From Pepperland to Alifbay: The Influence of "Yellow Submarine" on Rushdie's "Haroun and the Sea of Stories"

In Rushdie's 1990 novel, Haroun's journey from "the saddiest of cities" to the ocean of the stories is full of fantastic elements that remind the reader both of Oriental and Western fables, and of contemporary examples of the fantastic, from Italo Calvino's fiction to Terry Gilliam's cinema to George Dunning's Yellow Submarine, a 1968 cartoon film whose main characters were the four Beatles, travelling across the seas, in order to bring music and colours back to Pepperland, a merry country reduced to silence and sadness by the ruthless Blue Meanies. In this essay, the universe of Haroun with its multifarious stream of stories is also compared with topoi and icons of psychedelic graphics, first of all Aldridge's illustrations for the Book of the Beatles' Songs (1969). Written during the darkest days of the fatwa, Haroun and the Sea of Stories appears in this light as a sort of late 60s hymn to fantasy and imagination as the only weapons to defeat tyranny and totalitarism