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Memory as Resistance In Popular Literature:
A Study of ‘Errata’ in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Alfin Davis
M.A. English IVth Semester
St.Thomas’ College, Thrissur
ABSTRACT
Salman Rushdie’s 1981 book Midnight’s Children which deals with India's transition
from British colonialism to independence and the partition of British India, garnered much
attention with its winning of the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981.
Its enduring popularity saw the book receive the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993 and “Best of
Booker” prize in 2008 by public vote to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary.
This paper proposes to examine the role of the unreliable narrator or ‘errata’ in Midnight’s
Children viz, the protagonist Saleem Sinai, in constructing a resistance to the so called “metanarratives”. This paper serves as a case study in the use of the unreliable narrator in popular
literature and also brings to the forefront the question of how ‘memory’ operates within popular
culture providing a new perspective with which to approach history. It also intends to provide
valuable insight into the way in which memory serves as a tool for the construction of a nonEurocentric cultural and historical narrative. It is an act of resistance or the beginning of such an
act, towards the authoritarian and logo-centric master narratives of European culture thus
creating a collective memory for a community. The history of a community is oftentimes the
history of its collective memory and it helps in constructing its present and future realities. It’s
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often this collective memory that matters to the uneducated, ignorant and class conscious
community and not the recorded, written history.
Keywords: unreliable narrator, resistance, memory, history, reality
Memory and its usage as a narrative tool in literature, especially novels is a hot topic of
research nowadays. But it is not being researched merely as a narrative tool. It is often connected
to psychological, physiological, ontological and philosophical questions that man has been
seeking answers to since time immemorial. The use of this technique has seen much proliferation
since the modern era. The technique which authors use in order to fully exploit the complex
machinations of human memory is termed in narratology as the “unreliable narrator” or “errata”.
The ‘unreliable narrator’ is practically inspired by human beings themselves.
The term was first coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction.
Although the unreliable narrator has been in literature for a long time it was Booth who outlined
it and gave it a definitive form. Booth discusses unreliability in relation to the concept of the
implied author and to that of narrative distance. In Booth’s view, a narrator is “reliable when he
speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s
norms), unreliable when he does not” (158–59). If the reader discovers unreliability as encoded
by the implied author for the purpose of generating irony, she/he experiences a narrative distance
between the narrator and the implied author, and a secret communion occurs between the latter
and the reader behind the narrator’s back (300–09).
According to M. H. Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms:
The fallible or unreliable narrator is one whose perception, interpretation, and evaluation
of the matters he or she narrates do not coincide with the implicit opinions and norms
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manifested by the author, which the author expects the alert reader to share. (168)
Memory is an important aspect in the lifespan of a human being. But using memory as a
tool in literary narrative is a more conscious effort rather than unintentional. Scholes and Kellogg
adds further insight to our understanding of the concept of unreliable narrator by contending
that it requires a fairly thoroughgoing conception of reliability before it can be recognized and
exploited in fiction. They saw its frequent use in modern fiction as a reflection of the author’s
desire to make the reader participate in the act of creation (265).
Another perspective for looking at memory is by redefining ‘history’ as being created by
memory. Here ‘history’ is not used merely in the traditional sense of the word. It takes into
account the historiography, the historicity and historical discourse. The historical process is
sometimes supplemented by memory but sometimes the authenticity of the history- the history of
the victors and the marginalized- comes into question when one takes into account the
imperfections of memory.
Another angle from which to investigate the question of ‘errata’ would be that of the
postmodern, post colonial condition. We have already seen that the unreliable narrator is an
opportunity for the reader to take part in the act of creation, to explore the possibility of
multiplicity of narratives instead of settling for a grand narrative. The meta-narratives are
replaced by ‘micro-narratives’ which are partial, fragmented and incomplete. This incomplete,
partial and fragmentary nature is what we see in the unreliable narrator-the narrator that gives
space to an alternative reality which is dictated by subjectivity and epistemological freedom
instead of the violent, tyrannical narratives which follow a totalizing and overarching pattern
which appear to ignore the details and experiences of differences in their effort to construct
patterns which make sense of the world on a grand scale.
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Salman Rushdie is a post-modern writer, who when discussing his own works says that
the imagination is the driving force to synthesis or transformation. It is the imagination that can
liberate us from the simple facts of history, and for Rushdie there are no unqualified facts or an
absolute fiction, since the two categories overlap and leak into each other (Gant 3). Midnight's
Children is a 1981 book by Salman Rushdie that deals with India's transition from British
colonialism to independence and the partition of British India. It is considered an example
of postcolonial literature and magical realism. It garnered much attention with its winning of
the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. Its enduring popularity saw
the book receive the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993 and “Best of Booker” prize in 2008 by public
vote to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary. The New York Times said about
the book: “the literary map of India has to be redrawn…Midnight’s Children sounds like a
continent finding its voice.” The importance of Midnight’s Children lies in it being a faithful
representation of the Indian culture and its psyche. It has managed to bring out the disasters and
triumphs of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.
