they have a deeper understanding of
events than they actually do. This arrogance is also present in other characters,
such as Sam’s sister, who stubbornly refuses to reconcile with him, or in her
assumption that she will be able to recover from the fatal illness that eventu-
ally kills her. At its core, the novel is about the reconciliation of a family and
the ability to emotionally reconnect, which becomes possible only after a se-
ries of narratives that have kept the characters apart are revealed as such. The
tragic element of the human condition is the inability to understand and ac-
cept loss, especially when it is inescapable and suffering prevails. In this way,
Quichotte’s story reflects Sam’s tragic loss of his family, which was caused
by bad choices made by the author. The tragedy of the novel arises from the
irreparable consequences of a stubbornly maintained error, the inability to find
a balance between belief and doubt. When it becomes clear that lost time
cannot be regained, the only option is to ask for forgiveness and accept one’s
fate. The true hero is the one who defends or wins back his beloved affection.
Madness, on the other hand, is the act of sacrificing love for the false sense of
security that pride, arrogance, and vanity provide:
...did she not understand – O abominable creature! – that human life was short
and that every day of love stolen from her was a crime against life itself? [...]
They had never been that close, Sister lamented, but if he had shown her even
the slightest desire for rapprochement, she would have returned it multiplied a
thousandfold. Instead, there remained his unjust accusation of financial crime,
there remained the slap in the face, there remained the years of proud and un-
repentant absence, and they were all unforgivable. (Rushdie 2019, 262-263)
Quichotte’s encounter with humans transformed into mammoths predicts this

condition. It is the image of an angry, ignorant and selfish humanity whose inabil-
ity to empathise with others is represented by their supposedly animal appearance.
Rushdie’s humour masks Swiftian disdain for human contradictions. It is
impossible to have a happy ending or find solace in an inevitably tragic exis-
tence. Redemption, amorous or sexual affirmation are not allowed. It is even
impossible to find a proper ending. Rushdie does not describe the author’s
death directly, but only hints at it. At the end, it almost seems as if the nov-
el has come to an abrupt halt instead of concluding. Sam and Quichotte are
brought together from opposite sides of the story to a shattering realisation
that leads Sam to give up on life and Quichotte to find death in an attempt to
come into the world. The direction or ‘sense’ of the narrative can only be un-
derstood by considering the alternating movements of the individual stories,
with the unfolding of one enabling the continuation of the other.
128
Giuseppe De Riso
In Quichotte, Rushdie honours the way that his life has inspired his art
and vice versa: he foresaw many of the events, situations, and figures that he
would encounter later in life in his novels. His belief that characters and situ-
ations created through artistic imagination can somehow become real and in-
fluence actual historical events, rather than just serving as fleeting reflections
of human experience, has been a central aspect of his use of magical realism
in all of his works since Midnight’s Children. In this novel, Saleem Sinai’s
personal affairs and the history of the Indian people both contribute to the pro-
gression of their respective stories. Another example of this is how Mahound’s
preaching about Islam was inspired by Gibreel’s acceptance and rejection of
love and faith in The Satanic Verses, which would turn Rushdie himself into
Joseph Anton (a nickname which, in turn, combined Joseph Conrad and Anton
Chekhov). In fact, the Rushdie affair may be the most emblematic example of
this idea. According to Rushdie, receiving a fatwa was like being hit by a curse
or spell that made his life resemble that of many of his characters. He lived
under the pseudonym Joseph Anton for years to avoid a tragic end. Scotland
Yard provided protection for Rushdie after the fatwa was issued. David Sheff
(2000) described Rushdie’s first encounter with the protective forces in Play-
boy magazine, as if it were a scene from a spy film. In the years since, Rushdie
has seen himself reflected in several of his characters.
The story of Shalimar the Clown (2005) seems particularly intriguing when
looked at from this point of view. The story is set between Kashmir and the
United States, where “our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s; were
no longer our own, individual, discrete.” (Rushdie 2005, 45) It is about the
revenge that Shalimar the Clown (whose real name is Noman Sher Noman)
seeks against Max Ophuls, the former US ambassador to India and later head
of counter-terrorism in the US, for taking away his wife Boonyi, whom he
loved in his youth. Shalimar has already killed his wife at the beginning of the
novel and it is implied that he will also try to kill India/Kashmira, a document-
ary filmmaker born from the relationship between Max and Boonyi, who, unlike
Gibreel, wanted to “inhabit facts, not dreams.” (ivi, 19)
After taking Boonyi to her father, Shalimar, before also murdering Max,
utters an ominous message to India that is foreboding: “For every O’Dw-
yer [...] there is a Shaheed Udham Singh, and for every Trotsky a Mercader
awaits.” (Rushdie 2005, 38) Shalimar here refers to Michael Francis O’Dw-
yer, who served as a civil servant in the Indian Civil Service and later as
Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab in British India. O’Dwyer distinguished
himself by approving the Amritsar massacre perpetrated by Reginald Dyer,
reported in chapter two, and subsequently administering the martial law that
129
was immediately triggered. In revenge, O’Dwyer was shot dead by Udham

