Ghostly Thinking and Fictional Dwelling: Heidegger’s Philosophy of Nature and Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the connections between ghost fantasy and the meditation on dwelling in Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which explores migration and human intimacy with the natural environment. I argue that the novel helps clarify and develop Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of nature, which associates thinking and dwelling with the ghostly. As a communicative device, fictionality plays an important role in both writers’ exploration of the rootless condition of modern society, influencing their understanding of essence, truth, and value. I contend that a conversation between Heidegger and Rushdie discloses how contemporary literary fiction can contribute to a dynamic interpretation of the human-nature relationship, which embraces mystery and challenges mechanistic theoretical frameworks.

Introduction

At first glance, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of nature and ghosts in Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses might seem an odd combination. Rushdie is not known as a Heideggerian thinker, although he briefly mentions the connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and that of Heraclitus in his essay “Heraclitus,” which discusses migrant writers and fiction.¹ The ghostly is seldom considered a central term in Heidegger’s philosophy, but I will show that his imagination of specters deserves more academic attention.² I argue that they are both leading thinkers who, reflecting on the rootless condition of contemporary society, search for the possibility of homecoming. This essay will also demonstrate that their exploration of dwelling involves fictional devices, especially ghost fantasy. This method influences their understanding of some central concepts in environmental philosophy, such as essence, truth, and value.

In this article, I adopt the definition of fictionality as “intentionally signaled, communicated invention.”³ Instead of opposing fictionality against truth, I argue that Rushdie and Heidegger both involve invented elements, such as fictional scenarios and spectral characters, in their writings about authentic life. This method brings mystery and dynamicity into their theories without compromising validity, because the invention is signaled to the reader. Bringing Rushdie into a conversation with Heidegger, my analysis will show that fictionality is not only a significant literary device, but it also helps develop theoretical approaches to understanding thinking and dwelling in contemporary society.

Rushdie suggests the theme of rootlessness in the epigraph of The Satanic Verses. He quotes Daniel Defoe’s imagination of Satan’s fall: “Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode.”⁴ The ancient myth mirrors the contemporary human condition, especially regarding migration and the detachment from the natural environment. In Rushdie’s characteristically fantastical style, the novel begins when its two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, fall from a hijacked plane and land on a British beach. Gibreel regards this experience as their rebirth, but it begins an odyssey haunted by their past. They find themselves transforming into mythical existences after meeting Rosa Diamond, who has the phantom sight of the Norman Conquest and of her past life on the Argentinian Pampa. Gibreel used to be a movie star famous for playing gods. He objectifies women and manipulates religious sentiments to fulfill his desire. Now, he is trapped in the role of the archangel Gibreel in dreams. He is also pursued by the revenant of his ex-lover Rekha, who detaches herself from the earth with a magical flying carpet. After Rosa’s death, Gibreel reunites with the woman he loves, Alleluia (Allie) Cone. She has visions of a specter that keeps luring her back to Mount Everest, where she believes truth resides. Saladin, for his part, has a talent for faking accents and used to escape racial discrimination by disguising himself as a privileged white man. He has won fame and wealth by acting in racist shows demonizing immigrants. After the fall, though, he mutates into a monster and experiences the social violence in which he is complicit. In the process of Saladin’s home-leaving and homecoming, he imagines both his “old” Indian self and his “new” migrant self as ghosts.

Rosa, Allie, Gibreel, and Saladin are all haunted, and these ghosts are associated with their attachment to and detachment from certain lands. Similarly, when interpreting Trakl’s poetry, Heidegger describes a ghostly stranger who leads wanderers back toward a “land,” which he defines as “an open region that holds the promise of a dwelling, and provides a dwelling.”⁵ He calls this ghost-inspired return “homecoming” (OWL, p. 196). The Heideggerian “open” intertwines with his exploration of thinking and nature. In Heidegger’s first “Country Path Conversation,” three fictional interlocutors, a scientist, a scholar, and a guide, discover that authentic thinking “comes from the open-region” or the land.⁶ Elucidating Hölderlin’s poem about a countryman’s witness of nature’s “awakening” after a thunderstorm, Heidegger interprets nature as “a self-opening, which, while rising, at the same time turns back into what has emerged.”⁷ This definition is relevant to the ancient Greek notion of nature: physis (or phusis/φύσις). Although Heidegger famously adopts Hölderlin’s notion of poetic dwelling, I will show that fictionality helps bring mystery and liveliness into his philosophy, challenging mechanistic thinking patterns that treat nature as an inert object.

Like Rushdie, Heidegger is concerned about “the loss of rootedness” in contemporary society, and he believes that the dominance of “calculative thinking” has led to this condition.⁸ This thinking pattern is involved in modern technology, which tends to objectify nature as an inert and calculable resource (See CPC, p. 7). The obsessive calculation of everything’s instrumental value is intertwined with the aim of “controlling and exploiting nature” (CPC, p. 3). Heidegger claims that “a curious excess of frantic measuring and calculating” causes “unpoetic dwelling.”⁹

He further associates authentic thinking and dwelling with the true nature of humans. For him, a human is “a meditative being,” and meditative thinking involves “releasement toward things” and “openness to mystery,” which “grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way.” (DT, p. 55–6). Heidegger defines mystery as “that which shows itself and at the same time withdraws,” which is also his description of nature (DT, p. 55). His notion of a “thing” “conjoins itself out of world” while gathering “earth and sky, divinities and mortals” near to each other (PLT, p. 180, p. 175). Meditative thinking is thus related to nonhuman agency.

