A familiar notion is particularly well-expressed in Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame. The notion is that of history as itself a fiction; the expression is varied. ‘All stories,’ he says as intruding author, ‘are haunted by the ghosts of the stories they might have been.’ And elsewhere:
As for me: I too, like all migrants, am a fantasist. I build imaginary countries and try to impose them on the ones that exist. I too, face the problem of history: what to retain, what to dump, how to hold on to what memory insists on relinquishing, how to deal with change.
My story’s palimpsest country has, I repeat, no name of its own.
But earlier he had said, also as an intruding author: ‘But suppose this were a realistic novel! Just think what else I might have to put in.’ There follows a long paragraph-full of real horrors, with real names, which ends: ‘Imagine my difficulties!’ And he goes on:
By now, if I had been writing a book of this nature, it would have done me no good to protest that I was writing universally, not about Pakistan. The book would have been banned, dumped in the rubbish bin, burned. All that effort for nothing. Realism can break a writer’s heart.
Fortunately, however, I am only telling a sort of modern fairy-tale, so that’s all right; nobody need get upset, or take anything I say too seriously. No drastic action need be taken either.
What a relief!
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