Location: Main Index / Individual Entries

Hunger Artists
E3 Haroun Alice
by aahearn

Fish in Through the Looking Glass and Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Oysters, glumfish, sharks, pomfrets, and Plentimaws: fish surface repeatedly in Through the Looking-Glass and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. These aquatic creatures are one of the few constants between the two worlds Alice and Haroun traverse. In Haroun, Rushdie juxtaposes the glumfish and pomfret of Alifbay with the Plentimaw fish of Kahani. In Looking Glass, Carroll contrasts Kitty’s “make-believe...oysters” (Carroll, 271) with the Walrus and the Carpenter’s shellfish and Humpty Dumpty’s “little fishes of the sea” (Carroll, 217). In these two tales, Rushdie and Carroll repeatedly pair fish with processes of ingestion: both the literal ingestion of food and the more figurative ingestion of stories, words, and poetry. When Haroun eats glumfish or the Walrus eats oysters, the fish is digested, broken apart, internalized, and given a new shape, a process similar to the recycling and recombining of old tales which the Plentimaw fish perform in Kahani’s oceans. In the Looking Glass land and the story world, characters become “hunger artists” (Rushdie, 86) like the Plentimaw fish, drawing fodder from traditional tales and poems and refashioning them into creations of their “own invention” (Carroll, 233). In Alice and Haroun’s real worlds fish are a dull source of food, but in their fantasy worlds fish are vibrant, anthropomorphic creatures: a transformation representative of the creative processes of consuming and recycling old stories central to both Carroll and Rushdie’s narratives.

In one form or another, fish exist on both sides of the Looking Glass and in both Alifbay and Kahani, making them an interesting point of comparison between the two worlds. In the real worlds, the glumfish and oysters are uninteresting foodstuffs: they are meat for the inhabitants of the Sad City and a snack for Alice’s cat. Yet in Kahani and the mirror world, fish are individualized creatures who are sources of ideas, stories, and dialogue; they are gullible oysters, grinning little guppies, or chatty companions. Rushdie treats Goopie and Bagha as real characters who can speak in rhyming couplets, fall ill with sore throats, and tow Haroun and the Hoopoe out of the Old Zone, yet he lumps the glumfish together into one homogenous and impersonal group, writing only that they are “so miserable to eat that they made people belch with melancholy” (Rushdie, 15). Likewise, Carroll depicts Humpty Dumpty’s “little fishes” (Carroll, 217) and the Walrus and the Carpenter’s oysters as wearing shoes, carrying on conversations, sleeping in beds, and turning blue with emotion, yet he fails to give the real-world oysters names or personalities. In the dream world, Alice condemns the Walrus and the Carpenter for greedily devouring the oysters, yet outside of the Looking-Glass she has no qualms about pretending her Kitty eats shellfish. Thus, in comparison with the talkative oysters and little fishes of the mirror world and the vivacious, iridescent fish of Kahani, the food-source fish of reality are as uninteresting as a predictable and cliched story.

In Haroun’s Sad City, fish are representative of restricted choices and limited options: because they have no other source of food, the inhabitants of Alifbay consume the glumfish for most of the year despite the fact that their meat is sodden with misery. Except for the rainy season when they get “a break from the glumfish,” (Rushdie, 21) Haroun and his fellow city-dwellers must eat the same thing day in and day out, and therefore the glumfish become a symbol of stagnancy, boredom, and a powerlessness to change. The fish in Kahani’s oceans, on the other hand, typify the dynamic processes of innovation and recycling something old into something new. Even their name is a creative twist on a hackneyed expression: “plenty more fish” is converted into “plentimaw fish” (Rushdie, 85). When Haroun first sees Goopy and Bagha swimming alongside the Hoopoe, he describes them as having “iridescent coloring,” (Rushdie, 84) showing that even their fins change in appearance when viewed from different angles of light; all aspects of their being are devoted to making “new combinations” (Rushdie, 86). They “were constantly at work, sucking in Story Streams and blowing them out again” (Rushdie, 84) as they meld elements of different stories together and regurgitate them as new tales. Iff calls them “‘hunger artists’–‘Because when they are hungry they swallow stories...and in their innards miracles occur; a little bit of one story joins on to an idea from another...when they spew the stories out they are not old tales but new ones” (Rushdie, 86). While glumfish were associated with a visceral sort of hunger, the Plentimaw fish’s hunger is a form of artistry in which they feed on words, plots, and stories; what is mashed around in their many mouths is not food but fairy tales.

The consumption of fish is the common thread connecting all the poems, riddles, and songs Alice hears. In “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” a herd of gullible oysters are sliced , buttered, and consumed (Carroll, 187); in Humpty Dumpty’s poem, he fills a “kettle large and new, / Fit for the deed I had to do” (Carroll, 218) and wants to skewer “the little fishes of the sea” (Carroll, 217) with a corkscrew; in the White Queen’s riddle she describes cooking and supping on shellfish. When Alice reemerges back in the real world, she maintains this association between poetry and fish by telling her Kitty, “Tomorrow morning you shall have a real treat. All the time you’re eating your breakfast, I’ll repeat ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ to you; and then you can make believe it’s oysters, dear!” (Carroll, 271). It makes sense that the connection between Alice’s real world and dream world would be the consumption of fish because eating involves breaking something down, mixing it around, and turning it into new shapes and forms, much like the process of artistic re-invention central to Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty, the White Knight, and Alice, along with Rashid and the Plentimaw fish, become “hunger artists” (Rushdie, 86) by combining bits and pieces of dull, cliched stories into exciting new creations.

