THE SATANIC VERSES

Source: The Black Scholar, Vol. 20, No. 2, BLACK CULTURE (MARCH/APRIL 1989), pp. 17-18

THE SATANIC VERSES AND DEMOCRATIC FREEDOMS
Edward W· Said

In 1984, Salman Rushdie published a superb essay in Granta entitled Outside the Whale," in which he showed that today's writer could not be inside the whale, insulated from history and politics. "The modern world," Rushdie writes, "lacks not only hiding places, but certainties." These words have an ominously prophetic applicability to Rushdie's situation today, not only because he has to be in hiding in order to save his life, but because he wrote a book that made "a very devil of a racket" in challenging certainties and provoking anger and amazement.

“OUTSIDE THE WHALE"

An Outside the Whale" Rushdie says: If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history's great and most abject abdications. Outside the whale is the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the dialectic of history. Out- side the whale there is a genuine need for political fiction, for books that draw new and better maps of reality, and make new languages with which we can understand the world. Outside the whale we see that we are all irradiated by history, we are radioactive with history and politics; we see that it can be as false to create a politics free fictional universe as to create one in which nobody needs to work or eat or hate or love or sleep. Outside the whale it becomes necessary, and even exhilarating, to grapple with the special problems created by the incorporation of political material because politics is by turns farce and tragedy, sometimes... both at once. Outside the whale the writer is obliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm....

INVENTIVE WORK OF FICTION

Satanic Verses is an astonishing and prodigiously inventive work of fiction. Yet it is, like its author, in history, the world, the crowd and the storm. It is, in all sorts of ways, a deliberately transgressive work. It parallels and mimics the central Islamic narratives with bold, nose-thumbing, post-modern daring. In so doing, it demonstrates another side of its author's unbroken engagement with the politics and history of the contemporary scene. Rushdie is the same distinguished writer and intellectual who has spoken out for immigrant, black and Palestinian rights, against imperialism, racism and censorship. He has always unhesitatingly expressed willingness to take active political positions whenever his voice has been needed. What shocks Moslems is Satanic Verses' knowing intimacy with the religious and cultural material with which it so comically and resourcefully plays. There is also the further shock of seeing Islam portrayed irreverently and - although as a secularist I have difficulty in using this word - blasphemously by a Moslem who writes both in and for the West. The cultural context is horrifically and even ludicrously inhospitable to such transgressions.

INDIFFERENCE TOWARD ISLAM

Moslems think of the current situation between their umma and Western civilization in singularly unhappy terms. How many Islamic writers, Moslems say, from Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Pakistan or Senegal are published, much less known or read in the West? Why is that ignorance there, if not for the disregard, indifference and fear with which things Islamic are considered here? Israel bans hundreds of books in occupied Palestinian territories, and Palestinian writers are jailed without trial. Where are the protesting voices of Western writers and intellectuals?

Islam has been reduced to terrorism and fundamentalism and now is seen to be acting accordingly, in the ghastly violence pre- scribed by the late Ayatollah Khomeini. The fury increases as do the pieties and the vindictive righteousness. Above all, people from the Islamic world ask: Why must a Moslem, who could be de- fending and sympathetically interpreting us, now represent us so roughly, so expertly and so disrespectfully to an audience already primed to excoriate our traditions, reality, history, religious language and origins? Why must a member of our culture join the legions of Orientalists in Orientalizing Islam so radically and unfairly?

SERIOUSNESS OF QUESTIONS

 To try to answer these questions is by no means to deny the anguish and serious- ness of the questions. But it is, as a beginning, to say that although it contains many spheres, the contemporary world of men and women is one world. Human history has many divisions, many particularities, but it too is one. In this world, Rushdie, from the community of Islam, has written for the West about Is- lam. The Satanic Verses thus is a self- representation. But everyone should be able to read the novel, interpret, understand, accept or finally reject it. More to the point, it should be possible both to accept the brilliance of Rushdie's work and also to note its transgressive apostasy. If this peculiar paradox is also an emblem of the fate of hybrids and immigrants, that fate too is part of this contemporary world. For the point is that there is no pure, unsullied, unmixed essence to which some of us can return, whether that essence is pure Is- lam, pure Christianity, pure Judaism or Easternism, Americanism or Westernism. Rushdie's work is not just about the mixture; it is that mixture itself.

COMPLICATED MIXTURES

To stir Islamic narratives into a stream of heterogeneous narratives about actors, tricksters, prophets, devils, whores, heroes and heroines is therefore inevitable. Most of us are still unprepared to deal with such complicated mixtures, but as Rushdie says in Outside the Whale": "In this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss." What those of us from the Moslem part of this world need to add is that we cannot accept the notion that democratic freedoms should be abrogated to protect Islam. No world culture or religion is really about such violence or such curtailments of fundamental rights. If we have accepted Rushdie's help in the past, we should now be ensuring his safety and his right to say what he has to say. To dispute with him, to engage with his work does not, cannot, be the same thing as banning it or threatening Rushdie with violence and physical punishment.

Tughlaq: Karnard

Karnard’s Tughlaq

“The whirlpool of violence and bloodshed” called, Tughlaq, is based on “the life of Muhammad Tughlaq, a fourteenth century Sultan of Delhi,” the most infamous Mughal emperor who thinks himself as “I was too soft, I can see that now. They’ll understand the whip.” According to Karnad, Sultan Muhammad Bin Tughlaq was “Certainly the most brilliant individual ever to ascend the throne of Delhi and also one of the biggest failures.”. Initially, Tughlaq was  “A man with unshakable faith in himself and his mission, trying to out- reach his own vision, unfortunately with his bare hands.”

“A Faithful slave of the Lord” or Tughlaq is a learned, intelligent Sultan of a vast country, India. He has become a victim of passion though all the characters admit that he is not a common man. His step–mother reveals to Barani that “… he is such an intelligent boy”; Sheikh Imam–ud–din, the saint admits:” God has given you everything–power, learning, intelligence, talent.”  Barani, the sensible man, says,

“But you are a learned man, Your majesty, you are known the world over for your knowledge of philosophy and poetry”

But the irony is that such a high and mighty personality has failed to control his passions. He himself gets puzzled as to what has happened to him. He himself reviews, ponders and reveals his tragic tale thus:

“I started in Your path, Lord! why am I wandering naked in the desert now? I started in search of You. Why am I become a pig rolling in this gory mud” .

Through his failures, the Sultan is elevated to a man of wisdom and maturity and this becomes evident when he says to the historian Barani as follows:

“But I am not alone, Barani, Thank heaven! For once I am not alone. I have a Companion to share my madness now – the omnipotent God.”

