'Who has the best tunes?'

Sounds of Englishness in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses

Abstract

This paper offers a reading of The Satanic Verses as a secular narrative: focusing on the chapters set in London, I analyse spaces of Englishness in the novel. It is my contention that “imagined communities,” to use Benedict Anderson’s term, are allegorized by the trope of voice in the text: national identifications are portrayed as secular miracles, collective moments of national unisonance, suggesting that the most ephemeral entity is invested with the greatest possible significance in the novel. Focusing on three episodes (Rose Diamond’s vision of William the Conqueror, Saladin’s quest for Englishness on the streets of London, and the recreation of Dickens’ city in the Shepperton film studios) I argue that the more disarticulate and intangible the sound effect allegorizing these moments are, the less controllable they become by pedagogical discourses, and the more they are able to survive in the postmodern text.