Heidegger’s description of nature’s simultaneous emergence/withdrawal gives his philosophy a spectral character, which is incompatible with mechanistic modes of thinking. Embracing mystery allows him to develop his earlier discussion on Dasein’s spatiality, and he uncovers the dynamic natural agency through fictionality.¹⁰ I will clarify this by reading The Satanic Verses, a novel filled with mysterious elements like haunting and metamorphosis. Manifesting typical Rushdian concepts like “imaginary homelands” and “border crossing,” the specters I want to examine in this essay help clarify the ghostly character of Heidegger’s and Rushdie’s theories while developing them.

Some scholars have noticed in passing that there are possible connections between Rushdie and Heidegger, although they focus mainly on other novels. Tina Bilban associates Grimus (1975) with Heidegger’s ideas of temporality. Andrew Gaedtke ties Saleem’s “technological delirium” in Midnight’s Children (1981) to Heidegger’s meditation on modern technology. Frederik Tygstrup uses Heidegger’s account of the spatiality of Dasein to examine “the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization” that derive from geopolitical change and globalization in Shalimar the Clown (2005).¹¹ As these works only take Heidegger as one of their various theoretical sources, there is not an in-depth analysis of the similarities between the two writers’ methods and thoughts. My focus and perspective are also different from the existing literature. I have shown that Rushdie and Heidegger both employ fictional devices, especially ghost fantasy, to explore the meaning of thinking and dwelling. In what follows, I will clarify the different methods and concepts they use and answer the following questions: What is “nature”? How to think and dwell authentically? Why is fictionality, especially ghost fantasy, helpful for understanding essence, truth, and value?

Rosa’s Phantom Sight and Imaginary Homeland

Capable of seeing the specter of William the Conqueror since childhood, Rosa is the first character in the novel to give ghosts a more general definition: “unfinished business.”¹² Regarding her aging self as a “creature of cracks and absences,” Rosa derives an illusion of solidity from these recurring apparitions and the “well-worn phrases” she uses to describe them (SV, p. 134). For most of Rushdie’s critics, Rosa’s phantom sight is primarily about British national myth. Homi Bhabha, for example, sees her as a representation of “the English Heim or homeland,” while Ágnes Györke calls her “the allegorical figure of the English nation.”¹³ Although Gibreel’s relationship with Rosa is sometimes relevant to that with England, this interpretation is problematic on at least two different fronts. For one thing, Rosa’s vision of her migration to and from Argentina makes her an important migrant figure as well as a mentor for Gibreel. She shows him “the fierce energy” of migrants’ imagination of their lost homes, while he perceives that her creation of the imaginary Pampa, which she calls “silver land,” is her “preferred abode” and that her stories are “the very heart of her, her self-portrait” (SV, p. 149). Although Gibreel is aware of the fictional nature of Rosa’s stories, they deeply influence his quest for a genuine life. For another, the ghosts of clichéd national myth are overpowered by those of Rosa’s creative personal stories. Mistaking Gibreel for an Argentinian cowboy Martín de la Cruz, “her soul’s most deeply buried desire,” she immediately forgets the Norman invaders “as if they had never been” (SV, p. 138). In the beginning, her stories appear like banal and exoticized romantic fantasies. But her intimacy with the natural environment soon transforms them into creative narratives with endless possibilities. The words of her Argentinian neighbor Doctor Jorge Babington, who criticizes British colonization, signal her transformation from a colonial settler to a dweller intimate to the Pampa.

Rosa used to play the stereotypical role of a dispassionate housewife. This is not her true nature but the invention of her prosaic late husband, Henry Diamond (SV, p. 150). When she arrives at the Pampa, she asks herself a question: how can she “expand” herself in the immense natural environment (SV, p. 150)? The novel’s answer to this is love. As Babington sardonically comments, “Wherever the English settle, they never leave England,” unless, “like Doña Rosa, they fall in love” (SV, p. 158). Rosa’s attachment to the Pampa distinguishes her from other English settlers. Henry, a colonial landowner, can never understand her capacity for love. Rosa’s repressed passion is released when she watches the galaxy above the Pampa. Trembling “under the influence of that bright flow of beauty,” she begins to hum what she calls the “star-music” (SV, p. 150).¹⁵ This melodic resonance with the natural environment brings her joy and releasement.

Love’s power of expansion does not vanish when Rosa leaves the Pampa. Instead, it becomes an unfinished business that develops inside her body and is passed on to others through stories. Born from the agency of the Argentine land and sky, her stories are powerful enough to possess Gibreel. It even affects the narrative structure of the novel as Gibreel is forced into her fictional world. The stories that bind them only end after Rosa’s death, when Gibreel hears her specter sing to him and walks willingly into her arms. Like Rosa, Gibreel used to hide his talent “for loving genuinely, deeply and without holding back” (SV, p. 26). In his vision, the influence of her stories manifests itself as a shining umbilical cord that links him to Rosa (SV, p. 158). The image implies that she is a motherly figure crucial to his awakening from inauthenticity.