This “Intelligent, religious, cruel and hard hearted” unsuccessful Islamic or “Mad Muhammad” in the opening scene declares, “I shall build an empire which will be the envy of world.” Acutely aware of the short span of life and the stupendous task before him, like Ashoka the great, he seems to dedicate his life for the well-being of his subjects. He keeps awake during nights and tells his stepmother

“Tell me, how dare I waste my time in sleeping? And don’t tell me to go and get married and breed a family because I won’t sleep.”

He wants to climb the tallest of the trees in the world and call out to his people:

Come my people, I am waiting for you. Confide in me your worries. Let me share your joys. Let’s laugh and cry together.”

The King appears as a “carnivorous animal” and unlike other rulers, he wanted to be an ideal King and thinks “whatever he does is perfect” and foolishly announces, “Later this year the capital of my empire will be moved from Delhi to Daulatabad” and orders “Everyone must leave… Nothing but an empty graveyard of Delhi will satisfy me now.” By shifting his capital to the city of the Hindus, he hopes to win the confidence of the Hindus and help foster the Hindu-Muslim unity.

The cruelties of the Sultan find no end. When he comes to know of his stepmother’s killing of the Najib, he mercilessly orders “I want her stoned to death publicly tomorrow morning”. When his stepmother taunts him for killing his father, brother and Sheikh, Tughlaq claims that he has killed them for an ideal. He himself says, “I killed them–yes–but killed them for an ideal” because “They gave me what I wanted power, strength to shape my thoughts, strength to act, strength to recognize myself.”

Tughlaq desecrates prayer by using it as a means for political ends. At first he decrees religious punishment for failure to pray five times a day. Later, he bans prayer itself and punishes those who pray. Again, after sometime, he announces that “henceforth every Muslim will pray five times a day as enjoined by the Holy Koran and declare himself a Faithful slave of the Lord.” Later on towards the end, he admits his mistake and the wisest fool in the empire that he has become, he cries for God’s help:

God, God in Heaven, please help me. Please don’t let go off my hand. My skin drips with blood and I don’t know how much of it is mine and how much of others…. Clean me; cover me with Your Infinite Mercy.

The handling of the theme suggests that it transcends Muhammad Tughlaq of a specific period and encompasses men of all times. Ultimately the message conveyed by the dramatist is that God alone is the Supreme Being and not man:

Alla – Ho – Akbar! Alla – Ho – Akbar!      
Ashahado La Elaha Illilah.

Tughlaq has become the classic of the contemporary age through this eponymous and enigmatic character, the doomed dreamer, very well resembles Martin Luther King whose dreams were also shattered by destiny. Like Marlowe’s heroes namely, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus and Jew of Malta, Tughlaq, like a megalomaniac, is fully convinced that he alone knows what is good for others and he alone is capable of achieving it for them. The play greatly appealed to the Indian audience because it reflected the political mood of disillusionment, which prevailed in the Nehru era of idealism in the country. 

The Satanic Verses

Revisiting The Satanic Verses: Rushdie’s Desacralizing Treatment of 

the Koran as a Literary Intertext

by Gregory J. RUBINSON

Early 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. 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. 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. 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.

• 1  He is also, like Barnes especially, casting doubt on the reliability of commonly accepted historic (...)
• 2  Daniel Pipes explains: “To doubt this is to deny the validity of Muhammad’s mission and to imply t (...)

2At the outset of the novel, Gibreel Farishta, one of the novel’s two main characters, has lost his faith. He is forced in a series of tormenting dreams to play the role of his namesake, the archangel Gabriel/Gibreel. As the angel, he interacts while dreaming with Muhammad (here called Mahound) in the desert at the time of the founding of Islam. It is the content of this dream that most inflamed many Muslims’ religious sensitivities. In the parts of the novel that deal with this dream, Rushdie, as his contemporaries Jeanette Winterson and Julian Barnes have done with the Old Testament story of Noah and the ark, is casting doubt on religious texts by treating them not as sacred and authoritative but as akin to fictional literature.1Therein lies the problem, for orthodox Muslims consider the Koran to be the direct and inviolable “Word of God,”2 whereas the Old and New Testaments are not generally treated as such.

• 3  This scenario and the title phrase which describe it comes from an early story of questionable aut (...)

3Though much of the controversy around The Satanic Verses focused on the novel’s desacralizing portrait of Muhammad, the central focus of Rushdie’s manipulation and criticism is the text of the Koran itself. The eponymous issue of the “Satanic verses” arises when Abu Simbel, the crafty leader of the magical desert city Jahilia (Mecca), recognizes that Mahound and his one God represent the future. He tempts Mahound to accept just three of the city’s three hundred and sixty idol gods as “worthy of worship.” (105) The prophet consults Gibreel and returns, citing a set of verses from the Koran called “The Star” into which is inserted the declaration that Lat, Uzza, and Manat—the three most popular pagan idol gods—are “the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed.” (114) In other words, God would appear to be allowing the worship of idols, which is one of the fundamental prohibitions of Islam. But in response to news that Abu Simbel may betray his pledge of loyalty to Allah, Mahound consults Gibreel again and returns with a disavowal of the previous verses as the product of Satan,3 and replaces them with a citation from the text of the Koran itself: “Shall He have daughters and you sons? […] That would be a fine division! These are but names you have dreamed of…Allah vests no authority in them.” (124)

4Gibreel, however, informs us that both the first revelation and its repudiation came from him, and in each case the words were somehow forced from him by Mahound. Reflecting on the process by which the “Satanic verses” were first revealed and then repealed, he explains: “[Mahound] did his old trick, forcing my mouth open and making the voice […] pour out of me. […] From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked.” (123) The suggestion, then, is that the revelation of the Koran was not so much a recitation or citation of the Word of God—implying that Mahound was acting merely as the mouthpiece—but that Mahound was the origin of the text. The way in which all of this is dramatized is complex, but a sense emerges and begins to grow that Mahound’s “citations” were conveniently fabricated to suit whatever personal purpose he had at any given time. The disavowed “Satanic verses,” for example, helped him to convert the Jahilians to his new religion. Both the mytho-historical tale of the “Satanic verses” and Rushdie’s dramatic recreation of it conflate imaginative with “revealed” genres of literature, calling into question the putative “purity” and revelatory sanctity of the Koran.

5A second major challenge to the purity of the Koran occurs when Mahound’s scribe, Salman the Persian, begins to doubt the authenticity of Mahound’s recitations. Fleeing persecution in the desert city of Jahilia after the incident of “the Satanic verses,” the prophet and his followers go into the desert where Mahound, Salman recounts,

became obsessed by law. […] Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation […] rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one’s behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation […] told the faithful how much to eat, how deeply they should sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine sanction. (363-4)

6The strictures Rushdie mocks are not verbatim from the Koran, although the Koran does at times seem highly concerned with the minutia of the mundane: there are, for example, long and detailed passages about how a man’s inheritance should be divided, who a man may and may not have sex with, the legalities of marriage and divorce, etc. Some of the other strictures Rushdie mentions come from the documented accounts (calledhadith) of Muhammad and his followers’ lives, and different Muslim sects follow different hadith (Asad 293). So Rushdie is invoking and conflating a variety of religious and legal texts for convenience, but the general goal of his irreverent mockery is to express skepticism about religious texts and their ideological underpinnings. The hadith are still reflective of rules-obsessed sacred texts. Rushdie suggests that religious texts are in large part early law books which dictate restrictions on human behavior that do not—cannot except through deliberate re-writing—change with changing social values.

7One of the most troublesome areas in this regard is religious, or more specifically in this instance Muslim, positions on women. The Koran validates the idea of men’s superiority over women and their right to abuse them:

Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them and send them to beds apart and beat them. (Dawood, Koran 64)

• 4  Some critics have argued that Rushdie’s characterizations of women involve patriarchal and/or sexi(...)

8In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie suggests that such strictures were a matter of Mahound’s personal sexism: Salman tells the satirical poet Baal that when the women of Yathrib (the desert oasis Mahound has fled to) begin to express their autonomy, “bang, out comes the rule book, the angel starts pouring out rules about what women mustn’t do, he starts forcing them back into the docile attitudes the Prophet prefers, docile or maternal, walking three steps behind or sitting at home being wise and waxing their chins.” (SV 367) Part of Rushdie’s challenge to the sacredness of the Koran, then, is a protest against its restrictive and abusive ideologies regarding women—ideologies which have been and still are a major problem in some societies because the separation of women is crucial to the fundamentalist ideal of cultural purity.4

• 5  Like the instance of the “Satanic verses,” this event has an historical basis: Malise Ruthven expl (...)

9A challenge to the ideology of purity and absolutism enters the narrative in the form of textual subversion. Salman observes to Baal that Mahound started to lay down the law and then consult Gibreel to have it “confirmed.” In the hope of disproving his suspicions, Salman takes to interjecting his own modifications into the recitation to see if Mahound will notice. Even more directly than the Satanic verses incident, this act changes the genre of the text by interjecting artifice into putatively pure Divine revelation: “there I was, actually writing the Book, or re-writing anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language.” (367) When Mahound fails to notice this “pollution,” Salman is forced to conclude that the recitation—the Koran—is fabricated rather than God-given.5 From an Islamic point of view this is blasphemous, but from a secular point of view it is both a playful and serious desacralization of a religious text. This desacralizing does not defeat religious points of view; rather, Rushdie is suggesting that all faith is subject to doubt, even requires doubt. In an interview, Rushdie elaborates, proposing that doubt is an inescapable facet of postmodern society: “Doubt is the central condition of a human being in the 20^th century. […] We cannot any longer have a fixed certain view of anything.” (Appignanesi 24)

• 6  At one point, for example, Rushdie indirectly refers to Abraham as a “bastard” for leaving his son (...)

10Eventually Mahound does notice what Salman has done and confronts him: “Your blasphemy, Salman, can’t be forgiven. Did you think I wouldn’t work it out? To set your words against the Words of God.” (374) Through the postmodern strategy of re-imagining, parodying, and subverting the recitation of the Koran, it is exactly this that Rushdie has attempted in The Satanic Verses. And while there is a great deal of material in these parts of the novel that is straight-forwardly irreverent (even “blasphemous” according to some sensibilities), entirely apart from the arguments about freedom of expression which dominated the Rushdie controversy, it should require no apology.6 The book offers all the “justification” or “defense” it needs; within its pages is the resounding manifesto for the social function of art: “A poet’s work,” says the satirical poet Baal, is to “name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.” (97) Though many may not find this notion comforting, this has been in many societies a presumed role for literature, and it is particularly foregrounded in Rushdie’s fiction. And this, of course, is why Baal, whose job it is to “point at frauds,” must be killed while Salman, who polluted the sacred text of the Koran, can be forgiven. The poet offers the more potent challenge to authority, an idea that I don’t think is exaggerated when we look at the effect that The Satanic Verses had in the world.

11Rushdie suggests that it is necessary always to have voices of challenge. Just before his execution, Baal says: “Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive,” and Mahound replies: “Writers and whores. I see no difference here.” (392) Mahound equates writers with whores because they are both profane to him: whores for obvious reasons, and writers because the mere act of writing words challenges the authority of the “Words of God” as written/revealed in the Koran. In fact, by having Mahound equate writers with whores, Rushdie is again invoking the text of the Koran itself, which explicitly condemns imaginative writers: “Poets are followed by erring men. Behold how aimlessly they rove in every valley, preaching what they never practise.” (Dawood 264) Writing, as Fadia Faqir asserts, “is considered by strict Muslims as an act of subversion.” (Appignanesi 226) At the very founding of Islam, then, Rushdie states in an interview, there was a “conflict between the sacred text and the profane text, between revealed literature and imagined literature” (Appignanesi 23), a conflict manifested by the fact that when Muhammad returned to Mecca he executed only five or six people, four of whom were writers or satirical actresses. In The Satanic Verses Rushdie replays this historical act, having Mahound execute Baal for representing a profane alternative to Islamic ideals. Sadly, it is the same intolerance of imaginative literature (because of its challenge to revealed literature) that contributed to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death sentence on Rushdie.

• 7  Daniel Pipes discusses a number of similar objections to the book (110-3) and comments that “many(...)

12A frequent assumption was that Rushdie was attempting to revise Muslim history. Syed Ali Ashraf, for example, assumes that Rushdie has taken the myth of the Satanic verses and treated it as true: “He has intentionally and deliberately distorted the history of the Blessed Prophet and his Companions.” (Appignanesi 19) Similarly, an article in the London Sunday Times reported that “The grand Sheikh of Cairo’s Al-Azhar, the 1,000-year-old seat of Islamic theology, said […] the book […] contained ‘lies and figments of the imagination’ about Islam, which were ‘passed off as facts’.” (Appignanesi 27) Rushdie’s detractors received the novel as blasphemous propaganda and were noticeably unwilling to accept what he has called the “fictionality of fiction” (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 393).7

13Defending his novel, Rushdie draws attention to issues of genre to which I have already made reference:

I genuinely believed that my overt use of fabulation would make it clear to any reader that I was not attempting to falsify history, but to allow a fiction to take off from history. […] Fiction uses facts as a starting-place and then spirals away to explore its real concerns, which are only tangentially historical. Not to see this, to treat fiction as if it were fact, is to make a serious mistake of categories. The case of The Satanic Verses may be one of the biggest category mistakes in literary history. (Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 408-409)

14While it is perhaps overstating things to suggest that the true concerns of fiction are only “tangentially” historical (a position I doubt Rushdie would really stand behind), he is correct to point out that some basic distinction between fiction and fact must be maintained. To do otherwise would be to submit to the dangerously radical philosophy that all versions of history are equally valid.

15Rushdie introduces the conflict between fact and fiction in the novel when Gibreel’s dreams become the raw material for a new series of “theological” genre movies. Billy Battuta, one of the film’s producers, describes the first of them, a film that will “recount the story of the encounter between a prophet and an archangel”: “‘It is a film […] about how newness enters the world.’—But would it not be seen as blasphemous […] ‘Certainly not. […] Fiction is fiction; facts are facts’.” (SV 272) While there is some truth to this—it is important not to mistake fiction for fact—it is also important not to accept “fact” without skepticism. Battuta’s remarks seem ironic given that the whole spirit of The Satanic Verses (and of Rushdie’s other works) belies the over-simplistic division between fact and fiction or reality and fantasy. Gibreel, for example, can not work out for himself what is real and what is the product of his own delusional mind. Even as readers with all of the clues that Rushdie gives us, it isn’t really possible for us to work out exactly what is to be read as literal truth and what as metaphorical truth. Here again the issue of genre, and in particular the genre of magic realism, is crucial to how one understands the text.

16Rushdie’s use of magic realism, which includes such fantastical tropes as Gibreel’s transformation into the Archangel Gabriel, collapses the categories of literal and metaphorical truth. This is one of the reasons why arguments over the book’s alleged blasphemy are so vexed: on the one hand, its defenders have wanted to read it as a novel which fictionally dramatizes the conflict between faith and doubt; on the other hand, those attacking it see it as a challenge to the literalness of Islamic history and revered historical/theological figures. It is both of these things, but it does not seek to suggest that its own vision of Islamic history supplant the “official” history, just as in Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children he doesn’t intend for us to literally believe Saleem Sinai’s version of Indian history. Rather, it is suggesting that no historical or religious text should be automatically accepted as purely “factual.” The point here is that fact and fiction are inextricable in all genres of representation whether they are recognized as religious, historical, literary, or other.

17What Rushdie is ultimately arguing for, then, is a different aesthetics of reception for religious texts. To the faithful, religious texts belong to the genres of law book, cautionary tale, and factual historical record. But the secular reader can turn to religious texts like they turn to other literary texts: not for admonitions, rules, and maxims but for, among other things, insights into human nature. By putting the Koran, literally and metaphorically, on the same “shelf” as other texts, Rushdie encourages readers to approach such texts from a literary/critical perspective so that they’re less likely to accept them at face value and be manipulated by those who claim the right of interpretation. This, of course, has implications for all sacred texts, not just the Koran.

18Even when it was understood that The Satanic Verses wasn’t trying to substitute its narrative for the Koran’s, it met with a pervasive prejudice against fantasy in writing. Peter Mullen, a Christian reverend sympathetic to the Muslims outraged by the novel, implies that only the strictest realism can be counted as “good writing”: “The further the art work departs from the real world, the more conjectural and abstract it becomes, the worse it is. […] Good writing, like the Old Testament, eschews contrivance and gives us the world as it is.” (Cohn-Sherbok 31) While Mullen’s assumption that the Old Testament harbors no “contrivance” is ludicrous, the same assumption about the Koran is nearly universal among believing Muslims. One of the troubling facets of religious orthodoxy is that it insists, as Mullen does, that the world can be described in the most literal terms. The Satanic Verses, along with other postmodern, fantastic, or magic realist works, suggests otherwise. As Bhikhu Parekh observes, magic realism has become popular genre: its conventions speak directly to that contemporary loss of the sense of reality as mundane.

19In the sense that magic realism is often a response to that which is inexplicable in everyday reality, then, the genre provides a similar social function to that of religious texts. By doing so, and by suggesting that miraculous events can happen without divine will, it implies a challenge to religious texts. The distinguishing conventions of magic realism—supernatural or miraculous events, apparitions, wish-fulfilling fantasies—can be seen in different kinds of literary texts and in religious texts as well, suggesting that religious and literary texts have generic similarities. Religious texts, like classic fantasy stories, are characterized by miraculous events: the flood, the parting of the Red Sea, guiding pillars of fire and smoke, manna from Heaven, the immaculate conception, resurrection, etc. Much of the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses, then, has to do with the fact that Rushdie depicts the Koran as a human contrivance. For Rushdie, its sanctity as scripture is culturally attributed and the divine origin of the revelations is dubious. Despite the fact that it is a text with great cultural and historical significance, Rushdie plays with the narrative of the Koran as if it were a literary or fictional intertext such as A Thousand and One Nights (a text which he alludes to throughout his work).

20In February of 1994, the fifth anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwaagainst Salman Rushdie, the French television network Arté devoted an entire evening of programming to discussing the fatwa and The Satanic Verses with Rushdie. During the interview, Rushdie spoke strongly in favor of the notion that religious texts must be treated as other kinds of texts—that they not have the kind of privileged status that forbids questioning. “There should be no separate rules for religious texts,” he said. “They should have to face the competition of other texts on their own.” With this statement, Rushdie pinpointed the basis of the problems which were a response to the publication of his novel. Scripture is generally granted a privileged status in societies, and for some they are unassailable, unquestionable, absolute. Nevertheless, such texts are always being mediated by those who have been privileged as their interpreters.

21Although Rushdie’s play with the Koran in the Mahound parts of the novel expresses a harsh skepticism about Islam, the novel is not aimed at invalidating Islamic faith. Instead, Rushdie wants to desacralize the Koran—at least in the sense of it as a God-given, unquestionable text—and open it and Islam as a whole to questioning. This idea of questioning scripture, as Carlos Fuentes notes in an article defending Rushdie, is inimical to the whole idea of sacred texts: “a sacred text is, by definition, a completed and exclusive text. You can add nothing to it. It does not converse with anyone.” (Appignanesi 241) Strictly speaking, this is not true of all sacred texts or of everyone’s approach to such texts: sacred texts are always being questioned, interpreted, and mediated. But it is true that for fundamentalists sacred texts are absolute, inflexible, and unchallengeable. Further, since the Koran more or less encompasses Islam, Rushdie’s manipulation of the text is perceived by believing Muslims as a challenge to their faith. Fuentes notes that “For the Ayatollahs reality is dogmatically defined once and for all in a sacred text.” (Appignanesi 241) The idea of questioning such texts is inherently blasphemous to Muslims and that is what made the conflict virtually impossible to resolve on a religious level. Syed Shahabuddin, an Indian MP who was one of the earliest figures to denounce The Satanic Verses, asserts that the novel “serves to define what has gone wrong with the Western civilization—it has lost all sense of distinction between the sacred and the profane.” (Appignanesi 38) But it is not the distinction between the sacred and the profane that poses a problem as much as the categories themselves: declaring certain kinds of writing sacred and others profane discourages meaningful interaction with both kinds—the sacred is beyond questioning while the profane is not worthy of serious attention. Through its own intertextual practices with The Koran, The Satanic Verses dissolves these categories to encourage questioning of and dialogue with religious texts.

