The Real in the Magic: A Study of Magic Realism in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990)
Main Article Content
Abstract
While many studies have focused on Salman Rushdie’s use of magic realism in his highly-acclaimed novels, the way it is employed in his children’s fiction remains understudied. This paper, hence, attempts to fill in this gap by applying Anne Hegerfeldt’s (2005)’s theoretical framework on magic realism onto its reading of Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). This framework relies on five techniques or features namely: a realist mode of writing to describe fantastic events and characters, a marginalised focaliser, subverted scientific and historical discourses, a supernatural reality and finally, a literal manifestation of a figurative expression. This paper also suggests that Rushdie employs magic realism to undermine the realist narrative mode as well as scientific and historical discourses in order to present an alternative worldview that places narrative knowledge, gathered from stories with magical characters and events, as a legitimate source of knowledge regarding the world.
Article Details
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
References
Baena, R. 2001. Telling a bath-time story: Haroun and the Sea of Stories as a modern literary fairy tale. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36(2): 65–76.
Bettelheim, B. 1976. The uses of enchantment: The meaning and importance of fairy tales. London: Penguin.
Biscaia, M. 2005. Desire and ideological resistance: Fabulation in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In Forma breve 3 revista de literatura: A fábula, eds. O.P.
Monteiro, F.S. Silveira, E. Lisboa, D.H. Pageaux, R.M. Goulart, F.C. Fagundes, J.R. Castillo, R.P. Garay and J.M. Rodrigues Filho. Santiago, Aviero: Universidade San Aviero, 239–250.
Bortolussi, M. 2003. Implausible worlds, ingenuous narrators, ironic authors: Towards a revised theory of magic realism. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 30(2): 349–370.
Bowers, M.A. 2004. Magic(al) realism. Abingdon, Oxon: Taylor and Francis e-Library.
Coppola, C. 1991. Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories: Fighting the good fight or knuckling under. Journal of South Asian Literature 26(1/2): 229–237.
Culler, J. 1997. Narrative. In Literary theory: A very short introduction, ed. J. Culler, 82– 93. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.
Dillon, D. 1985. Quoted by G. Boomer. In Language, schooling and society, ed. S. Tchudi. Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook.
Durix, J.P. 1993. The gardener of stories: Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 28(1): 114–122.
Fallon, C. 2015. Salman Rushdie on magical realism, Twitter and his new novel. Huffington Post, 9 September. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/salman-on-hisnewnovel_us_55ef2dabe4b03784e276c430 (accessed 1 January 2016).
Guldager, M. 2012. Magical realism and hybridity: Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories & Luka and the Fire of Life. https://www.academia.edu/29393274/Magical_Realism_and_Hybridity_Salman_Rushdies_Haroun_and_the_Sea_of_Stories_and_Luka_and_the_Fire_of_Life (accessed 20 September 2018).
Faris, W.B. 1995. Scheherazade's children: Magical realism and postmodern fiction. In Magical realism: Theory, history, community, eds. L.P. Zamora and W.B. Faris, 163–190. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Habib, M. 2011. Literary criticism from Plato to the present. Chicester, UK: WileyBlackwell.
Head, P. 1996. Robert Cromier and the postmodernist possibilities of young adult fiction. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 21(1): 28–33.
Hegerfeldt, A.C. 2005. Lies that tell the truth: Magic realism seen through contemporary fiction from Britain. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Higonnet, M.R. 1987. Narrative fractures and fragments. Children’s Literature 15: 37–54.
Kakutani, M. 1989. Critic's notebook: Telling truth through fantasy; Rushdie's magic realism. The New York Times, 24 February. https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/18/specials/rushdie-realism.html.
Kullmann, T. 1996. Eastern and western story-telling in Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Erfurt Electronic Studies in English EESE 1/1996.
Mikkelsen, N. 2005. Powerful magic: Learning from children’s responses to fantasy literature. New York: Teacher’s College, Columbia University.
———. 1999. Words and pictures: Lessons in children’s literature and literacies. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Norton, L. 1998. Seeing is believing: Magical realism and visual narrative in Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover. Bookbird 36(2): 29–32.
Latham, D. 2006. Magical realism and the child reader: The case of David Almond’s Skelling. The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children’s Literature 10(1): n.p.
Rudge, I. 2006. Magic realism in children’s literature: A narratological reading. New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 10(2): 127–140.
Rushdie, S. 1998. The satanic verses (1988). London, England: Knopf.
———. 1992. Imaginary homelands. London: Penguin Books.
———. 1990. Haroun and the sea of stories. Great Britain: Granta Books.
Teverson, A.S. 2001. Fairy-tale politics: Free speech and multiculturalism in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Twentieth-Century Literature 47(4): 444–466.
Turner, H. 1999. Realism, magic and magical realism (for those upon whom such distinctions are lost). Canadian Children’s Literature 93: 60–62.
Zamora, L.P. and Faris, W.B. 1995. Introduction: Daiquiri birds and Falubertian parrot(ie) s. In Magical realism: Theory, history, community, eds. L.P. Zamora and W.B. Faris, 1–14. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.