HOTCHPOTCH Hotchpotch

Hotchpotch

Introduction

Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, and the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves. (Rushdie, 1991, p. 394).

 

Discussion

It is notoriously difficult to predict the future importance of contemporary art works, since this depends not only upon internal qualities but also upon the concerns of the future society which will evaluate them. This allows more confidence than usual in predicting the future importance of The Satanic Verses, since it is not only an unusually ambitious and accomplished art work in terms of traditional internal literary qualities, but it also reflects and embodies lasting concerns. A brilliantly written work about, say, the Cold War may be forgotten as we move farther from that era and our interest shifts to hotter wars. While political ideologies and conflicts, even those of superpowers, may fade within decades, some things have greater staying power. Communism is nearly gone, and capitalism and democracy could go in our lifetimes, as well, but the gaps between faith and secularism, between dark skins and light, between fact and fiction will be with us for the foreseeable future. The Satanic Verses not only treats such conflicts with exceptional insight and intelligence, but, through the controversy which it has aroused, it is itself a part of them.

Everyone has a different definition of postmodernism, and The Satanic Verses, like most contemporary works, fits some and not others. It meets, for instance, Linda Hutcheon's criterion by being, in part, "historiographic metafiction" (1988, p. 5), while it fails to meet Brian McHale's by failing to substitute an ontological dominant for an epistemological (1987, p. 10). We must, however, bear in mind McHale's proper insistence that the term "postmodernism" is a provisional construction, useful but always subject to change (1992, pp. 1-3). While theorists argue over whether postmodernism is an extension or a rejection of modernism, nearly everyone who uses the term agrees that it must logically describe what follows modernism. Since The Satanic Verses has itself changed our understanding of the function, meaning, and significance of contemporary fiction, it is, almost by definition, what follows modernism, and our definitions of postmodernism must now accommodate themselves to this path breaking work.

Some writers were able to see the lasting importance of The Satanic Verses almost immediately. As early as 1991, Christine Brooke-Rose placed Gibreel Farishta, one of Rushdie's two protagonists, in another postmodernist novel, alongside the likes of Oliver Twist and Emma Bovary, the Wife of Bath and Captain ...