This is actually pretty interesting if you make it to the end.

Marcos Norris
Professor Pothen
World Literature
May 15, 2008
A Poetic of Fiction in
The Kalevala and Haroun and the Sea of Stories
In order to develop what I believe may be extracted from The Kalevala and Haroun and the Sea of Stories to develop a poetic, or theory, of fiction, I will draw heavily from T.S Eliot's Tradition and The Individual Talent. In this text, Eliot argues that individual talent is manifested in artists who have a comprehensive knowledge of the history of their artistic tradition, understand their individual place and significance within that history, and create mimetic works of art which both assimilate and grow forth from the canon, while, in turn, because of the works' contributions to the canon, reshape its entire form and how the artist will understand it. Following this development, I will briefly attempt to explain how the canon and individual works of fiction relate to the artist and the empirical world in a similar way.
According to Eliot, a literary work must cohesively relate to tradition in order to have value. He says that "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead" (2320, Norton Anthology of British Literature). Textual "meaning" exists, according to Eliot, only if the text is expressive of all generations "of the literature of Europe from Homer" (2320). In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the Water Genie describes to Haroun the nature of the Sea of Stories, in a description that closely resembles the model of the canon given by Eliot. Rushdie writes,
He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different colour, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity...these were the Streams of Story...each coloured strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that have ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here. The Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. (72)
Like Eliot's model, literary works, or stories, must relate cohesively to the rest of the canon, much like a current of water relates to the entire ocean; although a current may be distinguishable, it flows, and in some ways is indistinguishable, from the rest of the ocean. The literary canon, like the Sea of Stories, is a comprehensive organism, which takes on (figuratively speaking) a substantive form capable of growth and mutation. As Eliot explains,
The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is compete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (2320)
Thus, Haroun's father, The Ocean of Notions, is a true artist and storyteller, who embodies the whole of literature and creates individual works of legitimate talent. Similarly, one may apply this artistic process to shamanism in The Kalevala, or to Lonnrot's own artistic process. Lonnrot was aware of the Finnish oral traditions, and created The Kalevala as a text which sprang forth from the tradition, and, in turn, reshaped the tradition and the manner in which artists will understand it. Likewise, the shamans in the text have an intrusive knowledge of primordial origins, or "the literature of Europe from Homer," so to speak. Their shamanic creations, in turn, affect the entire nation and shape how each citizen apprehends his or her place in history.
What causes the great conflict in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, is that tradition is neglected. Iff, Haroun's travel-guide and war companion, on observing the dark poison which has polluted the Sea of Stories, laments, "It's our own fault...we are the Guardians of the Ocean and we didn't guard it. Look at the Ocean, look at it! The oldest stories every made, and look at them now. We let them rot, we abandoned them, long before this poisoning. We lost touch with our beginnings, with our roots, our Wellspring, our Source. Boring, we said, not in demand, surplus to requirements. And now look, just look! No colour, no life, no nothing. Spoilt!" (146). This excerpt remarkably resembles what seem to be the mocking criticisms of Eliot, when he writes, "One of the facts that might come to light...is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects in his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poets differences from his predecessors...we endeavor to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed" (2320). As we see in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Khattam-shud creates the anti-stories, shadows whose eyes are the direct opposite of the humans from which they are projected, in order to annihilate the Sea of Stories. As pointed out by Eliot, it is the anti-story, or "individual" creation, that is polluting the literary tradition.
Thus, in accordance with Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and to a lesser extent, The Kalevala, suggests that a fictional work ought to be created by way of an artist's comprehension of the literary canon, and creative ability to contribute uniquely to the reformation of the canon.
In this final segment I will attempt briefly to explain a P2C2E (A process too complicated to explain[a referent to the text]), in order to develop how I believe the literary artist, the empirical world, and the fictional mimesis all flow into one another, and share, what may be apprehended as, truth. Borrowing once more from Eliot, he continues his definition of individual talent, writing, "my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in poetry, and those which become important in the poetry play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality" (2323). Thus, the poet, or literary artist, should not limit his or her creation to a mere expression of personality. In fact, in my opinion, the literary artist cannot do this. Like the shaman, the artist acts as a medium wherewith the artist's "impressions and experiences" unify and flow through, to a shaman-like expression.
It seems to me that all human beings experience existence through their perceptual sensations (e.g. the five senses), perceiving the world and developing a sense of reality, through their many relational-ties (e.g. feeling the ground, breathing the air, sight, movement, etc, etc, etc, the list is endless). As these perceptual relationships "combine in peculiar and unexpected ways," assimilating and formulating ideas about existence, most of us adopt language and begin to use it and develop our use of it in our experience of existence. For this reason, our very ability to think, feel, see, and interpret anything about existence, becomes rooted, limited, and defined by an apprehension of language, based on the dynamic of our life experience thus far. Therefore, our very means of existence is the language-based interpretation of our relational sensations (P2C2E?).
In this way, every person is a text or a story.
In the same manner a text is considered rich and legitimately individual, so too, human-texts are considered rich if they flow from a comprehensive apprehension of their own generation and human history. I wouldn't doubt that most of the world's "richest" people have a keen understanding of history, their generation, and themselves. And so the artist, a human-text, who comprehensively understands the canon of literature, is a work of art in his soul. Thus, the reciprocal-determinism evinced in the interplay of tradition and individual talent, also includes the influences of the artist's soul. So here's my grand formula: artist, individuals, empirical world, mimetic fiction and any other form of art, God, and any other existence-based relationship conceivable, all flow through one another in a great web of relationships, influencing and being influenced, in a continual organic metamorphoses, as a form of literature (P2C2E?). Once conceiving existence in this way, it is no longer difficult for me to tangibly understand that in the beginning was the Word and the Word became flesh. Works of fiction, express an artist's language-based relationship to the universal-text. This is why an understanding of tradition, contributes so beautifully to works of art.