Singh, an Indian revolutionary and martyr who belonged to the Ghadar Party,
a movement against British rule in India, and the Hindustan Socialist Republi-
can Association (HSRA). Singh was present on the day the Amritsar massacre
took place because he was there serving water in the crowd. During the trial
that followed the killing of O’Dwyer, Singh responded to a question about
his motives for the act: “I did it because I had a grudge against him. Ma-
chine guns on the streets of India mow down thousands of poor women and
children wherever your so-called flag of democracy and Christianity flies.”
(Singh 2013, 189-218) Similarly, the Mercader to whom Shalimar refers is
the Spanish secret agent Jaime Ramón Mercader del Río, who murdered Lev
Trotsky with a pickaxe. Shalimar thus indirectly tells India that he is about
to become her father’s murderer, without the girl naturally being able to sus-
pect him: “the assassin had confessed his crime to her before he committed
it?” (Rushdie 2005, 38) In a similar way to what happened to Gandhi, each
of the two murdered characters has his own nemesis waiting for him in the
future, because doing great things produces your own reflection or nemesis,
who will try to eliminate you. Art knew, therefore, that behind every Rushdie,
too, lurked a Hadi Matar.13 Similarly, Rushdie seems almost to be warning
himself against writing The Satanic Verses through another of his characters,
the pundit Pyarelal: “When you pray for what you most want in the world, [...]
its opposite comes along with it.” (Rushdie 2005, 95)
The more brutal and intolerant side of Islam rose up against Rushdie after
he wrote a novel expressing his desire for a different and more tolerant Islam.
It seems almost startling that Rushdie was able to predict what would happen
to him through literature before, during and after the publication of Quichotte,
despite the recent attack he suffered on himself. Like Shalimar, Hadi Matar
waited patiently for the right moment to take action in real life. Rushdie’s nov-
els predicted his future self without him realising it. They described situations,
loves, and people that Rushdie would encounter far into the future, as if they
were waiting to be described, imagined, and realised. In his art, Rushdie dis-
covers that he has explored not only his past and his own memories, but also
what he conveniently wanted to forget or remember. It is probably through
writing that he has learned how his Muslim upbringing laid the foundation for
his disbelief, creating the figure of Joseph Anton and threatening his own life
at the same time. The stories he feeds on are split up and reassembled in his art
13
The man who tried to kill him. See page 105.
130
Giuseppe De Riso
so that they can no longer be separated from his life. This reflects the internal
contradiction of history based on selective remembering and forgetting, where
any attempt to discern fact from fiction, what we have experienced from what
we want to remember, cause from effect, objective fact from interpretation, is
futile. A wiser approach is to acknowledge the creative and not merely rep-
resentational power of language, to appreciate and fear its potential for si-
multaneous liberation and subjugation. To see it as an abstract environment
in which life and art are constantly in tension, attracting and repelling each
other, separating and reuniting in unpredictable ways. It is this interaction that
makes history possible.
131
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147
List of key words and concepts
Ambiguity (un-, -uous, -uously), 14, 18, 84, 85n, 86, 96, 99, 101-103, 108-
21-22, 22n, 23, 25, 28-29, 34, 47, 110, 111n, 112-113, 116, 120-121,
49, 54, 55, 56n, 59-60, 62, 70, 93, 123, 125, 129, 133
101, 103, 114 Duplicity (-cation), 9, 20-22, 24, 78,
Aporia, 11 101, 105
Authentic (in-, -ity), 15, 24, 28, 30n, 43, Epistemology (-ical), 18-19, 38-39, 49,
59, 72, 85, 90, 118, 137 61n, 62n, 76, 106, 110
Belief (-able, dis-, -er, -ve, un-), 9, 11, Faith (-ful), 18, 26, 46n, 57, 64n, 77, 80-
13n, 20, 20n, 21-22, 25-27, 28n, 83, 85-87, 91, 93-94, 101, 112-113,
31, 37, 40-41, 45, 47, 49-55, 58-60, 129, 144, 146
60n, 61, 61n, 62, 62n, 63-65, 67-70, False (-ly), 12, 12n, 15, 28, 49-50, 57,
72-74, 76-77, 79, 79n, 80, 80n, 81n, 71-73, 98, 101, 108, 117, 128
