SOURCE: Davies, Mark. “Aspects of the Grotesque in Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.” In Seriously Weird: Papers on the Grotesque, edited by Alice Mills, pp. 51-61. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang, 1999.

In the following essay, Davies identifies and discusses aspects of the grotesque in The Satanic Verses.

One way of addressing the vexed problem of defining the grotesque would be to consider it, as J. P. Stern does the question of realism, in terms of Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblances.¹ But as Freud observed of the supernatural in his essay on “The Uncanny”, the grotesque too affects us very differently in different social and aesthetic contexts.² Most theories of the grotesque see it as in some way defamiliarizing or transgressive of traditional boundaries. But as Popper pointed out, theory always precedes observation, and different theorists tend to privilege the aspects of the grotesque that fit their aesthetic or...