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The
Matter of Metamorphosis in The Satanic Verses and Paradise
Lost: finding a way into one’s fancy.
Carolina
Romano Fabrini.
The
angels finally find Satan
Squat
like a toad, close at the ear of Eve/Assaying by his devilish
art to reach/The organs of her fancy, and with them forge/Illusions,
as he list, phantasms and dreams/ Or if, inspiring venom,
he might taint/The animal spirits, that from pure blood arise
Like gentle breaths from rivers pure, thence raise/At least
distempered, discontented thoughts/Vain hopes, vain aims,
nordinate desires/Blown up with high conceits engendering
pride. (IV: 799)
Reaching
the ‘organs of her fancy’, Satan makes Eve dream
of him in the shape of the Cherub, who “with dewy locks
distilled/ Ambrosia” (V: 56-57) allured her towards
the forbidden tree and showed how she could taste one of its
fruits. Finally,
after being taken by the angels he manages to return to Paradise
as some kind of mist, and, finding a serpent sleeping, he
takes its body:
Let
it; I reck not, so it light well aimed/ Since higher I fall
short, on him who next/ provokes my envy, this new favourite/
Of Heav’n, this man of clay (IX: 173-76) Finding
Eve, he accomplishes his plan, not without leaning towards
good for another time:
That
space the Evil One abstracted stood/ From his own evil, and
for the time remained/ stupidly good, of enmity disarmed/
Of guile, of hate, of envy, of revenge/ But the hot Hell that
always in him burns/ Though in mid-Heav’n, soon ended
his delight/ And now tortures him now more, the more he sees/
of pleasure not for him ordained (IX: 463-69)
Having
Satan reach his purpose, the whole text will have, to this
extent, caught the audience with an alluring chain of events,
which will have reached the reader’s capacity of detachment
and performed the abovementioned suspension of disbelief.
The
character of Satan, together with his metamorphoses, is used
in Paradise Lost as a vehicle for the text’s idea. Contradictorily,
he etymology of the word Satan is related to the idea of limitation,
of an obstruction placed before a goal. It would be
A
biblical name referring to both a supernatural being and an
obstacle (…).In the New Testament (Christian Scriptures),
satan can mean "obstacle" as in Mark 8:33 when Jesus
tells Peter "Get behind me, Satan." [2]
According
to Elaine Pagel’s “Origin of Satan”, the
notion of evil would not be restricted only to Satan, but
to any of the angels who might assume the condition:
The
Jews did indeed recognize "satan" [the word means
"obstacle" or "obstruction"]-- Jews thought
any angel could serve the Lord as a "satan". [3]
The
primary idea of ‘obstruction’ is deviated and
becomes the way through which an intention can find its route:
it is through Milton’s Satan that the purpose of the
book is reached.
The
matter of metamorphosis also figures in Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses as a device for the representation of its
characters, as well as a vehicle for the author’s purposes;
analogous to Milton’s intent, considering the mutations
in The Satanic Verses would be useful to identify the ways
of the author to the reader.
The
accident with Flight AI- 420 and the subsequent fall introduce
one of the major issues in The Satanic Verses: mutation. During
Chamcha and Farishta’s fall some important changes take
place; and it triggers transmutational processes, which will
continue along the whole story. Rushdie makes his own voice
present as he mentions the side effects of the fall acting
as an ‘initial deus ex machina’:
For
whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha,
condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish
fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes
of their transmutation began. Mutation? Yessir, but not at
random (…). Under extreme environmental pressure, some
characteristics were acquired. (1992:5)
At
this point, when the chapter introduces the idea of the “angelicdevilish”
fall, it asks the reader for such an ability of believing
that spares the characters any categorization related to what
is known to be good and what is not. The fall from Bostan
and the ‘limbic’ period spent on land had stood
for a strong sign of rebirth; nothing remained the same after
the wreck.
The
first important mutation after the flight happens when Saladin
Chamcha lands together with Gibreel Farishta. Saladin is transformed,
according to the narrative, into a concrete devil, with horns
and cloven feet. Without his documents and hardly believed
to have survived from a plane crash, Chamcha feels his body
change into this djiin. Contrastingly, Gibreel was delving
into his delirious thoughts of being the Archangel Gabriel
in person, for Saladin’s despair. Gibreel dealt very
comfortably with his ‘new-found’ land, whereas
Chamcha could hardly recognise the city in which he lived
for so many years, his ellowen deeowen:
“He
blinked hard, but the colours refused to change, giving rise
to the notion that he had fallen out of the sky into some
wrongness, some other place, not England or perhaps not-England,
some counterfeit zone, rotten borough, altered state. (...)
