Salman Rushdie on Novel Writing

the question is what does truth mean in fiction because of course the first the first premise of fiction is that it's not true you know that this story does not record events that took place these people didn't exist these things did not happen you know I mean that's that's the going in point the point of a novel so it's the novel tells you flat-out at the beginning that it's untruthful you know but then so what do we mean then by truth in literature and clearly what we mean is is human truth not not photographic journalistic recorded truth but the truth we recognize as human beings about about how we are with each other you know how we deal with each other what are our strengths and our weaknesses how we interact and what is that what is the meaning of our lives you know I mean this is this is what we look at you know you don't need to know that Anna Karenina really existed you know we need to know who she is what moves her and what and and what her story tells us about our own lives and about ourselves you know and that's what that's the kind of truth that as readers we look for and in in literature now once you accept that stories are not true once you start from that position then you understand that a flying carpet and Madame Bovary are untrue in the same way you know and as a result both of them are ways of arriving at the truth by the road of untruth and so that they can both do it the same way I mean this is the first novel in which I've actually managed finally to include a flying carpet not really I've been wanting to do it for a long time and and the immediate thing that I thought the moment you decide you're going to have a rug that flies through the air is you must immediately ask yourself realistic questions about it what would that be like you know if you were standing on a carpet and it levitated would it be difficult to keep your balance would the carpet be rigid or with the movement of the air under the carpet make the carpet undulate you know if you flew very high wouldn't it get very cold how would you kill how you keep warm on a flying carpet and I think the moment you start asking yourself those kind of practical real world questions the flying carpet becomes believable you know it becomes a thing that might exist and if it existed it would function like this but in the end what you're looking for in this book a fairy tale of fable and allegory a fantasy is the same thing you're looking for in you know in kind of kitchen-sink realism you're looking for people that you can believe in behaving in ways that you can recognize and and which tell you something those those behaviors tell you something about your own behavior in your own nature and about the life of the person next door to you as well you know so human truth is what you're looking for and you could get to that by many different roads

Channel: Big Think

Views: 126,701

Rating: 4.8513012 out of 5

Keywords: bigthink, Big Think, BigThink, BigThink.com

Id: eutYWr53mFE

Length: 3min 14sec (194 seconds)

Published: Tue May 31 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/kingkrule]

I've had to explain to a lot of people that I don't really enjoy "real" stories. By that I mean stories trying to be as realistic as possible. This video sums up my feelings towards that perfectly. Every story is untrue, and creators use that fiction as a way to bring to light the truth. When we understand that something like Jane Eyre is just as untrue, as Rushdie points out, as a flying carpet but reach the same truth. Why would I ever want to write about anything but the fantastic?