Salman Rushdie’s new collection of essays, The Language of Truth, begins with an ecstatic celebration of the magical tales of old worlds—wonder tales as he would have it. As the foremost magical realist of the East in the West, Rushdie has thrived on collecting his own dreams against the literary trends of the times (realism/formalism/transgressivism/whateverism). Sage advice from a master: “Don’t write what you know unless it is really interesting” or just dream better dreams. Having myself drifted away from reading fiction in recent years (a known trend in the publishing industry) and towards more and more detailed nonfiction, from the mind-control capabilities of cat shit to the mathematical learning algorithms embedded in the universe, I am certainly guilty of exactly what Rushdie rails against (a damned philistine of sorts), though I am equally skeptical of the Knausgård-style auto-fiction that is recently idealized as a contemporary answer to the vexing question of what new literary hell we deserve.
Still, magical realism or Rushdie-an wonder tales are essentially gimmicks for conveying sometimes lofty (say the shaping of thinking by modernity in Gabriel García Márquez or the effects of colonialism in Rushdie’s own works; Devapriya Roy suggests all “global novels,” which is code for New York/American, are idealizations of liberalism that work towards world peace in some suffused sensibility), but also often trivial observations about ancient human traditions. Calling this a cornerstone of truth begs a deeper question about what truths are being exposed. Is it this universality of the desire for power or the vanity of men and women? Is it the threat imposed by female eroticism to the stability of society? Rushdie likes to think these are answered by these olden forms but a most modern mind begs for explanations of a different sort when trying to map them to our most modern experience of society.
Take, for instance, the manipulation of politics by elaborate lies that arose with fascism and echoes even today across the American and global political landscape. We may think we see hints of this in the tales of hubris and narcissistic vanity derived from mythologies, but there is largely no parallel to the way in which a political body can be manipulated in our modern world. Ancient societies were too sparse, too stratified, and too devoid of expectations for individual achievement or democratic participation. Our nearest wonder tale begins with Orwell in the aftermath of World War II or, perhaps, with Kafka in the strange vault of mind-control politics. Rushdie does note Kafka but doesn’t ask the question of what exactly the psychological effect is on the reader? Or Solzhenitsyn? We come away from them with a dark theater of metaphors that point to the terrible state of being a prisoner of lies, or threats, of misinformation. But how do we apply this to living amongst those who accept doublethink as reality?
This is where I think there is room for literary gimmicks of different sorts. Knausgård with his more intimate kind of Proust is one such approach. But other gimmicks are equally valid, including video games (the shattered Ayn Randian idealisms of Bioshock, for instance). More, the nonfiction derived from the sciences is a fertile area to mine. Looking for a literary and storytelling gimmick ignores the richer estuary of how people think. What is the correlation between the cognitive acceptance of fantastical concepts from a religious upbringing and the manipulation by powerful, charismatic people? We may see hints in Voltaire, but magical thinking as a topic itself is too new for literature to have comment. Instead, fantastical ideas and associations were the way people thought, as Frazer noted over a hundred years ago. It was the source of those wonder tales. Understanding and taking it seriously might be the most interesting gimmick yet. In some ways this becomes anti-magical realism. Modernity didn’t rob people of hills of fairies and mystical backstories of Pythian snakes and odes, replacing them with efficient train-based delivery of goods. What instead happened was that the mechanisms by which dreams are conceived have been uncovered enough to realize that there is a quantum logic underlying the human experience, not clockwork efficiency, but some kind of aleatoric simmer to the human mind. The myths were partial truths at best. The quantum world below that, in the shadow boxing of eidolons, is that these truth forms are built on frameworks of biases and social constructs and educational artifacts, that can be seen more reliably by analysis and converted into a new gimmick for fictional appreciation.
This isn’t to deny Joseph Anton his defense of fiction and wonder. The stories are a background of a shared experience that makes creative freedom more tangible. And even if they are only partial truths, that isn’t to suggest that there is any possibility of ever arriving at completion. The labyrinth is incalculably vast and intricate. Knowing too many corners reshapes the edges. So we can only keep finding these gimmicks to keep the novel novel.