Midnight’s Children
Publication
Published in 1981—coincided with the launch of the era of poco
lit/studies in the West
M’s C--here was a text in rich, symbiotic relationship with theory at the
time—nation as imagined community; nation and narration (as a
narrative construct)
--“giving voice to a whole subcontinent”—seen as controversial and
elitist; publishing and marketing phenomenon; Booker Prize
--Second generation of postcolonial writers—a new cosmopolitanism,
out of its provincial connotation (earlier writers from India—RK
Narayan, Raja Rao: realism to magical realism; country to city)
globalization of Indian English literature linked to global literary trends
and tastes, and in turn setting them
--Rushdie himself born in undivided India; when his family moved to
Pakistan, he chose to come to Britain, as a schoolboy
Nation and Narration:
Nationness: constructed through complex strategies of cultural
identification and discursive address (the nation; the people)
Nation achieved through narrative strategy
The idea of India: p. 6 (discovered by Europeans)—colonial and
postcolonial histories: how India becomes a nation
Narrator, Saleem Sinai, 31 years of age
p. 3 “handcuffed to history”
National allegory, but is it?
Nation and narration: pp. 343-344
“As a people, we are obsessed with correspondences… It is a sort of
national longing for form… forms lie hidden within reality; that meaning
reveals itself only in flashes”
Origins:
Saleem: spoilt at the origins; no pure, uncontaminated beginnings;
mistaken identity
Unitary vs. diversity—unassimilable heterogeneity (nation split within
itself)
Partition: the nation splitting up; 1971: Pakistan splitting up;
Bangladesh its narcissistic wound
The nation’s margin/both inside and outside
love stronger than blood (345)
Time, History, Memory
Nation of forgetters; “corruption of clocks” (38)
“mysteriously handcuffed to history” (3)
Blandly saluting clocks and their occult tyrannies (4)
Interrupting official history
Tai: continuous mythic history (superstition, magic, prohphecy)—Christ
to Mughal times to indep.
S’s holy relic/ruins of the past: p. 350 top: a globe, a letter, a photograph
Umbilical cords
p. 28/29: the perforated sheet; the leather bag; the stetoscope inside the
trunk
The everyday and the epochal—disjunctive time of the nation’s
modernity
Narrative action opens in the middle of India’s history (1958), when
Saleem is 11
Contemporary South Asia: 30 years after independence
1915 (gf 25 yers old): A) Grandfather’s secular generation: loss of
religious faith replaced by a secular faith in the nation
Figure of exile
Gf—home: utterly enclosed, hostile environment: p. 5: “Now, returning,
he saw through travelled eyes…” R
Wracked by ambiguity; demolishing certainties; search for meaning
secularised
Secular geography of the nation evoked in gf’s travels from Kashmir to
Agra
1919—Jallianwala Bagh massacre—gf 29 years old to Quit India
movement: gf 52 years old
b) 1947: Saleem Sinai’s birth/India’s independence and Partition
Before, during and after Saleem’s birth
p. 343: Indo-Chinese war—loss of innocence and optimism
c) The end of the Nehruvian project—
the Emergency
Kashmir: the Paradisal land now
the site of disintegration—p. 5: valley overrun by soldiers
The nation’s margins: cognitive advantage; minority, marginal,
emergent
Questioning the settled nature of nationalism
Narrative techniques: modernist and postmodernist
Narration: an excess of “intertwined lives events miracles places
rumours, so dense commingling of the improbable and the mundane”
(4)
“everything has shape if you look for it. There is no escape from form”
(271)—modernist
Saleem’s claim “to a place at the centre of things” (285); his narcissisms
reflecting the collapse of centrality
His fear of absurdity (4)
Secrets; confessional mode, alibi for linearity? Padma: in the universe of
“what-happened-next”
Cinematic: Real life better than pictures (53)
Space-time articulation: the Kolynos ad merging into reality
Bombay talkies: p. 289
Realism vs. fantasy: p. 292; paras 3 and 4
Culinary: flavours leaking into each other; pickled stories
Body/body politic “began to crack” (277):
Saleem’s crumbling body—old before its time; cracking and
disintegrating, deformed
Wholeness versus loss (of his finger)
Fissured: leaking body, out of which history leaks out
History as an “irruption” (61)
Body as container of history: “uncork the body and who knows what
will come tumbling out” (283)
Body both literal and metaphor—history passing through body,
constituting it, as much as vice versa
“buffeted by too much history” (37)
