The Jolt of the Grotesque: Aesthetics as Ethics in The Satanic Verses

Now I challenge anyone to explain the diabolic and diverting farrago of Brueghel the Droll otherwise than by a kind of special, Satanic grace. For the words “special grace” substitute, if you wish, the words “madness” or “hallucination;” but the mystery will remain almost as dark.

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

Amplifying a tendency in Salman Rushdie’s novels since Midnight’s Children, his The Satanic Verses engages the grotesque to pose various ethical questions. He relates these questions with textual problems that engage literary invention, authorship, normalization, urban tensions, and the migration of both individuals and their stories. Rushdie has been celebrated for his alertness to processes of cultural transfer and transformation, even as he has been accused of an uncritical celebration of mixture. The performance and diagnosis of such transfer in The Satanic Verses combines the dynamics listed above with humor and irony. One of the novel’s recurring strategies is to combine discordant, supposedly heteronomous attributes, thereby blurring identities, geographical specificity, and chronology, as well as breaking linguistic strictures, as its dissonant, frivolous tones define moments of pathos, violence, and doubt. However, its “inappropriateness” allows The Satanic Verses to produce sophisticated acts of introspection and criticism. These incongruities give the text an elusiveness that multiplies the challenges of reading it and of forming an ethical response to its peculiarity. Even as it explores cultural and personal combinations and collisions, it performs verbal combinations, mutations, and collisions. That is to say, its very form evokes qualities and arguments that resist the ironies and asymmetries of orthodox assumptions.

It is through such aesthetic strategies that it jolts its reader into ethical questions, its moves resonating strongly with Derek Attridge’s discussion of the singular and the other in The Singularity of Literature. Attridge’s emphasis is on singularity with relation. For him, the singularity of the other is not premised on an inviolable or absolute distinction. For Attridge, “Otherness…is produced in an active or event-like relation—we might prefer to call it a relating” (29; italics Attridge’s). A singularity cannot be different or “other” in a void—it can only be “other than” something to which it is placed in a comparative relation. The grotesque in The Satanic Verses shows its very formation and transformation as the functions of relations. It is designated “the other” as a function of its subjection to the operations of the gaze, its aberration emerging from normalizing processes and the aspirations that the observation of (and desire for) power brings. In its inventiveness, The Satanic Verses itself displays, and encourages its reader to see, a range of relations that demonstrate its alterity or originality. This alterity requires the reader’s participation to realize its inventiveness—whether in recognizing a pun, a playful allusion, words from another language, or various other verbal formations that invite interpretive agility. As Attridge contends, “Absolute alterity, as long as it remains absolute, cannot be apprehended at all; there is, effectively, no such thing” (30). Alterity, as an expression of difference, or singularity, has its engine in its invention of difference through its engagement with the resources of the past. To write an original work involves the reworking of available materials “by destabilizing them, heightening their internal inconsistencies and ambiguities and exploiting their gaps and tensions” so as to make their otherness manifest (Attridge, 62–3). The gambit of the inventive work—and its ethical demand on the reader—is to make its inventiveness explicit. Moreover, Attridge notes, the “uniqueness” to which an ethical reading “must do justice is not an unchanging essence, nor the sum of the work’s difference from all other works as it appears in a time and place, but the inventive otherness of the work” (Attridge, 91). Therefore, this ethical demand also seeks a response that traces the work’s play with its resources while recognizing its reconfiguration of-- and differences from--them.

Definitions of the Grotesque

The aesthetics of such an ethics is dependent on recognizing both the need for thematization and the “otherness” or difficulty of the text. In The...