I find a special kind of joy in reading the non-fiction of writers whose novels I already adore. It’s as if I’m allowed a seat next to their desk, watching them think aloud about their own art. When I read Salman Rushdie’s essays in Languages of Truth, I felt precisely that, like I was eavesdropping on the mind of a man who has built entire worlds out of words (and sentences which go on and on and godknowshowlong), and was now explaining the secret architecture of those worlds.
Rushdie begins his essay Wonder Tales by making a case in favour of something that is pretty much out of fashion these days — fiction itself. There is no denial that we live in an age of non-fiction, a time when stories are often expected to come wrapped in the garb of truth, autobiography, or confession. That’s what sells, people will tell you. But would it matter to the artist? Does it ever?
Fiction, according to Rushdie, has turned too much toward realism of the Elena Ferrante and Knausgaard kind, where art begins to resemble too much with the real world, and imagination takes a back seat. If you’re into reading novels, you’d know what he is talking about. You’d understand the pull that realism carries in modern novels; how it allows you to understand your world better. But Rushdie’s point serves as reminder, especially for those who aspire to write fiction: literature must not lose its enchantment by becoming too literal.
He cites one of my favourite novelists, Milan Kundera, who famously said that the novel has two parents — Tristram Shandy and Clarissa. The former represents the eccentric, experimental, comic side of literature; the latter, the realist tradition. According to Rushdie, Kundera lamented that most of modern fiction had descended from Clarissa, while the more “antic, ludic, comic, eccentric” tradition had been neglected.
Rushdie urges us to turn to irrealism and find new ways of approaching the truth through lies. Truth through lies. I love that phrase. It feels like the truest description of what good fiction does. If you think about it, the paradox at the heart of the novel has always been this: that something wholly untrue can reveal something profoundly true. Rushdie defends the “fictionality of fiction,” insisting that imagination is not an escape from reality but a way of enriching it, adding fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions to the usual three.
It made me think of why I love his fiction so much, because it does precisely that. Midnight’s Children. The Satanic Verses. His novels take reality and expand it, exaggerate it, twist it, until it becomes more real than realism itself. His worlds are dreamscapes that somehow contain our own.
In one of my favourite parts of the essay, Rushdie challenges the modern writing mantra of “write what you know.” He turns it upside down:
Only write what you know if what you know is interesting. If you live in a neighborhood like Harper Lee’s or William Faulkner’s, by all means feel free to tell heated tales of your own personal Yoknapatawpha, and you’ll probably find you never need to leave home at all. But unless what you know is really interesting, don’t write about it. Write what you don’t know.
That feels liberating. I see it as a challenge to step beyond the narrow walls of my experience, to reclaim fiction’s right to dream. “We are all dreaming creatures,” he writes. “Dream on paper. And if it turns out like Twilight or The Hunger Games, tear it up and try to have a better dream.”
Ah, how I love his humour! But there is a valuable advice here. Rushdie’s remark is not a dismissal of popular fiction, rather it’s a challenge to dream deeper, better, more beautifully. Remember, the act of making things up is not an act of deception, but of faith, faith that invention itself can lead us to the truth.
Kalampedia 