SOURCE: Teverson, Andrew S. “Fairy Tale Politics: Free Speech and Multiculturalism in Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 4 (winter 2001): 444-68.

[In the following essay, Teverson explores Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories as “a complex allegory that emphasizes the importance of exchange between different cultural groupings,” comparing it with such works as Arabian Nights, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.]

Jacobites must speak in children's rhymes,
As preachers do in Parables, sometimes.

Pynchon (350)

Late in his life, either in the latter decades of the twelfth century or the first decades of the thirteenth, there is evidence that Farid ud-Din Attar, the Sufi mystic and poet, fell afoul of the Persian authorities and was charged with heresy. He had, according to Edward G. Browne, “aroused the anger and stirred up the persecuting spirit of an orthodox theologian” who denounced him as “a heretic deserving death” and caused his works to be burned, his property to be ransacked, and Attar himself to be sent from his homeland to hide (in Attar's own words) “like a ruby in Badakhstan” (Browne 509).¹ As with much of Attar's biography, the exact nature of his offense is obscure, although it is reasonable to assume, on the basis of the vivid contempt Attar displays for temporal authorities in his poetry, that he did not exert himself to find favor with the political and religious powers of the land. It is also reasonable to assume that Attar was not unaware of the risks he was running by promoting his faith and ideas through his poetry; his masterpiece Manteq at-Tair (The Conference of the Birds) is replete with examples of Sufis who have been dubbed heretics for their unorthodox beliefs and either driven into banishment or murdered by jealous tyrants.

Salman Rushdie first makes reference to The Conference of the Birds in his debut novel Grimus (1975), the story of a group of immortals who, shunned by (or shunning) conventional society, converge on Calf mountain, where they hope to find solace from their wandering. In this early novel, there is no evidence to suggest that Rushdie is aware of the fate of the poem's author or that he wishes that fate to form an allusive subtext for his narrative. Attar's ornithological myth seems useful to Rushdie to the extent that it provides thematic and structural support for his meditation on exile, but it is never overtly associated with pleas for freedom of speech or freedom from persecution. When Rushdie returns to The Conference of the Birds nearly 20 years later in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, it is again without allusion to the biography of its author. Attar and his fate are not mentioned in the text or, to my knowledge, in any commentary that Rushdie has made on the text. By this time, however, the similarities between Rushdie's own experience and Attar's have become striking. Rushdie too has “aroused the anger and stirred up the persecuting spirit of an orthodox theologian,” he has had his work burned by outraged believers, he has been denounced by the Islamic authorities as a heretic deserving death, and he has gone to hide himself like a ruby in North London. It is tempting to believe, on this basis, that Rushdie makes reference to Attar's work in Haroun either because he is aware of Attar's persecution and wishes to draw strength from the fact that he is not the first (or the last) to suffer for expressing opinions in a fictional form or because he is unaware of Attar's fate but recognizes in The Conference of the Birds the work of a man who is already intimate enough with the mechanisms of earthly oppression to compose the following lines:

A [divine] king is not one of those common fools
Who snatches at a crown and thinks he rules.
The true king reigns in mild humility,
Unrivalled in his firm fidelity.
An earthly king acts righteously at times,
But also stains the earth with hateful crimes,
And then whoever hovers nearest him
Will suffer most from his destructive whim.

(45-46)

The persecution experienced by Attar in the twelfth century and the persecution experienced by Salman Rushdie in the twentieth are, of course, of a different order. Attar was persecuted because, as a Sufi, he was expounding a doctrine thought to be heretical by the Islamic authorities; Rushdie is being persecuted because of his secular beliefs and because of his overt attack on Islamic fundamentalism. The persecution of Attar, moreover, was a local affair, involving a sect within Islam; the trials of Rushdie have attained global significance and have contributed to the polarization of relations between the Islamic nations and the West. There are also significant differences in the role and function attributed to storytelling in the work of both writers. For Rushdie, the freedom to tell stories is connected to freedom of speech and personal liberty. Attar, by contrast, is not constructing a broader argument for a free society but is suggesting that secular storytelling is useful in a religious context, because it can be used to encourage readers (or listeners) to engage actively with the arguments of the text and endure an interpretative struggle toward revelation and religious understanding. Rushdie has no such conception of religious truth, and while he, like Attar, incorporates obscurity into his storytelling, he does so not to promote the belief that there is a transcendental “truth” beyond ordinary human understanding but to suggest that there is no definitive, final truth “out there” to be apprehended. In Rushdie's novels, unlike Attar's poetry, to use the words of Carlos Fuentes, “truth is the search for truth, nothing is pre-established and knowledge is only what both of us—reader and writer—can imagine” (245).

Despite the substantial differences in the philosophical and ideological outlook of these two writers, however, and despite the very different social and cultural contexts within which they operate, both are persecuted for expressing ideas that were considered heretical by orthodox Islam, and, in both cases, the focus of this Islamic suspicion is the literary medium in which they work. Both, moreover, use literary allegory (Attar avant la lettre, Rushdie après la déluge) to respond to their detractors, mounting a defense of storytelling in the face of an extreme and potentially brutal form of censorship.

