To Be Born IS to Die: A Study of Spatio-Temporal Impossibility and the Apocalypse in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

In the nearly 25 years since its first publication, critics have labeled Salman Rushdie's <italic>The Satanic Verses</italic> postmodern, postcolonial, modern, or any combination of the three (as well as religious, antireligious, and other terms on which I do not focus). I argue for an interpretation of the text as postcolonial modern because such a reading allows one to grasp the workings of sublimity and apocalypse in the novel as understood in the context of a migrant worldview. Specifically, the apocalypse as I define it involves a reaching for or gesture towards the impossible, achieved via the road of a sublimity which distorts time, space, and the world of intertextual relations in order to disorient characters and readers, to upset their senses of the world and therefore to enable them to open themselves toward a re-grasping and a re-inventing of said world--a reorientation, a finding of oneself, a growth of one's confidence. This reinvention occurs in a spatiotemporal realm in which realistic conceptions of space are linguistically questioned and messianic, returning views of time usurp linear temporality, enabling a more accurate description of how various populations learn to construct, describe, and represent the experiences which constitute life.

Grantor dc:publisher

Wake Forest University

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Eisinger, Clara Louise

• apocalypse

Language dc:language.iso

en

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10339/37252

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:wakespace.lib.wfu.edu:10339/37252