Desire and Ideological Resistance: Fabulation in Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Abstract

Though in contemporary literature the genre of the fable has not flourished in its exemplary type, nevertheless it has been able to put its aesthetics and some of its strategies at the service of more successful forms. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie made use of fabulist elements both to attenuate the impact of a private trauma and to make a political statement, proving that the fable still has a place in the culture and literature of our time.