Postmodern London: Transnational Multiculturalism or Imported Neoimperialism?

By Jake Wires, Student

Brief analysis of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

As the recently dominant phenomenon of national colonialism gradually recedes into extinction, the alarmingly blatant injustices endured by diverse localities, which previously suffered detrimental smothering by the oppressive rule of extroverted economic leaders such as Great Britain, have been somewhat constrained. The cessation of active inhabitation of foreign lands by the British government has moderately reduced the amount of intercultural conflicts between Anglo-Saxons and diasporic communities on a global level, but the retraction of English power to within its own borders has not completely eradicated transcultural tensions. Even as the formerly imperial Britain retreats to its own domain, it does not encounter the culturally homogenous environment it has known in the past; that is to say, Great Britain no longer consists solely of the English. Mass migration of culturally diverse communities has created in Britain a microcosmic system of colonies in which England now finds itself host to members of the same countries into which it had previously trespassed.
The presence of such diverse cultural identities in England, and particularly London, can be seen as a potential foundation for intercultural understanding and healthy evolution in global politics. But recent trends of racial profiling and discrimination have stymied any such nascent progress, instead creating intriguing new social barriers within city limits, ghettoizing minorities particularly of Asian and African descent into curiously mutated colonies. Salman Rushdie’s expansive and multifaceted novel The Satanic Verses illustrates, in a perhaps exaggerated form, the new cultural tensions building within the city of London as de facto segregation creates new imported empires in which minorities are once again forced to submit to the British Empire (albeit in a new form) rather than being included in the multicultural society that was supposed to burgeon after the fall of colonialism. The Satanic Verses is a novel dealing with many complex issues in today’s postmodern social environment, but through extraordinary imagery and unique characterization, the novel emphasizes an interesting portrayal of a modern city’s cultural struggle within its own borders. As Rushdie notes, “Britain is now two entirely different worlds, and the one you inhabit is determined by the colour of your skin” (New Empire).
Throughout this immense novel, Rushdie employs sometimes-outlandish magical realism to illustrate the conception of London as a non-traversable chasm of cultural difference in which Asian minorities cannot enter the dimension of ‘egalitarian’ community enjoyed by whites. It is not surprising that certain disparities would arise from England’s new heterogeneous cultural composition – “culture does imply difference, but the differences are no longer taxonomic; they are interactive and refractive” (Appadurai, 60). The ultimate significance of Rushdie’s portrayal of these differences lies in the London majority’s highly exclusionary reaction to these cultural inconsistencies and the very limited nature of transcultural interaction between minority and majority:
A gulf in reality has been created. White and black perceptions of everyday life have moved so far apart as to be incompatible. And the rift isn't narrowing; it's getting wider. We stand on opposite sides of the abyss, yelling at each other and sometimes hurling stones, while the ground crumbles beneath our feet. (New Empire)
Rushdie portrays London as an impenetrable fortress in which the white majority is protected comfortably within intangible walls while ethnic minorities are relegated to a peripheral netherworld of simultaneous subservience and ostracization.
Rushdie consistently portrays London as a culturally exclusive pedestal effectively inaccessible to minorities – Mimi Mamoulian voices the problems faced by outsiders of privileged society when she sardonically discusses her demeaning job as an expendable and faceless voice for mainstream commercials:
Comprehend, please, that I am an intelligent female. I have read Finnegans Wake and am conversant with postmodernist critiques of the West, e.g. that we have here a society capable only of Pastiche: a “flattened” world. When I become the voice of a bottle of bubble bath, I am entering Flatland knowingly, understanding what I’m doing and why. Viz., I am earning cash… (Rushdie, 270)
This passage supports the image of London as an exclusive and homogenous Flatland, into which the injection of minorities is attainable only through the oftentimes degrading and restrictive admittance of the Flatland members or through magical anomalies – the novel’s instigating scene of Gibreel and Saladin falling down into London is an example of such an anomaly. London is shown as a culturally singular universe similar to Edwin Abbott’s portrayal of the most extreme instance of Flatland, the one-dimensional Pointland, in which its inhabitants are incapable of diversity:
