“What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even

True?”: Haroun and the Sea of Stories and

the Epistemology of the Storytelling Self

Avishek Parui

Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati

I n his memoir Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Salman Rushdie describes

Homo sapiens as a storytelling animal, constitutionally inclined to
inform identities, meanings and embodied experiences through
creative imagination and fabulation.1 Man’s uniqueness as a primate,
Rushdie asserts in Joseph Anton, lies in its being “the only creature on
earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was”
(17). Rushdie’s affirmation of the unique self-reflexive quality of the
human mind carries significant resonance with the works of cognitive
psychologists and philosophers who seek to study the unmappable
inwardness of the feeling self in relation to the external matter that
forms the brain. This article will attempt to illustrate how interfaces
between literary studies and cognitive psychology may be gainfully
implemented in interpreting a postmodern fable about storytelling and
storytelling selves. It will investigate this idea by studying a literary
narrative by one of the premier storytellers in contemporary English
fiction, one who in Joseph Anton describes the process of writing as
aimed “to explore the joining-ups and also disjointedness of here and
there, then and now, reality and dreams” (67-68). The essay will use
Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) as an early example in
postmodern fiction of the entanglement between the hard-wired brain
and the storytelling mind, which corroborates the claims increasingly
made by cognitive psychologists that “the construction of selfhood” is
directly dependent on the “capacity to narrate” (Bruner 86).
Through his fictional figures who “point at frauds, start arguments,
shape the world and stop it from going to sleep” (Rushdie, Satanic
Verses 97), Rushdie has received ample attention from literary and
critical theorists interested in studying art’s location in totalitarian
systems. However, as a creative writer keen to investigate how newness

[ © 2017 BY THE SOUTH ASIAN REVIEW ]

 Avishek Parui #

enters the world (Satanic Verses 8) and how stories could convey truths
which facts could not tell (Joseph Anton 11), Rushdie also offers fertile
fields for studies in cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind
interested in investigating the social and epistemic processes involved
in the making of the fully embodied self. This is an article on the
epistemology of the creative mind as it is situated in a political
landscape of censorship, compulsory utility, and anonymity. Of
particular interest to me is the manner in which fantasy and storytelling
in Haroun emerge as a form and mode of subversive agency and
intentionality that are politically directed as well as existentially
negotiated. I arrive at the inference, through the course of this article,
that the living and feeling self is best exemplified through the
experience of embodying and enacting fantasies that situate subjectivity
as well as the intersubjective intentions that make us fully human. I also
demonstrate that Rushdie’s postmodern fable, with its oneiric and
ludic2 landscapes, emerges as a critique of a technocratic culture that
disseminates data and derides imagination. Through a study of
Rushdie’s novel, I thus aim at investigating the cognitive condition that
attracts the human mind to storytelling and how such a condition can
emerge as politically subversive in a world overly determined by
scientific facticity.
In the wake of recent works in cognitive neuroscience and
philosophy of mind,3 it has increasingly become evident that the key to
understanding human thought processes lies not merely in the
mappings of brain science but in exploring the propensity for
fabulation, mimesis, and empathy. In particular, cognitive
psychologists are evidently interested in an investigation of subjective
perspectives via emotions through which the unique feeling self is
embodied, extended and enacted. Neuroscientists increasingly
interested in philosophy of feelings state that the need to converge the
first-and third-person perspectives of the felt universe is the biggest
challenge in cognitive science (Ramachandran 229) and that the
“storytelling attitude” of the human mind comes closest to accounting
for the self-reflective processes in the human brain (Damasio 189). The
interfaces between philosophy, phenomenology, and psychology have
paved the way for a new understanding of agency through storytelling.
Language itself is increasingly viewed as a “mind-transformative
cognitive scaffolding” (Clark 44) that corresponds to the plastic-
mimetic self as it changes across space and time. Linguists such as
Noam Chomsky state unequivocally that the complexity of human life
and the uniqueness of human agency can be more fully understood
from novels than from experiments in psychology (Horgan 47). The
necessity to look at literature and literary texts for a fuller grasp of
human emotions and consciousness was voiced by Freud himself in his
Studies in Hysteria (1895), where he almost grudgingly admitted that
works of literary fiction offered him insights into the human mind and
directly informed psychoanalytic studies (Freud 164). In a lesser-
 “What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True?” #

