''The Terrible Power of Metaphor''. The Performativity of Language in Salman Rushdie

Introduction 
 i 
Introduction 
According to Austin, performative speech acts in literature can only be 
“infelicitous”, since the subject (“I”), in this case the author, is not talking 
seriously. To have a happy performative, in fact, in which what I state is what I 
do, “I must not be joking, for example, or writing a poem” (9).  
Works of fiction, as novels, are fictional as the word itself suggests. Yet 
they do: they in fact create a new world, verisimilar or not: fictional characters, 
names, history, places, relations... Moreover, their are worlds that necessitate 
of at least two people to be real: the author and the reader, both of them bound 
by language and its rules. Yet if language does create a parallel reality based 
upon an interactional act, can we really assume the rules of language do not 
belong to the fictional reality as well?  
This thesis is based upon the assumption that the realm of literature and 
that of reality, literature and literalism, are not so different: reality can in fact 
be taken as a performance and literature can have literary effects. In this 
perspective, the work of Hillis Miller has been fundamental. 
Salman Rushdie’s works was chosen as the subject of this thesis because 
they question the authorship which is based on words. In so doing they unveil the 
fact that words do not only show, but also hide. They do not always create, but 
also destruct. They do not have just one, but multiple meanings.  
“The terrible power of metaphor”, the title of this thesis, is a quotation 
from The Satanic Verses and it can be interpreted in different ways. In this first 
meaning, it underlines the fact that metaphors, normally not included among 
the performative element since they transpose the meaning from one object to 
the other, do have power. They reveal what Bhabha calls the “third space” but 
also the “foreignness” present in the language: the meanings of words change 
from sender to receiver. As far as the adjective “terrible” concerns, this is 
particularly true for the effects Salman Rushdie’s characters undergo, which are 
exposed to both the creative and destructive power of language. But it also 
refers to the fact that the effects of words are almost never predictable. 
According to Aravamudan, he himself quoting Derrida:
Introduction 
 ii 
In any event, we cannot and ought not reduce Rushdie’s 
intervention “ to the dull inoffensiveness that some would naively 
attribute to books”; instead, we might consider that “it recalls 
(exposes, explodes) that which, in writing, always includes the 
power of a death machine.” (208) 
This thesis aims to analyze the ways in which the performativity of 
language affects the characters of two novels: Midnight’s Children (henceforth 
MC) and The Satanic Verses (henceforth SV). Along with them, the first chapter 
presents broader ideas of the author about the power of words and the role of 
writers as they are expressed in the collections of essays Imaginary Homelands 
(henceforth IH) and Step Across This Line (henceforth SL)
1
. 
An overview of Rushdie’s considerations on literature are in fact relevant 
for the consideration of the performativity of language, since his novels 
underline, through carnivalization and satire, the mechanisms used by 
authorities to define and describe the reality (chapter 1). Rushdie’s works are 
disturbing for the reader, because of the word games, the numerous cultural 
cross-reference and, especially, for the absence of certainties. 
Novels necessitate of writer and reader tied by a bond of belief (or a 
“willing suspension of disbelief” to use Coleridge’s expression) to be effective, 
as communication needs interaction and belief between senders and receivers. 
This intersubjective quality of the performativity of language is under focus in 
the case of Midnight’s Children (chapter 2), where different kinds of 
communication both in the novel and at a metafictional level are considered. In 
particular the dialogicality underlined by Engblom is analyzed in the relation 
between narrator and audience, in the effects of revelations and prophecies and 
in those of naming.  
In the third chapter the performative power of thoughts, utterances, and 
written text in The Satanic Verses is analyzed. Also in this case both the effects 
on characters and the reader are considered, since a metafictional perspective is 
possible in both the texts. In this case the political effects and utilizations of 
language are underlined in several aspects which reveal a general questioning of 
authorities and authorship. 
 
