6 - Haroun and the Sea of Stories and East, West

Summary

HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES

Like many a fairy tale, Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories explores complex moral and philosophical questions in a simple way: via the elementary emblematic of narrative. The misfortunes of Haroun's father, Rashid, who loses his storytelling gift when challenged by literal questions, and the adventures of Haroun himself among mythological beasts, evil demons, supernatural seas, and magical landscapes, are a fictive reflection of real problems in the real world. It is not surprising, therefore, that the novel may be read at one level as a coded account of Rushdie's personal predicament after the fatwa – a reading encouraged by the acrostic reference to his son Zafar that appears as dedication:

Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu,

All our dream-worlds may come true.

Fairy lands are fearsome too.

As I wander far from view

Read, and bring me home to you.

Rushdie told James Fenton, in interview, that he had promised his son ‘the next book I wrote would be one he might enjoy reading’. The details of the coded reading may easily be sketched out: the separation of the family, the attack on free speech (‘the greatest Power of all ’ (HSS 119)) by Khattam-Shud, the embodiment of silence and negation; the sinister power of Bezaban, the idol of black ice. A glossary lists names that ‘have been derived from Hindustani words’, and Bezaban is given as ‘Without-a-Tongue’ (HSS 217). But obviously this reading, while legitimate (even inevitable), risks being reductive. Haroun is also a story about story itself, about the need and the capacity of human beings to communicate with each other, across time and across cultures – and despite whatever other obstacles may be put in their way. In this respect, Haroun may also be compared with Gulliver 's Travels, a fiction which is both available to a contextualized, ‘local’ decoding in terms of eighteenth-century political personalities and events but also floats free of this encumbrance on a sea of its own, a mythical, magical, and dehistoricized account of human behaviour that retains nevertheless an important moral dimension.

It will be interesting, therefore, to consider how Haroun offers its own simplified version of Rushdie's recurrent themes.