In Attar's poem this defense is mounted primarily through the figure of the eloquent hoopoe who uses stories both to encourage the birds in their quest and to enable them, as representatives of the faithful, to negotiate the complexities of the way. The poem tells the tale of a group of birds that gather from all over the world to seek their spiritual king, the Simurg: a symbol of the Sufi conception of God, into whom the bird adepts will be assimilated if they can endure the rigors of their quest.² The hoopoe, as figure of the sheikh who guides the Sufi adept along the path of righteousness, appears at the start of the poem to tell the birds about their king, and the birds, initially, respond effusively and determine to take wing to the distant mountain of Kaf where the Simurg lives. When they start to consider the journey's length, however, more worldly concerns assert themselves, and the birds, one by one, decline the hoopoe's offer. The nightingale claims that he has a “lover's thirst” (35) and will not abandon his beloved for a single night; the heron suggests that he is too wrapped up in his own misery to leave “the empty shoreline of the sea” (46). As each bird “according to his kind” (35) offers its apologies, however, the hoopoe responds with stories that help it to overcome its reluctance. The nightingale, for instance, is told “The Story of a Dervish and a Princess” in which a dervish becomes a fool because he is preoccupied with worldly love rather than higher love, and the heron is told a rather oblique tale about a hermit who questions the ocean and discovers that the sea cannot provide a reliable route to salvation because “[l]awlessness is her law” (47). Having been swayed by the hoopoe's eloquence, the birds begin their journey, but after only a short distance they halt to make the hoopoe their official leader and to discuss some of their reservations. The majority of the remaining poem is then taken up with this halt, during which the hoopoe, having used his storytelling skills to encourage the birds to join him, now devotes himself to maintaining their enthusiasm for the venture. The hoopoe thus comes to represent both the ancient tradition of Sanskrit storytelling from which Attar has taken him and the value of the narrative arts in which he is adept. Given this significance it is no surprise, in Salman Rushdie's novella, that when the Water Genie asks Haroun to choose a bird to carry them to Kahani (story in Hindustani)³ Haroun chooses the hoopoe, the bird that “in the old stories … leads all other birds through many dangerous places to their ultimate goal” (64). As in Attar's poem, this hoopoe signals Rushdie's connection with an ancient Sanskrit tradition. It also—at an early point of the narrative—introduces two of the primary objectives of the novella: to reassert the value of storytelling after the fatwa, and to defend free speech against what he sees as the forces of silence and oppression.

FREE SPEECH

The exploration of the value of fiction in Haroun and the Sea of Stories is initiated with the question that Mr. Sengupta flings at Haroun's mother, Soraya, and that Haroun later repeats to his distraught father: what's the use of stories that aren't even true? This and other objections to storytelling in Haroun recall the Socratic objection relayed by Plato in The Republic that, for reasons both metaphysical and social, art has no claim to truth and therefore no value. On the one hand the artist is offering not a truthful representation of reality but an imperfect copy, and on the other the artist is acting upon an irrational, indulgent impulse and thus cannot proceed by rational means toward a true and philosophic understanding of actuality. These arguments are reflected throughout the tale, but primarily in Mr. Sengupta's condemnation of Haroun's father, Rashid, and in the Sengupta-inspired note that Haroun's mother, Soraya, leaves behind her: “You are only interested in pleasure, but a proper man would know that life is a serious business. Your brain is full of make-believe, so there is no room for the facts” (22). Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in the course of the narrative, offers several responses to these arguments, some of which are almost as old as the challenge to storytelling itself. Firstly, Rushdie reformulates the response to Plato suggested by Aristotle in his Poetics and later appropriated by Philip Sidney in his defense of poetry against its Puritan detractors, that the poet (or storyteller) “nothing affirms, and therefore never lyeth” (111). Rashid's intention is not to relay “facts” or tell the “truth,” so he can hardly be accused of an intention to mislead. “Nobody ever believed anything a politico said,” Haroun observes, but “everyone had complete faith in Rashid because he always admitted that everything he told them was completely untrue and made up out of his own head” (20).

A more important defense of storytelling offered in Haroun arises from Rushdie's sense that experience abhors simplification, and that the ambiguities of storytelling can do more justice to “reality” than the supposed certainties of rational inquiry can. Rashid's refusal to offer facts and truths, and his preference for yarns and fictions, make him more trustworthy than the “truth-tellers” because he is not attempting to reduce an irreducible reality into political sound bites and captions. In the revealingly titled conversation that Rushdie conducted with Gunter Grass in 1985, “Fictions Are Lies That Tell the Truth.” Rushdie tells Grass:

[T]he thing that made me become a writer was … a desire simply to tell stories. I grew up in a literary tradition. That's to say that the kind of stories I was told as a child, by and large, were Arabian Nights kind of stories. It was those sort of fairy tales. … And the belief was that by telling stories in that way, in that marvellous way, you could actually tell a kind of truth which you couldn't tell in other ways.

(15)

“I think using these fairy tales” notes Grass, in agreement with Rushdie,

is bringing us to another kind of truth: to a much much richer truth than you can get by collecting facts of this flat realism. We have many realities. Our problem is that we don't accept that there are many realities. This side only wants this reality, and the other only their own reality. This is one of the reasons we still have this struggle.

(15)

Both writers in these comments are reformulating an argument that had been made several decades earlier by Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Storyteller,” in which it is argued that storytelling is the antithesis of information, because information thrives on containment and limitation (“prompt verifiability”) while good storytelling is characterized by expansibility and ambiguity. “[I]t is half the art of storytelling' Benjamin suggests, “to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it”:

The most extraordinary things, marvellous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.