“Nothing comes from nothing, Thieflet; no story comes from nowhere; new stores are born from old–it is the new combinations that make them new,” (Rushdie, 86) Iff tells Haroun. Both Rushdie and Carroll’s books involve taking traditional stories, melodies, and words and reworking these cliched elements into innovative new amalgamations of one’s “own invention” (Carroll, 233). In Through the Looking Glass, the White Knight takes the traditional tune of “I give thee all, I can no more,” (Carroll, 244) which Alice recognizes, and mixes it with his own nonsense lyrics about haddock’s eyes, green whiskers, and an aged aged man, thereby crafting a new song of “his own invention” (Carroll, 244). Humpty Dumpty likewise takes the words of “Jabberwocky” and combines them with his own surprising definitions. Alice herself internalizes the songs and poetry she hears during her plunge into Looking Glass land and is able to repeat “Jabberwocky” to Humpty Dumpty and “The Walrus and the Carpenter” to Kitty afterwards. Thus, Alice becomes a sort of “Kache-Mer”: a “place that hides a Sea” (Rushdie, 40) because swimming around inside her consciousness are many different strands of poetry and narratives. The stories, like an ingested oyster, take on new forms within her.

Just as fish draw water through their gills and extract oxygen, or a Plentimaw fish draws narrative nutrients from the Story Streams, Rashid “drink(s) the warm Story Waters and then I feel full of steam” (Rushdie, 13) and Haroun describes the ocean as giving off “that soft, subtle steam that could fill a person with fantastic dreams” (Rushdie, 122). Like a Plentimaw fish, Rashid imbibes all of the traditional elements of stories: “sorcery, love-interest, princesses, wicked uncles, fat aunts, mustachioed gangsters in yellow check pants, fantastic locations, cowards, heroes, fights” (Rushdie, 17) and spews them out as “some brand-new saga” (Rushdie, 17). To his admirers, Rashid is known as “the Ocean of Notions” because he is “as stuffed with cheery stories as the sea was full of glumfish” (Rushdie, 15). His “innards” (Rushdie, 86) swirl with stock characters and plots, which he can then pull out in new combinations. For example, the story he tells in the Valley of K is a reformulation of many fragments of old, cliched tales: the defeat of some monstrous force by a young hero, the perilous quest to seek out a desired object, the ‘rebirth’ of a character who had lost his ‘Gift of Gab,’ and the rags to riches ascension of young Haroun to a mature hero. Even though this story contains cliched elements, the inventive and unfamiliar combination of them yields a tale powerful enough to overthrow Snotty Buttoo.

Rushdie and Carroll’s books are themselves products of the recombination and re-invention of old, familiar tales. Glimmers of The Wizard of Oz, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Alice in Wonderland, the stories of Sinbad, Beatles songs, Biblical legends and even Stars Wars appear in Rushdie’s story. For example, the “landscape that looked exactly like a giant chessboard” (Rushdie, 73) in chapter four is clearly filched from Looking Glass; the scene of Khattam-Shud’s ship melting in the sunlight recalls the images of a “rotting deck” in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; and the “winged monkeys” “walking about on the Water Genie’s palm” (Rushdie, 64) were extracted from Baum’s Wizard of Oz. Rushdie draws from a wide-ranging mix of children’s stories, contemporary songs, highly-esteemed literature, and classic movies, all of which have become somewhat stale and cliched due to their widespread exposure, and blends them into a refreshingly original novel. Just as the Plentimaw fish have “literally dozens of mouths” and “each mouth says something different,” (Rushde, 85) Rushdie’s novel is an ensemble of many different authors’ voices speaking through one body. This mixing of tales succeeds because, as Butt the Hoopoe says, “Any Story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up!” (Rushdie, 79).

Lewis Carroll is another author who, like the Plentimaw fish, takes old stories and poems, churns them around in his logic-filled brain, and regurgitates them in new forms. Elements from many favorite nursery rhymes, such as ‘Humpty Dumpty,’ ‘The Lion and the Unicorn,’ and “Row, row, row your boat” pop up in Carroll’s Looking Glass. In addition to mixing traditional nursery rhymes into his story, Carroll also borrows rhyme schemes and ideas from older poets like Wordsworth and Tennyson. “The Garden of Lives Flowers” chapter contains a talking rose, lily, and, larkspur, like the ones found in Tennyson’s “Maud”; the plot of the White Knight’s poem is “borrowed from Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence” (Carroll, 246); Humpty Dumpty’s poem adopts the rhyme scheme of “Summer Days” by an obsolete Victorian poet (Carroll, 216). Thus, Carroll takes obscure and uninteresting poems and enlivens them with nonsense words and fanciful plot lines, weaving them together into a new story of his “own invention” (Carroll, 244).

In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai says, “there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives, and to know me...you’ll have to swallow the lot as well” (Rushdie, 4). In order to know Lewis Carroll and Salman Rushdie’s books, you must also know the traditional tales and old stories these authors swallowed and combined. Alifbay’s glumfish and pomfret, the Red Queen’s fish course, and Kitty’s oysters might be dull foodstuffs, but when they are swallowed and digested, they commingle into fresh new forms. Both Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Through the Looking Glass point to the importance of cliched, traditional tales as the building blocks of new stories and literature. There is nothing fishy about absorbing and cobbling together elements of old fairy tales and well-worn narratives, instead Rushdie and Carroll suggest that this process is at the root of all “artistry” (Rushdie, 86).

May 12, 2005, 02:51 PM

Name:


Email Address:

Comments: