The Satanic Verses

But we may permit ourselves to speculate a while about the true nature of this Ultimate, this Inexpiable Offence. –Is it really, can it be, simply his silence on Rosa’s stairs? – Or are there deeper resentments here, gripes for which this so-called Primary Cause is, in truth, no more than a substitute, a front? – For are they not conjoined opposites, these two, each man the other’s shadow? – One seeking to be transformed into the foreignness he admires, the other preferring, contemptuously, to transform; one, a hapless fellow who seems to be continually punished for uncommitted crimes, the other, called angelic by one and all, the type of man who gets away with everything. – We may describe Chamcha as being somewhat less than life-size; but loud, vulgar Gibreel is, without question, a good deal larger than life, a disparity which might easily inspire neo-Procrustean lusts in Chamcha: to stretch himself by cutting Farishta down to size.
    What is unforgivable?
    What if not the shivering nakedness of being
wholly known
to a person one does not trust? – And has not Gibreel seen Saladin Chamcha in circumstances – hijack, fall, arrest – in which the secrets of the self were utterly exposed?
    Well, then. – Are we coming closer to it? Should we even say that these are two fundamentally different
types
of self? Might we not agree that Gibreel, for all his stage-name and performances; and in spite of born-again slogans, new beginnings, metamorphoses; – has wished to remain, to a large degree,
continuous –
that is, joined to and arising from his past; – that he chose neither near-fatal illness nor transmuting fall; that, in point of fact, he fears above all things the altered states in which his dreams leak into, and overwhelm, his waking self, making him that angelic Gibreel he has no desire to be; – so that his is still a self which, for our present purposes, we may describe as ‘true’ … whereas Saladin Chamcha is a creature of
selected
discontinuities, a
willing
re-invention; his
preferred
revolt against history being what makes him, in our chosen idiom, ‘false’? And might we then not go on to say that it is this falsity of self that makes possible in Chamcha a worse and deeper falsity – call this ‘evil’ – and that this is the truth, the door, that was opened in him by his fall? – While Gibreel, tofollow the logic of our established terminology, is to be considered ‘good’ by virtue of
wishing to remain
, for all his vicissitudes, at bottom an untranslated man.
    – But, and again but: this sounds, does it not, dangerously like an intentionalist fallacy? – Such distinctions, resting as they must on an idea of the self as being (ideally) homogeneous, non-hybrid, ‘pure’, – an utterly fantastic notion! – cannot, must not, suffice. No! Let’s rather say an even harder thing: that evil may not be as far beneath our surfaces as we like to say it is. – That, in fact, we fall towards it
naturally
, that is,
not against our natures. –
And that Saladin Chamcha set out to destroy Gibreel Farishta because, finally, it proved so easy to do; the true appeal of evil being the seductive ease with which one may embark upon that road. (And, let us add in conclusion, the later impossibility of return.)
    Saladin Chamcha, however, insists on a simpler line. ‘It was his treason at Rosa Diamond’s house; his silence, nothing more.’
    He sets foot upon the counterfeit London Bridge. From a nearby red-and-white-striped puppeteer’s booth, Mr Punch – whacking Judy – calls out to him:
That’s the way to do it
! After which Gibreel, too, speaks a greeting, the enthusiasm of the words undone by the incongruous listlessness of the voice: ‘Spoono, is it you. You bloody devil. There you are, big as life. Come here, you Salad baba, old Chumch.’

    This happened:
    The moment Saladin Chamcha got close enough to Allie Cone to be transfixed, and somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt his reborn animosity towards Gibreel extending itself to her, with her degree-zero go-to-hell look, her air of being privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe; also, her quality of what he would afterwards think of as
wilderness
, a hard, sparse thing, anti-social, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy him so much? Why, before she’d even opened her mouth, had he characterized her as part of the enemy?
    Perhaps because he desired her; and desired, even more, whathe took to be that