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E3 Haroun Alice
by jhoffman

John Hoffman
E3 Haroun Alice
Enigma and Escape in Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Through the Looking Glass

Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Through the Looking Glass are viable as children’s stories because they ostensibly deal in absolutes. Salman Rushdie’s Kahani is the scene of an epic battle between dark and light, between silence and speech, between pollution and purity. Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland has a similarly absolutist feel to it, governed by the strictures of dream-logic and populated by ridiculous characters. Yet their resonance as stories comes from their subtlety; both fantastic worlds are actually quite nuanced. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie substantially complicates his good/evil dichotomy: The darkness of Chup allows its inhabitants to see the beauty of the stars, the speech of the Gup nation is often ungainly and excessive, and the polluted stories have within them an element of originality that the unspoiled stories lack. Similarly, the rigidity and structure of the nonsense that pervades Wonderland requires a carefully calibrated sense of logic in order to appreciate it. In achieving a subtextual reading of these novels, ostensibly written for children, we often come to a conclusion that directly contradicts outward appearances.
Of the two, Haroun and the Sea of Stories appears far more benign; although both works rely on mysterious processes that confound and thwart their protagonist, the hostility Alice encounters in Wonderland is far more striking. Rushdie works to diminish this effect of his enigmatic forces, first by ironically naming them Processes Too Complicated to Explain, and second by declining to provide any background information, thus making them appear almost magical. Although their mystery frustrates Haroun, there is something quaint and comical in this encounter with the unknown; to follow the old cliché, Haroun cannot wait to grow up. By contrast, Carroll appears to deliberately construct an inimical environment. Isolated from other characters by an unending cycle of ridiculous puns, logic games, and semantic juggling, Alice never makes a true connection with any of Wonderland’s denizens. Instead, she acts as a pawn in a grand chess game of which she is only partially aware. The only true element of playfulness in Through the Looking Glass arises from its punning, yet even that collapses under further analysis: most quips in the novel are either nonsensical, irrelevant or outright menacing. The impossible insects generated by the entertaining wordplay in Chapter Three cannot sustain themselves, for they feed on human products that cannot be found in Wonderland (175). There is very little to laugh about in Alice’s adventures; even when dealing with Khattam-Shud, the novel’s persona of absolute evil, Haroun does not rather than chilling quips such as Humpty Dumpty’s “One ca’n’t, perhaps … but two can. With proper assistance, you might have left off at seven,” (211). The adult reader must question the suitability of the material for children.
Yet Rushdie complicates this comparison, just as he complicates his own world of moral absolutes. The mystery of the P2C2E is never resolved, yet it continues to dictate the circumstances of Haroun’s life through the Walrus’s artificial happy ending. Having completed his journey, Haroun returns to a home fundamentally transformed by the enigmatic forces he had ostensibly escaped. Worse, Rushdie’s protagonist demonstrates that he is entirely aware of his subservience: “It isn’t real. It’s just something the Eggheads got out of a bottle. It’s all fake.” (208) Carroll’s world is emphatically free from the tyranny of the P2C2E; beyond a handful of fantastic assumptions, very few truly inexplicable events ever occur in Wonderland; all seemingly magical creatures and occurrences are the product of some pun or Carrollian trick of logic. Every strange movement of characters in Through the Looking Glass proceeds according to the delineated moves of a chess problem. Thus, we are allowed at least some window into the nonsensical processes that shape Alice’s fate and define the logic of Wonderland. Furthermore, Carroll’s disorientingly abrupt conclusion extricates us from the logic of the looking glass world. Although the events of Alice’s adventure may be relevant in a metaphorical sense to her maturation, they do not exercise a concrete influence on her normal life.
A difference in perspective also creates a major point of divergence in the manner in which Rushdie and Carroll handle ambiguity: Haroun and the Sea of Stories places us on the same level as its protagonist, never learning any more than he does about the mysterious physical laws of Kahani, while Through the Looking Glass places us above Alice. As adults and as readers who have the ability to slow down the rapid-fire repartee of Wonderland, we may understand many things that she does not. To us, Humpty Dumpty is more than an extremely unsatisfactory individual; he also represents a strict semantic philosopher from whom we can extract Carroll’s opinions on the power and malleability of language. Thus, he is not so much hostile as representative of a particular school of philosophy. To a certain extent, we can reason out and apply an order to the things that bewilder Alice; there is no possible way to reverse engineer Kahani’s Processes Too Complicated To Explain.
The first effect of this divergence is a disparity in our level of identification with each protagonist. Although we follow Alice in her journey from square two to square eight, we are not in the least bit invested, nor do we truly have a definitive idea of her motivations and reactions. Playing as a pawn, her only available option is to move forward, and Alice seems to fulfill her duty with few second thoughts. Whenever Alice does takes action, such as when she threatens to pick the talking flowers or begins shaking the queen, it is unexpected and confusing. The contents of Alice’s head form the most confusing aspect of Through the Looking Glass, for she has the traits of randomness and irrationality that characterize early childhood. Without a sense of constancy, identification with Alice’s character is impossible, and we are compelled to simply sit back, observe Carroll’s games of logic and semantics, and watch the chess problem play out. By contrast, we are inseparably linked to Haroun through our commonality of knowledge and our understanding of his motivations. Although the immaturity of our narrator is clearly obvious throughout the novel, his identity has an undeniable constancy that Alice lacks, and we are clearly intended to become involved in Haroun’s journey. By becoming invested in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, we become subject to the same mysterious forces that govern Haroun’s life; by remaining removed in Through the Looking Glass, we can examine and discover order in Carroll’s absurdity from a position of freedom.
Through the Looking Glass concludes with a nagging metaphysical conundrum of “which dreamed it?”, but we must realize that there is freedom in the fact that Carroll designates it as but a dream. The adventures in Wonderland, taking place on a plane in which characters seem more concerned with discussing logic and linguistics than actual concrete events, have no hold on her current life beyond representing a condition (and it is only the reader who is aware of this symbolism). Unlike Haroun, the fantastic journey she has undergone will be forgotten, and its impact marginalized. Wonderland, although apparently menacing, is revealed to be fundamentally harmless, while the fantasy moon of Kahani remains a shadowy manipulator in Haroun’s life. Rushdie’s ostensibly happy ending grows quite sinister under analysis.
Following the trend of moral absolutes in Rushdie’s novel, Khattam-Shud's pollution of the story waters appears unequivocally evil. Yet it is no different in technique from the Walrus's P2C2E. In the normal process, "New stories are born from old" (86), created from the recombination of pre-existing elements. Khattam-Shud produces his anti-stories simply by combining incongruous elements, mixing comedy with tragedy and horror with romance (160). Yet this “pollution” has an element of originality that contradicts the pervasive sense of cliché on Kahani; Haroun is a passive observer in the generic Princess Rescue Story only until his horrific transformation. After it, he is involved directly and viscerally. The anti-story seems to provide an experience far more impressive than the cliché of the untainted one, and it does so without losing its coherence; there is tragic irony in the hero's transformation into the very creatures he fights against. The Walrus’s synthetic happiness does more than render a city emotionally barren and monotonous; it also imprisons Haroun’s life in cliché. Worse, the enduring mystery of the P2C2E and our own identification with the protagonist imprisons us as well.

May 12, 2005, 04:14 PM

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