Source: http://erea.revues.org/493

Bibliographie

Anees, Munawar A. The Kiss of Judas: Affairs of a Brown Sahib. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Quill, 1989.

Appignanesi, Lisa and Sara Maitland, eds. The Rushdie File. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1990.

Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.

Cohn-Sherbok, Dan, ed. The Salman Rushdie Controversy in Interreligious Perspective. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Meelen, 1990.

Dawood, N. J., trans. The Koran. 1956. London: Penguin, 1995.

Ellerby, Janet Mason. “Narrative Imperialism in The Satanic Verses.”Multicultural Literatures through Feminist/Poststructuralist Lenses. Ed. Barbara Frey Waxman. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1993. 173-89.

Grewal, Inderpal. “Salman Rushdie: Marginality, Women, and Shame.”Genders 3 (Fall 1988): 24-42.

Kamra, Sukeshi. “Replacing the Colonial Gaze: Gender as Strategy in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction.”  Between the Lines: South Asians and Post-Coloniality. Eds. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia, PA: Temple UP, 1996. 237-49.

Lester, Toby. “What is the Koran?” The Atlantic Monthly 283.1 (January 1999): 43-56.

Pipes, Daniel. The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West. New York: Carol, 1990.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta, 1991.

––. Midnight’s Children. 1981. London: Picador, 1982.

––. Shame. 1983. New York: Vintage, 1989.

––. The Satanic Verses. 1988. New York: Viking, 1989.

Ruthven, Malise. A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam. London: Chatto and Windus, 1990.

Verman, Charu. “Padma’s Tragedy: A Feminist Deconstruction of Midnight’s Children.” Panjab University Research Bulletin (Arts) 20.2 (Oct. 1989): 59-65.

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Notes

1  He is also, like Barnes especially, casting doubt on the reliability of commonly accepted historical narratives by re-writing the story of the founding of Islam.

2  Daniel Pipes explains: “To doubt this is to deny the validity of Muhammad’s mission and to imply that the entire Islamic faith is premised on a fraudulent base. […] [A] Muslim may not question the authenticity of the Qur’an. To do so is to raise doubts about the validity of the faith itself, and this is usually seen as an act of apostasy” (56). Nevertheless, the recent discovery in Yemen of a gravesite of seventh- and eighth-century copies of the Koran reveal aberrations from the standard text of the Koran, suggesting that the Koran is a text that has changed with history rather than the absolute and unchanging Word of God. The historicization of the Koran would undermine the most foundational Islamic belief (Lester).

3  This scenario and the title phrase which describe it comes from an early story of questionable authority about such “Satanic verses.” Malise Ruthven provides a detailed explanation in A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam (37-39), as does Daniel Pipes in The Rushdie Affair (57-59). For a Muslim perspective which argues that the incident of the “Satanic verses” is a false myth, see M. M. Ahsan, “The Orientalists’ ‘Satanic’ Verses” (Anees 6-10).

4  Some critics have argued that Rushdie’s characterizations of women involve patriarchal and/or sexist conventions (see, for example, Ellerby, Grewal, Kamra, Verma). While I do think there is a certain quality of androcentrism in many of Rushdie’s depictions, he uses a cartoonish, comic mode of representation with practically all of his characters, female and male. There are women who are villains (e.g. Abu Simbel’s wife Hind; the Widow in Midnight’s Children), women who haunt men (e.g. Rekha Merchant in The Satanic Verses); women treated with condescension (Padma in Midnight’s Children); and even women treated as monstrous destroyers of men (Sufiya Zinobia in Shame). But there are just as many, if not more, men treated at least as harshly. Further, some of his women characters, such as Zeeny Vakil, Alleluia Cone, and her mother, Alicja Cone, are clearly the most admirable personages in the novel, certainly more so that Gibreel or Saladin. And throughout Rushdie’s work he demonstrates an awareness of the difficulties of women living in an androcentric society, such as when he remarks of Hind Sufyan (Sufyan’s wife) that “she had sunk into the anonymity, the characterless plurality, of being merely one-of-the-women-like-her. This was history’s lesson: nothing for women-like-her to do but suffer, remember, and die” (Satanic Verses 250); or when Alicja Cone tells her daughter: “So a woman’s life-plans are being smothered by a man’s. […] So welcome to your gender” (348). Further, in his essay “In Good Faith,” Rushdie points out that part of his reason for portraying the “Satanic verses” incident was that he “thought it was at least worth pointing out that one of the reasons for rejecting these goddesses was that they were female” (Imaginary Homelands 399-400).

5  Like the instance of the “Satanic verses,” this event has an historical basis: Malise Ruthven explains in her contribution to The Rushdie File that, according to an historic account, one of Muhammad’s scribes lost his faith after “a deliberate mistake in his transcription of the divine text went unnoticed by the Prophet.” (187)

6  At one point, for example, Rushdie indirectly refers to Abraham as a “bastard” for leaving his son in the desert because it is God’s will. He comments: “From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable.” (95) It is a common enough criticism of religious institutions, and part of the tradition of literature as social criticism.

7  Daniel Pipes discusses a number of similar objections to the book (110-3) and comments that “many Muslim critics complained that Rushdie had not told the truth, as though his highly elaborated account was intended exactly to recapitulate Islamic history.” (110) Pipes attempts to explain this misunderstanding as the product of a pervasive (though certainly not universal) Muslim unfamiliarity with the novel form: “The notion of the literary imagination proceeding into the hypothetical, where context shapes no less than words, remains alien to many Muslims, and fundamentalists reject this approach in its entirety.” (112)

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Gregory J. RUBINSON, « Revisiting The Satanic Verses: Rushdie’s Desacralizing Treatment of the Koran as a Literary Intertext », E-rea [En ligne], 2.1 | 2004, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2004, consulté le 12 mai 2013. URL : http://erea.revues.org/493 ; DOI : 10.4000/erea.493

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Auteur

Gregory J. RUBINSON

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)Greg Rubinson is a lecturer in the Writing Programs department of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He has published essays on British writers Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Julian Barnes, and now Salman Rushdie. A book on these writers, Point at Frauds: Genre and Desacralization in Contemporary British Literature, is forthcoming.

20 C. Drama

Source:http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/entertainment/dramawestern-twentieth-century-drama.html

During the 20th cent., especially after World War I, Western drama became more internationally unified and less the product of separate national literary traditions. Throughout the century realism, naturalism, and symbolism (and various combinations of these) continued to inform important plays. Among the many 20th-century playwrights who have written what can be broadly termed naturalist dramas are Gerhart Hauptmann (German), John Galsworthy (English), John Millington Synge and Sean O'Casey (Irish), and Eugene O'Neill, Clifford Odets, and Lillian Hellman (American).

An important movement in early 20th-century drama was expressionism. Expressionist playwrights tried to convey the dehumanizing aspects of 20th-century technological society through such devices as minimal scenery, telegraphic dialogue, talking machines, and characters portrayed as types rather than individuals. Notable playwrights who wrote expressionist dramas include Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser (German), Karel Čapek (Czech), and Elmer Rice and Eugene O'Neill (American). The 20th cent. also saw the attempted revival of drama in verse, but although such writers as William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and MaxwellAnderson produced effective results, verse drama was no longer an important form in English. In Spanish, however, the poetic dramas of Federico García Lorca are placed among the great works of Spanish literature.

Three vital figures of 20th-century drama are the American Eugene O'Neill, the German Bertolt Brecht, and the Italian Luigi Pirandello. O'Neill's body of plays in many forms—naturalistic, expressionist, symbolic, psychological—won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and indicated the coming-of-age of American drama. Brecht wrote dramas of ideas, usually promulgating socialist or Marxist theory. In order to make his audience more intellectually receptive to his theses, he endeavored—by using expressionist techniques—to make them continually aware that they were watching a play, not vicariously experiencing reality. For Pirandello, too, it was paramount to fix an awareness of his plays as theater; indeed, the major philosophical concern of his dramas is the difficulty of differentiating between illusion and reality.

World War II and its attendant horrors produced a widespread sense of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. This sense is brilliantly expressed in the body of plays that have come to be known collectively as the theater of the absurd. By abandoning traditional devices of the drama, including logical plot development, meaningful dialogue, and intelligible characters, absurdist playwrights sought to convey modern humanity's feelings of bewilderment, alienation, and despair—the sense that reality is itself unreal. In their plays human beings often portrayed as dupes, clowns who, although not without dignity, are at the mercy of forces that are inscrutable.

Probably the most famous plays of the theater of the absurd are Eugene Ionesco's Bald Soprano (1950) and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). The sources of the theater of the absurd are diverse; they can be found in the tenets of surrealism, Dadaism (see Dada), and existentialism; in the traditions of the music hall,vaudeville, and burlesque; and in the films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Playwrights whose works can be roughly classed as belonging to the theater of the absurd are Jean Genet (French), Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (Swiss), Fernando Arrabal (Spanish), and the early plays of Edward Albee (American). The pessimism and despair of the 20th cent. also found expression in the existentialist dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre, in the realistic and symbolic dramas of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Jean Anouilh, and in the surrealist plays of Jean Cocteau.

Somewhat similar to the theater of the absurd is the so-called theater of cruelty, derived from the ideas of Antonin Artaud, who, writing in the 1930s, foresaw a drama that would assault its audience with movement and sound, producing a visceral rather than an intellectual reaction. After the violence of World War II and the subsequent threat of the atomic bomb, his approach seemed particularly appropriate to many playwrights. Elements of the theater of cruelty can be found in the brilliantly abusive language of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956) and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), in the ritualistic aspects of some of Genet's plays, in the masked utterances and enigmatic silences of Harold Pinter's "comedies of menace," and in the orgiastic abandon of Julian Beck's Paradise Now! (1968); it was fully expressed in Peter Brooks's production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade (1964).

During the last third of the 20th cent. a few continental European dramatists, such as Dario Fo in Italy and Heiner Müller in Germany, stand out in the theater world. However, for the most part, the countries of the continent saw an emphasis on creative trends in directing rather than a flowering of new plays. In the United States and England, however, many dramatists old and new continued to flourish, with numerous plays of the later decades of the 20th cent. (and the early 21st cent.) echoing the trends of the years preceding them.

Realism in a number of guises—psychological, social, and political—continued to be a force in such British works as David Storey's Home (1971), Sir Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests trilogy (1974), and David Hare's Amy's View (1998); in such Irish dramas as Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) and Martin McDonagh's 1990s Leenane trilogy; and in such American plays as Jason Miller's That Championship Season (1972), Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly (1979), and John Guare's Six Degrees of Separation (1990). In keeping with the tenor of the times, many of these and other works of the period were marked by elements of wit, irony, and satire.

A witty surrealism also characterized some of the late 20th cent.'s theater, particularly the brilliant wordplay and startling juxtapositions of the many plays of England's Tom Stoppard. In addition, two of late-20th-century America's most important dramatists, Sam Shepard and David Mamet (as well as their followers and imitators), explored American culture with a kind of hyper-realism mingled with echoes of the theater of cruelty in the former's Buried Child (1978), the latter's Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), and other works. While each exhibited his own very distinctive voice and vision, both playwrights achieved many of their effects through stark settings, austere language in spare dialog, meaningful silences, the projection of a powerful streak of menace, and outbursts of real or implied violence.

The late decades of the 20th century were also a time of considerable experiment and iconoclasm. Experimental dramas of the 1960s and 70s by such groups as Beck's Living Theater and Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre were followed by a mixing and merging of various kinds of media with aspects of postmodernism, improvisational techniques, performance art, and other kinds of avant-garde theater. Some of the era's more innovative efforts included productions by theater groups such as New York's La MaMa (1961–) and Mabou Mines (1970–) and Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Co. (1976–); the Canadian writer-director Robert Lepage's intricate, sometimes multilingual works, e.g. Tectonic Plates (1988); the inventive one-man shows of such monologuists as Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, and John Leguizamo; the transgressive drag dramas of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theater, e.g., The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984); and the operatic multimedia extravaganzas of Robert Wilson, e.g. White Raven (1999).

Thematically, the social upheavals of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s—particularly the civil rights and women's movements, gay liberation, and the AIDS crisis—provided impetus for new plays that explored the lives of minorities and women. Beginning with Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959), drama by and about African Americans emerged as a significant theatrical trend. In the 1960s plays such as James Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charley (1964), Amiri Baraka's searing Dutchman (1964), and Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody (1967) explored black American life; writers including Ed Bullins (e.g., The Taking of Miss Janie, 1975), Ntozake Shange (e.g., For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf, 1976) and Charles Fuller (e.g., A Soldier's Play, 1981) carried these themes into later decades. One of the most distinctive and prolific of the century's African-American playwrights, August Wilson, debuted on Broadway in 1984 with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and continued to define the black American experience in his ongoing dramatic cycle into the next century.

