The Satanic Verses: The Rhetoric and the Dream

Abstract

I am inclined to trust Salman Rushdie’s claim, shortly after The Satanic Verses had been symbolically
burnt in Bradford (14 Jan. 1989), that “that was not the book [he] wrote.” He wrote a tale only to discover that
his readers’ “misreadings” produced another; a “framed” narrative that drove him to live in hiding and
perilously precipitate declarations of apostasy. If Rushdie wrote the tale(s) he wrote (immigration, divided
selves, dreams), the text produced its own tale (defamation, blasphemy) and confirmed its implied author in
what Derrida calls, in another context, his “faithful unfaithfulness.” Let us believe, in spite of the controversies,
that Rushdie’s intentions are liberating ones and that his authorial intentions, as he asserts in his apologia “In
Good faith,” though a bit oddly, are the only trustworthy guide for the novel’s meaning