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Haroun’s Stories + Alice’s Anti-Stories = Khattam Shud!
E3 Haroun Alice
by bellwang

Both Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There weave well-known children’s tales into their own child’s tale. Each novel strews its compilation of tales, epics, and accounts with elements such as mischievous word play, puns, and themes, but with different results. Whereas the classic children’s stories “complete with sorcery, love-interest, princesses, wicked uncles, fat aunts, mustachioed gangsters in yellow check pants, fantastic locations, cowards, heroes, fights, and half a dozen catchy, hummable tunes” (Rushdie 17) are poked, pinched, and rained into Haroun’s tale for a light-hearted, comic “new [story] born from old” (Rushdie 86), nursery rhymes are reflected into Alice’s adventures and create a dark inversion of children’s nonsense tales. The inverse of stories in Through the Looking-Glass is the same as the anti-stories that pollute Kahani’s Ocean of Stories.

The Silencer of Stories, Khattam Shud, poisons every story in the Ocean of Stories with an anti-story. Khattam Shud annuls a happy story with a sad anti-story; he cancels an action drama by making it move too slowly in his anti-story; he invalidates a tragedy with an anti-story that “[induces] helpless laughter” (Rushdie 160). When Alice crawls through the Looking-glass, so do the nursery tales she has memorized in her world. A reflection is an inversion: what was the left hand on one side of a mirror is the right hand on the other side, as the “enantiomorph” (Gardner, ch.4, note 3) Tweedle twins demonstrate (Carroll 182). The inverse of a mathematical function reverses the function’s procedure just as the anti-story for a sad story is the opposite: a happy story. When the inverse of a function is combined with the original function, the original function’s result is annulled exactly as the anti-story deletes the original story.

A nonsensical child’s diddy such as “Humpty Dumpty” is given meaning on the other side of the looking glass: Humpty Dumpty’s pride “goeth before his fall” (Gardner, ch.6, note 6). Similarly, figurative speech in Alice’s world has a literal reflection through the Looking-glass: Alice asks a Frog where the servant who answers the door is and the Frog asks Alice what the door has been asking (Carroll 259). The expression “to answer the door,” meaning to open the door, takes on the literal implication that someone answers a question that the door apparently asks. Logic is also inverted through the Looking-glass. The Red Queen tells Alice that to remain in one place one must run (Carroll 165). Opposites between Alice’s world and the Looking-glass world of stories she enters, abound in nonsense having sense, words having double meaning, and logic being reversed.

In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, words are also puns and have dual meanings, but the difference between word play in the two novels is that double meanings are obvious or become so to Haroun whereas to Alice they do not. Haroun sees large fish in the sea with mouths all over their bodies. He is told they are called Plentimaw Fishes and before Haroun can overlook any subtleties in meaning, Butt the Hoopoe tells him, “They acquire their goodname from the fact… that they have plenty of maws” and if Haroun still had trouble understanding that these fishes’s names are in fact a play on their appearance, Butt further defines maws as “i.e. mouths” (Rushdie 84). Having double meanings served to him on a silver platter is typical for Haroun. Rashid says, “Thanks for fixing this up, son, but I admit that for some time I thought we were all fixed good and proper.” Yet again, in case Haroun didn’t catch his father’s pun on the word “fixed,” Rashid continues, “I mean done for” (Rushdie 39). For Haroun, no misunderstandings arise because of wordplay.

Alice, on the other hand, is constantly confused, consistently offends, and is continuously impeded in her quest to become Queen by the misunderstandings that arise from word play. Frequently word play consists of the inversion between conventional expressions Alice says and their literal inverse in the Looking-glass world. The Red Queen asks Alice what would remain if an angry dog chased after her for taking away its bone. The answer, the Red Queen reasons, is the dog’s temper because it “lost it” (Carroll 254). Word play does more than simply baffle Alice, word play obstructs Alice’s path to cross to the eighth square. When the Sheep warns Alice not to drag her oar in the water lest it pop up and smack her out of her seat, Alice becomes annoyed because she interprets the Sheep’s rowing slang literally. Alice’s misunderstanding not only produces irritation between herself and her companion, but the Sheep’s predictions come true and Alice’s oar handle smacks her out of her seat. In this instance, not comprehending the dual meaning behind a phrase quite literally obstructs Alice’s path as she rows. More often, however, dual meaning deters Alice as she crosses the chessboard, because she antagonizes those who could direct her by not understanding the implications in what she says or in what they say.

