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265 CHAPTER SIX When Truth Is What It Is Told to Be Rushdie’s Storytelling, Dreams, and Endings [P]olitics and literature, like sport and politics , do mix, are inextricably mixed, and the mixture has consequences. . . . It seems to me imperative that literature enter such arguments, because what is being disputed is nothing less than what is the case, what is truth and untruth. If writers leave the business of making pictures of the world to politicians, it will be one of history’s great and most abject abdications. —Rushdie, “Outside the Whale”1 In 1947, shocked by the partition of time as well as of country, when Indian standard time is set half an hour ahead of Pakistan’s, Mr. Butt, Saleem’s father’s friend, exclaims, “If they can change the time just like that, what’s real any more? I ask you? What’s true?” (MC, 90). His question resonates in this text as it voices the trauma of loss, of finding truth, language , and system unfixed from their comforting gold standard and of encountering the dizzying instabilities of post-Independence reality. Saleem responds with a little disquisition on truth: I reply across the years to S. P. Butt . . . “What’s real and what’s true aren’t necessarily the same.” True, for me, was from my earliest days something hidden inside the stories Mary Pereira told me: Mary my ayah who was both more and less than a mother; Mary who knew everything about all of us. True was something concealed just over the horizon towards which the fisherman’s finger pointed in the picture on the wall, while the young Raleigh listened to his tales. Now, writing this in my Anglepoised pool of light, I measure truth against those early things: Is this how Mary would have told it? I ask. Is this what the fisherman would have said? (MC, 90) Saleem thus proceeds to define not what is “real” but what is “true.” The term real drops out of his reply, suggesting that “truth” is accessible only by ellipses, as “something,” or “something hidden.” What is “true” is rendered instead by Saleem as a deeply subjective knowledge, as founded in his childhood experience of engaging with two kinds of texts: the orally told stories of Mary, his ayah; and the painting of the fisherman’s pointing finger that hung in his bedroom , itself a visual representation of instructive storytelling.2 In both, what is “true” is cast as something that lies beyond linguistic definition, “something hidden,” oblique, elusive, that cannot be captured in a moral but is hidden in a tale or is pointed to by a finger that leads the eye beyond the frame, so that the observer in the painting (no less than the paradigmatic colonizer, Sir Walter Raleigh) must look beyond that frame, into what cannot be contained within the work of art. Truth is thus what escapes the colonizing gaze. And in both cases, what is “true” is signified by parental figures in scenes of familial instruction , whose indirect but foundational criteria of “truth” engender and shape the writing of the adult Saleem as well. This centrality yet elusiveness of truth underwrites both Midnight’s Children and Shame. We have seen how Rushdie establishes the agency of his narratives by constructing a new language that purports to be material and bodily by nature and by its effects. He thus suggests how his writing can act: how, as a bodily emanation , it can affect its environment, breaking the boundaries between self and world; how unspoken words have material physiological effects; and how narrating the past can enable control of that past and of the future. Rushdie applies this capacity of his narration to the issue of truth telling and truth making as ways of creating reality in and through his fiction. Rushdie knows, perhaps better than When Truth Is What It Is Told to Be 266 either Kipling or Forster, that truth is not only something that may (or may not) be told, to which language may refer, but also something that can be made, that language actually constructs. As we have seen, and as the epigraph above indicates, if the goal of Rushdie’s postcolonial cultural work is to describe (or redescribe) things both as they are or were and as they might be, then the effort of his new materially powerful language is both to tell the truth to the best degree possible and to make it, making a...

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