The expansion of Rosa’s being is both spiritual and physical. After returning to England, she constantly bumps into things, complaining that “everything shrinks” (SV, p. 149). At the end of her story and her life, she tells Gibreel that she cannot bear to “diminish into this, after being in that vastness” (SV, p. 160). The motor habits that Rosa has formed in Argentina incorporate the vastness of the Pampa. After returning to England, her body refuses to be limited by the narrowness of her surroundings. This conflict between her bodily space and the environment allows the silver land to haunt her like a phantom limb.

Rosa’s expanded being, seen in this way, echoes Heidegger’s notion of “handiness” or “readiness-to-hand.” It refers to the kind of being of entities that Dasein uses, but it is different from an instrumental sense of use value (BT, p. 98). As Bruce Foltz argues, Heideggerian handiness is a “more primordial disclosure of nature” in “our concerned involvement and interaction with it.”¹⁴ According to Heidegger, what is handy “has the character of closeness,” “which is not to be ascertained by measuring distances” (BT, p. 135, p. 142; Heidegger’s italics). Handy entities are close by, but they are also inconspicuous as Dasein concerns itself primarily with assignments when using them. In Heidegger’s words, while manifesting themselves, they also “withdraw [zurückzuziehen] in order to be ready-to-hand quite authentically” (BT, p. 99). Therefore, handiness involves a dynamic notion of distance that is not determined by measurement but rather by the thing’s interactions with Dasein, or in other words, its self-emergence and self-withdrawal.

An entity loses its handiness and becomes present-at-hand in three modes: conspicuousness (when it is broken), obtrusiveness (when another entity that is necessary for using this one is missing), and obstinacy (when it gets in the way of our concern) (BT, p. 102–4). To some extent, this framework helps interpret Rosa’s everyday engagement with her environment. When she lives on the Pampa, it is ready-to-hand and withdraws itself. She inhabits the natural environment rather than seeing it as an object. Her own body, which is attached to the Pampa, becomes obtrusive after she leaves the Pampa. The English environment is physically close, but it bothers Rosa with its obstinacy: everything seems to shrink because it stands in the way of her concern. For her, it seems that both environments have become impossible to dwell in. But when it comes to Dasein’s spatiality, the states of being close by and being far away are not mutually exclusive. Although technically the Pampa has become a lost abode, it continues to shape Rosa’s being: there is a unique closeness between them. Her lost abode reveals itself through her unique spatial recognition and phantom sight, allowing her to expand herself in creative ways, for example, by telling stories.

This process of expansion leads me to an aspect of the spatiality of Being-in-the-world: de-severance.¹⁵ De-severing something is “bringing something close by, in the sense of procuring it, putting it in readiness, having it to hand” (BT, p. 140). What Rosa brings close through fiction is not tangible matter but a “lost world” (SV, p. 150). This explains why ghosts, as unfinished business, are significant to her imaginary homecoming. She has turned her stories into the phantoms of her lasting intimacy with the lost homeland. Left with no definitive endings and containing multiple alternating possibilities, these stories have the qualities of ghosts. By allowing their imaginative potential to grow and spread, Rosa bestows on these stories the power that propels her toward the lost abode. They also have the ghostly power to enchant. Through storytelling, Rosa invites Gibreel into her fictional world.

This interpretation helps extend Heidegger’s framework into the realm of fictionality. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that to grasp beings in their Being, one needs to avoid reporting narratives/telling stories about them (BT, p. 63). However, Rosa’s experience shows that “narrative” and “fictional” are not the antonyms of “authentic.” As Doctor Babington tells her, and as Rushdie seems to endorse, “fantasy can be stronger than fact” when it comes to exploring the world (SV, p. 154). This is especially true for a rootless wanderer searching for a lost abode.

In Rushdian terms, the human tendency to bring lost and faraway things close explains why migrant writers are always “haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back.”¹⁶ However, the physical distance prevents them from experiencing and describing the lost abode as it is. This gap in knowledge leaves space for invention, and they subsequently seek to counteract the loss by creating “imaginary homelands” in fiction (IH, p. 19). Imaginary homecoming is a remedy for not only migrants but also a solastalgic contemporary society. Rosa’s story shows that the fictional nature of this manner of homecoming is not its weakness but the source of its creativity. Spreading the haunting power of Pampas, “the story of her life” helps her create an expanding fictional world that mediates between self and others, the past and the present (SV, p. 157).

On the other hand, even an expanded framework of handiness appears limited for examining natural agency. The ghosts from the silver land are not merely the result of Rosa’s personal habits; they are born from Rosa’s attachment to the vast land and the starry sky. Heidegger’s later philosophy extends his earlier understanding of spatiality by exploring a dynamic notion of nature. He shifts his focus from Dasein to the open and from the closeness of handy equipment to the nearness of the homeland. He describes the homecoming in Hölderlin’s poetry as “the return to the nearness to the origin” (EHP, p. 42). This nearness is not a small distance but a kind of agency. It is a mystery that “brings near that which is near, yet keeping it at a distance” (EHP, p. 42). He claims that the homecoming poet receives greetings from two preservers, earth and light, who show that “the ‘nature’ of things and people is safely preserved” (EHP, p. 36). Foltz rightfully contends that, in this context, earth refers to “the sheltering, preserving, and self-concealing aspect of phusis,” which “bears and gives rise to what comes to light” (IE, p. 14). What is the true “nature” of human and nonhuman beings that the homecoming poet finds? How is this concept of essence relevant to the Heideggerian patterns of nearness/farness and emergence/withdrawal? I will answer these questions by interpreting Allie’s spectral attachment to Everest.

