RUSHDIE,SALMAN AND THE SEA OF STORIES - A NOT-SO-SIMPLE FABLE ABOUT CREATIVITY

This paper examines Salman Rushdie's tale 'Haroun and the Sea of Stori es', written for his younger son while Rushdie was in hiding from the fatwa. It is a fairy tale about the boy Haroun, who travels to the moo n to find a cure for his father's loss of capacity to tell stories. Th ere he discovers that the Ocean of Stories-source of all stories-is po lluted. The author sees this tale as a parable of creativity, which ca n be used on many levels. On one level, it describes the artist's stru ggle against forms of political oppression, which aims at destroying a ll art, speech and thought. On another level, it could be seen as an i nternal conflict between the creative forces derived from the life ins tinct and those which are destructive and self-destructive deriving fr om the death instinct. Rushdie describes ways of dealing with this con flict and different outcomes depending on the way the conflict is face d