Rushdie's Everest: Secular Transcendence in The Satanic Verses

Abstract

Alleluia Cone, a female character from Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, has a visionary experience when she reaches the summit of Mount Everest. This transcendent experience is not ironized in the novel by the author's characteristic discourse of religious doubt. In fact, it exists in the text as a counterweight to the career of the prophet Mahound, who also ascends a mountain with aspirations of transcendence. Allie explains her experience in terms of her deceased father's rejection of ‘the idea of the continuum’. Otto Cone's universe of irreconcilable elements admits the possibility of the sublime without reconciling it with a consistent metaphysical system. In fact, this approach to the sublime may allow a perceiver to regard it in that other (Rudolf) Otto's words as a ‘mysterium tremendum’, discontinuous with the path of normal life. The sublime mountain presents not just an obstacle in Allie's life journey but an incoherence; a break in the track. Allie is one of only a few Rushdie characters untroubled by a religious upbringing and yet she is the one who, in her encounter with Everest, experiences transcendence in its naked perfection. This paper explores the paradox of secular transcendence in this novel, noting that Allie's reflections on the topic echo some of the author's own in ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’