Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

A few notes on finishing so I can scrape clean the outer edge of my brain for a while and think about something else.

Other works on my list it's explicitly interested in: Paradise Lost, Ulysses (both get echoed). Also there are Dickens jokes, and lots and lots of other jokes, but not of things I'm reading for this exam.

The transformation/metamorphosis thing could be good to talk about--Salahuddin becomes Saladin becomes the Devil, becomes Saladin becomes Salahuddin once again. He's trading selves, letting other people define him (letting England shorten his name when he goes to school, then letting the immigration officials define him as a devil when he transforms after being arrested at Rosa Diamond's house), then chooses at the end to define himself as his father defined him, reverting to his birth-name again. (Does this count as self-determination, to accept his father? I'm not sure. It IS less malicious than the police defining him, anyway...) Also the other freaks in the secret hospital ward--'they have the power of description over us,' one of them says about the customs/immigration officials, 'and we turn into how they've described us.' Racism as poesis--the novel is doing the same damn thing with its described world. (Gibreel tries to do the same thing, too, at the end, by making movies about how he's the archangel--does he succeed? Only in a shitty way. But shooting himself in the mouth with a gun he summons from Aladdin's magic lamp is kind of awesome.)

The narrator is an "I" at like two points in the whole novel. I don't know who the "I" is. It seems to be observing both Gibreel and Saladin/Salahuddin at various times like it has to be a personal narrator, but the novel's not very interested in pushing this. So it's just unattached and only slightly creepy. The rest of the time it behaves like a regular old impersonal narrator.

Realism: Magical Realism is a kind of extreme realism, after all--it takes ordinary boring things (clothes, body parts, car windshields) and makes them EXTRAordinary, but it does this by always paying such extremely close attention to their materiality that it seems that everything--the real world around is--could be transformed in this way. That if we just paid attention, we too would see the Arabian Sea parting and an angel made out of butterflies floating over it. (Realism of the 'describing objects in Dickensian/Chekhovian parlors' sort is a less crazy version of the same thing -- if you just paid attention to the gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, it argues, you'd already have foreseen that same gun going off in Act V. The objects themselves have no duty to have their observation tell quotidian stories--Chekhov's gun might as well turn into a spaceship as shoot someone in the face. It's not the materiality or its observation that's responsible for this--it's the rules of the fictional universe that do. But I have no idea how to talk about this in a structuralist way, except to note that, as we should already know by now, talking about physical reality is no guarantee of 'realism.' Things that are real have no duty to be also Real--they are just as free to be Magical. (And the point of being Magical is to show that the Real is ordinarily crazy, if you only pay enough attention to notice it.)