known work, Delusion and Dream, Freud made the claim that each
human being resembles, in varying degrees, characters in a literary
novel or play, enacting the emotions and agency that may be found in
the pages of a well-wrought urn of fiction.
With the increasing importance of a phenomenological
investigation of the human mind, even cognitive psychologists, such as
Daniel Dennett, have come to admit that human beings’ most potent
way to articulate agency and selfhood is best manifested not in building
dams or spinning yarns but in telling stories, especially stories about
who we are (Dennett 418). In a similar vein, developmental
psychologist Michael Tomasello argues that the most distinguishing
feature of the human brain—one that differentiates it from other
primates’—is the capacity for intersubjectivity, or the ability to
anticipate others’ intentions. This ability manifests itself most
fundamentally in the “causal coherence” that stories contain in
narrative discourse (185). The bridge between cognitive science and
literary narrative is perhaps best exemplified in the emergence of
cognitive narratology as a discipline, one which investigates how the
phenomenological world is experienced within and is represented by
the fictional narrative (Herman 244)4 and how this experientiality
embedded within the plot itself can connect to broader questions
around free-will, agency and intentionality. The literary novel—
especially one that self-reflexively underlines its own fabulatory
propensity—often emerges as best equipped to enunciate the complex
experiential processes associated with cognition and reflection.
Embedded as well as enacted in a deliberately playful and
defamiliarizing language, the literary novel can offer the closest
description of the dialogues between consciousness and culture while
revealing how each informs the other. As cognitive narratology
increasingly affirms, “storytelling practices” inform the mind as it
negotiates with the productions and interpretations of material and
symbolic registers (Herman 314).
One of the first reviews Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories
received was by Paul Griffiths, who described the work as “a great
assertion of the imagination” (1036). Written at a time when Rushdie
was in hiding due to the fatwa issued against him for publishing
Satanic Verses (Weatherby 194), Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a
tale about totalitarianism, censorship and the creative mind. Its
similarities with and inheritances from various Indian and western fairy
tales and myths, including Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking
Glass, Wizard of the Oz, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Somadeva’s
Katha-Sarit-Sagara and Farid-ud-din ’Attar’s The Conference of Birds,
have been consistently pointed out and acknowledged (Goonetilleke
107-24). What has not been so readily explored is the manner in which
the novel may be read as a phenomenological investigation of the
 Avishek Parui #

human agency and mimetic ability, especially when it is pitted against

forms of totalitarian control, which operate at political as well as
existential levels. Haroun and the Sea of Stories opens with the
description of a city of loss, which can only be summed up in negative
superlatives:

There was once, in the country of Alifbay, a sad city, the

saddest of cities, a city so ruinously sad that it had forgotten its
name. It stood by a mournful sea full of glumfish, which were
so miserable to eat that they made people belch with
melancholy even though the skies were blue. (15)

Rushdie’s descriptions straddle the objectively real and the subjectively

phenomenal realms. We soon learn that the apparently unreal space
described is actually an allegory of an “unhappy metropolis” (15) that
operates on the principles of replicability and anonymity. At the very
beginning of this meta-fictional fable about storytelling, the unique
agency of the human mind is localized in its fabulatory quality amidst a
clutter of replaceable machines. The loss of happiness is directly related
here with the loss of individual agency, exemplified explicitly in the
collective oblivion of their existential location in the minds of the city’s
inhabitants.
It is interesting to compare the state of the inhabitants described in
the opening of Haroun with the “scooped out, de-souled” Korsakov
patients described by the neurologist Oliver Sacks (113). Korsakov, as
a disease, cognitive psychologists assert, is marked by a loss of one’s
sense of self, which in turn is related to a neurological disorder called
dysnarrativa, “a severe impairment in the ability to tell or understand
stories” (Bruner 86). The loss of the agentic self is immediately
connected to the loss of the storytelling ability in Rushdie’s Haroun.
Thus while his wife leaves him for the purely pragmatic Mr. Sengupta,
Rashid’s sense of shock and loss manifests itself most immediately
when he can no longer fabulate stories:

Then the thing happened, the Unthinkable Thing. Rashid went

out on to the stage in front of that vast jungle of a crowd, and
Haroun watched him from the wings—and the poor storyteller
opened his mouth, and the crowd squealed in excitement—and
now Rashid Khalifa, standing there with his mouth hanging
open, found that it was as empty as his heart.
‘Ark.’ That was all that came out. The Shah of Blah sounded
like a stupid crow. ‘Ark, ark, ark.’ (26)