Allie’s Spectral Vision and Border Crossing

A British mountaineer born in a Polish migrant family, Allie also announces that she knows what a ghost is (SV, p. 201). Like Rosa, Allie tells her own ghost stories, which revolve around a specter from Mount Everest. On her Everest climb, Allie sees the revenant of a climber, Maurice Wilson, who died there and thus failed to complete a solo ascent. Since then, Wilson’s unfinished business has become Allie’s secret dream, and his ghost continues to lure her back to Everest. Allie also shares Rosa’s reluctance to go back “into a narrow island, an eternity of anticlimax” (SV, p. 316). However, her attachment to Everest is different from Rosa’s intimacy with Pampas in several respects.

While Rosa’s body resonates in harmony with the Argentine natural environment, Allie’s flat feet, not suitable for mountain climbing, make her encounter with Everest painful and potentially deadly. She reaches the summit through “the hard physical labour” of climbing, which she believes has brought her close “to transcendence, to the miracles of the soul” (SV, p. 205). Seeking to merge with the mountain, Allie removes her oxygen equipment and risks her life. On the top of Everest, she has a sudden, dangerous urge to tear off her clothes, open herself up, and let the light soak into her skin. Similar to Rosa’s star-watching, Allies mountain-climbing involves mysterious natural music. She hears it when the light seems to open up to her and “to resonate, to sing” (SV, p. 201). This vision hides the signs of a dangerous blizzard blowing in. However, Allie believes that the specter makes a sharp noise to awaken her and save her life. Therefore, she considers Wilson’s specter as at once “a declaration of kinship,” “a prophecy of the future,” and “the angel of her death” (SV, p. 203).

Allie endures life-threatening hardship to encounter the mountain as “a human being, not a breathing machine” (SV, p. 204). Her story does not fit into the theoretical framework of handiness. It also calls for a deeper reflection on the link between interpersonal relationships and dwelling. If Rosa’s desire for Martín motivates her imaginary homecoming, Allie’s romantic relationship with Gibreel presents a further obstacle to her return to Everest. Allie believes that love blurs “boundaries of the self” between her and Gibreel, “for whom she could open as she had never opened before” (SV, p. 324, p. 310). However, she hides her phantom sight from him, and her desire for openness makes her vulnerable to Gibreel’s arrogance and jealousy. Whereas the stories that Rosa creates succeed in establishing a bond between herself and Gibreel, Allie cannot describe her transcendental experience to others. She tells Gibreel that “Everest silences you” (SV, p. 306). If Rosa’s stories show us how the “handiness” of language can help bridge the temporospatial gap between ourselves and the places we covet, Allie’s silence reveals the limitation of language when confronted with nature’s capacity for withdrawal.

In Heideggerian terms, Allie opens herself to nature’s mystery on Everest. She regards the summit of Everest as a place of wonders and truth, where she is no longer trapped in “the anaesthesia of the everyday” (SV, p. 312). Allie’s doubt about everydayness is relevant to her dilemma between authenticity and inauthenticity. Because the mysterious vision on the summit has convinced her that the truth resides in the mountain, she wishes to escape a society of misinformation by climbing (SV, p. 323). However, the TV commercials and talk shows that support her proposed ascent, where she effectively acts the role of “the first sexually attractive blonde to conquer Everest,” have left her surrounded by lies (SV, p. 319). She is not willing to be sexualized, and her goal of climbing is not to conquer but to open herself to the mountain. For Allie, the repetitive everyday life and material gains are inauthentic. Beneath the façade of habituation, the real world is “a place of wonders” (SV, p. 312). Her story thus associates fantasy with authentic dwelling.

Given that her first name is taken from the Alleluia verses and her last name maps onto Mount Cone – the place where, in Gibreel’s dreams, a prophet Mahound claims to have encountered the Archangel – it is not surprising that existing literature tends to interpret Allie either as a catalyst for Gibreel or a counterpart of Mahound, or a combination of both. Hani Al-Raheb sees her as “the woman energizer” who encourages Gibreel to choose love over religion and activates his impulse for truth-finding.¹⁷ Catherine Addison argues that Allie’s visionary experience on the summit shows “a dogma-free transcendence” contrary to that of Mahound, who keeps trying to impose his beliefs on others.¹⁸ Accordingly, Wilson’s ghost is simplified as either a benevolent presence that facilitates her transcendental experience or a symbol of her implicit “death-wish.”¹⁹ The complexity of her personality and life experiences renders such interpretations problematic. If Wilson’s ghost is a symbol of Allie’s desire to die by suicide, then why does she believe that he has saved her life? If he symbolizes benevolence, then why is he also her death angel? What is the meaning of the light and truth that she has discovered on the summit?

These questions yield few if any answers from the extant critical literature. I contend that Heidegger’s notion of nature offers a new way of interpreting Allie’s story. For Heidegger, “the countryside, nature out-of-doors, is only a specially delineated sector of nature or physis in the essential sense: that which of itself unfolds itself in presencing.”²⁰ He associates nature with one of his most idiosyncratic concepts, that of “the place of light” that illuminates “the open for all appearing” (EHP, p. 79). He also shows that light is inseparable from darkness, which signifies nature’s capacity to withdraw.

