“Turn Your Watch Upside Down in Bombay and You See the Time in London”: Catoptric Urban Configurations in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses

Abstract

This article reassesses the counter-discursive signifi cance of the urban problematic in Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. It argues that cities in the text unsettle the ideas of historical fi xity and geographical location by continually reconfi guring each other and that urban spatialities and temporalities and urban identities are di-versifi ed, rearticulated and displaced through the production of "satanic", or erosive, migrant verses, spells and stories that undermine offi cial metropolitan narratives. Such di-versifi cations involve strategies that I have termed "catoptric" (from "catoptrics", a term which designates the study of images and light) in order to encompass a variety of mirror effects and illusions and the ways in which they bear on subjectivities, cartographic discourse and travel. Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, Rushdie's characters cross and thus subvert a number of looking-glass frontiers. These catoptric itineraries compromise the concepts of origin, teleological directionality and cultural purity and have cities refl ect each other in new ways.