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

Abstract

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