This description provides a useful bridge for understanding Allie’s vision. In her own words, she sees “the universe purified into light” and believes that she can “lift a veil and see the face of God, everything” (SV, p. 205). In this moment of Heideggerian homecoming, she feels that she has access to a place of light and an opportunity to reveal the truth of the world. Along with the self-revealing of nature, Allie also experiences its self-withdrawal on Everest. Stunned by natural beauty, she becomes “snow-blind and mountain-foolish” (SV, p. 205). After the vision, Allie feels in the air “heaviness instead of that light, that lightness” (SV, p. 205). Everest’s dual agencies of self-revealing and self-concealing are as natural as the “good breathing pattern” that is so important to Allie’s climb: simply drawing air in and letting it out (SV, p. 204).

Like Allie’s story, Heidegger’s philosophy associates nature and life with the breathing pattern of “the drawing-in and drawing-out, the emerging into the open and the pulling back in of the open.”²¹ He also links nature to truth, which means “letting-be-unconcealed” or “nearness” and concerns “the essence of thinking” (CPC, p. 9, p. 101. p. 76). In this sense, truth is not an abstract concept that human reason delineates objectively with true-false boundaries. It rather concerns a lively interplay of concealing/revealing. I would suggest that this is the nature of the truth that Alleluia experiences on Everest: a glimpse of the authentic life that is intimate to natural agency. Her witness of the self-emergence and self-withdrawal of nature inspires her urge to release herself toward things and mystery. The “truth” that the mountain has shown to Allie is not some specific set of facts. It is the belief that the universe is “a place of wonders;” she correspondingly embraces mysteries in her life and meditates upon the world with Everest’s “brooding presence in her soul” (SV, p. 312–3). Rushdie associates truth with wonders and criticizes “the opposition of imagination to reality” (IH, p. 122). His idea of authenticity echoes the fantastical style of his fiction.

Allie’s desire for a life of openness explains why she uses the metaphor of an open body to describe love. However, instead of developing mutual understanding, the two lovers come to take on the antagonistic roles of “invader” and “invaded” (SV, p. 311). The relationship ends when Allie finds out that Gibreel has destroyed her sculptures of the mountains, her “surrogate Himalayas” (SV, p. 461). In Heideggerian terms, she has tried to satisfy her desire for openness by establishing a relationship with Gibreel. His destruction of the sculptures makes her realize that she cannot achieve intimacy with Everest by looking for substitutes. She must face the mountains and experience their self-presencing in the flesh.

Why is Allie attracted to the Himalayas, and why does she believe that the ultimate truth resides in mountains? To answer these questions, I need to invoke her understanding of mountains’ metamorphic nature. According to Heidegger, the word “nature” gestures toward the “innermost essence” of “each and every being” (FCM, p. 31). This claim further associates essence with Heidegger’s notion of truth and life. What then is the essence of mountains? Taking Allie’s perspective, the narrator suggests that “a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land’s attempt to metamorphose into sky” (SV, p. 313). Instead of seeing the land as fundamentally different from the sky, the narrator emphasizes that they strive to release themselves to one another through transformation. As a Heideggerian “thing,” Everest brings “earth and sky, divinities and mortals” near to one another, but it does not eliminate the distance (PLT, p. 175). Its agency lies in its in-between and metamorphic nature. In Heideggerian terms, Allie is a mortal who “dwells by spanning the ‘on the earth’ and the ‘beneath the sky,’” and traversing the interplay of these “on” and “beneath” is essential for her authentic dwelling (PLT, p. 221). Scaling the mountain brings truth as it allows her to experience the convergence of earth and sky and to open her mortal self to nature. A creative power of invention is born in this traversal. As Heidegger argues, and as Allie’s experience on the summit seems to suggest, the light of the sky and the darkness of the earth concern nature’s intertwining nearness and farness. Because Everest is capable of metamorphosis, it has a transformative effect on Allie. This influence is preserved in the form of a ghostly angel because what attracts her are the phantasmal qualities of nature – its alternate agency of self-presencing and self-withdrawal.

The most extreme example of this interconnectedness between presence and withdrawal is the phenomenon of death, which Heidegger regards as “the shrine of Nothing” that “harbors within itself the presencing of Being” (PLT, p. 176). The novel mentions that the Sherpa people, who dwell in the Himalayas, associate the interplay of presencing and concealing with the liminal nature of the mountain. A sherpa climbs alongside Allie and convinces her that the “goddess mountain” is “diabolic as well as transcendent,” and that “its diabolism and its transcendence [are] one” (SV, p. 314). According to Heidegger, nature “constantly threatens man,” but at the same time “protects, supports, sustains, and nourishes him.”²² The dual agency of nature explains why the specter from Everest symbolizes life and death, intimacy and danger for Allie. Her scheme for a solo ascent is thus not about a death wish; on the contrary, her opening up to nature is an experience of authentic life and the nearness of land that accords with physis.

Rosa’s self-expansion and Allie’s self-opening are both relevant to one of the central themes of The Satanic Verses: border crossing. Rushdie explains that this concept involves both the traversal of geopolitical boundaries and a softening of “the frontier between the self and the world” (IH, p. 427). He regards humans as “frontier-crossing beings,” claiming that “to cross a frontier is to be transformed.”²³ I mentioned that Heidegger views a human as “a meditative being” (DT, p. 56). Rushdie and Heidegger both link the human essence to a way of thinking that is inseparable from the environment. Rushdie introduces “a secular definition of transcendence” that regards art as “the third principle that mediates between the material and spiritual worlds” (IH, p. 420). This definition explains why music and storytelling play significant roles in the characters’ imaginary homecoming. As Rosa’s and Allie’s transcendental experience suggests, secular transcendence is also environmental transcendence: natural agency and its inspiration for creative invention are essential to this manner of border crossing. Their homecoming is not only the return to their preferred abodes but also a return to a connection to nature that is more originary than those regulated by matter-spirit dichotomy.