(89)

For Rushdie, Grass, and Benjamin, this means that storytelling, when unfettered, becomes the antithesis of totalitarian thinking, because it resists the fascistic (or Platonic) drive to control society by limiting potential definitions and controlling interpretations. Storytelling is complicit with “liberated man,” as Benjamin argues toward the end of his essay, because it “tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest” (102).⁴

This is a point made vivid, in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, in the fear that Khattam Shud—representative of the totalizing tradition from Plato to Khomeini—has of storytelling. For Khattam Shud, storytelling is one of the greatest threats to his power, because the eclecticism implicit in any uncensored grouping of stories, along with the expansiveness and ambiguity of any one narrative, undermine the lust for closure and finitude that his name (completely finished in Hindustani) represents. He is obsessed with the desire to establish a univocal interpretation of culture by policing who may and who may not speak, and the story sea, as living embodiment of heteroglossia and polyphony, is a fluid rebuttal of this politics of exclusion. When Haroun asks why he hates stories so much, given that stories are such fun, Khattam Shud replies:

“The world, however, is not for Fun. … The world is for Controlling.”

“Which world?” Haroun made himself ask.

“Your world, my world, all worlds,” came the reply. “They are all to be Ruled. And inside every single story, inside every Stream in the Ocean, there lies a world, a story-world, that I cannot Rule at all. …

(161)

The aim of the novella, it is hardly necessary to add, is to reveal the destructive potential of this viewpoint, by showing how the frenzied pursuit of totalitarian rule results in a society riven with jealousy, suspicion, and mutual mistrust, and by showing how, contrary to the logic of authoritarian rule, freedom of speech and freedom of thought will ultimately create a stronger community.

This leads us to the third defense of storytelling presented in Haroun: that free narration is a form of free speech and thus is good for society. It is only through the free exchange of ideas and words that members of a community can achieve their full potential. This “free” society is represented in Haroun by the Guppees who defend the story sea because it reflects the diversity of their own community, a multicultural utopia in which mechanical hoopoes consort with many-mouthed fish and Archimboldoesque vegetable men fraternize with blue-bearded water genies. In this society “the Power of Speech” is regarded as “the greatest Power of all” and is “exercised to the full” (119), a political principle that may give Haroun and Rashid pause for thought when the city's preparations for war are hounded by disorder and chaos, but which is ultimately validated when the Guppees overrun the Chupwalas:

The Pages of Gup, now that they had talked through everything so fully, fought hard, remained united, supported each other when required to do so, and in general looked like a force with a common purpose. All those arguments and debates, all that openness, had created powerful bonds of fellowship between them. The Chupwalas, on the other hand, turned out to be a disunited rabble … their vows of silence and their habits of secrecy had made them suspicious and distrustful of one another.

(185)

A free society in which there are no limits to what can be said and what can be told, Rushdie is suggesting, will always prove stronger than a society that is superficially bound by imposed government policy and enforced ideology.

This assertion of the importance of absolute free speech, however, does raise some problems that Rushdie fails to confront in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In theory, freedom of expression leads toward a more tolerant society in which a multitude of different, competing ideas can coexist side by side. In practice, however, it is usually the case that, even in societies in which there is no direct censorship, indirect censorship based on various social and economic factors will still operate. As Rodney Smolla argues:

The marketplace of ideas, no less than the marketplace of commerce, will inevitably be biased in favour of those with the resources to ply their wares. The ideas of the wealthy and powerful will have greater access to the market than the ideas of the poor and disenfranchised.

(6)

By arguing, in Haroun, that the principle of free speech is sufficient to guarantee a free society, Rushdie is, uncharacteristically, ignoring the impact of social and economic inequality on an individual's ability to speak out, and so failing to engage with arguments that suggest that society would be more just if speech was, in certain conditions, regulated to protect the rights and freedoms of the underprivileged and unrepresented. Rushdie is also ignoring the argument (that his own emphasis on the power of words in Haroun would paradoxically suggest) that language, far from being a materially innocuous tool, has the capacity to cause harm and should, as such, be subject to legal controls comparable to those that govern acts of physical violence.

For these and similar reasons Haroun has been criticized for naivate and for excessive simplification of complex political issues. As Srinivas Aravamudan has argued, it “becomes a banal didactic fiction that demonstrates … everything that is wrong with liberal assumptions about literature” (327). It assumes that “pluralist individualism (as large a variety of opinions as possible will be best for all concerned)” (328) is preferable in all circumstances regardless of context, and regardless of the fact that “very different kinds of multicultural considerations have to be weighed and balanced in a socially responsible manner” (325). It also assumes that speech does not have the capacity to cause direct harm, and so fails to recognize that “[m]ost speech is attempting to act upon the world in some fashion and … therefore relates to its background in a pragmatic and materially effective way” (324).

Some commentators have attempted to defend Rushdie's tale against criticisms such as these by suggesting that Rushdie is not, after all, writing a polemical work, and that it should not be read as a serious piece of political thought. “Haroun is not a tract,” James Fenton observes; “ideas are played with, but not forced into too tidy an order.” “This is a fable without a moral,” notes Rushdie himself: “It uses all the techniques in a fable without trying to operate a homily at the end” (Tushingham 5). In both these arguments the implication is that Haroun is exempt from rigorous critique because it is (as Rushdie's narrator suggests ironically of Shame) “only … a sort of modern fairy tale, so … nobody need get upset, or take anything … too seriously” (70). The narrator of Shame, however, clearly means this statement to be disingenuous and for the reader to understand that fairy tale status (pace Grass) does not disqualify a story from being political. The same must also be true of Haroun. The ideas may not be arranged in too tidy an order, and there may be no clear “homily” at the end, but in many respects Haroun remains a tract in favour of freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas. Rushdie himself acknowledges this in a conversation held with David Tushingham: “[t]here is obviously a kind of view,” he notes, “that the values of language are superior to those of silence. So in so far as there is an author's message, it's there” (5). Unfortunately, this is precisely the message that critics of Haroun are objecting to. Rushdie, according to commentators like Aravamudan, has exchanged a blinkered and unthinking religious fundamentalism for an equally blinkered, equally unthinking form of “first amendment fundamentalism” (324, 328).