82-84, 86-89, 94, 94n, 98, 100-101, Historiographic, 104, 104n, 122
103n, 105, 108-109, 111-112, 112n,
Historioplastic, 26, 104, 146
113, 115-116, 116n, 120-121, 124,
History (a-, -ical, -ically, -icity), 5, 9,
12-130, 144
11-12, 12n, 13-15, 15n, 16, 18-19,
Binarism, 23, 26 21n, 22-23, 25-27, 29, 30, 30n, 31,
Chutney (-fication), 47, 71, 84, 96, 136 34, 36-37, 37n, 38-40, 42-48, 50,
Coincidentia oppositorum, 20, 20n, 53n, 54-55, 59-60, 63, 67-69, 71-75,
21n, 22 84-85, 87, 90-92, 100-104, 104n,
Colonial (-ise, -ism, -ist, post-), 17, 55- 106, 109-111, 112n, 113-116, 118,
122, 127, 129, 131, 134-136, 138-
56, 67, 83, 95, 98, 105, 115, 133,
140, 142-143, 146
134-138, 141-143, 145-147, 155
Humour (-ous), 13, 24, 27, 30-31, 46-
Converge (div-, -nce, -nt), 19, 67, 95, 155
47, 50, 65-68, 70-71, 93, 120, 122,
Dominant, 17, 17n, 18-19, 62n, 94n, 98 128, 146
Double (-ness), 23, 63, 67, 94, 109 Hybridity (-sation), 17, 55, 63, 68, 75,
Doublethink, 116, 116n 83, 92n, 94, 98, 116, 134
Doubt (-ful, un-, -edly), 9, 11, 16, 25, Hyphen (-ation), 9, 20, 22, 45
27, 31-32, 35, 39, 46-47, 50-51, Imagine (-ative, -ary, -ation), 9, 27,
54-58, 60, 72, 75, 82-83, 85, 89-90, 42, 45, 50, 56n, 58-59, 60n, 61n,
102, 109, 116, 118, 123, 126, 128 63-64, 64n, 67-68, 70, 75-76, 83,
Dream (day-, -er, -like), 26, 34n, 41-42, 88, 93-94, 95, 98n, 102-103, 109,
47-48, 56, 64n, 71, 75, 79, 81-82, 111, 111n, 113-114, 117, 119, 120,
List of key words and concepts
122, 124-126, 129-130, 134-135, New (ness), 9, 11n, 12, 17, 19, 21, 28-
144, 155 29, 31, 35, 37n, 41, 43, 48, 54, 69,
Inconsistent (-cy), 9, 27, 28n, 34, 36, 76, 81, 83, 86-87, 89, 94, 94n, 95-
40, 69, 100, 116 100, 102-103, 103n, 104-105, 109,
112-113, 116-117, 117n, 120, 122,
Inertia, 103, 103n
124, 140, 154
Invent (-ion, re-), 3, 12, 14, 19, 26, 36,
38, 40, 47, 56-57, 59, 61, 61n, 63, Ontology (-ical), 17-19, 39, 49, 62n, 76,
72, 76, 98-99, 102-103, 108, 116, 90, 106-107, 110, 140, 155
121, 136 Opalescence (-t), 9, 22, 25, 27, 47, 49,
Inversion, 110, 137 54, 60, 67, 75
Iridescence (-t), 48-49, 67, 115 Opposite (-tion), 12, 19, 20, 20n, 21,
21n, 22, 22n, 23, 26-27, 29, 53n, 59,
Irony (-ic, -ally), 11-12, 17, 25, 27-28,
77, 86, 92, 100, 108, 110, 113, 119,
28n, 29, 30n, 32, 36, 39, 46, 52-53,
123-124, 128, 130
56, 63, 72, 78, 91, 99n, 101, 105,
114, 122, 136, 142 Palindrome (-ic), 9, 22, 26, 115
Magical realism, 17, 25, 63, 65, 129, Palinodic, 9, 26, 75, 101, 118
133, 138, 139, 143, 146, 147 Panfictionalism, 16, 16n
Make-believe, 3, 55, 63, 65, 70, 72, 119 Pastiche, 25, 30, 30n, 103, 104n, 105,
Metamodernism (-ist), 105-106, 146- 122
147, 155 Pliability (-able), 26, 104, 122
Metamorphosis (-ic), 26, 45, 78, 83, Postmodernism (-ist), 12, 16-20, 26, 29,
92, 92n, 95, 106-107, 111n, 140, 30n, 49-50, 60, 62n, 73, 76, 103-
146 104, 104n, 105, 110, 134, 137, 139-
Metaxy (metaxis), 9, 22, 26, 101, 105- 143, 145-146
106, 107-108, 113-114, 137, 141 Reality (un-), 9, 14-15, 15n, 16-18, 21n,
Migrant (-te, -tion), 17, 21, 25-26, 39, 23, 26, 28n, 29-30, 40, 42, 48, 53,
83-84, 95, 97-98, 141 55, 58-60, 62n, 63, 67-68, 70, 72-73,
Mimicry, 98 81-82, 84, 94, 96, 98, 101-104, 108-
109, 111, 113-125, 127, 134, 153
Myth (-ical, -ology), 9, 13n, 14, 20, 22,
24-25, 27, 29-30, 32n, 33-34, 65, Reliable (-ability, un-), 9, 18, 25, 27,
68, 73-74, 102-103, 105, 107n, 111, 37-39, 47, 49, 51, 53-54, 60-61, 61n,
111n, 117, 141, 145 69, 92, 144
Momentum, 109, 124 Restoring force, 82, 109
Modernism (-ist), 15, 17-19, 26, 49, 61, Simulate (-ion, dis-), 14, 28, 61n, 89
61n, 62n, 76, 110, 134-135, 139- Suspect (-ion, un-), 25, 27, 47, 49-52,
140, 143, 146 54-56, 59-60, 67, 69-70, 72, 84, 130
150
Giuseppe De Riso
Tentative acceptance, 9, 27, 47, 70-71 Truth (-ful, -fulness, un-), 3, 7, 12-13,
Thinking other-wise, 94, 94n 13n, 14-15, 15n, 18, 20, 22n, 23-
24, 28, 32n, 36, 39-40, 42-44, 47,
Transform (-ation, -ative), 12, 26, 65, 50, 55, 57-58, 61, 61n, 62-63, 69,
78, 78n, 88n, 92, 94, 97, 102-103, 72-75, 76n, 83-85, 87-88, 90-92,
106, 114, 119, 123, 125, 128, 143 94, 98, 101-103, 109, 115-116, 119,
Translate (-ion, -or), 17, 46, 46n, 83, 87, 124-126, 137, 145, 147, 154
95-97, 106, 114, 134-137, 141, 143
151
Acknowledgements
This work represents the crowning achievement of a decade-long journey of in-