Wordplay adds light humor within the stories Haroun experiences. Wordplay in Through the Looking-Glass adds the inverse of light humor to create another anti-story element: the only audience who derives pleasure from wordplay in the stories Alice travels through is the reader, but for Alice and the Looking-glass creatures, puns and the confusion arising between literal and figurative expressions is anything but humorous. Wordplay which is humorous and accelerates the storyline in Haroun and the Sea of Stories is darkly inverted into a frustrating nuisance for Alice.

Similar to how the story of Alice’s journey through the eight squares to become Queen incorporates the compilation of other stories, Haroun’s original goal is to renew his father’s subscription for Story Water, but doing so involves the birth of many other stories in Haroun’s tale. Haroun begins his original adventure as an unappealing, thoughtless boy and through each story venture becomes more likable because of the qualities he develops and displays. Haroun feels his thoughtlessness increases his father’s depression after his mother leaves when he shouts “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” (Rushdie 22) Haroun comes to understand through the many story adventures he experiences that “stories are fun” (Rushdie 161) and with this realization, he learns focus and determination as well as displays loyalty and bravery as he fights against Khattam Shud’s Shadow to preserve the future of stories. Haroun develops into a hero. The anti story for the happy, overriding narrative in Haroun and the Sea of Stories is created in Alice’s quest to become Queen.

The inverse to Haroun’s positive, upward progression of qualities that make him a hero are Alice’s deterioration of adult qualities into childish impulses as she progresses towards becoming a Queen. Alice first goes through the Looking-glass and “[picks the White King] up very gently” (Carroll 146). She leaves the Looking-glass world upon becoming a Queen when she “fiercely” (Carroll 266) grabs the Red Queen and “[shakes] her backwards and forwards with all her might” (Carroll 267) in a fit of temper. Similarly, during her first encounters with the Looking-glass creatures as a pawn, Alice does “not [wish] to begin an argument” over the verbal misunderstandings that arise from wordplay. Once she becomes a Queen, however, Alice’s maturity thins and she contradicts others because she is “always ready for a little argument” (Carroll 251). Alice attains Queenship, but chaos ensues at her coronary banquet and her feat is anti-climactic. Alice’s achievement is the hollow inverse to Haroun’s. In Alice’s crossing to adulthood, her considerateness and patience are obscured by a resurgence of childish mercurialness; Alice has fulfilled her goal, but at the cost of her personal development. Haroun becomes a hero when he saves the Ocean of Stories in his quest to aid his father, and so Khattum Shud’s anti-story weaves an empty victory for Alice when she becomes Queen because she is no hero: not only has she saved no one or nothing, but Alice has lost the maturity that should have been gained as she becomes an adult as represented by her Queenship.

The inverse of the importance of not only Haroun’s story but the story he experiences within his story is reflected in the marked absurdness with which Alice sees the Looking-glass world. Haroun’s initial quest to renew his father’s subscription to Story Water has little to do with the story within a story of Khattam Shud poisoning the Ocean of Stories. Yet Haroun does become involved and personally invested in the outcome of the Guppies. The fantastic stories within Haroun’s actual life-story become as real to Haroun as the occurrence of his mother running away and thus gain importance. Haroun states, “This new world, these new friends … none of it seems very strange at all” (Carroll 87). Alice, on the other hand, categorizes her experiences in terms of their strangeness and as a result she remembers the strangest “of all the strange things [she] saw in her journey Through the Looking-Glass” the “most clearly” (Carroll 243). Due to the absurd strangeness with which Alice views the stories within her own, she feels no attachment to the dilemmas occurring within them; Alice feels no tragic loss upon learning moments after leaving Humpty Dumpty that he has fallen and shattered.

The main narratives of Haroun and Alice are mirror reflections of one another due to the upward progression of Haroun’s character and the downward progression of Alice’s. The stories within Haroun’s story and the stories within Alice’s story are inverses of each other as well because the use of wordplay aids Haroun and deters Alice. As a result, Through the Looking-Glass contains the anti-stories which would annihilate the stories flowing in the Ocean of Stories if the two were ever combined – thankfully, Haroun saves readers from these two sets of stories combining and obliterating one another with his defeat of Khattam Shud.

May 18, 2005, 05:42 PM

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