Salman Rushdie (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

300 Pages·2003·1.79 MB·English

by  Harold Bloom

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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
©2003 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.
Introduction © 2003 by Harold Bloom.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Salman Rushdie / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
p. cm. -- (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 0-7910-7400-5
1. Rushdie, Salman--Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom,Harold.
II. Series.
PR6068.U757 Z844 2002
823'.914--dc21
2002152674
Chelsea House Publishers
1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400
Broomall, PA 19008-0914
http://www.chelseahouse.com
Contributing Editor: Anne Marie Albertazzi
Cover designed by Terry Mallon
Cover photo by © Matthew Mendelsohn/CORBIS
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Rushdie’s Shameas Apologue 5
M.D. Fletcher
Censorship and Justice: On Rushdie and Soyinka 19
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
“Rehearsing Voices”: Salman Rushdie’s Grimus 23
Catherine Cundy
Literary Theory and the Rushdie Affair 37
K.M. Newton
The Satanic Verses as a Cinematic Narrative 51
Nicholas D. Rombes, Jr.
Postcolonial Differend: Diasporic
Narratives of Salman Rushdie 63
Vijay Mishra
Materialism, the Uncanny, and History
in Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie 99
Eleni Coundouriotis
Tales of the Alhambra: Rushdie’s Use
of Spanish History in The Moor’s Last Sigh 121
Paul A. Cantor
vi CONTENTS
Victim into Protagonist? Midnight’s Children
and the Post-Rushdie National
Narratives of the Eighties 145
Josna E. Rege
Demonizing Discourse in Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses 185
Brian Finney
Pessoptimism: Satire and the Menippean Grotesque
in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children 209
John Clement Ball
“You Must Remember This”: Salman
Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh 233
Stephen Baker
The Dialectic of Shame:
Representation in the MetaNarrative
of Salman Rushdie’s Shame 247
Ayelet Ben-Yishai
Chronology 267
Contributors 271
Bibliography 275
Acknowledgments 279
Index 281
Editor’s Note
My Introduction follows Salman Rushdie himself by arguing the case for the
purely aesthetic achievement of The Satanic Verses.
M.D. Fletcher finds Rushdie’s Shame an apologia pro vita sua, after
which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. defends both Wole Soyinka and Rushdie
against the forces of censorship.
To Catherine Cundy, Grimus marks an entrance into Rushdie’s work,
while K.M. Newton spins a fine web of literary theory that seems to me
sublimely irrelevant to Rushdie’s sufferings.
The palpably cinematic elements in The Satanic Verses are set forth by
Nicholas D. Rombes, Jr., after which Vijay Mishra sees Rushdie’s mode as
diasporic narrative.
I find little in common between the work of Toni Morrison and Salman
Rushdie, despite the argument of Eleni Coundouriotis.
Paul A. Cantor shrewdly focuses on Rushdie’s excursions into Spanish
history in The Moor’s Last Sigh.
The influence of Midnight’s Children on national narratives of the
eighties is outlined by Josna E. Rege.
Brian Finney, approaching the heart of the matter, deals with the
demonic in The Satanic Verses, while John Clement Ball examines traditions
of satire in Midnight’s Children.
Stephen Baker illuminates aspects of The Moor’s Last Sigh, after which
Ayelet Ben-Yishai considers complexities of representation in Shame.
vii

Introduction
The Satanic Verses clearly is fated to be Salman Rushdie’s most notorious
book. After rereading it against Midnight’s Childrenand The Moor’s Last Sigh,
it seems to me also Rushdie’s largest aesthetic achievement.
Though I allow myself some remarks in the Editor’s Note upon the
essays collected in this volume, they possess in common a great disinterest in
the question of the aesthetic. Since their interests are theoretical, historical,
Marxist, Post-Colonial, they scarcely are interested in asking and answering
the question: how good a book is The Satanic Verses? Rushdie fortunately is
not of their number. He passionately defends his book as an aesthetic value,
as a figurative work that transcends political and religious considerations.
Audacity is the keynote of The Satanic Verses. Though an Enlightened
sensibility, Rushdie writes of Mahound with insight, humane reverence, and
awakened imagination. As a historical portrait of the prophet of Islam,
Rushdie’s Mahound is persuasive and properly enigmatic.
Unfortunately, 1988 was not a good year to publish The Satanic Verses.
Indeed, 2002 would be even worse. The Ayatollah Khomenei is dead and his
fatwah (I believe) is void, but now that militant Islam and the West are, more
or less, at war, Rushdie remains in a somewhat precarious condition, even in
the United States. And of course he must be haunted, by the eleven deaths
and sixty injuries that accompanied The Satanic Versesinto our world.
To his everlasting credit, Rushdie has broken with the motley crew of
postcolonialism, the rabblement of lemmings who might have seen him as a
martyr according to the Gospel of Foucault. He has proclaimed The Satanic
Verses as a figurative achievement, a cunning and beautiful structure of
rhetorical tropes. His book’s purpose is neither to exalt nor to debase Islam,
or its prophet, but to tell an enchanting story, and to add strangeness to
beauty.
Rather than quote Rushdie upon Rushdie, I turn instead to the text of
The Satanic Verses, to the fearful moment in which Mahound executes the
poet Baal:
1