Feminist and other women-centered themes dramatized by contemporary female playwrights were plentiful in the 1970s and extended in the following decades. Significant figures included England's Caryl Churchill (e.g., the witty Top Girls, 1982), the Cuban-American experimentalist Maria Irene Forńes (e.g., Fefu and Her Friends,1977) and American realists including Beth Henley (e.g., Crimes of the Heart, 1978), Marsha Norman (e.g., 'Night Mother, 1982), and Wendy Wasserstein (e.g., The Heidi Chronicles, 1988). Skilled monologuists also provided provocative female-themed one-women shows such as Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues (1996) and various solo theatrical performances by Lily Tomlin, Karen Finley, Anna Deveare Smith, Sarah Jones, and others.

Gay themes (often in works by gay playwrights) also marked the later decades of the 20th cent. Homosexual characters had been treated sympathetically but in the context of pathology in such earlier 20th-century works as Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934) and Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (1953). Gay subjects were presented more explicitly during the 1960s, notably in the English farces of Joe Orton and Matt Crowley's witty but grim portrait of pre-Stonewall American gay life, The Boys in the Band (1968). In later years gay experience was explored more frequently and with greater variety and openness, notably in Britain in Martin Sherman'sBent (1979) and Peter Gill's Mean Tears (1987) and in the United States in Jane Chambers' Last Summer at Bluefish Cove (1980), Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy (1981), Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart (1986), David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly (1988), which also dealt with Asian identity, and Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey (1993). Tony Kushner's acclaimed two-part Angels in America (1991–92) is generally considered the century's most brilliant and innovative theatrical treatment of the contemporary gay world.

Rape of the Lock

Source: http/zainabkhawaja.wordpress.com/2011/4/11/the rape of the-lock/

The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope is one of the most famous examples of a mock-epic poem in the English language. It was first published in 1712, and was later revised to include the “machinery”, the retinue of supernaturals who influence both the actions and the morals of the story. It is Pope’s poetic career that defines the Augustan Age of English literature with neoclassical poetry that was learned and allusive, setting less value on originality that the Romantic poets would in the next century. A main feature of literature at this time, one that affects Pope’s writing, is that it was morally and politically engaged, privileging satire as its most central form.

The poem was inspired by an actual incident that took place between acquaintances of Pope’s. The main character in the poem, Belinda, is in fact based on Arabella Fermor, and the man who cut off a lock of her hair is Lord Petre. John Caryll, to whom the poem is addressed, asked Pope to write a poem, putting the entire event forth in a light-hearted way to end the strife between the two families. Pope’s aim was to encourage his friends to laugh at their own foolishness by writing a humorous commentary on the arrogance and idleness of the 18^th century elite.

The Rape of the Lock is a mock-heroic poem. The epic is a form of poetry usually applied to grand, lofty subjects such as love and war. By applying this form to the trivial argument between Belinda and the Baron, Pope pokes fun at his society and its failure to rise to epic standards. His election to shape his poem in the elaborate style of the classic epic involved observation of certain required traditions: the invocation to the muse, the playing of a game that becomes a symbol of battle, the description of the heroes’ armor, and a descent into the underworld. Using this style essentially makes a mockery of the event, which is said to have actually occurred and inspired Pope’s poem. As a result, Pope emphasizes the ridiculousness of a society that contains members who have so much free time they elevate frivolous events and treat these events with the gravity that should be applied to more serious issues. Values have lost all proportion.

Literary devices are intricately laced throughout the poem. The verse form of this poem is the heroic couplet, one in which two ideas may be easily balanced and counter-weighed. It is perfectly suited to the evaluative, moralizing nature of the poem. The heroic couplet is made of rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines, with sentences distributed across lines and half-lines, so that the judicious aspect of Pope’s ideas is emphasized.

Pope tells us a great deal about his poem during the impact of its first few seconds. The opening of Canto 1 makes clear the mock-heroic style. Here, Pope invokes the Muse, states the dedication to John Caryll, and introduces the conventional epic subjects of love and war. (Tillotson, 1938)

‘This verse to Caryll, Muse! Is due;

This, ev’n Belinda may vouchsafe to view.

Yet already we can see that these subjects are not being treated seriously. We are promised a narrative of towering anger and conflict, ‘dire Offence’ and ‘mighty Contests’, but already, the amorous causes, however mighty the contests they produce, have been dubbed ‘trivial Things’.  In addition to the social context, there is a literary one. Pope’s opening lines are an allusion to Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is here that we establish that this is to be a mocking poem. Copying Milton, Pope surprises us by writing not of the wrath of Achilles, or Virgil’s arms and the man, but simply the cutting off of a girl’s hair. The humor is Pope’s poem is “high-built indoor laughter”. Its mockery is far from simple. The laughter is often simultaneously hitting two objects: the great epic form and life itself, the characters, the well-bred lord, the gentle belle, Sir Plume. And yet, not all will be laughter. There is the title and the fierceness of the verb ‘assault’ to remind the reader that there is some seriousness yet.

In Canto 1, with Belinda’s dream, Pope introduces the “machinery” of the poem. He begins to sketch the character of coquette” in this initial canto. He draws the portrait indirectly, through characteristics of the Sylphs rather than of Belinda herself. The Sylphs become an allegory for the mannered conventions that govern female social behavior. Pope makes it clear that these women are not conducting themselves on the basis of abstract moral principles, but are governed by an elaborate social mechanism – of which the Sylphs cut a fitting caricature. (SparkNotes Editors, 2002)

Pope was a weak human as well as a moralist. In his poem, he flatters Belinda, saying that she must be forgiven for her mistakes. He dubbed the cutting of the lock a ‘trivial Thing,’ but if Belinda has all the typical female foibles, Pope wants us to recognize that it is partly because she has been educated and trained to act this way.

Pope’s portrayal of Belinda at her dressing table introduces mock-heroic motifs that run through the poem. The scene of her toilette is rendered first as a religious sacrament, in which Belinda herself in the priestess and her image in the looking glass is the Goddess she serves, This parody of the religious rites before a battle gives way, then to another kind of mock-epic scene, that of the ritualized arming of the hero. Combs, pins, and cosmetics take the place of weapons as “awful Beauty puts on all its arms”.

In Canto 2, Belinda sets out by boat to Hampton Court Palace. She is accompanied by a party of ladies and gentlemen, but is the most striking member of the group. Her two ringlets are described as love’s labyrinths, designed to entangle men’s hearts. The Baron decides to steal these locks. He builds an altar to pray for success. In true mock-heroic fashion, the gods listened to his prayer but decided to grant only half of it. Ariel remembers that ‘some dire disaster’ threatens Belinda, and assigns her an extensive troop of bodyguards.

In the first canto, the religious imagery surrounding Belinda’s grooming rituals gave way to militaristic conceit. The same happens in this canto. (SparkNotes Editors, 2002) Her curls are a trap to ensnare an enemy. Her petticoat is described as a defensive armament comparable to the Shield of Achilles. Here, the sexual allegory of the poem comes into view. The title of the poem associates the cutting of Belinda’s hair with a more explicit sexual conquest and here Pope cultivates that suggestion. The sexually metaphorical language increases with words like ‘ravish’ and ‘betray’. Also, the breaking of china is an allusion to the loss of virginity.  Belinda’s petticoat is the battlefield that requires the most extensive fortifications. This fact furthers the idea that the rape of the lock stands in for literal rape.

In Canto 3, the boat reaches its destination and Belinda sits down with two men to play a game of cards. They play ombre, somewhat like bridge. And it is described in terms of a heroic battle: the cards are troops. Belinda begins favorably, but soon the Baron is winning. Belinda recovers in the last trick so as to just barely win back the amount she bid. Then they all get ready to drink coffee. The Baron is reminded of his intention to cut Belinda’s lock. Clarissa gives him scissors and on his third attempt he manages to achieve his goal. The Sylphs try to protect her, but Ariel finds that she has ‘an earthly lover lurking at her heart’, and gives up protecting her then. The implication is that she secretly wants to be violated. The deed is done. Belinda throws a fit of anger.

Hampton Court Palace is described as a place where Queen Anne ‘dost sometimes consel take – and sometimes tea’. This is a zeugma, the effect of which is show the royal residence as a place that houses both serious matters of state and frivolous social occasions. Against the gossip and chatter of the young lords and ladies, Pope opens a window onto more serious matters that are occurring meanwhile, like criminal trials & executions. The card game is a parody of the battle scenes of great epic poems. Pope is suggesting that the energy and passion once applied to brave and serious purposes is now expended on such insignificant trials as games and gambling, which often become a mere front for flirtation. Belinda’s distress after her lock has been cut is to some degree an affectation. The melodrama of her screams is complimented by the ironic comparison of the Baron’s feat to the conquest of nations.

In Canto 4, after the loss of Belinda’s lock, an earthly gnome named Umbriel flies down to the “Cave of Spleen”. He passes through Belinda’s room, where she’s attended by Ill-Nature and Affectation, her two handmaidens. Umbriel addresses the ‘Goddess of Spleen’ and returns with a bag of ‘sighs, sobs and passions’, and a vial of sorrow, tears and grief, which he unleashes on Belinda, fueling her anger and depression. Her friend Thalestris urges Belinda to avenge herself, insisting that her honor has been insulted. Thalestris urges her husband, Sir Plume, to demand that the Baron return the lock. Sir Plume’s speech is silly and ineffectual, highlighting how far from courtly behavior this generation of gentlemen has fallen. His speech has no logical, moral or oratorical power.

Thalestris’s insistence that Belinda has suffered the worst kind of offense shows us that the real question is a superficial one – public reputation – rather than the moral imperative to chastity. At the end of the canto, Belinda says:

‘Oh, hadst thou, cruel! Been content to seize

Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!’

This is suggestive of pubic hair, and Pope is pointing out the degree to which outward appearance is valued over all else.

The Baron ignores the ladies’ appeals, and Clarissa delivers a long speech, stating the moral of the poem. She questions why society places so much emphasis on a woman’s beauty, but almost none on ‘good sense’ and ‘good humour’. The moral of the poem is seriously meant. Critics of that time considered the old poets had planted a firm moral in their epics and this element Pope imitated without mockery. He allotted Clarissa a long speech, setting it out so clearly that no one could have any excuse for missing it.

‘And trust me, Dear! Good Humour can prevail,

When Airs, Flights, and Screams, and Scolding fail…

She is ignored by Belinda and Thalestris, and an all-out attack is launched on the Baron. Umbriel congratulates himself on causing this discord. The description of the battle has a markedly erotic quality, as all the characters wallow in their mock-agonies. Belinda and the Baron meet in combat and she emerges victorious by peppering him with snuff and drawing her bodkin. Pope tells us that the Baron is not frightened because he “sought no more than on his foe to die”, meaning his goal all along was sexual consummation. The ringlet has been lost in the chaos. Pope avers that it has risen to heaven to become a star, so that it may be admired for all eternity. In this way, it will attract more envy that it ever could on earth.

Canto 5’s battle scene is an allusion to heroic military actions. The stoic Baron is compared to Aeneas ‘the Trojan’ and Roman gods are invoked by name. The bodkin here represents a decorative hair pin, but there is a suggestion of the weapon of the ancient days as Belinda holds it over the Baron. The poem ends in a decidedly mock-heroic way. The ending is designed to compliment Arabella Fermor (Belinda), and also to praise the poet as the instrument of her immortality. We find that no real moral development has taken place. Belinda is asked to come to terms with her loss through a kind of bribe, or distraction that reinforces her basically frivolous outlook.

The fundamental theme of The Rape of the Lock is the ruckus that high society makes over insignificant matters, such as breaches of decorum. Other themes that Pope develops in the poem include human vanity and the importance of being able to laugh at life’s little reversals. The latter motif is a kind of “moral to the story.” (Cummings, 2011) Epic conventions that Pope parodies include: invocation of the muse, division of the poem into cantos, descriptions of soldiers preparing for battle and heroic deeds, account of a great sea voyage, participation of deities or spirits in the action, and presentation of scenes in the underworld.

The main figure of speech in The Rape of the Lock is hyperbole. Pope uses it throughout the poem to exaggerate the ordinary and the commonplace, making them extraordinary and spectacular. In so doing, paradoxically, he makes them seem as they really are, small and petty. (Cummings, 2011) One example is:

‘Sol through white Curtains shot a tim’rous Ray,

And ope’d those Eyes that must eclipse the Day.’

Other literary devices are also used, such as personification in the phrase ‘Love in these Labyrinths his Slaves detains’ and anaphora in the line ‘He saw, he wish’d, and to the Prize aspir’d’ and alliteration in several heroic couplets, such as:

‘Where Wigs with Wigs, with Sword-knots Sword-knots strive,

Beaux banish Beaux, and Coaches Coaches drive.’

Pope’s message is very effectively put across. Not only does he show how the conflict between the two parties is trivial, but through this poem he also addresses wider societal concerns. His satire is directed to upper-class society as a whole. Mocking Belinda’s vanity and pretensions, her compares her to the sun. His images of silver and gold suggest that we need to consider the real value underlying glittery and outwardly attractive surfaces.

I found this poem very well written and enjoyable. Pope’s careful diction and use of the heroic couplet not only enhances the satire of the poem, but paints a striking picture of how Pope views the society that he lives in. Throughout the poem, it seems that he is half-admonishing, half-poking fun at Belinda and the Baron. In a good-natured way, he’s trying to point out flaws.