“Turn Your Watch Upside Down in Bombay and You See the Time in London”: Catoptric Urban Configurations in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

Abstract

This article reassesses the counter-discursive significance of the urban problematic in Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. It argues that cities in the text unsettle the ideas of historical fixity and geographical location by continually reconfiguring each other and that urban spatialities and temporalities and urban identities are di-versified, rearticulated and displaced through the production of “satanic”, or erosive, migrant verses, spells and stories that undermine official metropolitan narratives. Such di-versifications involve strategies that I have termed “catoptric” (from “catoptrics”, a term which designates the study of images and light) in order to encompass a variety of mirror effects and illusions and the ways in which they bear on subjectivities, cartographic discourse and travel. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, Rushdie's characters cross and thus subvert a number of looking-glass frontiers. These catoptric itineraries compromise the concepts of origin, teleological directionality and cultural purity and have cities reflect each other in new ways.