Well then: a transit lounge.”(1992:132)
At
this point, some of the most meaningful changes start to take
place, for the fall had caused unexpected effects. Gibreel’s
halitosis had disappeared whereas Chamcha had acquired a sour
breath, and had on his temples two prominent bumps, which
incredibly held his bowler hat during the whole fall. The
matter of metamorphosis, at this point of the chapter, is
approached as follows:
What
did they expect? Falling like that out of the sky: did they
imagine there would be no side effects? Higher Powers had
taken an interest; it should have been obvious to them both
(...) Great falls change people (...). I was saying, mutations
are to be expected not all of them random. Unnatural selections.
Not much a price to pay for survival, for being reborn, for
becoming new, and at their age at that. What? Should I enumerate
the changes?
“Is
birth always a fall?” asks Rushdie in the beginning
of the novel. The question is apparently posed at random,
for there is no concrete or obvious answer for it along the
text, but what can be inferred is that, in the duration of
the story, the characters’ fall figures as the beginning
of a re-birth process, with the mutations above mentioned.
Salahuddin
Chamchawalla managed to be born again when he decided to become
‘a goodandproper Englishman’, reconstructing his
identity as Saladin Chamcha and with a set of features and
tunes that would, according to his parameters, insert him
into the ‘foreignness he admires’ (1992:426).
Gibreel
Farishta, feeling the universe of his dreams leaking into
his waking like, strived to deal with his hallucinatory dreams
in which he had to be constantly renewed, and at the same
time strived to grasp some concrete idea that would define
for himself what the reality he belonged to was.
The
previously mentioned idea of an obstacle working as a vehicle
is presented in the fifth chapter of Rushdie’s novel:
Allelluia Cone, the mountain climber, found it hard to accept
the prohibition of climbing the Himalayas one more time, for
it seemed to be forbidden “to mortals to look more than
once upon the face of the divine” (1992:303). According
to the novel’s pattern of approaching the satanic and
the divine, Alleluia realized that the mountain was diabolic
as well as transcendent, or, rather, its diabolism and its
transcendence were one (1992:303). It also considers the mutating
character of the ‘obstacle’:
An
iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially
a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land’s attempt to
metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated
– nearly – into air, and become, in the true sense,
exalted. (1992:303)
The
‘lethargy of custom’, mentioned in Coleridge’s
words, can be seen in several passages of The Satanic Verses,
as the odd features and behaviour of the metamorphosed characters
are treated in many moments as everyday matter. As the characters
in The Satanic Verses pass through a series of improbable
situations, Salman Rushdie relies on the reader’s ability
of detachment from what is usually considered ‘real’,
so that his narrative can be read as a faithful text. At this
point, the reader becomes more comfortable while dealing with
the text and having imprinted in his/her reading a subjective
re-writing of the story.
On
the same note, when Satan finds his way in to Paradise, he
also tries to find a way into Adam and Eve’s life, and
is found “squat like a toad by Eve’s ear in Eden,
using his wiles ‘to reach the organs of her fancy, and
with them forge/Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams’”.
The passage, which quotes Milton’s words from Book IV
of Paradise Lost, is attributed to Gibreel Farishta, the ‘angelic’
figure in Rushdie’s Verses. Gibreel recalls the mythical
scene as he feels threatened “by that same ambiguous
Creature, that Upstairs-Downstairs Thing” (Rushdie,
1992: 324), a presence which he feared but also knew not to
be specifically good or evil. It is important to highlight
Gibreel Farishta’s feeling concerning the ‘ambiguous
Creature’, for this ‘Creature’ stands for
the major point in question: there’s no ambiguity, but
ambivalence: “Whether We be multiform, plural, representing
the union-hybridization of such opposites as Oopar and Neechay,
or whether We be pure, will not be resolved here” (1992:319).
The
blurred limits between the ‘satanic’ and ‘angelic’
conditions and the free transit from one to the other require
this ability of detachment; the frontiers being crossed are
also geographic and imaginary. The “wiles” that
serve to reach the readers’ willingness to believe in
the authors’ work on the representation of the characters,
finally find their way into one’s fancy.
Notes
[2]
http://anyboard.net/soc/2think/archive/8477.html
[3]
http://anyboard.net/soc/2think/archive/8477.html
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