Rashid’s loss of fabulatory abilities appears like a neurological disorder

and is indeed akin to the dysnarrativa described by Bruner. More
significantly, Rashid appears as a scooped-out soul whose loss of
agency determines and is, in turn, determined by his inability to tell
 “What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True?” #

stories, which is described in Rushdie’s novel as an embodied

performance that extends as well as sustains the self.
The self appears in modern psychology as a complex movement of
cognitive processes that are performed and negotiated bodily as well as
culturally, thus corroborating the claim that “the bridge from cultural to
biological realms is necessarily cognitive” (Donald 10). The
performative quality of Rashid’s storytelling is vividly described by
Haroun’s perception of the same: “Haroun often thought of his father as
a Juggler, because his stories were really lots of different tales juggled
together, and Rashid kept them going in a sort of dizzy whirl, and never
made a mistake” (16). Rushdie’s novel about the ability and inability to
situate the self through stories may be connected to modern
neurophilosophical notions about self and agency, which are
underpinned by the subject’s ability to balance its unique subjectivity
through an economy of emotions and narratives (Damasio 119). The
“sea of stories” referred to in Rushdie’s novel thus corresponds directly
to the flux of the feeling self and agency that constitutes the human
subject, one which appears in existential crisis and as one cognitively
compromised at the beginning of the novel. Indeed, the epistemology
of story-formation in Haroun is described as a self-regenerative process
of pure imagination in the sea of fantasy under the moon Kahani:

And because the stories were held here 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
the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of
yarns. It was not dead but alive. (72)

As a living cognitive process that operates through a fluid self-

reflective mode of assimilation and growth, story-formation in
Rushdie’s novel is an embodied as well as an existential activity that
straddles materiality and fantasy. A cessation to this process brings in
deadness and loss of agency, which is continually connected
throughout Haroun with the inability to imagine and create stories.
The cognitive crippling described at the opening of Haroun
becomes a shared experiential state among the citizens. This is perhaps
most immediately instantiated by the fact that the inhabitants no longer
remember the name of their city and that almost the entire mimetic
agency of the shared space is localized in Rashid’s storytelling ability
alone. The sadness of the unnamed metropolis is attributed to its
unimaginative landscape of bleak machines that produce and
disseminate depression:
 Avishek Parui #

In the north of the sad city stood mighty factories in which (so
I’m told) sadness was actually manufactured, packaged and
sent all over the world, which never seemed to get enough of
it. Black smoke poured out of the chimneys of the sadness
factories and hung over the city like bad news. (15)

Reminiscent of the Blakean London of “mind-forg’d manacles” (Blake

53),5 the city in Rushdie’s novel appears as a landscape of law and loss,
where the human self and its agency cannot run free. The narrator of
Haroun seems to pit the phenomenal unmappable human self against
the empirical economy of checks and balances, and the ludic versus
logic theme is established right at the outset. Haroun’s interest in
finding out the source of Rashid’s endless efflorescence of stories is
premised on a series of logical questions and is met with the playfully
evasive answer that storytelling is a private performance, which
subscribes to a “P2C2E,” a Process Too Complicated to Explain. From
its very beginning, Rushdie’s narrative exposes the limitations of logic
in the face of subjective and purely phenomenal experience, and thus
curiously connects to current debates in cognitive psychology and
phenomenology about the location of qualia in human consciousness.
While evolutionary materialists such as Steven Pinker suggest that
the human mind is little different from “a robot made of tissue” (Pinker
92) with mappable neural circuits and switching mechanisms, qualia as
described by philosophers like Joseph Levine, is classified as the
“explanatory gap” between materialism and subjectivity (Levine 356).
Likewise, the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman
describes cognitive qualia as essentially a “phenomenal experience”
which constitutes “first-person matter” and is thus epistemically at odds
with the “formulation of a completely objective or casual account”
(Edelman 114-15). Neurophilosophy and cognitive psychology have
increasingly been interested in qualia and in how the subjective
incommunicable experience constitutes the feeling of being truly
human. Contesting the ultra-Darwinist notion that human beings are
primarily determined by their genetic codes, that the living being is
essentially a bundle of genetic data (Dawkins 112), phenomenologists
interested in qualia instead see human consciousness as driven by an
essentially unmappable agency, indeed a process too complicated to
explain. One of the most remarkable enunciations of the indeterminable
quality of subjective experience features in the philosopher Thomas
Nagel’s controversially titled essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
where he argues thus:

It [the subjective experience] is not captured by any of the

familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for
all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not
analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional
states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to
 “What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True?” #

robots or automata that behaved like people though they

experienced nothing. (391)

