SOURCE: Kuortti, Joel. “‘Nomsense’: Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.” Textual Practice 13, no. 1 (1999): 137-46.

In the following essay, Kuortti underscores the significance of language—particularly the power of naming—in The Satanic Verses.

Jean-François Lyotard, in establishing clear distinctions between different genres and discourses, argues that the rules of language games within the distinct and different areas of discourse are modifiable, although ‘even before he is born, if only by virtue of the name he is given, the human child is already positioned as the referent in the story recounted by those around him’ (emphases added).¹ This observation is part of a major turn in the history of ideas, a turn which Richard Rorty describes as ‘the linguistic turn’,² a turn towards the perceived dominance of language, illustrated here by Lyotard's example of the linguistic sign of a person, the name, being prior to that person's birth.

This...