It is perhaps fair to note that Aravamudan does not extend his criticisms of Haroun to the fiction produced by Rushdie preceding the fatwa. “When [his] novelistic skill is applied to the political shenanigans of an Indira Gandhi, a Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, or a Zia-ul-Haq,” he argues, “Rushdie's novels achieve the status of responsible and context-specific political satire mediated through magic realism” (327). It is only in Haroun that Rushdie seems to advocate the blanket application of abstract principles and, in so doing, fails to recognize the importance of deploying “flexible and differential pragmatics” (327) in sensitive multicultural situations. The implication of this is that Rushdie, composing Haroun under the stress and strain of an exceptional situation, abandoned his customary political sensitivity to produce a work that (for reasons that are understandable and perhaps forgivable) is little more than a shout of anger and frustration, and should not be regarded as representative of his thinking.

Aravamudan's critique of Haroun provides a counterbalance to the growing number of essays on the novella that celebrate its vision of free speech without recognizing its tendency to simplify these issues for the sake of utopian allegory or for the sake of the children's book market, at which it is, in part, aimed. However, while there is a strain of untheorized bitterness that blunts the edge of Haroun's satire and makes some of its ideological postures look hollow, there is also more to the text's political allegory than Aravamudan gives it credit for. The battle waged by the Guppees against Khattam Shud is, after all, not just a battle for the freedom to say what you want when you want—it is also a battle fought over competing ideas of nationhood. The ocean of stories is not just a vision of “free narratives” floating vacuously in a world of speech without consequences, it is also an allegory of a utopian national culture that allows its members to be who they are without fear of persecution. To assess the ideological position expressed in Haroun more fully, therefore, we should not limit our discussion of the significance of storytelling to its implications for free speech: we should also consider the use of storytelling in Haroun in relation to issues of national and cultural identity. In order to do this, I should like, in the following section, to begin by exploring the cultural significance of storytelling traditions and narrative genres that Rushdie is drawing upon. The discussion will then broaden to show how Rushdie's idiosyncratic use of narrative tradition reflects and reinforces an argument that is being made about national identity in other dimensions of the text.

A SEA OF STORIES

Haroun and the Sea of Stories can be described as a short literary fantasy that combines traditional elements of fairy tale with the author's own creative and surreal imaginings. It operates as a children's quest narrative that features a young boy traveling to distant lands in search of a happy ending and as a potent political allegory that confronts pertinent contemporary issues, ranging from the restrictions on freedom of speech imposed by fundamentalist regimes to the pollution of the environment by irresponsible multinational corporations. As such it can be located in the subgenre, suggested by Jean-Pierre Durix, of “the children's story which only adults can really understand” (343), a tradition that incorporates Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726) and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865).

The influence of both these predecessors is evident in the style and the structure of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. All three narratives use fantastical and nonsensical scenarios to conceal (or reveal) a satirical intention, and all three are organized around the adventures of a central hero who begins the tale in a comfortable domestic environment, travels out of that environment to visit a fantasy world full of peculiarities and marvels—though strangely parallel to his or her own world—and then returns home to find that his or her understanding of the home world has been clarified.⁵

Despite the similarities between Haroun and texts such as Gulliver's Travels and Alice in Wonderland, however, Carroll's and Swift's tales, unlike Rushdie's, both derive from a predominantly English storytelling tradition. Alice in Wonderland was heavily influenced by previous Victorian “juvenile” literature such as Catherine Sinclair's Holiday House and Frederick Marryat's Masterman Ready, and also reveals a debt to the fantastical, nonsensical situations portrayed in popular British fairy tales and nursery rhymes.⁶ Swift's novel, similarly, is influenced by popular British oral or chapbook fairy tales such as The History of Tom Thumbe and The History of Jack and the Giants.⁷ Rushdie's fantasy, by contrast, demonstrates a resistance to the tradition's exclusive reliance on European narrative forms and European modes of perception by taking this tradition, saturated in British folklore and fairy tale, and merging it with an equivalent tradition in Indian storytelling that derives from Indic, Persian, or Arabic oral and literary sources. In addition to a host of character types and scenarios reminiscent of Western fairy tales, for instance, Rushdie gives us plotmotifs and expressions from The Arabian Nights, Bhatta Somadeva's eleventh-century Ocean of Streams of Story (Katha Sarit Sagara), and, as we have seen, Attar's The Conference of the Birds.

There are, of course, elements in Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels that also derive from texts such as these. The Arabian Nights first became popular in Britain in the early eighteenth century, and, since Swift, as Peter Caracciolo notes, was among its first English readers, it is probable that oddities recalling “the wonderful East” in Gulliver's Travels, such as the floating island populated by transcendentalist astronomers, owe something to The Nights (2). The figure of the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, similarly, with his hookah and his “languid, sleepy” voice, draws upon stereotypes of the drug-addled oriental that narrative collections like The Nights have been associated with since their introduction into Europe by Antoin Galland. These orientalist elements, however, do not represent attempts to incorporate the non-European narrative into the substance and body of the story; neither do they represent attempts to convey the spirit of Arabic or Sanskrit storytelling to a new readership. On the contrary, they isolate fantastic or absurd features of the non-European narrative tradition to emphasize their strangeness, and to play upon European ideas of the foreign and exotic. Rushdie, by contrast (although this is a contentious point),⁸ aims to transform the genre by placing both narrative traditions on an equal footing, by showing how the two are interdependent and intertwined.

