"Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts"
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Rushdie is naming the dirty secret of storytelling: once a tale catches, it stops reporting the world and starts running it. “Legends make reality” flips the usual hierarchy. Facts are supposed to be bedrock; legends are supposed to be decorative. He’s pointing to the opposite dynamic in public life, where a compelling narrative can recruit believers, justify policies, and harden into “common sense” long after evidence objects.
The word “useful” is the tell. Rushdie isn’t praising myth as truer-than-true in some mystical way; he’s describing its practical power. Legends compress complexity into a portable script: heroes and villains, origins and destinies, a reason you can repeat at dinner or in a speech. That utility makes them sticky, and stickiness becomes authority. The subtext is political as much as literary: national founding myths, religious stories, revolutionary romances, even media narratives about crime or “decline” all create emotional permission for real-world actions. The legend doesn’t need to be accurate; it needs to be actionable.
Context matters with Rushdie. Writing out of postcolonial history, migration, and the culture wars around sacred stories, he understood how myth can be both shelter and weapon. His own life, shadowed by the consequences of contested narratives, underscores the line’s bite: stories are never just stories. They are infrastructure for identity, and infrastructure is what reality is built on. Facts can be disputed; legends organize the disputants.
The word “useful” is the tell. Rushdie isn’t praising myth as truer-than-true in some mystical way; he’s describing its practical power. Legends compress complexity into a portable script: heroes and villains, origins and destinies, a reason you can repeat at dinner or in a speech. That utility makes them sticky, and stickiness becomes authority. The subtext is political as much as literary: national founding myths, religious stories, revolutionary romances, even media narratives about crime or “decline” all create emotional permission for real-world actions. The legend doesn’t need to be accurate; it needs to be actionable.
Context matters with Rushdie. Writing out of postcolonial history, migration, and the culture wars around sacred stories, he understood how myth can be both shelter and weapon. His own life, shadowed by the consequences of contested narratives, underscores the line’s bite: stories are never just stories. They are infrastructure for identity, and infrastructure is what reality is built on. Facts can be disputed; legends organize the disputants.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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