The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual
historical events as with historical fiction. Although Midnight’s Children is narrated from first
person point of view, the narrator, Saleem Sinai who is thirty one, does a parallel narration of
both individual and national history. The novel begins with Saleem’s description of the time and
day on which he was born. He uses a conversational tone and his narration runs very fast as he
wants to record his life before he loses his memory completely. Sinai is well aware of the
“imperfections” of his memory and exclaims, “...in words and pickles, I have immortalized my
memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the
shadows of imperfection” (Rushdie, MC 642). In his article “The Reliability of the Narrator in
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Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of
Solitude” Ronan McFadden explains how Saleem’s narrative moves beyond his contro,l that
there are lot of errors in his narration which he openly acknowledges:
I am racing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible, and overstatements, and
jarring alterations in tone; I’m racing the cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have
already been made, and that, as my decay accelerates […] the risk of unreliability grows
(Rushdie, MC 270).
Rushdie explicitly states in his collection of essays Imaginary Homelands that the
mistakes of his narrator Saleem "are the mistakes of a fallible memory". He admits that he made
his narrator suspect his narration because his attempt in Midnight's Children was primarily a
novel of memory, and his India was mainly a version, "and no more than one version of all the
hundreds of millions of possible versions"( Rushdie, IH 10). History, in the view of Rushdie, is
characterized by ambiguity. He states:
Facts are hard to establish, and capable of being given many meanings. Reality is built
on our prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and
knowledge. The reading of Saleem's unreliable narration might be, I believe, a useful
analogy for the way in which we all, everyday, attempt to 'read' the world (25).
In the course of the novel, he declares that in spite of the mistakes he made in his narrative, he
still believes:
‘I told you the truth,’ I say yet again, ‘Memory’s truth, because memory has its own
special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies
also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent
version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than
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his own.’(Rushdie, MC 292)
Saleem reminds the reader that individual perception as created by memory is an illusion
that ultimately comprises a truth for that individual. Rushdie presents this new reality as a reality
created by memory, in which one holds on to that which creates meaning. Re-imagining history
means filling in the gaps of a person’s memory, in a manner that may or may not concur with
recorded fact. Saleem describes the inevitable gaps and errors in memory and proceeds to reimagine his history in a manner that provides meaning to him. To emphasize this point, Rushdie
enables Saleem’s narration to catalog the history of Saleem’s grandparents through memories
that cannot possibly exist due to his forthcoming birth, 32 years in the future. In his narcissistic
style of narrative, Saleem reminds the reader that “Most of what matters in your life takes place
in your absence” (Rushdie, MC 328). Saleem consistently reminds the reader of the necessity of
re-imagining history in order to have a concept of one’s own past and even re-imagines the
points from which he was absent.
In the novel Saleem draws attention to the error he makes regarding the elections of 1957
and the assassination of Gandhi, but significantly adds "in my India, Gandhi will continue to die
at the wrong time" (230). Saleem’s mind contains wrong pictures and he is careless with facts.
For instance he stresses that he is a Muslim who has a great knowledge of the Hindu tradition.
According to Saleem, Ganesha took down the Ramayana from the poet Valmiki. But the truth is
that it was Vyasa who dictated the Mahabharata to Ganesha (Rushdie IH 22). Rushdie's
justification of fantasy is that India itself was: "quite imaginary", a "mass fantasy", "the new
myth — a collective fiction in which anything was possible...." (Rushdie MC 150). The narrator
even confesses to the reader that he had concocted the section on Shiva's death:
To tell the truth, I lied about Shiva's death. My first out-and-out lie — although my
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presentation of the Emergency in the guise of a six-hundred-and-thirty-five-day- long
midnight was perhaps excessively romantic, and certainly contradicted by the
available meteorological data (619).
Rushdie states that his aim with the novel changed as he wrote it. In the beginning he
tried to reshape the lost times, the India of his youth, but he found that time and migration had
“placed a double filter” (Rushdie IH 24) between him and the subject. As he continued writing
the novel, he found that what was really interesting was “the process of filtration itself. So my
subject changed, was no longer a search for lost time, had become the way in which we remake
the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool.”(24) For instance, when escaping
from the Sundarbans, Saleem claims that they were carried out by a giant tidal wave, but right
after that, he writes that according to the weather forecasts, there was no tidal wave in that part of
the country that year. Despite this, Saleem continues to claim to having been born out of the
jungle on that fictional wave. His truth is too important to him to be changed by a simple weather
report. “It is memory’s truth, he insists, and only a madman would prefer someone else’s version
to his own”. (Rushdie IH 25)
In Origin and Originality in Rushdie’s Fiction, Martine Hennard Dutheil points to the
central idea of Midnight’s Children as “the power of fiction to capture and invent a new reality”
(10). In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie undermines conventional forms of history, narrative, and
truth. Rushdie presents a fragmented view of history that stems from the imperfect and partial
nature of memory, as evinced in Saleem’s narcissistic narration. The fragmentary history gains
emphasis from a narcissistic narration that mimics memory through its orality and destabilizes
not only language but also the idea of recorded history as the one true history.