                                                
1
 Unless otherwise stated, all the emphasis quoted are in the original texts.
1. Performativity 
 1 
1. Performativity: 
the concepts involved and Rushdie’s essays 
...All the stories you used to make laughter 
will be told around the tables of your people 
and we will be rich with weapons. 
(Janet Amstrong, “For Tony”) 
1.1. Performatives 
1.1.1. An overview of the concept and its applications 
In considering the performativity of language one cannot avoid introducing 
what a performative is. According to J. Austin, a performative is a peculiar type 
of illocutionary speech act in which the action that the sentence describes is 
performed by the utterance of the sentence itself (109). For instance, when one 
says “I confess I stole the wallet”, one is doing a confession. With the time, 
“speech acts” and “illocutionary acts” became synonyms. This is the reason why 
Hillis Miller can define a performative utterance as “a speech act in which the 
saying or writing of the words in some way or others does what the word say” 
(2). In his How To Do Things With Words Austin tried to define the distinction 
between constantive and performative utterances: the former are those which 
have a descriptive meaning, the latter are somewhat action by themselves. Yet, 
according to Miller, in the very same book Austin demonstrates “the 
impossibility of establishing a clear and complete doctrine of speech acts”, for 
“the project [to establish the clear distinction between performative and 
constantive utterances] frays out into increasingly unmanageable complexity, 
the complexity of everyday usage in ordinary language” (13). For instance, 
describing a place and giving it a name are in fact typically constantive 
utterances, but naming, at the same time, exemplifies one salient performative 
utterance : “I name thee…”. 
The distinction is in fact more fragile that imagined, since Austin himself 
states that all depends on “how the locution is taken” (146). In his work in fact 
Austin analyzes contexts, sender and receiver in order to isolate the cases of 
“happy” performatives: there is the necessity of an independent, willing “I” and
1. Performativity 
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a ritual to be followed by participants with honest intentions. Nevertheless, this 
analysis does not achieve any definitive distinction. Focusing on intentions, 
Austin appears as in between two opposite ideas that he both refuses: on the 
one hand the idea that “our word is our bond”, on the other the concept that we 
have full control on our words (Miller 32). 
For Austin, in fact, “seriousness” of intention of the speaker appears as a 
central element, even if it is difficult to be established. Yet one point seems to 
be precise in his work: the “infelicity” of a speech act seems to be a synonym 
with literature: “I must not be joking, for example, or writing a poem” (9). 
This is one of the point from which Miller criticises Austin, affirming that 
it is possible and interesting to analyse speech acts in literature, namely written 
and spoken utterances said by the characters on a novel as a whole (I). The 
whole novel, in fact, if only by describing situations (constantive utterances) 
actually creates them, like in the earlier example. In order to find a 
philosophical way to consider speech acts in literature, Miller brings into play 
other philosophers of language such as Paul de Man, Derrida and Wittgenstein. 
According to Derrida, in fact, the notion of the willing and independent 
“I” has to be rejected and unconscious must be liberated and “be taken 
seriously, that is, in (as) a manner of speaking, up to and including its capacity 
for making jokes” (qtd. in Miller 95). This is connected with the non-concept of 
“iterability” of language, according to which each mark
2
 can be repeated 
limitlessly in different utterances, by different senders and to different 
receivers in different contexts, each time having a meaning by itself. Moreover, 
each time it is used the mark is different, somewhat ‘other’ (as the “iter” in 
“iterability” suggests). Finally, each mark is dehiscent, disseminative (Miller 68, 
77-83)
3
. As a consequence the speaker is never fully aware of the meanings his 
words acquire in the mind of the listener. As a result, the lack of intentions for 
performatives is double: on the one hand the lack of intentions concerning 
everything said, on the other hand the lack of power on controlling if the effects 
of a performative move toward the intended direction. Hence happy 
                                                
2
 A term Derrida prefers to “word” because it indicate a sign with a meaning, therefore also a 
clause. 
3
 According to Derrida, iterability is valid for thoughts as well. (Miller 109)
1. Performativity 
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performatives (or pure speech acts) are peculiar cases, almost coincidences, 
among the vast majority of unhappy ones (or impure speech acts). 
Paul de Man is even more pessimistic: “a speech act makes something 
happen all right, but it is never what is intended or what is predicted 
beforehand” (Miller 144). This is because language has got ‘inhuman’ qualities 
that transcend the speaker: 
[t]he ‘inhumane’ is not some kind of mystery, or some kind of 
secret; the inhuman is: linguistic structures, the play of linguistic 
tensions, linguistic events that occur, possibilities which are 
inherent in language ― independently of any intent or any drive or 
any wish or any desire we might have. (qtd. in Miller 32) 
Both Derrida and de Man recall the distinction introduced by Lacan between 
énoncé (statement) and enunciation (enunciation), in order to mark off two 
levels present in every instance of speech, that is, the level of conscious 
intention (ego-talk) versus the level of what is actually said (the intersubjective 
consequences of a given utterance).  
Moreover, de Man enlarges the kind of utterances having performative 
effects, such to include irony, which can be very performative, also in respect of 
history, since it consoles, promises and excuses (Miller 42). 
Finally, Wittgenstein analyses the fact that even if we cannot know the 
passion (e.g. pain) of another human being, we behave as we could. This aporia 
leads to a response: for instance pity in case of someone else’s pain. Since it is 
based on belief and not on knowledge, our response belong more to the realm of 
“I promise” than to the cognitive realm of “I know”, according to Austin. Belief 
in fact marks the difference between constantive and performative utterances: 
law and social order depend on such belief.  
Yet, as Austin himself states in his essay “Other Minds”, belief is implied 
in all forms of communication: 
It seems… that believing in other persons, in authority and 
testimony, is an essential part of the act of communicating, an act 
we constantly perform. […] We can state certain advantages of such 
performances, and we can elaborate rules of a kind for their 
“rational” conduct […]. But there is no “justification” for doing 
them as such. (qtd. in Miller 175-6) 
There is not justification because they are not open to verifiability, they do not 
belong to the realm of knowledge. Communication itself, as a intersubjective 
act, is a performance. It is performative.