“The question is what does truth mean in fiction?” asks Salman Rushdie in a refreshingly straightforward and easy to understand talk on how magic and fantasy help us arrive at realism. “Of course, the first premise of fiction is that it is not true; the story does not record events that took place, these people did not exist and these things did not happen. That is the ‘going in’ point of a novel. The novel tells you flat out that it is untruthful. So what do we mean then by truth in literature? Clearly, what we mean is human truth. Not journalistic, photographic, recorded truth, but the truth we recognize as human beings...about how we are with each other, how we deal with each other, what are our strengths and weaknesses, how we interact and what is the meaning of our lives. This is what we look at. We do not need to know that Anna Karenina really existed. We need to know who she is and what her story tells us about our own life and about ourselves. That is the kind of truth that as readers we look for in literature.”
Rushdie goes on, “Once you accept that stories are not true, once you start from that position, then you understand that a flying carpet and Madam Bovary are untrue in the same way. As a result both of them are ways of arriving at truth by the road of untruth…so that they can both be looked at in the same way.”
In the novel titled “Luka and the Fire of Life” (2010), which Rushdie wrote, by his own admission for his twelve-year-old son, he has included a flying carpet. In defence of doing so Rushdie not just makes the above comparison but goes on to say, “This is the first novel in which I managed, finally, to include a flying carpet…” His small laugh as he says that reveals how exciting it was for him to do so. “I have been wanting to do that for a long time and the immediate thing that I thought…the moment you decide you are going to have a rug that is flying through the air is that you must immediately ask yourself realistic questions about that. What would that be like? If you were standing on a carpet that levitated, would it be difficult to keep your balance? Would the carpet be rigid or would the movement of air beneath the carpet make it undulated? If you flew very high wouldn’t it get very cold? How do you keep warm on a flying carpet? I think the moment you start asking yourself these kind of practical real world questions the flying carpet becomes believable. It becomes a thing that might exist and if it existed it would function like this.”
Rushdie becomes really convincing when he says, “But in the end what you are looking for in this book, a fairy tale, an allegory, a fantasy you are look for the same thing you are looking for in kitchen-sink realism.” Kitchen-sink realism is a self-explanatory phrase which began its existence in England to describe the British cultural movement to depict social realism with layers of frustration beneath. Rushdie elegantly captures the essence of fiction when he says, “You are looking for people (in fiction) you can believe in behaving in ways you can recognize and which tell you something…those behaviours tell you something about your own behaviour, your own nature and about the life of the person next door to you. So human truth is what you are looking for and you can get to that by many different doors.”
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