Agaphour's Reading of "The Satanic Verses"

In Andrew Agaphour’s essay ‘Identity and Religion of the Status: The Rushdie Affair in the West’ he claims that, in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie outlines three types of ‘identity formation’: the ‘religious’, the ‘secular’ and the ‘postmodern’. The religious Agaphour defines in terms of traditional assignations of identity according to some transcendent ground; the secular is an identity that is utterly rational; and the postmodern (so-called) is seen in terms of ‘individual agency’. In Agaphour’s reading, then, Rushdie clearly favours the ‘postmodern’ over the other two. This a badly drafted typology, however: the ‘secular’ identity scarcely appears at all in the novel (as Agaphour defines it) and whether ‘postmodern’ is the most enlightening term for the identity Rushdie favours is extremely dubious. In fact, even Agaphour has to admit that Rushdie’s strident critique - in blatantly moral terms - of the religious identity is at odds with what may be termed a ‘postmodern’ critique. Rushdie’s analysis of identity and selfhood is contemporary (and in that sense perhaps ‘postmodern’) in that it is situated in the contemporary experiences of religious violence and of the massive movements of people-groups across the globe. However, it also solidly rooted in the Enlightenment and in the liberalism of the mid-twentieth century. There are echoes, too, of existentialism in Rushdie’s celebration of the individual forging his identity in the teeth of the circumstances, and especially death. Rushdie is perhaps a postmodern narrator, but he is no Foucauldian. The self in Rushdie is unsettled and unstable, but certainly not decentred.