quiry. The seed for this project was planted with the publication of my doctoral
thesis. Drawing comparisons between the mediums of video games and cinema,
that work delved into the production of digital narratives through the interplay
between reality and virtuality. My undertaking would not have been possible
without the guidance of the two individuals who have been with me since the
beginning of my academic pursuits. To them, I owe not just my professional
and intellectual growth, but also my personal development. The first person I
would like to thank is Rossella Ciocca. A true paragon of discipline and earnest-
ness, she has been an incomparable guidance to me. Her supervision has been
characterised by unwavering attention, rigour, and kindness. One can only hope
to encounter such a rare combination in a mentor. I have found her presence,
affection, and wisdom to be a nourishing elixir for my mind, for which I will be
eternally indebted. I am also deeply grateful to Maria Laudando, who possesses
a unique blend of human sensitivity and an intense emotional depth. Her ability
to cut through the façade of things and directly access their essence is a testa-
ment to her intelligence. It is through her that I have come to realise the notion
that there can be no true insight without respect and humbleness. Her advice and
comprehension have been invaluable in my journey of learning. Both Rossella
and Maria have been a consistent source of support during trying times, and a
haven of reassurance in moments of confusion. My gratitude towards them is
immeasurable and will remain etched in my heart for all time.
Staying on the subject of professional relationships, I must express my
heartfelt appreciation to Bianca Del Villano. She has been a trusted advisor
and an exemplary role model, both as a teacher and as a colleague. I am fortu-
nate to be able to boast of her friendship. I have also had the pleasure of cross-
ing paths with a number of other colleagues who, each in their own unique
way, have added knowledge and enjoyment to my journey. They are Anna
Maria Cimitile, Mara De Chiara, Simonetta de Filippis, Roxanne Doerr, Elena
Intorcia, Anna Mongibello, Aureliana Natale, Oriana Palusci, Katherine Rus-
so and Tiziana Terranova.
My deepest gratitude belongs to my mother Elvira and my father Antonio
for raising me unsullied by vanity. Through them I have learned that true em-
pathy and understanding for others can only be achieved when we accept and
embrace our own contradictions. A tender thought also for my sister, Lina. I
am grateful for the memories of laughter and tears that we have shared togeth-
Acknowledgements
er and for her generous spirit. Though distance may now separate us, I hope
that we can continue to share new memories, together with her dear husband
Giuseppe, whom I consider as a younger brother, and their precious Giulia.
Since her arrival, I have found new motivation and inspiration in my daily
pursuits.
My deepest gratitude extends to my father-in-law Antonio, his lovely wife
Maria, and their daughter Valentina. You are my second family, not chosen for
me by fate but rather by the bond of mutual affection and esteem. I have been
blessed to learn so much from each of you, and I hope to be the son to you that
fate may have intended on another path.
My sincerest thanks goes out to my dear friend, Alfonso Maresca, for the
enduring bond we have shared. As often as I needed the truth spoken, he was
the one to do so, never shying away from the challenging, yet necessary, paths
to my self-discovery and autonomy. He has also contributed to my being here
today, writing these words.
A special thanks must go out to Maria Russo and Martina Piccirillo for
their contributions to this project. Maria’s expertise in reviewing the bibli-
ographical material was crucial, and Martina’s talents in design are evident in
the beautiful cover she created under a tight deadline. I am grateful to both of
them for their patience and dedication in making our collaboration successful
despite the challenging circumstances. In this regard, Mariano Cinque also
deserves particular praise for his miraculously fast and accurate editing work,
which made it possible for this volume to be published on schedule.
As I reach the end of this endeavour, my thoughts turn to the one who has
been my spiritual fulfilment and source of strength, my beloved wife Maria
Ida. Your presence in my life has been the binding force of my past, the steady
pillar of my present and the hope of my future. In the stormy seas of life’s
journey, I am eternally grateful for the gift of your love, which has been and
continues to be the greatest treasure I have ever found.
154
About the author
Giuseppe De Riso is a researcher in English Literature at the University of

Naples “L’Orientale”, where he also completed his Ph.D. in Cultural and Post-
colonial Studies of the Anglophone World. He was also editorial assistant and
webmaster for Anglistica AION, an interdisciplinary journal of the Department
of Literary, Linguistic, and Comparative Studies of the University of Naples
“L’Orientale”. He published two books: Affect and the Performative Dimension
of Fear in the Indian English Novel: Tumults of the Imagination (Cambridge
Scholars, 2018), and Affective Maps and Bio-mediated Bodies in Tridimen-
sional Videogames of the Anglophone World (Tangram Edizioni Scientifiche,
2013). He also published different articles on Anglo-Indian literature and digi-
tal media, such as “Time out of Time: Transworld Identity and the Collapse of
Ontological Boundaries in The Accidental by Ali Smith” (2022), “The Algebra
of Anger. Social Oppression and Queer Intersectionality in Funny Boy and The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness” (2021), “Writing with the Ghost: Specters of
Narration in Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje” (2020), “Ethical Responsibility
in Midnight’s Children. Clinical Storytelling as a Form of Biological and Cul-
tural Survival” (2019), “Palimpsests of Power in Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives
of Others”, “Memory and Negotiations of Identity in Train to Pakistan”, “Of
Smoke and Mirrors: Tribal Women in Postcolonial India” (2018) and “Gam-
ing Gender: Virtual Embodiment as a Synaesthetic Experience” (2015). He is
currently researching on English Post- and Metamodernism, the processes of
transmedia convergence and contamination in literature, as well as ethnic-reli-
gious and gender issues in the Anglo-Indian novel.
IL TORCOLIERE • Officine Grafico-Editoriali d’Ateneo
Università di Napoli L’Orientale
stampato nel mese di gennaio 2023
Dipartimento di Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Comparati
Dottorato in Studi Letterari, Linguistici e Comparati
In this book, the literary world of Salman Rushdie is carefully scrutinised using a
‘metaleptical’ critical approach. Weaving together truth and fiction, reality and
fantasy in his novels, the Anglo-Indian author’s work exudes a ‘metamodern’
sensibility as it seamlessly weaves the fabric of real-world experience with the
intricate patterns of language and art. Beginning with the contradictions and
errors in the narrative of Rushdie’s first masterpiece Midnight’s Children, through
the blending of the sacred and the secular in The Satanic Verses, to the palin-
dromic movement of the mutual convergence of life and writing in Quichotte, the
volume takes the reader on a journey of discovery of the creative power of
language and how it shapes and is shaped by history. Salman Rushdie’s work
offers, in fact, the opportunity to engage in a nuanced examination of the
balance between historical reality and artistic expression, individual aspirations
and collective needs, continuity and decay, truth and make-believe.
ISSN 2724-5519
ISBN 978-88-6719-266-3

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List of key words and concepts 149

About the author 155

1.1 Rushdie’s aporia

completely different context and a message that was in direct opposition to

Rushdie here describes Gandhi’s historical achievements and representa-

Rushdie contrasts the unstable and ephemeral nature of postmodernism (which

verisimilitude. Followers of Gottlob Frege’s8 philosophy (Mendelsohn 2005),

Conversely, McHale observes that modernist literature was characterised

flicting moral standards and suspend judgement between different points of

1.2 Playing on duplicity and hyphenation

many elements, characterised by the proximity of opposites or contrasting fea-

1.3 Opalescence, metaxy and palindromes

While Chandrabarty’s critique is certainly accurate, it is perhaps overly

tory sentiments in relation to religion, nationalism or any prevailing orthodoxy,

Who would want to believe that they never met again,

2.1 A story rooted in history, myths and inconsistencies

is always a slightly different interpretation, depending on how well we are

faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning [...] something.” (ivi, 22,

As mentioned earlier, at a certain point in the novel Saleem makes a refer-

2.2 Reliable fabrications: a narrative of bias and doubting

Saleem is obviously emotionally invested in the events; Rushdie does not

Using Ahmed’s unhappiness to foreshadow one of the central themes of The

Other important ethical questions follow then from this considerations:

rumours, hearsay, and unverified stories, in a complex web of the ordinary

2.3 Opalescent writing and tentative acceptance

The epistemological uncertainty in Midnight’s Children, a characteristic

improve his reliability as a narrator, as is already anticipated in the chapter

thing to an objective refutation of Saleem’s narrative in order to accept his

which it validates the narrative we want to believe. This becomes especially

Acceptance of the invention is determined by its verisimilitude, that is:

series of signposts [...]. Subsequently, in order to be accepted by the reader,

Self-deception, suspicion and opalescence are narrative devices found in

result of the controlled administration of ‘parts’ of Naseem’s body that stimu-

I would like to draw attention to three particular literary devices Rushdie

a) Anthropomorphising of inanimate objects

and the chronicles of officially recognised or documented historical facts. Ac-

He is described as a hybrid of the mythological figure of Charon, a ‘watery

Having witnessed the events first-hand, he goes so far as to challenge Sal-

Tentative acceptance is a consequence of make-believe because it makes the

We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the

3.1 Mirrored perceptions

As to Gibreel, he struggles between wanting and being unable to believe in

survives by returning to his roots. Gibreel’s failure to find a woman to love

Indeed, there have been a seemingly endless number of violent protests

3.2 Challenging textual authority: the emergence of the new

Adding a third polarity to the Gibreel/Satan binomial,22 Salman realises

Booker summarises the essence of the reflection we are conducting here,

Kundera sees the creation of an “imaginary terrain in which moral judge-

values, unquestioned truths or strict ethical requirements: “The Satanic Verses

abstractly (i.e. virtually) with other assemblages on different levels of exis-

Ultimately, Rushdie would answer the question himself: “Mélange, hotch-