He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no conception; he knows not Length, nor Breadth, nor Height, for he has had no experience of them; he has no cognizance even of the number Two; nor has he a thought of Plurality; for he is himself his One and All, being really Nothing. Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy. (Abbott, 94)
Rushdie portrays London’s ruling majority as so ethnocentric that it has substantially separated itself from its minorities, grouping them into small inferior colonies that the ruling class dominates with laws and morals but otherwise ignores. In a sense, London has imported minority communities within its borders only to treat them in much the same way that Great Britain’s external subjects were ruled during imperial occupation of foreign countries.
As Gibreel ventures farther into the Flatland of London, his perception of the city becomes “vague” and “amorphous.” He begins to feel that “it is becoming impossible to describe the world” (Rushdie, 474). Rushdie’s aforementioned conception of “a gulf in reality” begins to become more and more severe, resulting in the author’s increasing use of magic realism to illustrate the ‘indescribable world’. As Professor Fluck notes, “The aesthetic mode opens up the possibility of a new interpretation of the world. It draws attention to aspects that have been overlooked, ignored, or suppressed” (Fluck, 88). Rushdie uses this inherent property of aesthetics to forcefully convince the reader to contemplate the status of the unique intercultural environment in London by portraying Gibreel and Saladin, cultural aliens in London, as fantastic abnormal beasts. The problems minorities in London face are magnified by Rushdie’s symbolic use of angles and devilish goats as he narrates his tale of modern day London.
Coupled with the fantastic images invoked by Rushdie’s highly inventive narrative is a credible network of diverse character interactions, which help to further the novel’s exploration of cultural dissent in London. The characters’ perceptions of the multicultural dissonance within the city are dependent upon their social status, and this very contingency helps to emphasize the segregated nature of London. “The modern city is the locus classicus of incompatible realities. Lives that have no business mingling with one another sit side by side upon the omnibus,” lectures Otto Cone, one of the few representatives of the cultural majority present in this novel (Rushdie, 325). Not having faced the hardships that minorities have, Otto is willing to minimize the significance of cultural differences, rationalizing any dissension by treating it as an inevitable byproduct of interaction between ‘lives that have no business mingling with one another’. But seen from outside the fortress of inclusion, the incompatibility of reality takes on a more significant role, as Dr. Simba, the cultural scapegoat of London society preaches:
‘Make no mistake,’ he said in that court, ‘we are here to change things. I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed; African, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are other than what we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans, if our mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. We shall be the hewers of the dead wood and the gardeners of the new. It is our turn now.’ (Rushdie, 429)
The very fact that the cultural majority of London doesn’t notice the severity of distension between its citizens is a signal of the institutionalized nature of discrimination within the country; Britain’s long history of dominating other societies has ingrained a somewhat monocultural philosophy in its citizens. They truly have become their own world, their own universe. They are incapable of conceptualizing any significant society outside their own. When they do momentarily allow minorities into their spheres of cognizance, it is in an artificial form – Mimi and Saladin are seen as nothing more than voices for shampoo bottles, while other minorities similarly complain of being construed in a less than accurate manner: “‘They describe us,’ the other whispered solemnly. ‘That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct’” (Rushdie, 174).
Even after the termination of England’s imperial control of foreign countries, Rushdie is conscious of a domineering and exclusionary control of England over cultural minorities. The Satanic Verses, among other things, is an exploration of the unique social divisions within London, in which minorities are relegated to inferior spheres resembling the discriminative social constructs of Great Britain’s previous imperial reign. Rushdie employs a distinctively fantastic and magical landscape as well as convincing characterization to explore the nature of intercultural interactions in London from the minority’s perspective in an attempt to stimulate in the reader’s mind a dialogue of political multiculturalism and true globalization.


















Works Cited

Abbott, Edwin A. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. New York: Dover Publications, 1952.
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Fluck, Winfried. “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Eds. Elliott, Emory, Louis F. Caton, and Jeffrey Rhyne. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Picador, 1988.
– – –. “The New Empire Within Britain.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms. New York: Viking and Granta, 1991.