Salman Rushdie’s Use of Magic Realism in Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Exploring the employment of magic realism in Salman Rushdie's children's fiction

Abstract

Though, many studies have laid emphasis on Salman Rushdie’s usage ofmagic realism in his novels that are highly acclaimed, the way inhischildren’s fiction it has been employedhas notbeen studiedyet. Attempts have been made in this paper to fill in this gap by implementing theoretical framework of Anne Hegerfeldt’s (2005) on magic realism onto its reading of Sea of Stories (1990) and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun.On five features ortechniques thisframework relies specificallya realist mode of writing to describe fantastic characters and events, literal manifestations of figurative expressions, subverted and historicaland scientific discourses, a supernatural reality andfinally a marginalized focaliser. It has alsobeen suggested in this paper that magic realism was employed by Rushdieto undermine thehistorical and scientific discourses also realist narrative mode topresent an alternateview of the world that positions narrative – knowledge, gainedfromstories which have magical events and characters, as a source of knowledge which is legitimate with regard to the world.