Rushdie's attempt to demonstrate the compatibility of tales from different cultures is most apparent in the episode in which Haroun takes a drink from the story sea. Haroun is miserable, having failed to wish hard enough for the return of his father's storytelling abilities, so Iff, the Water Genie, extracts a story from the water to cheer him up. Haroun drinks the story water and finds himself transported to a virtual landscape in which the story is being played out before him. First he has to dispatch several monsters, which he does with considerable ease; then he finds himself at a white stone tower:

At the top of the tower was (what else but) a single window, out of which there gazed (who else but) a captive princess. What Haroun was experiencing, though he didn't know it, was Princess Rescue Story Number S/1001/ZHT/420/41(r)xi; and because the princess in this particular story had recently had a haircut and therefore had no long tresses to let down (unlike the heroine of Princess Rescue Story G/1001/RIM/777/M(w)i, better known as “Rapunzel”), Haroun as the hero was required to climb up the outside of the tower by clinging to the cracks between the stones with his bare hands and feet.

(73)

Rushdie is clearly being playful here. This passage creates a comic effect by drawing attention to the formulaic conventions of fairy tale and then confounding those conventions by introducing the extravagant device of a princess with a haircut. Despite this frivolous approach, however, Rushdie's parodic fairy tale notation suggests a serious point. The first notation, S/1001/ZHT/420/41(r)xi, calls to mind The Arabian Nights. The number 1001 evokes the thousand and one nights, and the letters ZHT (possibly) signify Scheherazade. The second notation, G/1001/RIM/777/M(w)i, also suggests the presence of The Arabian Nights (1001) but then alludes to the Brothers Grimm, the capital letters spelling GRIMM unambiguously, the lowercase w standing for Wilhelm. Both are variants, as Rushdie notes, of the “princess rescue story” that has become popularized as “Rapunzel.”

This playful notation alerts the reader to the fact that the tale “Rapunzel” is not exclusive to the Grimms' collection, and that different variants of the tale, such as the mysterious S/1001, are also floating around in the veins of the story sea. The variant of “Rapunzel” that is now most popular is undoubtedly that which was collected by Grimm in 1812, but—as Rushdie reminds the reader cryptically—this is not the only version, nor indeed is it the first. Grimm took the tale from a story by Friedrich Schultz, who had in turn borrowed it from a French tale, “Persinette,” by Mile. Charlotte-Rose de la Force (published anonymously in Contes des Contes in 1692) (Zipes 729). It is unclear where de la Force took it from, although there is an Italian variant in Basile's Pentamerone, and it is probable that Basile's version, through various complex paths, is related to early Indian versions of the tale.⁹ Just as Rushdie implies in his parody, therefore, there are Indian and Middle Eastern precedents for a ta le that is now predominantly thought of as European. The implication of this is that the tales of different cultures are not separated from one another by rigid cultural divides and “walls of force” but may share a number of significant features.

Perhaps this is giving too much weight to what is, arguably, little more than a passing joke on Rushdie's part. S/1001/ZHT/420/41(r)xi and G/1001/RIM/777/M(w)i are, perhaps, only jests at the expense of folklore indexers such as Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson that were not meant to be subjected to rigorous analysis. However, there are other ways that Haroun suggests to the reader that narratives evolve through a process of cultural exchange and fruitful intermingling, and are not (as the Brothers Grimm and later the Nazis were eager to suggest) indications of the purity of the national voice. This idea is presented to the reader pictorially in the image of the story sea that Haroun examines only a page before he drinks the princess rescue stories. The story waters, as Haroun observes, are “made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity.” As Iff explains:

Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held there in fluid form they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.

(72)

It is this livingness, for Rushdie, that characterizes storytelling. Stories may seem to be “fixed” or “stable” if they are fixed artificially—by a canon of “official” narratives, or by direct censorship. The most cursory investigation of a story's genealogy, however, will reveal that the borders and boundaries we have erected around the stories of different peoples and nations are permeable, and that a serious assessment of a narrative's ancestry must include a recognition of the process and performance of cultural interaction. It is in this respect that the story sea as an image of Rushdie's hybrid sources comes to reflect one of the dominant arguments presented in the plot of Haroun—that the establishment of strict and impermeable boundaries between different cultures gives a false impression of the “purity” of each culture and prevents cultural groups from discovering that their respective social narratives provide as much of a basis for dialogue and communication as they do for segregation and separation. As a testament to this, the troubles that Haroun encounters on the moon of Kahani are largely the result of the separation of the moon into two halves. There is a light side populated by the talkative Guppees (derived from gup, gossip in Hindustani) on which the sun always shines, and a dark side populated by the silent Chupwalas (quiet fellows in Hindustaru) that is in perpetual darkness. The division between the two sides is maintained by a wall of force erected by the Guppees to keep the Chupwalas out, and it is this wall that is responsible for the tensions between the two communities. Its name, “Chattergy's Wall,” after the king of the Guppees, recalls the Roman emperor Hadrian's barrier against the Picts and the Scots, but it also invokes the Berlin wall separating communist East Germany and democratic West Germany which had come down the year before Rushdie published Haroun. Its symbolic function is the same as that of the wall constructed by the king in Edward Bond's play Lear (1972): it is meant to ensure the safety of the populace, but it ends up being a cage, a trap, which causes hatred, suffering, and brutality.