gf’s nose: itching; sensing history; gm breaks out in boils under her veil;
Rani’s white blotches
sinuses being drained out
Gender:
Male story: phallic writing: his other pencil
Gm: got rid of the veil; a businesswoman
Rev Mother: anti-political, holding on to tradition
Rani: political
Padma: down to earth yet her contradictory love of the fabulous
The veiled jamila, like her gm 359
Repression/patriotism
Midnight’s Conference:
Fantasies of power
Leadership questions: “we would have no meaning until we were
destroyed” (273)
Optimism
Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will
Optimism that “what-we-had-in-common” would have finally
outweighed “what-drove-us-apart” with ref to MCC (p. 342); repeated
on p. 348
Bombay, ShangriLa (350)
Karachi never forgiven for not being Bombay (352)
Karachi scene: p. 352-4 vs “the highly spiced noncomformity of
Bombay”
Secular Bombay: business over faith—p. 355
`Rupture/break
1962 war with China
Saleem’s sinuses clear up
Family decides to emigrate to Pakistan—“15 years too late”
Disbanding of the MCC
Leaving childhood behind
Gains sense of smell (of hyprocisy, of vengeance and hate, narrowness),
following trails
Worldliness; presence/absence
The German philosopher Walter Benjamin had the curious notion that
we could change the past. For most of us, the past is fixed while the
future is open. Benjamin thought that the past could be transformed by
what we do in the present. Not literally transformed, of course, since the
one sure thing about the past is that it does not exist.
What Benjamin meant was that how we act in the present can change
the meaning of the past. The past may not literally exist (any more than
the future does), but it lives on in its consequences, which are a vital
part of it.
In one sense, we know more about the French Revolution or the
Stalinist reign of terror than those who were involved in them, because
we know what they led to. With the privilege of hindsight, we can
inscribe these events in a broader narrative, making more sense of them
than Robespierre or Trotsky were ever able to do. The price of this
superior knowledge is impotence. There is no way we can use this
knowledge to undo past catastrophes. We are like men and women
frantically waving at history from a long way off, powerless to intervene
in its crises and convulsions.
Yet we are not entirely impotent. It is up to us to ensure that
Michelangelo and Thomas Mann, say, did not belong to a race that ended
up destroying itself. They themselves, being dead, are powerless to
prevent that tragic denouement, whereas we are not. We can make a
difference to their stories. We cannot undo the fate of those in the past
who fought for justice and were murdered for their pains. But we can
rewrite their narratives by our own actions in the present, and even
give them a classical happy ending.
In this way, Benjamin thought, we could redeem our ancestors after a
fashion.
the past holds vital resources for the renewal of the present. Those who
wipe out the past are in danger of abolishing the future as well. Nobody
was more intent on eradicating the past than the Nazis, who would, like
the Stalinists, simply scrub from historical record whatever they found
inconvenient. The past was as much clay in their hands as the future.
True power is sovereignty over what has already happened, not just the
capacity to determine what will happen next.
In one of his shrewdest sayings, Benjamin remarked that what drives
men and women to revolt against injustice is not dreams of liberated
grandchildren, but memories of enslaved ancestors. It is by turning our
gaze to the horrors of the past, in the hope that we will not thereby be
turned to stone, that we are impelled to move forward.
Benjamin was greatly interested in the work of a fellow Jew, Sigmund
Freud, who also saw remembrance as the key to emancipation. In
Freud's view, human beings are naturally amnesiac animals. It is
forgetfulness that keeps us going. We survive only by repressing a great
deal of unpleasant material from our past. For Freud, it is oblivion that
is natural to us. Remembering is just forgetting to forget. It can be an
extraordinarily painful process, which is one reason why we tend to
avoid it.
There is a parallel here between individuals and nations. Nations
sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being.
Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or
usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can
sovereignty feel secure.
“Adrift in the sea of optimism, we—the nation, my parents, I—floated
blindly towards the reefs”