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Haroun and the sea of stories (Click to select text)
In Rushdie's book, Haroun is the son of Rashid Khalifa, a famous story-teller, who loses his powers of story-telling when his wife leaves him for Mr. Sengupta, a town clerk who hates fictional stories. Haroun accompanies his father to the beautiful Dull Lake which closely resembles the Dal Lake in Kashmir. Having taken residence on one of this lake's famous tourist houseboats, called Arabian Nights Plus One, Haroun embarks on a quest to recover his father's lost powers of story telling. A Water Genie takes him to the Ocean of the Streams of Story and invites him to drink of it. Instead of experiencing a beautiful love story, however, he undergoes a nightmare. The ocean turns out to be poisoned by a tyrannous "Cultmaster" (148) who aims at controlling the world. After visiting Gup City which is oppressed by Khattam-Shud, the cultmaster, Haroun finally manages to stop the source which is poisoning the ocean of stories. As a reward, the king of Gup provides him with a happy ending: Haroun awakes in his bed on the houseboat and finds that his father has recovered his gift of story-telling. His mother returns to the family to complete the happy ending. In Rushdie's book, Haroun is the son of Rashid Khalifa, a famous story-teller, who loses his powers of story-telling when his wife leaves him for Mr. Sengupta, a town clerk who hates fictional stories. Haroun accompanies his father to the beautiful Dull Lake which closely resembles the Dal Lake in Kashmir. Having taken residence on one of this lake's famous tourist house boats, called Arabian Nights Plus One, Haroun embarks on a quest to recover his father's lost powers of story-telling. A Water Genie takes him to the Ocean of the Streams of Story and invites him to drink of it. Instead of experiencing a beautiful love story, however, he undergoes a nightmare. The ocean turns out to be poisoned by a tyrannous "Cultmaster" (148) who aims at controlling the world. After visiting Gup City which is oppressed by Khattam-Shud, the cultmaster, Haroun finally manages to stop the source which is poisoning the ocean of stories. As a reward, the king of Gup provides him with a happy ending: Haroun awakes in his bed on the houseboat and finds that his father has recovered his gift of story-telling. His mother returns to the family to complete the happy ending. As Rashid explains to Haroun, the spirits of dead kings live on in the guise of hoopoe birds (25), who are also said to be helpful companions on quests (64). A kind of mechanical hoopoe bird will carry Haroun to the Ocean of the Streams of Story and to Gup City, which is the first stage in his quest. Haroun is accompanied by a Water Genie, who seems to have sprung directly from the Arabian Nights. The various colours of the ocean recall the vividness which is certainly one of the most striking features of the stories of this famous collection, with their countless references to precious gems of various colours. Haroun and the hoopoe are joined by two fish as companions, Bagha and Goopy, whose names, as Rushdie points out in the glossary, are derived from a film by Satyajit Ray, the well-known Indian film director. The 'pages' whom Haroun meets at Gup City owe their names to a pun on pages in both the senses of servants and of pages in books. As pages in books they share many particulars with the game of cards in Alice in Wonderland. Another reference to Eastern culture occurs when, later on, part of the army of Gup City meet a "shadow warrior" who has difficulties with speaking but can communicate in Abhinaya, a classical Indian dance which he uses as a language. In Rushdie's book, however, intertextual allusions are not just heaped up for their own sakes. They rather serve to convey a 'metafictional' statement. In the beginning Haroun asks his father: "What is the use of stories that aren't even true?" (22). The answer to this question is what Haroun will find out on his quest. There is first of all the beauty of the stories, as indicated by the beautiful colours on the Ocean of the Streams of Story. The stories are called, for example, "Princess Rescue Story G/1001/RIM/777/M(w)i, better known as 'Rapunzel'" (73). Both Grimm's fairy-tales and the thousand and one Arabian Nights are alluded to. When Haroun takes a drink from the Ocean, however, the "princess-rescue" story turns out wrong: The hero who climbs the tower where the princess is imprisoned is transformed into a spider. The princess does not like being rescued by a spider and pushes him off. When Haroun regains his senses, his companion the Water Genie explains to him how the story should have ended: "'You saved the princess and walked off into the sunset as specified, I presume?'" (74). The obvious point is that even conventional stories can be enjoyable. With the transformation of the hero into a spider, Rushdie certainly alludes to Kafka's famous short story, "Die Verwandlung" (Later on, Haroun will meet a "shadow warrior" who, living in a land of silence, can only produce gurgling and coughing sounds: "Gogogol" and "Kafkafka" [129]). But even if the reader does not realize this allusion, he or she will understand that the poisoning of the story refers to the modernist tendency of looking for problems and conflict in literature rather than for beauty and harmony. The same point is made by "Blabbermouth", one of the pages of Gup City, in answer to Haroun's question about the reality of his present experience: "'That's the trouble with you sad city types: you think a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real'" (114). Another statement concerning the techniques of fiction concerns the mixing up of different stories and different cultural traditions. A fairy-tale creature, the Water Genie, finds no difficulties in riding a mechanical, electronic and computerized vessel which has the shape of a hoopoe bird and can speak. This mixture of literary motifs becomes a topic of discussion when Haroun wonders if the various streams of story do not disturb one another. The answer he gets is: "Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up" (79). The multiplicity of streams in the "Ocean" indicates that there is an immense reservoir of stories which are allowed to mingle to produce new stories. This "shaking-up" corresponds to what happens in dreams. The mingling motif from different traditions which characterizes Rushdie's books is both an attempt at an accurate rendering of the processes of consciousness in dreams and a literary technique. The final poetological message concerns the practical use of "stories which aren't even true." A reason which would be sufficient in itself is that stories provide pleasure. But why should a monster called the "Cultmaster" poison the Ocean of the Streams of Story? An answer is given in a conversation between Haroun and the cultmaster: 'Why do you hate stories so much? ... Stories are fun ...' 'The World, however, is not for Fun,' Khattam-Shud replied. 'The World is for Controlling.' 'Which world?' Haroun made himself ask. 'Your world, my world, all worlds,' came the reply. 'They are all there 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. And that is the reason why. (161) he realm of the imagination can provide for alternative worlds. Any attempt at controlling the world can be frustrated by creating a new world in a story. Giving scope to imagination ensures freedom from oppression. The very fact that fictional stories do not necessarily represent reality constitute their strength: even if no happy ending is likely in real life, it is always possible to create one imaginatively. The story of the monster who hates stories has an obvious autobiographical reference: The monster can easily be identified with the Ayatollah Khomeini who sentenced Rushdie to death for having written The Satanic Verses, the book Khomeini considered blasphemous. On one level, Haroun and the Sea of Stories can be read as Rushdie's defense of his novel and as his answer to the Ayatollah: The Satanic Verses consists of a "shaking up" of old stories, including what Rushdie called the "grand narrative" of Islam (1992: 432). The aim of the book is not to fight religion but to look at it from an ironical point of view, hereby providing pleasure and enlarging the mind. In denouncing the book the Ayatollah revealed himself to be actuated by his wish to gain totalitarian power. There are, however, indications in the text of Haroun and the Sea of Stories that this book should not just be interpreted in so limited a way. Khattam-Shud not only recalls Khomeini, but also resembles, as Haroun notices, Mr. Sengupta, the town clerk with whom Haroun's mother ran off. It is not only tyrants or dictators who oppose the liberty of writing and hearing stories but also people who believe in business-like rationalism in the narrowest sense of the word. As Mr. Sengupta takes off with Rashid's wife, he scores a victory over the story-teller and endangers Rashid's story-telling powers. Haroun, the boy, is in danger of being influenced by the obviously successful attitude of his father's adversary. In the end, however, when Rashid regains his powers of story-telling and his wife returns to him, imagination and fantasy triumph over both cold-hearted rationalism and totalitarian tyranny. We are not to suppose, by the way, that imagination and rational modernity are mutually exclusive. The hoopoe bird, which carries Haroun over the Ocean of the Streams of Story, is reminiscent of ancient legends while being, the same time, a perfect modern computerized machine. As the Water Genie points out, imagination is not just useful but actually necessary to get hold of reality: "'... Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there? ... Kangaroos, Mount Fujiyama, the North Pole? And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eyes and you'll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess'" (63.). As a cognitive faculty, imagination is indispensable to supplement eyesight. Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a book mainly addressed to Western readers. Its characters and scenery are obviously Indian. The literary tradition where the book can be placed is British children's fantasy, a tradition which is particularly open for the presentation of material from various sources. From Alice in Wonderland onwards books of this kind have contained reflections on other literary texts, reflections which can be called metafictional. In the Alice-books, nursery rhymes are repeatedly referred to, as well as mythological stories and fairy-tales. An immediate precursor of Rushdie is Michael Ende with his Neverending Story, which includes an ancient quest hero as well as a Chinese dragon and other creatures of various origins. It is within this tradition of children's literature that Rushdie writes his poetological parable - making use of children's imaginativeness to address both child and adult readers.
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