Inviting the reader to participate in the discovery of alternative truths, the narration
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exemplifies Hutcheon’s concept of the ‘narcissistic narrative’ as it undermines conventional
forms and suggests memory and individual perception as a means of grasping a reality. The limit
of the idea of alternate truths resides in memory and how one manipulates that memory. One
may choose to alter memory by the definition of others or one may retain that which provides the
best meaning. Because memory is alterable, both inwardly and outwardly, it is imperfect.
Inwardly, one may misremember an event yet the sense of reality memory gives to that false
event makes it as valid as the recorded truth. Outwardly, one may alter memory according to the
recorded truth of history. However, individual perception and participation allows Saleem, as
well as the individual, to accept that which makes the most meaning to that person. Rushdie
invites the reader to analyze the function of memory and the definition of historical truth.
Rushdie is trying to tell us that this is reality nowadays, to be more precise, in this
postmodern post colonial world. Rebuilding the past through one’s own memory is the best one
can get close to reality. It is built not upon unchallenged facts and verifiable, quantifiable
descriptions of events, but upon our prejudices, misconceptions and mistakes as well as on our
perceptiveness and knowledge. The unreliable narration of Salem Sinai might be taken as a
useful analogy for the way in which we try to construct our own reality in this imperfect,
fragmented and error-ridden world. The memories of Saleem which reconstructs his past life is
not only significant as private memories but as collective memories. Sometimes these collective
memories become part of history. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is both a pointer and a
reminder to the operations of history and its errors. The history of a community is oftentimes the
history of its collective memory and it helps in constructing its present and future realities. It is
often this collective memory that matters to the community and not the recorded-written history.
For them, memory is the reality even if it’s biased, mistaken and challenged by something
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scientific and authentic.
The narrative landscape of MC echoes the postcolonial and postmodern concerns.
Memory serves as a tool for the construction of a non- Eurocentric cultural and historical
narrative. The narrative provides an alternative version of history, albeit an erratic one, a history
that ratifies the feelings of the victimized. It is an act of resistance or to be more specific, the
beginning of such an act, towards the authoritarian master narratives of European culture. It also
acts as a rebuilding tool of the past that is the ‘home’ for the diasporic writer.
Memory is the healing balm for postcolonial trauma. In Imaginary Homelands Rushdie
reflects upon the process of writing the novel Midnight’s Children which was set in India and
Pakistan while living in north London. The narration in the novel was an attempt from Rushdie’s
part to restore the childhood home, distant both in time and space, to the present. Speaking of
Indian migrants Rushdie writes that ‘our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means
that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing we lost; that we will in short, create
fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the
mind(10). Memory helps the migrant create an in-between position in a world where the
experience and legacy of migration are altering the ways in which individuals think of their
relation to place.
The reader who follows closely the workings of the mind of the unreliable narrator
couldn’t help but gain a new understanding of how memory works. It gives one the idea that
memory is not merely a physiological function or in the least a standalone cognitive process,
rather it works in conjunction with imagination and other such faculties of the brain to construct
an individual reality, a reality which is not only valid with respect to the perceptive capabilities
of human beings, but which could carve out an existential niche for the individual thus making
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sense of his past, present and the future. This memory might be a false one, but in a world where
distinguishing between false and true memories is impossible, where no one could have an
objective idea of reality , where memory is unreliable in the sense that it is constantly
reimagined, created and destroyed by our psyche, the truths created by our memory is the only
ray of hope. This might be viewed as a pessimistic and foolish notion. Some might even argue
that one could access reality and not rely on one’s own memory. But to understand the
importance of memory one need only to look at history. Memories forge the human psyche,
which we know is the motive force behind all human actions which in turn becomes memory.
We have seen the memories of the narrator in MC operate in a way in which it protects
him from traumatic incidents of the past. It creates a reality which makes them feel good. In
other words it gives importance to other versions of reality. The narrator is mindful of the fact
that their versions of reality might be different from others. He even doubts his memories
frequently. But this doesn’t discourage him from creating a reality from his own memories. The
narrator is implicitly in support of the opinion that only a fool would prefer the literal truth to the
remembered version. The operations of memory as evident in the use of the unreliable narrator
creates a site of resistance against the generalization, erasure and bowdlerization of history, and
acts as a last resort, an unencumbered space for the less fortunate common folk as well as the
popular culture that they represent.
References
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2009. Print.
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Blaise, Clark. “A Novel of India’s Coming of Age”. New York Times 19 April 1981. Print.
Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1983. 2nd
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Dutheil, Hennard Martine. Origin and Originality in Rushdie’s Fiction. Switzerland:Peter
Lang, 1999. Print.
Gant, Damian. Salman Rushdie. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd,1999. Print.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier
UP, 1980.Print.
Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. London: Vintage, 1992. Print.
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and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Opticon 1826 8 (2008):
n.pag. Web. 10 Feb 2015.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Vintage, 2010. Print.
---. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage, 1981. Print.
Scholes, Robert., James Phelan, Robert Kellog. The Nature of Narrative. New York: OUP,
2006. Print.