When we spoke with Salman Rushdie, he had recently finished the screenplay of Midnight's Children and hopes to complete the movie by the end of the year. He was also nearly a quarter of the way through his memoir, which he says is "about the problem I've developed of having an interesting life." We talked with him about why he wrote a book for each of his sons on the cusp of their adolescence and how the works tapped into the larger themes of his life philosophy.
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| The author with his son Milan. |
Did you write Haroun and the Sea of Stories for your oldest son, Zafar? And was that your first book after the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses?
When I was writing The Satanic Verses, Zafar said that he thought it was disappointing that I didn't write books that he could read. Until then, I hadn't thought about writing for children. I told him, "Let me finish what I'm writing now, and then I'll write one you can read." Then everything that happened happened, and I thought it was right that I should keep that promise. I'd had the germ of the idea of Haroun before I started Satanic Verses, so I knew where to begin. And I kept that promise to what was then my only son.
Milan is now 13. He was very aware that Haroun was written for his older brother. The principle of equality demanded that I write another one. The experience of Haroun has been one of the most joyful in my life. It's had a very rich afterlife: It's put on at schools, it was a New York City opera, there have been puppet theater versions of it. I didn't want to return to the Sea of Stories, so the question was how to find another imaginative world and how to go back there.
Haroun tells Luka, "You've reached the age at which people in this family cross the border into the magical world." Is there a significance to the age of 12?
Not exactly 12, but that borderland when children can seem extraordinarily wise and confident and at other times are still little children. That particular moment is fascinating. It's a magical time.
In Luka, everyone seems to seek a kind of "forgetfulness." In the Real World people go to Obliviums ("giant malls where everyone went to dance, shop, pretend, and forget") and in the World of Magic, they travel on the Flying Carpet into Oblivion. As a culture, are we forgetting our past?
I think those moments in the book sprang from the sense that as a culture we're losing our memory. We don't have a long, deep connection to the past in the way that humans always have. If you don't understand the past, you don't understand why things are the way they are now. Living in a culture where there's Muzak and everything's brightly lit, you lose something.
There's also that poignant quote from Soraya, "Magic is fading from the universe. We aren't needed anymore, or that's what you all think, with your High Definitions, and low expectations."
In the age in which we live, she's suggesting that we may be turning away from that side of human nature, which is fanciful and dreaming and magical, and being forced into a more narrow and impoverished side of human nature.
And that relates to Luka's defense when he gets close to the Ring of Fire: when he says to the gods, "Look at you! Instead of real Powers you have Beauty Contests!"
Certainly it's true that once upon a time--frankly, within living memory, my own memory--you could assume that people you were talking to would have a certain level of knowledge about mythology, the world of Greek or Roman gods, and when you mentioned Jupiter or Apollo, people would know who you were talking about. That's no longer the shared knowledge of our culture. There are other forms of shared knowledge; we all know who's on Jersey Shore. But that might be a lower form of shared knowledge. Creative art is the way to maintain our connection to a world that is rich and powerful in meaning. Only through its retellings can we preserve it. This book is in a little way an attempt to do that.
Do you think as a culture, we're losing our connection to words and story?
I don't know if we are. I do think--and it's a phrase I often use--one of the most intrinsic things about us is that we're storytelling animals. The need to understand the world through our stories is profoundly embedded in human nature. When I'm feeling optimistic, I feel this activity cannot die out. When children are born, one of the first things they want is to be told a story. We tell about our families, our countries, our religions as a way of understanding the culture in which we live. Through story, we come to understand each other and ourselves. I've been a believer in the profound power of storytelling at the center of human life.
In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, there's a passage that talks about
the ocean holding the stories "in fluid form, ...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." That made me wonder about your view of
e-books. Do you see the Internet like that Ocean of the Streams of Story?
Somebody wrote a story in which I was given credit for foreseeing the possibilities of the Internet, with that very passage you quoted from Haroun. It appears as though I invented the Internet. [Laughter.] My son Milan has an iPad, and I don't, and I'm enormously envious of it. Frankly, I have a Kindle, but I don't use it. But the e-book experience on the iPad is significantly better than anything I've seen before. I like the idea of the literal storytelling possibilities of the Internet, and the way in which, through this wonderful world of hyperlinks, stories can be connected.
[Spoiler Alert…]
Does Bear (the dog) give up his immortality because he sees what immortality does to the gods? Or out of love for Luka? Luka talks about how the idea of immortality "strikes him as more frightening than exciting."
I think that moment was about two things, really. If you say in a book, somebody's got to die, you cannot duck that issue. The book is about life and death, and if the figure of death comes and says, "The catch is somebody's got to die," then you have to fulfill your contract with the reader. And you have to show readers that life is real; you don't get a free pass, without dealing with the thing that was a catch.
And yes, the love Bear has for Luka. If you really think about it, do you really want to be immortal? Do you want to be 6,000 years old and everyone else you know is dead? Do you want to outlive your life and time? If all you had to do was eat a potato to live forever, would you do it or not? And they deal with it quite beautifully: they put it in the pantry to decide another day. Do you really want to live 6,000 years, or is this life enough? Soraya is the wise character, and she thinks life is life and that's plenty. Readers have to make up their own minds about that.