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Definition of Motif
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the central themes of a book... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of related symbols, help develop the... read full definition
A motif is an element or idea that recurs throughout a work of literature. Motifs, which are often collections of... read full definition
Part 1, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Fused Words:
Throughout the novel, Rushdie occasionally uses a stylistic motif in which he fuses disparate words into one. In Chapter 2 of Part 1, for instance, he writes:
For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased to exist.
Then, in the next chapter:
"You come back after so long and think godknowswhat of yourselves."
And later, in Part 5:
Bythesametoken, if his angeling was proving insufficient, whose fault, please, was this?
This technique serves a few purposes. First, it significantly impacts the tone and pace of the novel. Passages that employ one of these fused words feel faster, more energetic, more elaborate, and more fanciful. They also tend to read as more mythic, the work of an intricate and passionate storyteller.
These words also exhibit in miniature one of the book's larger arguments. Just as Rushdie fuses distinct words into one whole, The Satanic Verses advocates for a worldview that holds distinctions and differences together. Good and evil, Rushdie argues, are not separate but entwined. The same is true of distinct cultures, opposing religions, fact and fiction, and life and dreams. By using fused words to demonstrate this position, Rushdie also advocates for the importance of language in communicating this kind of unity across difference.
Related Themes:
Part 1, Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis—Fused Words:
Throughout the novel, Rushdie occasionally uses a stylistic motif in which he fuses disparate words into one. In Chapter 2 of Part 1, for instance, he writes:
For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased to exist.
Then, in the next chapter:
"You come back after so long and think godknowswhat of yourselves."
And later, in Part 5:
Bythesametoken, if his angeling was proving insufficient, whose fault, please, was this?
This technique serves a few purposes. First, it significantly impacts the tone and pace of the novel. Passages that employ one of these fused words feel faster, more energetic, more elaborate, and more fanciful. They also tend to read as more mythic, the work of an intricate and passionate storyteller.
These words also exhibit in miniature one of the book's larger arguments. Just as Rushdie fuses distinct words into one whole, The Satanic Verses advocates for a worldview that holds distinctions and differences together. Good and evil, Rushdie argues, are not separate but entwined. The same is true of distinct cultures, opposing religions, fact and fiction, and life and dreams. By using fused words to demonstrate this position, Rushdie also advocates for the importance of language in communicating this kind of unity across difference.
Related Themes:
Part 3, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—The Omniscient "I":
Throughout the novel, a first-person narrator appears very occasionally. This first-person voice functions as a motif. Near the beginning of Part 3, for instance, Rushdie writes:
Higher Powers had taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies.
Later, in Part Seven, the "I" crops up again:
I'm saying nothing. Don't ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll. Where's the pleasure if you're always intervening to give hints, change the rules, fix the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up to this point and I don't plan to spoil things now. Don't think I haven't wanted to butt in; I have plenty of times [...]
Once, this "I" figure even appears to Gibreel in person as a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair. Ostensibly, this figure is God himself, commenting and slightly intervening in the events of the novel. Elsewhere, though, this "I" figure seems to stand in for Rushdie, who, of course, acts as a kind of god over his own work. Many readers also speculate that the "I" figure might be Satan, which would justify the novel's title: The Satanic Verses would be expected to be narrated by Satan, after all.
Though the book most supports the notion that the intervening "I" is God, all these possibilities are valid. In fact, the way interpretations shift between them is an important point of Rushdie's "I." The presence of a higher narrative power in the novel is always speculative, never fixed. This might be read as Rushdie's argument for how religion ought to operate, as opposed to the fundamentalist understanding he critiques so thoroughly in his novel.
Related Themes:
Part 5, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Fused Words:
Throughout the novel, Rushdie occasionally uses a stylistic motif in which he fuses disparate words into one. In Chapter 2 of Part 1, for instance, he writes:
For many of his fans, the boundary separating the performer and his roles had longago ceased to exist.
Then, in the next chapter:
"You come back after so long and think godknowswhat of yourselves."
And later, in Part 5:
Bythesametoken, if his angeling was proving insufficient, whose fault, please, was this?
This technique serves a few purposes. First, it significantly impacts the tone and pace of the novel. Passages that employ one of these fused words feel faster, more energetic, more elaborate, and more fanciful. They also tend to read as more mythic, the work of an intricate and passionate storyteller.
These words also exhibit in miniature one of the book's larger arguments. Just as Rushdie fuses distinct words into one whole, The Satanic Verses advocates for a worldview that holds distinctions and differences together. Good and evil, Rushdie argues, are not separate but entwined. The same is true of distinct cultures, opposing religions, fact and fiction, and life and dreams. By using fused words to demonstrate this position, Rushdie also advocates for the importance of language in communicating this kind of unity across difference.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—A Pure Idea:
The notion of an idea or belief system that is pure, uncompromising, and intense is a recurring motif throughout the novel. Often, this motif appears in the context of religious radicalism; the prophets that populate the novel, from Mahound to Ayesha, are examples. In two key passages, though, Rushdie addresses the concept head-on.