The Guppees, in Rushdie's tale, seem to have justice on their side, since they are defending their moon Kahani against the tyranny of Khattam Shud. As the tale progresses, however, it becomes increasingly apparent that the Guppees are as much responsible for Khattam Shud's reign as the Chupwalas, because it is their machinery that has created the division between the two cultures. They developed techniques with which to bring the moon's rotation under control, separating day from night and Chupwala from Guppee, and it is this separation that has allowed Khattam Shud's fanatical opposition to the Guppees to flourish. The success of Haroun's quest, therefore, depends on his being able to undo this binary opposition, which he does in the end by causing the moon to turn “so that it is no longer half in light, half in darkness” (170). Light shines down on Chup for the first time, causing all Khattam Shud's shadow battalions to melt away to nothing.

Once the binary is undone, the people of Gup and Chup devise a peace settlement that permits “a dialogue” (193) between the two groups. “Night and Day, Speech and Silence,” according to this peace, “would no longer be separated into Zones by Twilight strips and Walls of Force” (191). This radical transformation in the way that the two cultures interact is prelude to a total reassessment of their understanding of one an other. Each realizes that the other is not as bad, or as different, as they first thought—and both realize that the distinctive differences between the two cultures can provide opportunities for productive exchange rather than destructive enmity. This is something that the perceptive young Haroun has realized several chapters previously while watching Mudra, the shadow warrior from the “enemy” city of Chup, do his martial dance. At first he thinks:

How many opposites are at war in this battle between Gup and Chup! Gup is bright and Chup is dark. Gup is warm and Chup is freezing cold. Gup is all chattering and noise, whereas Chup is silent as a shadow. Guppees love the Ocean, Chupwalas try to poison it. Guppees love Stories, and Speech; Chupwalas, it seems, hate these things just as strongly. …

(125)

And yet, he recognizes,

it's not as simple as that … because the dance of the Shadow Warrior showed him that silence had its own grace and beauty (just as speech could be graceless and ugly); and that Action could be as noble as Words; and that creatures of darkness could be as lovely as the children of light. “If Guppees and Chupwalas didn't hate each other so,” he thought, “they might actually find each other pretty interesting. Opposites attract, as they say.”

(125)

In a tale that is largely about oppositions—between fantasy and reality, between child and adult, between good and bad—Rushdie is being careful to suggest that there can be “dialogue” and “crossover” between categories.

On several levels, therefore, Rushdie has created in Haroun a complex allegory that emphasizes the importance of exchange between different cultural groupings. At the level of theme, he has shown how Guppees and Chupwalas are able to create a better society when rigorous separation is not enforced; at the level of symbolism, he has given us the potent image of the story sea that is only healthy when stories from diverse places are permitted to intermingle freely; finally, and perhaps most innovatively, he has created a story sea in his own text by drawing eclectically from diverse narrative traditions (Arabic, Persian, Indian, and European) and allowing those traditions to cross-pollinate one another.

The allegory of Haroun, in this sense, is one that works, like traditional fabular allegories, by creating situations in the plot that “speak otherwise” about social, cultural, and political events; but it is also possible to argue that Rushdie has extended the reach of the traditional fable by making intertextuality serve an additional allegorical function.¹⁰ Not only is the story of Haroun about the dangers of ethnocentrism and its terrible impact on a fantastical other world, but the eclecticism of Haroun as a piece of writing also operates as material evidence of the benefits (in terms of lively and dynamic storytelling) that can be accrued from a willingness to traverse freely across the boundaries of diverse cultural traditions. The real tragedy of Khattam Shud, in this respect, must be that he is not only confounded by the opponents he comes up against within the tale—Haroun and the representatives of the story sea—he is also confounded by the very materiality of the story within which he finds himself. He is thus, we might say, completely finished before he is even begun.

THE DISSEMINATED NATION

In Rushdie's vision of a plethora of “small” stories, all set in opposition to the “grand mythology” promoted by Khattam Shud, there is an echo of Lyotard's famous distinction between petits récits and metanarratives. Khattam Shud's is the totalized account of experience that must suppress difference to maintain the illusion of its own totality; the story sea is a riot of diverse narratives that resist the drive toward assimilation and incorporation, and in so doing responds to a lyotardian call to be “witness to the unpresentable” and to “wage war on totality” (82). Whereas Lyotard's vision of competing narratives remains at the level of metaphysical generality, however, Rushdie's allegorical revisitation of Lyotard's attack on the Platonic tradition has a more specific focus. His aim is not to reimagine a form(lessness) for truth in the abstract, although this might well be one of the implications of his allegory; his aim is to reimagine a form(lessness) of social and communal interaction. Or, more specifically, his aim is to imagine a form for the nation, if nation is understood not as a unified and holistic entity defined by the exclusion of “others” but as a fluid, provisional entity defined by its capacity to incorporate difference and variation. In this respect, Rushdie's Ocean of Story can be described with more accuracy as an attempt to give shape to the Lyotardian ideal as it is appropriated by Homi Bhabha in service of a description of the disseminated nation—a nation that is

a form of living that is more complex than “community”; more symbolic than “society”; more connotative than “country”; less patriotic than patrie … less homogenous than hegemony; less centred than the citizen; more collective than the “subject”; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism.

(140)

The story sea, according to this interpretation, is not just a metaphor for free speech and free narratives; it also offers a model for an ideal concept of nationhood that permits unlimited interaction and exchange between cultural interests.

