Abstract
(Ahmed) Salman Rushdie justifies Wordsworth’s view that ‘the Child is father of the Man’.1 Rushdie wrote: ‘The Wizard of Oz (the film, not the book, which I didn’t read as a child) was my very first literary influence.2 … When I first saw The Wizard of Oz it made a writer of me.’3 The other important literary influence in his childhood was The Arabian Nights which was the basis for the stories his father narrated to his children and which surfaces in the flying carpets and metamorphoses of The Satanic Verses (1988) and predictably in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).
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Notes
William Wordsworth, ‘My heart leaps up …’, in A Book of English Poetry, ed. G. B. Harrison (London: Penguin, 1950 edn), p. 247.
Salman Rushdie, The Wizard of Oz (London: British Film Institute, 1992), p. 9.
W. J. Weatherby, Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1990), p. 14.
Salman Rushdie, ‘Bonfire of the Certainties’, interview recorded on 27 January 1989 by Bandung File and broadcast on 14 February on Channel 4, in The Rushdie File, ed. Lisa Appignanesi & Sara Maitland (London: Fourth Estate, 1989), p. 30.
Rushdie, ‘Satyajit Ray’ (1990), in Imaginary Homelands: Essays in Criticism 1981–1991 (London & New Delhi: Granta & Penguin India, 1991), p. 107.
Rushdie interview in Scripsi, Vol. 3, Pt.2–3, 1985, p. 116.
Rushdie, ‘Gunter Grass’ (1984), in Imaginary Homelands, p. 276.
Ian Hamilton, ‘The First Life of Salman Rushdie’, in The New Yorker, 25 Dec 1995 & 1 Jan 1996, p. 95.
Rushdie, ‘Censorship’ (1983), in Imaginary Homelands, p. 38.
Rushdie, Grimus (London: Paladin, 1989 edn), p. 209;
Rushdie, quoted from ‘Salman Rushdie: Interview by Suzie Mac-Kenzie’, in The Guardian Weekend, 4 November 1995, p. 12.
James Harrison, Salman Rushdie (New York: Twayne, 1992), p. 36.
Catherine Cundy, ‘“Rehearsing Voices”: Salman Rushdie’s Grimus’, in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1, 1992, p. 135.
Mujeebuddin Syed, ‘Warped Mythologies: Salman Rushdie’s “Grimus”’, in ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1994, pp. 136, 139.
M. M. Bakhtin, Problems of Doestoevsky’s Poetics (1963), in The Bakhtin Reader, ed. Pam Morris (London: Edward Arnold, 1994).
Yeats, ‘Swift’s Epitaph’, in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1961 edn), p. 277; originally, used of the Roman satirist Juvenal.
Notice, for instance, Rushdie’s statement: ‘Grimus enabled me to use fantasy without worrying about it.’ — ‘Salman Rushdie: Interview’, in Kunapipi, Vol.4, No.2, 1982, p. 25.
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© 1998 D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke
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Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A. (1998). Early Life and Early Works. In: Salman Rushdie. Macmillan Modern Novelists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26745-3_1
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