The subjective experience for phenomenologists and for philosophers

such as Nagel is always situated at an excess in relation to the
mappings of medical science. Qualia is an important issue in the works
of cognitive narratologists as well, who study it alongside the
positioning, embodiment, and the distributed nature of the emotional
mind operative in the narrative process (Herman 314). The
experientiality in such a process, informed by as well as informing
storytelling consciousness, is thus of crucial concern in any major study
of narrative theory, which explores literature as a fertile “subfield of
cognitive research” (Hogan 4). What emerges from such a study of a
literary novel about human emotions and agency is the unmappability
of that which makes us fully human and storytelling selves. Indeed, as
the narrator Marlow asserts before his immediate listeners in Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “The inner truth is hidden—luckily,
luckily” (36).
The tendency to quantify and determine every living act in terms
of its empirical facticity is first embodied in Haroun and the Sea of
Stories by the childless Mr. Sengupta, who looks down upon Rashid’s
storytelling and bluntly asks Rashid’s wife Soraya, “What’s the use of
stories that aren’t even true?” (20). The reductionist rhetoric associated
with such utilitarianism is consistently critiqued in Rushdie’s story
about storytelling, one which politicizes fantasy and fantasizes political
performance. The utilitarian question of Sengupta, however crudely,
connects to what the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner classifies as
the “ontological dilemma” of narrative: are stories real or imagined
(Bruner 22). Rushdie’s novel opens up the dilemma precisely at the
point where storytelling as a cognitive performance is most vividly
instantiated. Thus Rashid is depicted as a favorite among the politicians
who would seek to exploit his fantasies, which contain the power to
persuade. Indeed the entanglements of fact and fiction, faith and
fabulation, are kept deliberately slippery in Rushdie’s novel, which
itself blurs lines between children’s fantasy and political satire. The
narrator informs the reader thus:

Nobody ever believed anything a politico said, even though

they pretended as hard as they could that they were telling the
truth . . . 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)

In a 1985 conversation with Günter Grass, Rushdie had described

the fictionality embedded in politicized truth and the truth conveyed by
 Avishek Parui #

fiction. Speaking of the “historical project” in post-Second World War

European literature of reclaiming and remaking the past through
fiction, Rushdie asserts thus:

Fiction is telling the truth at a time in which the people who

claimed to be telling the truth were making things up. You
have politicians or the media or whoever, the people who form
opinion, who are, in fact, making the fictions. And it becomes
the duty of the writer of fiction to start telling the truth. This is
a kind of paradox which, perhaps, is true of many countries
now. (qtd. in Reder 73-74)

The contrast in Haroun, between Rashid’s stories and the political

tracts, points to what cognitive psychologists describe as the “tension
between what is possible and what is established,” which marks the
difference between a literary narrative with an inward turn and
common law (Bruner 58). With their imaginative playfulness, Rashid’s
stories perform what Walter Benjamin describes in Illuminations as the
“psychological connection” with which the “narrative achieves an
amplitude that information lacks” (89). What endears Rashid to his
audience is the de-familiarization that he conveys with his performed
fantasies, which would immediately create an intersubjective economy
of empathy and subjective understanding. Empathy, like agency, is a
crucial issue in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy of mind, in
terms of how it triggers intentionality through affect. In her essay on
sympathy, synchronicity and mimetic communication in The Affect
Theory Reader, Anna Gibbs delineates the dynamics of affect and
affirms how “mimetic communication in social processes” can make
and unmake bonds through “affect contagion” that constitutes
embodied as well as cultural realms (191). The empathy that is
established between Rashid and his audience subtends the mimetic and
ludic quality of the creative human mind through which, as Benjamin
states in One Way Street, the “child plays at being not only a
shopkeeper or a teacher but also a windmill or a train” (160).
Mimesis, in the works of the psychologist Merlin Donald, holds
the key to an evolutionary movement of meaning through symbols in
human culture, thereby creating a shared economy of symbolic thought
through externalized objects and events. Such externalized mimetic acts
(of which Rashid’s storytelling performance is the perfect example) are
determined by the mind’s ability to map what Donald describes as the
perceptions and possibilities to action, metaphor and mimetic diffusion
(Donald 210-20). Rashid’s storytelling in Haroun enthralls the
audience and arrests its attention:

Haroun went with his father whenever he could, because the

man was a magician, it couldn’t be denied. He would climb up
on to some little makeshift stage in a dead-end alley packed
 “What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True?” #

with raggedy children and toothless old-timers, all squatting in

the dust; and once he got going even the city’s many
wandering crows would stop and cock their ears, and monkeys
would jabber approvingly from rooftops and the parrots in the
trees would imitate his voice. (16)

The magic referred to in this passage corresponds closely to what

Bruner describes as the “magic of well-wrought stories,” which
intertwines the landscape of fiction with the landscape of consciousness
(Bruner 26-27). In Rushdie’s Haroun, in a belief system where “the
real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real”
(50), made-up stories appear with imaginative and ludic possibilities
that exceed ontological realities. The ludic quality of Rashid’s stories is
corroborated by their stepping out of the ordinary realm of existence
and their sense of freedom. They also carry the potential to create a
new order of existence which “brings a temporary, a limited perfection”
(Huizinga 10) in a world of epistemic and existential uncertainties.
Operating at a verbal-corporeal as well as an imaginative-abstract level,
Rashid’s storytelling informs a collective cognitive process that
mesmerizes as well as evokes imitation. As a storehouse of surprises
that awaken the mind from its states of boredom, Rashid’s stories are
examples of narratives that structure “the common forms of human
mishap into genres—comedy, tragedy, romance, irony, or whatever
format may lessen the ting of our fortuity” (Bruner 31).
With his postures, performances and vocalization involved in the
storytelling process,6 Rashid achieves what theorists of emotion and
social interaction describe as cognitive convergence (Hatfield Cacioppo
and Rapson 5). The condition is constructed through an affective
contagion that operates transversally through minds, objects and
images, a theory which Charles Darwin had anticipated in his
description of motor sympathy between two bodies (Darwin 40). It is
interesting to establish an analogy between Rashid’s storytelling with
the psychologist Silvan Tomkins’ notion of “distributed authority,”
which transforms cognition from a pure process into one contaminated
by drive, affect, sensations, and proprioceptive sense. Tomkins goes on
to define cognition as an almost indeterminable yet palpable process
“as elusive to define as the ‘power’ in a democratic form of
government or the ‘meaning’ in a sentence” (Tomkins 17). The
indeterminacy characterizing cognition and the cognitive process thus
operates on principles similar to the location of power in a notionally
democratic structure; it is the uncertain center, which is everywhere and
nowhere. Cognition, as described in the works of several psychologists
and philosophers, also constitutes empathy which, in turn, involves a
propensity towards imitation through a neural mechanism.7 This
mechanism is studied by psychologists such as William S. Condon,
 Avishek Parui #

whose notion of situation-synchrony constitutes a theory of collective

cognition as being “both sequentially and hierarchically continuous at
the same time” (Condon 135). Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories
is an immediate example of a ludic literary text that illustrates the
cognitive negotiations between mimesis and magic against a political
backdrop that may be interpreted as neo-Fascist hegemony of hyper-
rationalized knowledge. Eventually celebrating the collapse of such
hegemony, Haroun thus depicts that the creative agency that fabulates
can also emancipate, politically as well as existentially. In the context
of the theories of mimesis and mimetic behavior referred to in an
article, Rushdie’s novel points to the political and aesthetic significance
of the “mimetic efficacity,” which works by the ritual of inducing
collective trance (Borch-Jakobsen 109), and by the affective emotional
tie that underlines the economy of empathy and signifiers of shared
knowledge.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Sengupta in Rushdie’s novel, who questions
the functionality of stories that are not true, appears eventually as
Khattam-Shud, “the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of Language
itself” (39). As Haroun’s mother, Soraya, escapes with Mr. Sengupta,
leaving the following note for Rashid:

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 in it for facts. Mr. Sengupta has
no imagination at all. That is okay with me. (22)

As the antithesis of story and the storytelling self, Khattam-Shud

embodies anti-creation and annihilation, while the land of Chup
(silence) emerges as the spatial and spiritual opposite of the land of
Gup (gossip). Creative imagination and storytelling are thus pitted
against death and deadness in Rushdie’s novel, corroborating Michel
Foucault’s contention that the motivation behind storytelling in
Arabian Nights was “the eluding of death” (Foucault 117).8 The
process of story-formation through the body, as depicted in the hunger
fishes Goopy and Bagha (named after the magician-musicians in
Satyajit Ray’s film The Kingdom of Diamonds), is similar to that of
biological birth itself:

When they are hungry they swallow stories through every

mouth, and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one
story joins on to an idea from another, and hey presto, when
they spew the stories out they are not old tales but new ones.
Nothing comes from nothing . . . no story comes from
nowhere; new stories are born from old—it is the new
combinations that make them new. (86)
 “What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True?” #

The process described shares its mechanism with the concept of the
ceaseless recycling of matter; the connection between fantasy and
materiality is illustrated throughout Haroun, especially in its
description of the P2C2E House in Gup City:

A huge building from which whirrs and clanks were

constantly heard, and inside which were concealed one
thousand and one Machines Too Complicated To Describe,
which controlled the Processes Too Complicated To Explain.
(88)

If the physical architecture of the P2C2E House resembles that of the

human brain with its ceaseless network of production and circulation,
its inexplicability points to the workings of the mind, always situated at
an epistemic excess in relation to the mappable brain. Thus while the
mechanical brain “can be fixed up, overhauled, even replaced” (174) in
Haroun, the mimetic and agentic mind that underlies it remains a
process too complicated to explain.
It is precisely the unmappable agency of the storytelling mind that
accounts for the willful agency offsetting the hyper-rationalist
Khattam-Shud, who appears as another avatar of Mr Sengupta, the
“sniveling, mingy, stingy, measly, weasely clerk” temporarily
destroying Rashid’s storytelling ability by escaping with his wife. As
the ultimate emperor of the country of Chup, which is the opposite of
light, creation, and life, Khattam-Shud asserts arrogantly before Rashid
that the world is not for Fun or Storytelling but for Controlling.
However, even as he asserts his hubris of hyper-rationalistic control,
Khattam-Shud admits his inability to control the storytelling mind:
“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). As a super-
scientific controller of human creativity, Khattam-Shud may be
compared to the Coleridgean Kubla-Khan figure, one that seeks to tame
the pure processes of creation by means of a great Generator, which
constantly converts “mechanical energy into electrical energy by means
of electromagnetic induction” (163). Like Coleridge’s Kubla Khan,
Khattam-Shud’s rationalistic universe of precision and measurements,
too, is doomed to collapse against an external attack, which stems from
the ubiquitous agents of creativity. The source of stories in Rushdie’s
novel is appropriately described using Coleridgean metaphors:

The Source of Stories was a hole or chasm or crater in the sea-

bed, and through that hole, as Haroun watched, the glowing
flow of pure, unpolluted stories came bubbling up from the
very heart of Kahani. There were so many Streams of Story, of
so many different colors, all pouring out of the Source at once,
 Avishek Parui #

that it looked like a huge underwater fountain of shining white

light. (167)

The deep romantic chasm in Rushdie’s novel emerges as a political

space that contains the powers to undermine the prison-house of
language and logic, and becomes, in the process, the site where the
mimetic and creative agency is most fully articulated against hyper-
rationalist totalitarian control. As Haroun manages to establish
amicability between the land of perpetual light and the one of perpetual
darkness, the sun rises over Chup City and destroys the deadness that
had governed it thus far. The collapse of the icon of stillness in Haroun
is described in graphic detail: “The colossal ice-idol of tongueless,
grinning, many-toothed Bezeban beginning to totter and shake; and
then, drunkenly, it fell” (190). The physical fall is loaded with symbolic
and political undertones and may be connected to the public destruction
of the statue of the totalitarian emperor in Satyajit Ray’s The Kingdom
of Diamonds (1980), a film which, like Rushdie’s novel, is about the
subversive function of magic and mimesis against a culture of coercion
and political Fascism that censors free speech and agency.9 For his
prowess in rescuing Princess Batcheat and restoring order in the land of
Gup, Haroun is granted his wish: that his sad city and his adventure
receive a happy ending.
As Rashid recovers his storytelling powers and the narrative
returns to the real world in Haroun, the story that he embarks to tell is
the one that had depicted him as a character so far, thus corroborating
the constant confluence of the magical and the real realms in the world
of imagination. Unsurprisingly, the story Rashid prepares to narrate
before the people of the Valley is named Haroun and the Sea of
Stories. If the meta-fictional quality of Rushdie’s novel becomes
explicit at this point, what complicates it even further is the immediate
political significance that Rashid’s story-within-the-story takes up, with
its ability to allegorize the real and render it into an allegorical narrative
that can mesmerize and inspire an audience to take political action. The
imaginative associations Rashid’s listeners make between the fantastic
Khattam-Shud and the real Mr. Buttoo work through a complex
cognitive process. It incites an emotional reaction that awakens agency
and is immediately subversive to totalitarian political control:

Whenever Rashid was talking about Khattam-Shud and his

henchmen from the Union of the Zipped Lips, the whole
audience stared very hard at Snooty Buttoo and his henchmen,
who were sitting behind Rashid on the stage, looking less and
less happy as the story unfolded. And when Rashid told the
audience how almost all the Chupwalas had hated the
Cultmaster all along, but had been afraid to say so, well, then a
loud murmur of sympathy for the Chupwalas ran through the
crowd, yes, people muttered, we know exactly how they felt.
 “What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True?” #

And after the two falls of the two Khattam-Shuds, somebody

started up a chant of ‘Mister Buttoo—go for good; Mister
Buttoo—khattam-shud,’ and the entire audience joined in.
(206)