On the other hand, Heidegger’s exploration of the essence of thinking focuses on the more-than-human agency involved in border crossing. In CPC, Heidegger lets his fictional characters question modes of thinking that are regulated by human-centric willfulness and subject-object distinction. He argues that merely catching sight of a thing and forming some “general representational idea” cannot reveal a thing’s essence (CPC, p. 55). It follows that seemingly accurate non-fictional representation is not enough for truth-seeking. The problem is not simply the limitation of human perceptual capacities, either. Transcendence, which “passes beyond the perception of objects,” does not naturally reveal the true essence of things (CPC, p. 72). The traditional concept of transcendence presupposes a subject-object distinction and neglects “the construct of creative imagination” (CPC, p. 65). In transcendental representation, things appear as objects to subjects. Therefore, what this mode of thinking captures is not the things’ true essence but rather their “objectness in relation to objects” (CPC, p. 63). “The objectification of nature” underlies the modern thinking patterns that Heidegger criticizes in his “Memorial Address” (CPC, p. 7). On the other hand, he contends that authentic thinking is not just affected by human will. It is not willful “going-out-beyond [Hinausgehens]” but rather a form of “releasement” that is allowed by and “comes from the open-region” (CPC, p. 63, p. 79). It is also “the releasing of oneself from transcendental representing” (CPC, p. 92). This mode of thinking is not passive but rather “outside the distinction between activity and passivity,” because humans emerge from the open-region in the first place (CPC, p. 70).

The fictional form of CPC allows Heidegger to explore how natural agency affects thinking by inventing a conversation on a country path. At the beginning of the first conversation, the characters wonder at the serene transition of seasons and the “feeling for nature” that distracts them from “the abstractions of philosophy” (CPC, p. 2). The interlocutors are released from indoctrinated thinking patterns. They realize that authentic thinking is “let[ting] oneself into an involvement in the open of the open-region” because, from the beginning, this conversation is involved with nature (CPC, p. 78). The natural environment also plays a significant role in Heidegger’s aforementioned meditation on Trakl’s poetry. He pays attention to the river, the rock, the twilight, and the seasonal changes in the poems. Describing a dynamic natural background, he imagines a journey led by a ghostly stranger. It happens on a path toward “the land of descent into the ghostly night:” the self-concealing earth that “awaits those who will dwell in it” (OWL, p. 176, p. 164). He thus associates the ghostly with a natural interplay of light and darkness, releasing and gathering that allows dwelling.

To further explore the significance of releasement and dwelling, I now turn to the novel’s two protagonists, Saladin and Gibreel. They are professional actors who produce fiction, but the stories that they tell are not as genuine as those of Rosa and Alleluia. Saladin and Gibreel are both haunted by dangerous ghosts born from their detachment from the homeland and authentic life. Their experiences help clarify (a) fictionality’s difference from disguise and blind faith as well as (b) meditative thinking’s difference from calculative thinking, leading to a deeper reflection on the connections among truth, value, and essence.

The Return to Rootedness: Fictionality and Meditative Thinking

Gibreel’s trouble with ghosts is rooted in his inauthentic way of life. He is pursued by the specter of his ex-lover Rekha throughout the novel. Rekha is also a ghost from Everest. However, her Everest refers to a skyscraper in Bombay, Everest Vilas, the height of which symbolizes its residents’ capital assets and social status. Rekha’s body bears witness to “her long divorce from the impoverished, heavy, polluting earth” (SV, p. 14–5). This metaphor involves a problematic opposition between nature and culture, which is inherent to the mode of modernity that Heidegger criticizes. Rekha’s airborne specter repeatedly reminds Gibreel of the inauthenticity of his previous life. Gibreel used to be a movie star playing gods in popular genre movies based on religious texts. Pretending to be a god in real life and using religious fanaticism to win fame and sexual favors, he treated his lovers as “vessels into which he could pour himself” (SV, p. 26). He invented a godly disguise to manipulate others at his will, but this powerful mask also buried his talent for love.

When the signal for invention is hidden from the audience, the fiction turns into lies. A near-death experience and the encounter with Allie encourage him to end his disguise. He breaks up with Rekha and sets out to meet Allie, leaving a cursory note: “We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. Goodbye” (SV, p. 13). Failing to grasp the invented elements in this note, Rekha misinterprets it as a suicidal plan and fatally jumps off the roof of Everest Vilas. Gibreel is also misguided by his imagination. He mistakenly believes that access to an authentic life only lies in the clouds. Akin to Rekha’s specter hovering over his head, Gibreel’s habit of disguise detaches him from the earth. Failing to escape the show business and its mercenary mentality, he eventually kills Allie and himself, blaming the tragedy on Rekha’s vengeful specter.

