Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020

by Salman Rushdie

If the realist tradition has been the dominant one, it is worth spending a few moments to defend the alternative, the other great tradition. It is worth saying that fantasy is not whimsy. The fantastic is neither innocent nor escapist. The wonderland is not a place of refuge, not even necessarily an attractive or likable place. It can be—in fact, it usually is—a place of slaughter, exploitation, cruelty, and fear. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is a tragedy. Captain Hook wants to kill Peter Pan. The witch in the Black Forest wants to cook Hansel and Gretel. The wolf actually eats Red Riding Hood’s grandmother. Albus Dumbledore is murdered, and the Lord of the Rings plans the enslavement of the whole of Middle-earth. The flying carpet of King Solomon, which, according to the stories, was sixty miles long and sixty miles wide, once punished the great king for the sin of pride by beginning to shake, so that the forty thousand people upon it all tumbled to their deaths. (Not for the first time, ordinary people suffered for their rulers’ sins. Wonderland can be as flawed a place as earth.) We know, when we hear these tales, that even though they are “unreal,” because carpets do not fly and witches in gingerbread houses do not exist, they are also “real,” because they are about real things: love, hatred, fear, power, bravery, cowardice, death. They simply arrive at the real by a different route. They are so, even though we know that they are not so.