In the light of this interpretation we can reread the conflict between the Guppees and Khattam Shud not as the battle between absolute free speech and censorship but as the collision between conceptions of nationhood identified by Bhabha as the “pedagogical” (which sees “the people as an a priori historical presence”) and the “performative” (which sees the people as constructed—and continuously reconstructed—in the “enunciatory present” [147]). Khattam Shud represents the pedagogical (fundamentalist) ideal of a nation that exists as an essentialized entity independent of any actual manifestations of national life and that defines itself by its opposition to and difference from “extrinsic other nations” (148). The story sea, by contrast, represents the idea of a nation that is redefined in each moment of its existence and is able to incorporate new strands into the national narrative as they become part of the ongoing performance of national life. Whereas Khattam Shud demands a nation that can be homogenized according to some preestablished blueprint, in other words, the supporters of the story sea celebrate a “liminal” idea of nation that will never be complete or incomplete, neither resolving nor eliminating cultural difference but recognizing it as an insurmountable and dynamic aspect of community. It is this “liminal figure of the nation-space” that presents the supreme threat to Khattam Shud because, as Bhabha puts it, it ensures “that no political ideologies [can] claim transcendent or metaphysical authority for themselves” (148).

On this basis it is now possible to suggest that Rushdie's call for freedom of narration in Haroun cannot be reduced so easily to a facile, liberal plea for freedom of speech. The demand for free interaction of stories in the story sea is linked to the demand for the freedom of individuals, groups, minorities, to be a part of the nation with which they are affiliated. It is also a reinforcement of the rights of individuals, groups, minorities not to be excluded from a nation simply because they do not conform to a pedagogical nationalist ideal. Haroun, in this capacity is not only a vindictive cry against Khomeini and a pedantic, ill-theorized insistence on the right to say what we want when we want, it also incorporates a more radical response to Khomeini in its challenge to the nationalist and fundamentalist principles on which Khomeini's authority is based, and on the strength of which the fatwa against Rushdie's life was issued. While Srinivas Aravamudan is undoubtedly correct to critique Haroun for those instances in which it stereotypes Khomeini and Islam “through the lens of James Bond” (326), and for its occasionally simplistic assessment of the problem of free speech, a fair appraisal of Rushdie's ideological position in Haroun should also take into account the radical revisioning of traditional ideas of nationhood that the story sea connotes.

Of course, as both Rushdie and Bhabha are aware, it is still possible to misread their revisioning of nationhood as a liberal dream of a multicultural utopia. If “cultural difference” is understood as “the free play of polarities and pluralities in the homogenous empty time of the national community” (162). Bhabha has argued, then multiculturalism becomes little more than an argument for a cultural relativism in which all are equal because all are the same, and all are included because no one is different. In arguing for “perplexity” in the living and writing of the nation, however, Bhabha is insisting on a more antagonistic vision of cultural difference in which social contradictions and antagonisms are “negotiated” without being “sublated” (162). “The difference between disjunctive sites and representations of social life,” he argues, “have to be articulated without surmounting the incommensurable meanings and judgements that are produced within the process of transcultural negotiation” (162). Minority discourse, therefore, must not be seen as discourse to be incorporated into the national discourse but as a form of intervention that repeatedly subverts and transforms the national narrative without ever offering the promise that there will be a point at which the national narrative accumulates into an organic unity. Different forms of cultural knowledge and practice, in other words, should not be seen as adding up the idea of nation so that minorities and margins are subsumed in the discourse of the “many as one” but should be seen as adding to (interrupting and perplexing) the idea of nation, which remains an incomplete and uncompletable entity.

If we reread Rushdie's vision of storytelling in Haroun and the Sea of Stories along these lines, as an attempt to imagine a form of narration that accommodates the idea of supplementary subversion, then we have the model of a cultural ideal very unlike the liberal dream of multicultural homogeneity that Aravamudan accuses Rushdie of constructing. In this vision, each new narrative, or each fresh formulation of an old narrative, is not a simple addition to the body of narratives that already exists; it antagonizes it or (as Butt the Hoopoe might put it) “shakes it up a little, va-voom!” (79). That there are a thousand and one different tales in the story sea, moreover, does not imply that there is a finite number of narratives that the nation can add up to. For Rushdie, as for Jorge Luis Borges, the number a thousand and one is a magical number that suggests infinite complexity even as it suggests limitation.¹¹ A thousand and one nights does not mean a thousand nights plus one night. It means a thousand nights and then one more night, and then one more night, and then one more night ad infinitum, where each night added will transform all the nights that have gone before and all the nights to come. The number 1001 in Rushdie's fiction thus comes to represent what Bhabha has called “the insurmountable extremes of storytelling [where] we encounter the question of cultural difference as the perplexity of living and writing the nation” (161).