If Gibreel’s life shows the danger of conflating fiction with lies, his dream further reveals the deadly influence of blind faith. He is trapped in the role of the archangel Gibreel in dreams. Under the influence of Rosa and Rekha, Gibreel finds that “the dream-worlds of his archangelic other self” begin to haunt his waking life (SV, p. 211). The archangel is in turn haunted by other creatures of the sky, for example, the prophet Ayesha’s butterflies. In Gibreel’s dream, the village of Titlipur exists in a large tree, where humans and nonhumans live together in harmony. A prophet Ayesha interrupts their uneventful life with her miraculous willpower. She can control local butterflies and use them as food, clothing, and, above all, instruments for her religious propaganda. She also claims that she has received a message from the archangel, demanding them follow her on a pilgrimage across the sea. The locals abandon their roots in the tree, leave their homeland, and eventually walk into the sea. Taking Gibreel’s perspective, the novel shows clearly that Ayesha’s so-called prophecy is an invention. However, neither Ayesha nor the villagers are aware of this. During the journey to Mecca, Ayesha gradually strips the villagers of humanity and bends them to her will, just as she had previously deprived the butterflies of their free nature.

Rushdie has said that he wrote Ayesha’s story to explore “the huge power of faith” (IH, p. 409). Driven by blind faith, fanatical believers of Gibreel and Ayesha willfully take inventions for reality. Gibreel’s tragedy shows that this destructive power of blind faith is not exclusive to religion, and modern scientific rationality cannot solve the problem. In the novel, religious fanaticism and modern media share the features of calculative thinking. Ayesha and Gibreel both willfully objectify human and nonhuman others, seeing them as constantly available resources with calculable use value. As Heidegger warns in his “Memorial Address,” modernity bewitches humans, giving them an illusory view of the world while threatening them with “the loss of rootedness” (DT, p. 48–9). “The turmoil of the big cities” and “modern techniques of communication” are both responsible for detaching humans from their homeland (DT, p. 48).

The solution Heidegger offers is meditative thinking. If Gibreel’s spectral doubles show the potentially disastrous consequences of calculative thinking, Saladin’s ghostly selves reveal how meditative thinking enables a return from the willful objectification of nature to rootedness. Saladin is a British Indian actor. An affair with Zeeny, who is an Indian activist and art critic, makes him aware of his rootless condition. She tempts him “back to his old self,” but he considers his Indian past to be “a dead self, a shadow, a ghost” and likens his current migrant self to a phantom, who has “an airline ticket, success, money, wife” but no land to haunt (SV, p. 62). In this haunted condition, Saladin visits his father, with whom he has an embattled relationship. Approaching his seaside hometown, he feels the ghostly past “filling his lungs with its revenant saltiness” (SV, p. 65). The sight of the birth tree his parents planted for him, in particular, makes him tremble. But he hides these signs of intimacy by calculating the market value of the tree. The visit results in yet another fight, and he asks his father to cut the tree down and send him the cash equivalent. Saladin duly converts his birth tree into “a large number of notes,” but his attempt to eradicate his Indian roots seems only to have released his repressed old self (SV, p. 72). As in Gibreel’s dreams and Heidegger’s “Address,” the notion of “root” symbolizes dwelling in Saladin’s story of homecoming.

Saladin’s identity crisis is bound up with the inauthenticity of his life. Like Gibreel, he lives under a willfully invented disguise. He wants to become an Englishman, but his career ignominiously involves faking the accents of immigrants in racist shows. To maintain the commercial value of his voice, he is humiliatingly forced to conceal his Indian appearance. He is thus both a victim and an accomplice in racial discrimination. This life of disguise is brought to an end when he falls from the sky and mutates into a half-goat devil. This absurd transformation forces him to experience racial violence that his acting career reinforced. Muhammad Sufyan, a kind fellow migrant, offers him shelter. Their conversation about Ovid’s fictional work Metamorphoses helps Saladin to reflect on his mutation and, eventually, to reconcile with the “ghostly still” shape of his old self (SV, p. 298). He duly decides to go back home and forgive his father. By the latter’s deathbed, Saladin senses that his “old, rejected selves” are coming closer to him (SV, p. 538). He chooses to reroot himself in his native land, changing his name back to Salahuddin and participating in local struggles for social justice following Zeeny’s example. In so doing, he succeeds in releasing himself from calculative thinking and redirecting himself toward the agency of his homeland that haunts him.

The above plot details have been necessary to show the crucial differences between “calculative” and “meditative” thinking and their relevance to the novel. The two protagonists regard their own bodies and human/nonhuman others as objects and resources, which results in social strife and individual rootlessness. Their experiences show the danger of a calculative understanding of value that puts price tags on everything. Their obsession with instrumental value results in toxic habits of disguise, which involve their distorted understanding of essence and truth. On the other hand, a new rootedness is accessible through meditative thinking (DT, p. 53). I have shown that the novel and Heidegger’s works guide me to explore this liminal and non-willing way of thinking through the imagination of haunting.