The excitement induced by Rashid’s story about Khattam-Shud works

through complex neuromimetic associations and culminates in a
spectacular resentment, which stops just short of becoming violent:
“The crowd allowed him to escape, but pelted him with rubbish as he
fled” (207).10 The collective behavior described here corresponds to an
epistemic retaliation, a recovery of selfhood and its intentional agency
exhibited through existential and mimetic acts: such as Rashid’s
enactment of the story of freedom inhabiting the fantastic realm and the
crowd’s empathetic response towards the same in real space and time.
As Haroun and Rashid return to their home-city, they are greeted
by a boisterous rain, which immediately induces a happy mood in what
they had previously known as a sad city, and “soon the two of them
were splashing and chasing each other like little children” (207). The
behavior turns out to be not uncommon, and soon Haroun and Rashid
find that the sad city that they had known and left is now full of people
“running and jumping and splashing and falling and, above all,
laughing their heads off” (207). The reason for this spectacle of
happiness is soon revealed to the father-son duo, appropriately enough,
by a policeman: it was because the inhabitants of the city have
suddenly remembered its name, Kahani. The unique sense of agency is
thus recovered in the life of the city, and, just as Rashid’s sense of self
is restored with his ability to tell stories, the happiness in the
inhabitants’ life re-appears due to the disappearance of shared
existential oblivion as they remember the name of their city, one which
means story. The collective happiness manifests itself as the harmony
and contagion of affect, one that “sustains or preserves the connection
between ideas, values and objects” (Ahmed 29). The reason for the
euphoria is, thus, an act of remembrance, a problem having been
solved, and the feeling of being accepted, which are attributes social
psychologists ascribe to feelings of joy (Argyle 127).
The name of the city, itself a metaphor for mimetic agency of the
self-reflective storytelling human mind, emerges as the objective
correlative to collective social happiness, with an affective
intentionality connecting ideas, emotions and attitudes. More
significantly, Rushdie’s novel problematizes the distinction
psychologists frequently make between immediately experienced and
remembered happiness—the “cognitive trap” between the experiencing
self and the remembering self (Kahneman 406-10)—as the experience
of joy in Haroun arises directly from an act of remembering. The
spectacle at the end of Haroun depicts “happiness as a happening,” one
 Avishek Parui #

that involves affect, intentionality, and evaluation (Ahmed 29). The

novel proceeds to a series of further happy cognitions, with Rashid and
Haroun rushing back to their home to see Soraya returned, after having
been disgusted with Mr. Sengupta, who had effectively been finished as
Khattam-Shud in Haroun’s story-within-the-story. The narrative ends
with another act of remembrance: with Haroun’s remembering that it is
his birthday; and the time that had been out of joint in Kahani returns
now to its normal course just as Haroun finds himself stepping into a
perfectly made-up happy ending: “Outside, in the living room, his
mother had begun to sing” (211).
Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a postmodern fable
about the significance of storytelling and imagination in a world of
machines devised to rest and replace the mind. More significantly, it
depicts the cognitive principle at work within the mimetic mind, and
how that is always situated at an epistemic excess in relation to the
mappable brain. Related to this is the crucial question of subjectivity
and political agency, which emerges as directly dialogic with
imagination and creative mimesis. Stories emerge in Rushdie’s novel as
epistemic as well as embodied enunciation of the uniquely human and
agentic self, with their existential and performative quality, which can
always subvert and transcend the narrow laws of logic. In its depiction
of the vitality of the storytelling process, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
raises significant questions about the unmappable epistemology of
affect. This, in turn, shows “the messiness of the experiential, the
unfolding of bodies into worlds, and the drama of contingency
[classified in Rushdie’s novel as a Process Too Complicated to
Explain], how we are touched by what we are near” (Ahmed 30). With
its deliberate meta-fictional quality and parody of the logic of precision
and political pompousness, Rushdie’s tale expounds that narrative “is
indeed serious business” (Bruner 107), one that informs existential
sustenance while emerging as a cognitive signifier of collective fantasy
and hope, one that is immediately political in its scope.
In its subversive quality, Rushdie’s novel may be considered as an
example of a political myth that Slavoj Žižek describes as the container
for “a multitude of meanings” (101), which can depict disparities
through a shared sense of its fictionality. Such a tale about the
awakening of agency is especially significant in the ultra-Darwinist
climate of the twenty-first century, which considers human beings as
assemblages of genes and their cultural activities as a “proliferation of
memes” (Žižek 165). Often regarded as a children’s fantasy-tale,
Haroun and the Sea of Stories is an urgent reminder, as well as a
celebration, of what Martha Nussbaum defines as the “third ability” of
true citizenship along with factual knowledge and logic, that of
“narrative imagination,” which corresponds to “the ability to think what
it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself”
(Nussbaum 95-96). In its psychological and existential complexity,
Haroun illustrates the unmappable and messy entanglements of
 “What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True?” #

empathy, agency, and mimetic vitality that constitute true humanity and
its phenomenological uniqueness. In doing so, it articulates the creative
“insistence on the importance of the imagination to the human, and of
the human to the imagination” (Malik x), through which the special
significance of Rushdie’s writing is most vividly validated in the global
literary landscape of today.

