Document Type
Article
Abstract
In his essay, “Is Nothing Sacred?”, Salman Rushdie lays out a place for literature as an arena in which various perspectives may interact. He thereby provides a context for the controversy regarding his books, most particularly The Satanic Verses. Despite his claims, however, literature, as Rushdie conceives it, operates not simply as an arena for discourse but similarly as a rule-maker, controlling the discourse which operates within its bounds. The Satanic Verses, in particular, suggests that revelation as it passes through unstable and hybrid human language loses its authority and power to speak purely or dogmatically. In so doing, Rushdie questions not only the purity of divine revelation, but also the integrity of poetic and fictional language, indicating that both serve as a kind of will to power or will to truth. In his criticism, then, Rushdie ironically sets up a place of privilege for literature that his novel The Satanic Verses essentially deconstructs. In this ironic tension, he demonstrates the uncompromisable boundaries existing between purportedly atheological or secular domains of discourse and theological or revelationally-based domains of discourse. In other words, the pressupposition that God has not (or could not have) spoken and the presupposition that he has (or could have) spoken are inextricably at odds with one another and thus fight for the same territory in defining the nature of all discourse.
Repository Citation
William, Conrad. ""If your God has really spoken to you… then all the world must hear it": The Discourses of Revelation and Satire in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 6, no. 2, 2006, pp. 1–16. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol6/iss2/7
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