Heidegger’s meditations on nature and thinking offer me the method to explore the philosophical depth of Rushdie’s fantasy, and the ghosts in The Satanic Verses help expand Heidegger’s theory into the realm of fiction and an era of global migration and mass media. With techniques of fantasy like dreams, visions, and transformations, the novel questions the distinctions between reality and imagination, human and nonhuman, and spirit and matter. Rosa’s and Allie’s pursuits of expansion and openness are inseparable from their stories about ghosts. Rosa’s phantom sight and stories propel her toward a lost abode. The creative natural agency, which once released her true passionate nature, influences Gibreel through her narration. Allie experiences nature’s dynamic self-emergence and self-withdrawal during her Everest ascent. This transcendental experience and her spectral visions allow her to associate truth with wonders. Their experiences show that one’s intimacy with his/her homeland is determined not by birth but by the authentic lived experience of nature’s mystery. This new way of dwelling requires one to stay intimate with the land and to preserve the free and metamorphic nature of other beings. The novel helps transform Heidegger’s seemingly abstruse terminology into vivid stories. Heidegger’s research on authentic thinking and dwelling also partly relies on fictional elements, like an invented conversation on a country path or a ghost-inspired journey back to dwelling. As Rushdie argues in Imaginary Homelands, fantasy helps novelists explore “how to build a new, ‘modern’ world out of an old, legend-haunted civilization” (IH, p. 19). Their works show that fictionality can be a way of thinking, building, and dwelling, because it challenges the borders in modern modes of thinking and helps rootless wanderers create imaginary homelands.

Heidegger and Rushdie both investigate mystery, modernity, homecoming, transcendence, and the dual agency of nature in their writings. A deeper connection is that, instead of describing ghosts as outdated superstitions or unpleasant illusions, Heidegger and Rushdie both associate them with authentic thinking and dwelling. They examine human intimacy with the natural environment through fictionality, which sheds light on a renewed understanding of the human-nature relationship: essence and truth are inseparable from nature’s mysterious agency of self-emergence and self-withdrawal, which resists a view of nature only as a valuable resource. A conversation between Heidegger and Rushdie connects humanity to an openness toward nature. Furthermore, their imagination of ghosts illuminates a way to understand how natural agency enjoins us to embrace mystery and dwell with other beings authentically.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Professor Graham Huggan, Dr Nicholas Ray, and Dr Richard Brown for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of Leeds and China Scholarship Council under Grant [202106270024]

Notes on contributors

Sirui Zhu

Sirui Zhu is a PhD researcher at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include eco-phenomenology, ecocriticism, and contemporary Indian English fiction.

Notes

1. See Salman Rushdie, “Heraclitus,” in Language of Truth: Essays 2003–2020 (London: Jonathan Cape).

2. See Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (London: The University of Chicago Press). Derrida analyzes Heidegger’s understanding of concepts relevant to ghosts and the spirit, such as Geist, geistig, and geistlich, and why he sometimes avoids using them.

3. Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen and Henrik Skov Nielsen, “Distinguishing Fictionality,” in Exploring Fictionality: Conceptions, Test Cases, Discussions, ed. Cindie Aaen Maagaard, Daniel Schabler, and Marianne Wolff Lundholt (Odense: University Press of Southern Denmark), p. 23.

4. See the epigraph of Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses: A Novel (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008); hereafter abbreviated SV.

5. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971); hereafter abbreviated OWL, p. 194. Directly related to “the departed dead,” geistlich bears the dual meaning of “spiritual” and “ghostly” (OWL, p. 186).

6. Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations, trans. Bret W. Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); hereafter abbreviated CPC, p. 79.

7. Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2000); hereafter abbreviated EHP, p. 69, p. 79.

8. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1969); hereafter abbreviated DT, p. 49, p. 46.

9. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001); hereafter abbreviated PLT, p. 226.

10. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962); hereafter abbreviated BT, pp. 138–9. Da-sein, also called Dasein, means “being-there” (see the translator’s footnote in BT, p. 27). The Heideggerian Dasein often refers to human beings.

11. Tina Bilban, “Human Being as Defined by its Temporality: The Problem of Time in Salman Rushdie’s Grimus and Umberto Eco’s Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana,” Interlitteraria 16, no. 1 (2011): 297–8; Andrew Gaedtke, “Halluci-nation: Mental Illness, Modernity, and Metaphoricity in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” Contemporary Literature 55, no. 4 (2014): 709; and Frederik Tygstrup, “Changing Spaces: Salman Rushdie’s Mapping of Post-Colonial Territories,” in Literary Landscapes: From Modernism to Postcolonialism, ed. Attie de Lange, Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, and Jakob Lothe (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 204.

12. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses: A Novel (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2008); hereafter abbreviated SV, p. 133.

13. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 317; and Ágnes Györke, “‘Who Has the Best Tunes?:’ Sounds of Englishness in The Satanic Verses,” The AnaChronisT 16 (2011): 104.

14. Bruce V. Faltz. Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1995); hereafter abbreviated IE, p. 11.

15. Heidegger regards “Being-in-the-world” as a basic state of Dasein. He emphasizes that “‘in’ is derived from ‘innan’ – ‘to reside,’ ‘habitare,’ ‘to dwell’” (BT, p. 80; Heidegger’s italics).

16. Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991); hereafter abbreviated IH, p. 10.

17. Hani Al-Raheb, “Religious Satire in Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses,’” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 6, no. 4 (1995): 336.

18. Catherine Addison, “Rushdie’s Everest: Secular Transcendence in The Satanic Verses,” English Studies in Africa 60, no. 2 (2017): 24.

19. D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke, Salman Rushdie (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1998), p. 88.

20. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Volumes One and Two, vol. 1, trans. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperOne, 1991), p. 181.

21. Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus: The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Logic: Heraclitus’s Doctrine of the Logos, trans. Julia Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018), p. 226.

22. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995); hereafter abbreviated FCM, p. 30.

23. Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (New York: Modern Library, 2003), p. 349, p. 353.