UTOPIAN ENDINGS

In his reconception of society as a complex and multiform body of competing discourses Rushdie has moved a fair distance from the vision of society promoted by Farid ud-Din Attar in The Conference of the Birds. Attar's vision, in tune with Sufi philosophy, is based on the ideal and transcendental unity of its members. This is suggested toward the end of his narrative by Attar's use of an ingenious (and somewhat Rushdiesque) pun: 30 birds reach the mountain of Kaf expecting to find their king, the Simurg, awaiting them, but when they alight they realize that they themselves, having undergone their quest for enlightenment, are their own collective king—Simurg, in Persian, also meaning thirty birds (si: thirty, morgh: birds).¹² The trajectory of Rushdie's heroes and heroines is in many respects antithetical to Attar's. When the hoopoe and his cohorts reach their goal, they discover a story sea that does not embody a principle of the many as one but on the contrary represents resistance to totality (whether it be the totality of a preexisting essential unity or a post factum totality achieved by gradual accumulation). While Attar and Rushdie have the potent symbol of the hoopoe in common, therefore, it is apparent that their hoopoes signify very different traditions of thinking, one that aims at incorporation, the other at dissemination. Rushdie's hoopoe is a postmodern bird whose quest leads toward a celebration of diversity, and who has, appropriately, a mechanical, computerized brain; Attar's hoopoe is a spiritual entity whose quest leads in the opposite direction toward the absolute eradication of difference. At the same time that we can identity these dissimilarities in Rushdie and Attar's systems of thought, however, it remains possible to detect continuities across the centuries in the motivation behind their fiction. Though they have imagined very different forms of ideal community, they have both used their “elsewhere” as a means of responding to their persecutors. Both have attempted to imagine models of communal interrelation that do not result in the marginalization or exclusion of their own dissenting voices, and both, finally, have sought solace as well as empowerment in imaginary utopias.

Notes

1. Attar is comparing himself to another persecuted poet, Nasir-e-Khosrow, who, “in order that he might not look on the accursed faces” of his oppressors (Browne 509), was forced to spend his remaining days, like a lost jewel, in the remote province of Badakhstan.

2. There are variations on the English spelling of Simurg. Here I have used the spelling employed by Rushdie in Grimus (adopted because it is an anagram of his titular character).

3. The translations of the names are provided by Rushdie in a glossary, 217-18.

4. Benjamin anticipates Roland Barthes (as he anticipates so much late twentieth-century theory) in his understanding of myth. Myth, in this context, means an official kind of story in which each element is marshaled toward some total explanation of experience. The story or fairy tale, by contrast, is a predominantly secular form of telling that tends to proliferate narratives rather than organize them under the umbrella of a single authoritarian metanarrative.

5. This is a subject that Rushdie explores in his British Film Institute pamphlet on The Wizard of Oz, another adult-children's tale that inspired Haroun.

6. See Reinstein.

7. See Smedman.

8. Whether or not Rushdie simply reinforces orientalist stereotypes in his reuse of texts such as The Nights is a matter of ongoing debate. See Baker for a full discussion.

9. Stith Thompson identifies an early Indian variation on the motif of the princess held captive in a tower (R41.2) in his Motif Index of Folk Literature (273). One such Indian version can be found early on in the Katha Sarit Sagara, a story collection that influenced The Arabian Nights. See Somadeva 15.

10. Other allegories operate at the level of form as well as at the level of text, of course, but in Rushdie's tale the correlations between the fictional representation of a story sea and the intertextual embodiment of a story sea are self-consciously foregrounded.

11. “[T]he word thousand is almost synonymous with infinite,” Borges writes:

    To say a thousand and one nights is to add one to infinity. Let us recall a curious English expression: instead of forever, they sometimes say forever and a day. A day has been added to forever. It is reminiscent of a line of Heine, written to a woman: “I will love you eternally and even after.”

    (45-46)

12. It is partly because of this pun that Rushdie makes The Conference of the Birds a key source for Grimus, a novel that is obsessed with word games and conundrums. The word grimus itself, in fact, is a word game built on a word game—grimus being an anagram of the pun simurg.

Works Cited

Aravamudan, Srinivas. “Fables of Censorship: Salman Rushdie, Satire, and Symbolic Violence.” Western Humanities Review 49.4 (1995): 323-29.

Attar, Farid ud-Din. The Conference of the Birds (Manteq at-Tair). Trans. and ed. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis. London: Penguin, 1984.

Baker, Stephen. The Fiction of Postmodernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 83-109.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Seven Nights. Trans. Eliot Weinberger. New York: New Directions, 1984.

Browne, Edward G. A Literary History of Persia from Firdawsí to Sa'dí. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1928.

Caracciolo, Peter, ed. The Arabian Nights in English Literature: Studies in the Reception of “The Thousand and One Nights” into British Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988.

Durix, Jean-Pierre. “‘The Gardener of Stories’: Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Ed. D. M. Fletcher. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. 343-51.

Fenton, James. “Keeping Up with Salman Rushdie.” New York Review of Books 28 Mar. 1991: 32.

Fuentes, Carlos. “Worlds Apart.” Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. Peter Brooker. London: Longman, 1992. 244-46.

Grass, Gunter, and Salman Rushdie. “Fictions Are Lies That Tell the Truth.” The Listener (June 1985): 15-16.

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Reinstein, P. Gila. Alice in Context. New York: Garland, 1988.

Rushdie, Salman. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta, 1991.

———. Shame. London: Picador, 1984.

———. The Wizard of Oz. London: British Film Institute, 1992.

Sidney, Philip. Defense of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella and Other Writings. Ed. Elizabeth Porges Watson. London: Dent, 1997.

Smedman, M. Sarah. “Like Me, Like Me Not: Gulliver's Travels as Children's Book.” The Genres of Gulliver's Travels. Ed. Frederik N. Smith. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1990. 75-100.

Smolla, Rodney. Free Speech in an Open Society. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Somadeva, Bhatta. Katha Sarit Sagara or The Ocean of Streams of Story. Trans. C. H. Tawney. Vol. 1. Calcutta: J. W. Thomas, 1880.

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Tushingham, David. Interview. “Salman Rushdie in Conversation.” Theatre Programme. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Dir. Tim Supple. National Theatre (Cottesloe) 1 Oct. 1998: 3-5.

Zipes, Jack, ed. and trans. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. New York: Bantam, 1992.