September 4, 2008

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

“Language and imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human” (In Good Faith, 396). I think Rushdie is indicating that our ability to think at such an extraordinary level, and to imagine things and ideas beyond what we see makes us human. Forcing ourselves, forcing language and imagination into a narrow cell makes life mechanical. If we were to lose our imaginations, there would be no source for new ideas and our minds would stagnate. The good of stories that aren’t even true then, is partially that they exercise the imagination, thereby stimulating the mind and enabling us to grow as individuals—they make us human. The sea of stories exemplifies growth as a fundamental aspect of life. Because the stories were “in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and 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). The stories were alive because they were constantly evolving; restraining imagination sucks a little bit of the life out of us; we become a little less human. Like objects, we become a little easier to define and categorize.