In the country of Gup, the citizens’ shared linguistic connection allows them, through parrhēsia, to discuss their military strategy equitably and at great length. Salman Rushdie’s 1990 children’s novel, Haroun and the Seas of Stories provides a fictional example of parrhēsia working effectively against tyranny. Parrhēsia is simple, unfurnished speech from a position of lesser political power than the speaker’s interlocutor, and is therefore disseminated at personal risk. As Foucault relates, in the form practiced by the Ancient Greeks, parrhēsia was the linguistic imparting of the subject’s sincerely held opinion, so as to form a connection between subject and polis, with the discourse and knowledge of the former benefiting the latter. As Haroun realizes, ``He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.'' (Jan.Both Michel Foucault and Salman Rushdie have been criticised for a lack of potentiality of resistance in their writing, but a consideration of the linguistic practice of parrhēsia, to an extent, militates against such a reading of both writers. Rather than retreating under the famous death threats, Rushdie reiterates the importance of literature, stressing not just the good of stories ``that aren't even true'' but persuading us that these stories convey the truth.

It's almost as if Rushdie has invented a new form, the meta-fable.

But although the pyrotechnics here are entertaining in and of themselves, the irresistible force of the novel rests in Rushdie's wholehearted embrace of the fable-its form as well as its significance. Saturated with the hyperreal color of such classic fantasies as the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, Rushdie's fabulous landscape operates by P2C2Es (Processes Too Complicated To Explain), features a court where all the attendant Pages are numbered, and unfurls a riotous display of verbal pranks (one defiant character chants ``You can chop suey, but / You can't chop me!'' elsewhere, from another character: `` `Gogogol,' he gurgled. Repentant, Haroun quests through a fantastic realm in order to restore his father's gift for storytelling. The clocks freeze: time literally stops when the ability to narrate its passing is lost. ``What's the use of stories that aren't even true?'' Haroun demands, parroting the neighbor and thus unintentionally paralyzing Rashid's imagination. Supposedly begun as a bedtime story for Rushdie's son, Haroun concerns a supremely talented storyteller named Rashid whose wife is lured away by the same saturnine neighbor who poisons Rashid's son Haroun's thoughts. Following the unprecedented controversy generated by The Satanic Verses, Rushdie offers as eloquent a defense of art as any Renaissance treatise.

Haroun and the sea of stories book