First, when Gibreel is madly wandering London in Part 5, Rushdie writes:
Any new idea, Mahound, is asked two questions. The first is asked when it's weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze?—The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but the hundredth time, will change the world.
'What's the second question?' Gibreel asked aloud.
Answer the first one first.
Later, in Part 8, the same language crops up again in the story of Ayesha's pilgrimage, when Mirza Saeed challenges her authority with an offer to fly the pilgrims to Mecca; after consideration, she rejects his offer:
His offer had contained an old question: What kind of idea are you? And she, in turn, had offered him an old answer. I was tempted, but am renewed; am uncompromising; absolute; pure.
This motif introduces two types of idea. The first type is flexible and compromising; the second type is unbending, absolute, and pure. This distinction is key to Rushdie's understanding of prophets and religious fundamentalists, who ascribe to the notion of a pure and uncompromising idea, no matter the cost to themselves or others. There's something undeniably alluring about the way Rushdie writes about such ideas; his language is intense, powerful, and almost seductive. But the results of following such ideas are nearly always destructive, like the drowning of Ayesha's pilgrims.
In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie himself seems fixed on a single uncompromising idea—but this, by nature, creates a paradox. The idea to which Rushdie is committed is that change is constant and infinitely complex. Every character, moral, and story in the novel is metamorphic and hard to pin down. To Rushdie, the only truly lasting and uncompromising idea is, paradoxically, that the world is always changing, compromising, and evolving.
Related Themes:
Part 7, Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—The Omniscient "I":
Throughout the novel, a first-person narrator appears very occasionally. This first-person voice functions as a motif. Near the beginning of Part 3, for instance, Rushdie writes:
Higher Powers had taken an interest, it should have been obvious to them both, and such Powers (I am, of course, speaking of myself) have a mischievous, almost a wanton attitude to tumbling flies.
Later, in Part Seven, the "I" crops up again:
I'm saying nothing. Don't ask me to clear things up one way or the other; the time of revelations is long gone. The rules of Creation are pretty clear: you set things up, you make them thus and so, and then you let them roll. Where's the pleasure if you're always intervening to give hints, change the rules, fix the fights? Well, I've been pretty self-controlled up to this point and I don't plan to spoil things now. Don't think I haven't wanted to butt in; I have plenty of times [...]
Once, this "I" figure even appears to Gibreel in person as a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair. Ostensibly, this figure is God himself, commenting and slightly intervening in the events of the novel. Elsewhere, though, this "I" figure seems to stand in for Rushdie, who, of course, acts as a kind of god over his own work. Many readers also speculate that the "I" figure might be Satan, which would justify the novel's title: The Satanic Verses would be expected to be narrated by Satan, after all.
Though the book most supports the notion that the intervening "I" is God, all these possibilities are valid. In fact, the way interpretations shift between them is an important point of Rushdie's "I." The presence of a higher narrative power in the novel is always speculative, never fixed. This might be read as Rushdie's argument for how religion ought to operate, as opposed to the fundamentalist understanding he critiques so thoroughly in his novel.
Related Themes:
Part 8
Explanation and Analysis—A Pure Idea:
The notion of an idea or belief system that is pure, uncompromising, and intense is a recurring motif throughout the novel. Often, this motif appears in the context of religious radicalism; the prophets that populate the novel, from Mahound to Ayesha, are examples. In two key passages, though, Rushdie addresses the concept head-on.
First, when Gibreel is madly wandering London in Part 5, Rushdie writes:
Any new idea, Mahound, is asked two questions. The first is asked when it's weak: WHAT KIND OF AN IDEA ARE YOU? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze?—The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, be smashed to bits; but the hundredth time, will change the world.
'What's the second question?' Gibreel asked aloud.
Answer the first one first.
Later, in Part 8, the same language crops up again in the story of Ayesha's pilgrimage, when Mirza Saeed challenges her authority with an offer to fly the pilgrims to Mecca; after consideration, she rejects his offer:
His offer had contained an old question: What kind of idea are you? And she, in turn, had offered him an old answer. I was tempted, but am renewed; am uncompromising; absolute; pure.
This motif introduces two types of idea. The first type is flexible and compromising; the second type is unbending, absolute, and pure. This distinction is key to Rushdie's understanding of prophets and religious fundamentalists, who ascribe to the notion of a pure and uncompromising idea, no matter the cost to themselves or others. There's something undeniably alluring about the way Rushdie writes about such ideas; his language is intense, powerful, and almost seductive. But the results of following such ideas are nearly always destructive, like the drowning of Ayesha's pilgrims.
In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie himself seems fixed on a single uncompromising idea—but this, by nature, creates a paradox. The idea to which Rushdie is committed is that change is constant and infinitely complex. Every character, moral, and story in the novel is metamorphic and hard to pin down. To Rushdie, the only truly lasting and uncompromising idea is, paradoxically, that the world is always changing, compromising, and evolving.
Related Themes:
