‘The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross’: Stepping Across Lines in Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

Abstract

In his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie explored the frontier between fact and fiction with explosive consequences. By foregrounding the textuality of a sacred text, the novel worked to bring the nature of contemporary reality into doubt, merging the religious and the secular in a way that challenged what Rushdie saw as the increasingly rigid frameworks of communal identity taking hold in Britain during the 1980s (in his explicitly anti-Thatcherite 1982 essay, ‘The New Empire Within Britain’, he describes ‘a crisis of the whole culture, of the society’s entire sense of itself … [of which] racism is only the most clearly visible part’ [1992, p. 129]). It was in many ways this idea of ‘merging’ that, on both a literal and a metaphorical level, touched a nerve with so many people at the time (not only amongst religious conservatives, but also amongst political conservatives, whose sense of homogeneous national identity was placed under threat by an increasing normalisation in Britain of both multiculturalism and multiracialism). The Satanic Verses drew attention to what has since become a truism in contemporary debates about cultural difference: namely, that reality is plural, with multiple worlds often occupying a single place in space and time. As the Rushdie Affair itself made evident, it is when the borderlines between such worlds are crossed or contested that they can literally erupt into spaces of violent, existential conflict.