webs. Your words serve only to spin cocoons around your own irrelevance." [Grimus p. 91] Further, in Grimus the habits that communities adopt to prevent themselves from acknowledging multiplicity gain allegorical representation in the Way of K. The Way of K may be seen as Rushdie probing the Rousseau-influenced theories of man and society that influenced much post-18th century Western travel writing and the modernist influenced literature of 1930s England in particular. In light of this, we can see Rushdie as having produced what Linda Hutcheon terms a "histiographic novel". That is, novels that explore and undermine concepts of stable cultural origins of identity. Like his later work Midnight's Children, with Grimus Rushdie draws attention to the provisional status of his text’s ‘truth’ and thus the provisional status of any received account of reality, by using meta-texts that foreground the unnaturalness and bias of the text’s construction as an entity. For example, Grimus's epilogue includes a quotation from one of its own characters. Thus, the text revolves around the ‘symptoms of blindness which mark its conceptual limits’ rather than the direct expression of didactic insights. Rushdie has argued that "one of the things that have happened in the 20th century is a colossal fragmentation reality". Hence, like Gabriel García Márquez, Grimus incorporates magic realism to transgress distinctions of genres, which mirrors "the state of confusion and alienation that defines postcolonial societies and individuals". Structure One of Grimuss structural devices draws upon Attar of Nishapur's The Conference of the Birds. An allegorical poem that argues "God" to be the transcendental totality of life and reality rather than an entity external to reality. This is a fundamental aspect of Sufism, and Rushdie’s use of it prefigures his exploration of the relation of religion to reality in The Satanic Verses, Shame, East West and a number of his non-fiction works. Both narratives build towards the revelation of the "truth" that waits atop of the Mountain Qâf. The footnote in Virgil's diaries "explains" the use of "K" rather than "Q", which both overtly draws attention to the narrative as a construction, the effects of which are discussed above, and in a quite dark irony prefigures the "Rushdie Affair" when it states that "A purist would not forgive me, but there it is." [Grimus footnote p. 209] The Dante Alighieri Divine Comedy provides the structure for Grimus's exploration of inner dimensions. i.e. a journey through