In my last blog, I discussed a few different possibilities for the importance of stories. Mostly I settled on two aspects of the story, that of the introspective reader who is able to look into the stories and find the "mirror of man" and the other was a sense of escape. The first I looked into in a little detail, and I hope that in my ramblings I was able to show that stories can be used as a differing perspective to the method of scientists. We can look at ourselves through literature rather than at the world around us. The second I touched upon briefly for a short paragraph and had thought the idea sufficiently written on until I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It is my hope then, in the next few paragraphs to look into the one aspect of the novel that captured me from the beginning: time.
Time is everywhere in Haroun. It is present when Soraya smashes the clocks at precisely eleven before leaving with Mr. Sengupta. It is there as Haroun struggles to concentrate on anything for more than eleven minutes at a time after his mother's departure. Time is present as Haroun and his friends travel on their adventures and even when he returns. In short, Time rears its head every moment of the book. Though we are not aware of it, or, perhaps more accurately, only subconsciously so, it is time that accompanies us on our journey through this tale, and time that leads us back again.
Time is such an integral part of our world that we hardly ever really think about it. We understand that it is a need to be in one place or another at a particular time that drives our world as we know it today, that wakes us up in the morning and drags us to work or school in an effort to not be late, to remain on schedule. Like the moving hands of the clock, we pass, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, along a repetitive path of waking and dreaming, eating and working. The constant repetition so absolute that the world around us sometimes begins to haze and blur passing swiftly by us like the currents of a stream and carrying us all toward the inevitable conclusion at the end: Khattam-Shud. We look to escape that constant tedium, and, in our search, many of us turn to the worlds of myth and legends created by others, stories where we can be anything, do anything, and live in worlds that we know can only exist in our dreams.
Just as we are trapped within our own time, so Haroun is trapped in his. He is trapped in a world where the time of happiness has stopped, where his mother is no longer present, and the songs she sang are now silent. He is trapped in a world where his father can no longer tell the stories that captivated his audiences and led them through magical lands. He is, therefore, trapped in a world that many of us have inhabited and from which many of us long to escape. If we look closely at the story, Haroun teaches us how.
Haroun's solution comes in the need to rekindle the fire of creation within his father that will allow the man to tell his stories again. And so, on the night before his father is set to help a greasy politician win the hearts of the people, Haroun goes on an adventure that will change his life forever. Here I must warn those that have not read the book that there are spoilers in the next few paragraphs. Do yourselves a favor and pick up the book before continuing. For those readers who have already finished the story, let us continue.
Haroun finds out shortly after arriving on the moon, Kahani, that the ocean of sea of stories is in fact poisoned. After falling in with several friends and eventually finding his father in this strange world of stories, Haroun is charged with saving the Ocean, as we knew he must be. A long story short, Haroun saves the world of stories by returning time to normal. (He actually causes the moon to begin to rotate on its axis, a process by which we measure time.) In so doing, he is able to overthrow the evil shadows, and the rest of the shadow people, along with the people of Gup, live happily ever after.
Haroun returns to the "lower world" and begins to worry for his father. After all, their adventures took place over the course of two days and the Shah of Blah was supposed to tell his tales the previous evening for the wicked politician. To Haroun's amazement, however, he soon learns that the entirety of his journey took place in one night. He had accomplished in mere hours, the events of several days. Soon Haroun and his father return home to find Soraya returned and life returns to normal, time begins again.
Let us pause, then and return to several aspects of the story of Haroun that deal with the aspects of time. First, there is the concept of the moon with one half in perpetual light while the other half remains in perpetual dark with a twilight strip in between. This at first seems natural, since the figures on the dark half are so accustomed to night and their counterparts of light so used to the sun. Yet, it is the very perpetuity of the darkness that creates the problems for the Ocean of Stories. The evil shadows, born because of endless night, create a shadow ship from which the poison the ocean and a plug that they hope to use in order to stop any new stories from forming. It is only the power of the sun, the world returned to its rightful cycle, that saves the world and the ocean.
The other concept that I wish to look at is the time lapse that occurs when Haroun travels to Kahani and back. His adventure lasts only one night. We as readers fall into stories in much the same way, I would argue. A novel can turn eons into pages, battles that last hours into minutes. And it can do the reverse. It can make a moment last a life time. Create from the last moment before death an entire world in which characters live and love and die.
Time, then, is the instrument of the story, from dreams to books to movies, it is through stories that we pass beyond the bounds of time and enter worlds where eons are but a second and seconds last an eon. It is through stories that we escape the endless circle of the clock and become the heroes of our own stories.
I realize that the beginning of my article was not very comforting, that many of the readers of this piece will be saying: "that is all well and good," but eventually we wake, eventually the story ends, and we must, however regrettably, return to the bounds of that clock. To those of you I can only quote a passage from the book itself. "The real world is full of magic and so magical worlds could easily be real." It is true that the world, itself, can be a boring place, full of the dull trappings of everyday life. But Dull Lake, as Haroun and his companions floated upon it, turned out to be anything but. It was instead a place where men made their own realities. In much the same way, I will argue one last time, and you may agree with me or not, we can make our own worlds. Even the rainiest day can bring joy if we know where and how to look for the magic within it, and if we ever find that this world has become a little too mundane for the moment, there is always a return trip to the world of stories waiting for us in the form of a Hoopoe or a flying lion, waiting to rush us with all haste back to the the Ocean of Stories and whatever dreams we wish to make realities.
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