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Nameless Being
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So I seem to have enjoyed this book a lot more than some. I liked the blend of fantasy and reality, the quality of the writing, and the multiple threads that were maintained even though the threads were not continuous, but instead seemingly temporarily abandoned to be resumed later. Though I also saw some common themes being present in all threads. I will admit though that there are many aspects of the book that left me wondering what Rushdie's intent was, and even in cases where I think I understand at times was at a loss of how to put my thoughts into words. With regard to that I really, really appreciate BelleZora's comments.
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Originally Posted by BelleZora
Metamorphosis happens throughout this book, most significantly as Gibreel Farishta becomes an angel and Saladin Chamcha becomes the devil. But this post is now too long. This is a theme I would like to see discussed and I’ll likely have a good deal to say about it. But now I must read Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
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Metamorphosis! That's just the word I was looking for. Much better than the word I was originally thinking of, reincarnation. Many of the characters go through a metamorphosis in the book, both in a reality based sense and a fantasy based sense, and also across geography and centuries of time. And not just Gibreel and Saladin, but others as well (eg Ayesha).
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Originally Posted by BelleZora
This book asks so many questions that I can barely (or not even) comprehend them, much less the answers, although questions are obviously more important to Rushdie than answers. The questions that held my attention most concerned the presence of good and evil within the same person: how could this be? What does it mean?
Rushdie asks: "Are we coming closer to it? Should we even say that these are two fundamentally different types of self?"
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Exactly what I got out of it. Are good and evil the two sides of the same coin, two aspects of any character, or really just a spectrum running from white to black with most of it gray? Which leads me to discussing one of the main initial interests I had in this book, why Islamic leaders were so offended by this book?
Of course the mere mention of the so called “Satanic Verses” may have been enough. When Mahound (Muhammad) is offered status and power in Jahilian (Mecca) if only he will be flexible in his belief that there is only one God—Allah— and accept the pagan goddesses Uzza. Manat, and Al-Lat as lesser deities he goes to the cave on the mountain to await a revelation from the Angel Gibreel (Gabriel). He receives a revelation that he may do so, announces this to his followers and others in Jahilian, but quickly renounces this a a false revelation from Satan. Bad enough in the eyes of Islamic leaders to even speak of this, but in this book Rushdie has Gibreel reveal that that "Satanic" revelation was not from Satan, but from him.
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At the end of his wrestling match with the Archangel Gibreel, the Prophet Mahound falls into his customary, exhausted, post-revelatory sleep, but on this occasion he revives more quickly than usual. When he comes to his senses in that high wilderness there is nobody to be seen, no winged creatures crouch on rocks, and he jumps to his feet, filled with the urgency of his news. ‘It was the Devil,’ he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving it voice. ‘The last time, it was Shaitan.’ This is what he has heard in his listening, that he has been tricked, that the Devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but 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.
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There are also instances where Rushdie expresses cynicism about the very notion of divine revelations.
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After that Salman began to notice how useful and well timed the angel’s revelations tended to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound’s views on any subject, from the possibility of space travel to the permanence of Hell, the angel would turn up with an answer, and he always supported Mahound, stating beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was impossible that a man should ever walk upon the moon, and being equally positive on the transient nature of damnation: even the most evil of doers would eventually be cleansed by hellfire and find their way into the perfumed gardens, Gulistan and Bostan. It would have been different, Salman complained to Baal, if Mahound took up his positions after receiving the revelation from Gibreel; but no, he just laid down the law and the angel would confirm it afterwards; so I began to get a bad smell in my nose, and I thought, this must be the odour of those fabled and legendary unclean creatures, what’s their name, prawns.
The fishy smell began to obsess Salman, who was the most highly educated of Mahound’s intimates owing to the superior educational system then on offer in Persia. On account of his scholastic advancement Salman was made Mahound’s official scribe, so that it fell to him to write down the endlessly proliferating rules. All those revelations of convenience, he told Baal, and the longer I did the job the worse it got. . . .
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What finally finished Salman with Mahound: the question of the women; and of the Satanic verses. Listen, I’m no gossip, Salman drunkenly confided, but after his wife’s death Mahound was no angel, you understand my meaning. But in Yathrib he almost met his match. Those women up there: they turned his beard half-white in a year. The point about our Prophet, my dear Baal, is that he didn’t like his women to answer back, he went for mothers and daughters, think of his first wife and then Ayesha: too old and too young, his two loves. He didn’t like to pick on someone his own size. But in Yathrib the women are different, you don’t know, here in Jahilia you’re used to ordering your females about but up there they won’t put up with it. When a man gets married he goes to live with his wife’s people! Imagine! Shocking, isn’t it? And throughout the marriage the wife keeps her own tent. If she wants to get rid of her husband she turns the tent round to face in the opposite direction, so that when he comes to her he finds fabric where the door should be, and that’s that, he’s out, divorced, not a thing he can do about it. Well, our girls were beginning to go for that type of thing, getting who knows what sort of ideas in their heads, so at once, bang, out comes the rule book, the angel starts pouring out rules about what women mustn’t do, he starts forcing them back into the docile attitudes the Prophet prefers, docile or maternal, walking three steps behind or sitting at home being wise and waxing their chins. How the women of Yathrib laughed at the faithful, I swear, but that man is a magician, nobody could resist his charm; the faithful women did as he ordered them. They Submitted: he was offering them Paradise, after all..
‘Anyway,’ Salman said near the bottom of the bottle, ‘finally I decided to test him.’
One night the Persian scribe had a dream in which he was hovering above the figure of Mahound at the Prophet’s cave on Mount Cone. At first Salman took this to be no more than a nostalgic reverie of the old days in Jahilia, but then it struck him that his point of view, in the dream, had been that of the archangel, and at that moment the memory of the incident of the Satanic verses came back to him as vividly as if the thing had happened the previous day. ‘Maybe I hadn’t dreamed of myself as Gibreel,’ Salman recounted. ‘Maybe I was Shaitan.’ The realization of this possibility gave him his diabolic idea. After that, when he sat at the Prophet’s feet, writing down rules rules rules, he began, surreptitiously, to change things.
‘Little things at first. If Mahound recited a verse in which God was described as all-hearing, all-knowing, I would write, all-knowing, all-wise. Here’s the point: 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? Look, I swear, I was shaken to my soul. It’s one thing to be a smart bastard and have half-suspicions about funny business, but it’s quite another thing to find out that you’re right.
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To question Mahound (Muhammad) as a prophet, to question parts or all of the Quran, understandably the worst sort of blasphemy.
This idea is raised again when the modern Ayesha (the butterfly woman) claims to have received a revelation from Gibreel that the entire village of Titlipur should walk to Mecca, and that when they reach the sea it will part to allow them to pass. Later pressed to reveal how this revelation came to her she admits that she heard in in the lyrics of popular songs of the day.
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Originally Posted by BelleZora
A second theme that fascinates me is the experience of the migrant, which is also a metamorphosis. But there will be time enough in this thread for that.
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Yes, what I took from the overall story of Saladin Chamcha was that his metamorphosis, purposely erasing his Indian identity to assume a British one, was a false effort, the work of Satan so to speak. Becoming a success, but as an actor whose face no one sees but who can imitate anyone. He recovers his true self only on returning to India and marrying Zeenat Vakil.
Rushdie also has some negative things to say about what sort of discrimination and abuse an immigrant, especially one of brown to black skin shade, can expect in Great Britain.
So I found this a very complex book and probably have only grasped the meaning of some of it. I am really looking forward to more discussion from others.
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