Salman Rushdie · Imaginary Homelands

I want to argue a paradox that the myth asserts: that the origins, liveliness, and durability of cultures require that there be space for figures whose function is to uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on.

I’ve always remembered something you—something Winston Smith says in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when he begins writing his ill-fated journal on that beautiful cream-coloured paper. “For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn … How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature

Imagination comes alive in its struggles with the reality of the material world and humans with their own purposes, characters and interests. Contrary to the assumption of the Romantics, this kind of imagination always mutates as it becomes actualised, transforming through its interaction with the world of reality, like a chemical forming new compo