Notes
1. I am grateful to Professor Patricia Waugh of the Department of
English Studies, Durham University, for introducing me to the
interdisciplinary research on literary studies, phenomenology and
cognitive psychology, which directly inform this article. I also
acknowledge my gratitude to the librarian of Van Mildert College,
Durham University, Dr Naomi Marklew, for her kind permission to
access texts and secondary sources used in this work.
2. I use this term in the sense deployed by Johan Huizinga in his
classic text Homo Ludens, where he defines “play” as a significant
function which transcends immediate needs and is yet a vital
component of culture and cultural forms of cognition. Anticipating
many tenets of game theory that were to follow, Huizinga asserts that
language and its use are replete with ceaseless play between orders of
signification and representation, whereby the nominative faculty of the
mimetic mind is rendered wondrous and man manages to create a
“second, poetic world alongside the world of nature” (4).
3. The key figures in this convergence of psychology,
phenomenology, and philosophy include Antonio Damasio, Oliver
Sacks, and Shaun Gallagher.
4. I am grateful to Professor David Herman in the Department of
English Studies, Durham University, for the many useful insights
which went into the making of this article, particularly those pertaining
to cognitive narratology.
5. It is interesting to make a comparative analysis between the
landscapes and figures in the Blakean myth and the fantasy figures in
Rushdie’s novel. As in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, there are
tensions between eros and thanatos, pleasure-drive and death-drive,
between creation and anti-creation, imagination and reason, in Blake’s
mythical cosmos, variously depicted through the figures of Urizen, Orc,
Los and Nobodaddy. For a full study of Blake’s use of mythical figures
and landscapes that inform the political content in the poetry of Songs
of Innocence and Experience, see Hagstrum (78-87).
6. Rashid’s performance of storytelling corresponds to Merleau-
Ponty’s notion of writers as making phenomenological gestures rather
than delivering messages (60).
 Avishek Parui #

7. The theory of empathy and imitation through the process of

mimicry as a neural mechanism has been particularly prominent in the
works on mirror neurons by scientists such as Vittorio Gallese and
Giacomo Rizzolatti. To describe in simple terms, mirror neurons,
located in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain, account for the
motor schema involved in mimicry and the establishment of empathy,
qualities unique to the human being as a species. These qualities
account for why, when we see an action take place before us, the neural
circuits that would have been involved had we performed the same
action, are immediately activated. More significantly, thanks to this
mechanism, we may actually experience the act by merely watching it,
as well as being inclined to imitate it ourselves.
8. The analogy with Arabian Nights is maintained throughout
Rushdie’s novel, not least in the symbolic name of the boathouse in
which Haroun and Rashid stay in Lake Dull, Arabian Nights Plus One.
9. Satyajit Ray’s film The Kingdom of Diamonds is about a
fictional state whose apparent opulence is forcibly and artificially
created by human slavery and totalitarian control, whereby inhabitants
are transformed into interpolated subservient subjects through brain-
washing machines controlled by the despotic emperor. The totalitarian
state is eventually defeated by a poet-figure who hides in the hills,
along the margins of the state, with the aid of the magician-musicians
Goopy and Bagha. Ray’s The Kingdom of Diamonds, while apparently
a children’s film, has also been interpreted as a contemporary political
critique of the national emergency declared and imposed by the Indian
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi from June 26, 1975 to March 21, 1977.
Rushdie is a self-proclaimed admirer of Ray’s cinema and his tribute to
Ray is evident not only in naming the hunger-fishes in Haroun after
Ray’s cinematic characters, but also in the way the entanglements
between magic, mimesis and political control is depicted. For
Rushdie’s admiration for the cinema of Satyajit Ray, see Imaginary
Homelands (107-14).
10. Crowd psychology has been studied variously as
manifestations of different forms of cognitive behavior by social
scientists since the late-nineteenth century. One of the biggest
proponents of the theory of collective contagion through hysteric
reception was the French social commentator Gustave Le Bon, who
studied the emotional excitability and susceptibility to suggestions
prevalent in crowd behavior. Drawing on the neurologist Jean-Martin
Charcot’s studies in hysteria, Le Bon asserted that crowd-hysteria could
be produced by mesmerizing political speeches, which operate on
similar cognitive principles as hypnotism (Nye 30). It is also
interesting, in this context, to revisit an analogous theory of
neuromimesis or nervous mimicry, as expounded by the nineteenth-
century British neurologist Sir James Paget. Neuromimesis, as
described by Paget, corresponds to a form of crowd-behavior “allowing
 “What’s the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True?” #

people to be influenced by or to identify themselves with the actions or

directions of others” (Vrettos 84).

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