Fiction Under Siege: Rushdie's Quest for Narrative Emancipation in Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Because of the danger and isolation of his life, one would think that Salman Rushdie would have followed The Satanic Verses with a novel that would prudently avoid the controversy over the censorship of fiction. However, it is the provocative question, “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” (20) that drives the narrative of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Under the spell of this children’s story, we learn that the ability to tell and hear stories is not only gratifying but, in fact, a necessary ingredient of democratic life. Here is a satiric story that we can read with children that is not a polemic on censorship but rather an engaging narrative that confronts and contributes to the discourse on this issue. Like George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an allegory of an all-too-real situation that we can explore in order to understand more deeply the complexities of censorship. Like Michael Ende in The Neverending Story, Rushdie addresses the serious theme of storytelling and its critical link to cultural emancipation within his own rollicking story of a boy’s fabulous adventures.

Rushdie’s motives and intentions for writing Haroun are intimately bound up with—indeed, built up by—his singular historical context, the narrative of his life. That is, they are influenced by what Paul Smith calls the “subject’s self-narrative” (158). First, he had promised his son, Zafar, that he would write a book for him after completing The Satanic Verses. Once Rushdie was forced into exile and separated from his son, the promise became even more pressing. Second, a children’s book gave Rushdie a safer venue in which to write again, which was not easy—after the imposition of the fatwa, he confessed, “I felt that everything I had put into the act of being a writer had failed, had simply been invalidated by what had happened. . . . I spent an awful lot of time thinking I would never write again, not because I couldn’t but because I didn’t want to” (qtd. in Fenton 33). Third, Rushdie surely must have been motivated by the chance to wrestle with his awful dilemma of seclusion, danger, and enforced silence. He needed to write a story that could free him to inscribe a happy ending, one that would bring imaginary closure to his specific exile, even if only on the pages of a book for his child. Fourth, Haroun gave Rushdie the space to negotiate both his own situation and the social processes of despotic censorship and menace that led to his exile, a space in which he could both allegorically mock and describe the character of his oppressors. Given this biographical and historical context, Haroun can be read not only as a children’s story but as a politically subversive narrative of resistance.

The immediate parallels between Rushdie’s plight and the story’s predicament augment our respect for the artistry of Haroun, but the narrative also derives much of its merit from attributes that have consistently been traits of Rushdie’s general notions of storytelling. There is, for example, his continual play with language, as evidenced by humorous and telling names he has created like “Bezaban,” “Batcheat,” “Blabbermouth,” and “Bolo.” Still, behind this playfulness, observes James Harrison, “is an implicit comment, insightful or satiric, on the processes of artistic creation and the ways of bureaucratic expertise” (10). In fact, in all of his novels, Rushdie employs fiction to address social conditions, assess political bureaucracies, and critique oppression. Indeed, his first novel, a work of magic realism entitled Midnight’s Children, celebrates the triumph of the human imagination over tyranny. In an interview about the novel, Rushdie says, “It’s designed to show a country or a society [India] with an almost endless capacity for generating stories, events, new ideas, and constantly renewing, rebuilding itself” (23). Hence, the theme of storytelling as renewal and regeneration is launched in Midnight’s Children and continues to surface in Rushdie’s writing up...