![]() ![]() One of the major things Rushdie was trying to do in The Satanic Verses was offer a challenge to that static purity of the sacred text. In contrast, its principle intertext, The Koran, is often treated as absolute and pure, a characteristic of sacred texts that Rushdie finds questionable and even dangerous: they allow no dialogue, no questioning, and therefore are rigid with regards to human development and history. The Satanic Verses, for example, features a startling cast of characters with hybrid identities in a narrative that is a startling fusion of genres including satire, magic realism, postmodern metafiction, and religious allegory. 1Early in The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie asks: “How does newness come into the world? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?” (8) Though the answers to these questions are pursued throughout the novel, one kind of answer is already posed by the question: newness is the product of “fusions, translations, conjoinings.” Similarly, we might apply this question to the creation of texts: How do new texts come into the world? And the answer is the same: from “fusions, translations, conjoinings.” Rushdie, ever the champion of such mixing or hybridity, clearly bases his aesthetic approach on textual mixing. ![]()
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