Salman Rushdies novel Midnights Children is one of the most acclaimed books to emerge from Indian Diaspora. At once the personal tale of the books narrator, Saleem Sinai, it is also the story of Indias creation; the ups and downs of Sinais life echo the rise and fall of India. Midnights Children is perhaps Rushdies greatest work, winner of both the Booker and Booker of Bookers prizes, and the range of styles and meanings within the novel have caused it to be described by some theorists as: at once an autobiographical bildungsroman, a picaresque fiction, a political allegory, a topical satire, a comic extravaganza, a surrealist fantasy, and a daring experiment in form and style (Naik and Narayan, 2001, page 39). In the course of the novel, all these features are employed to undermine the author, the history he offers, and even the nature of fiction-writing itself.
This essay will begin by considering some of the themes of the novel, and the stylistic approach of Rushdies postmodernism, it will then move onto an examination of Saleem, the narrator and protagonist of the story; his story-telling, his physical body, and his history being the source of much of the disturbance of regular authorship found in the book. This will naturally lead on to a discussion of how Midnights Children destabilises the notions of historiography, authenticity, and the reliability of the author/narrator. A conclusion will then consider whether the novel can be regarded as revealing an unstable subject.
Rushdies Midnights Children is set in India, in the years between 1915 to 1978; the largest portion of the novel concentrates upon the years after Independence (1947). The author recounts the story of his ancestors, which are later shown to not be his ancestors, in the thirty-two years before his birth, and the thirty-one years after. Saleem is born at midnight on the fifteenth of August, 1947 (hence the title), at the exact moment of Indian liberation; this mystical connection between land and individual I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history (Rushdie, 1981, page 3) means that Saleem develops a supernatural power, as do all of the children born at the same time: Indian history since independence, according to this text, is supernaturally linked to the fates of the children born at the same time as the state itself; midnight on August 15, 1947 (McHale, 95). Within this first book are the keys to the narrative: family, magical events, and India and her history.
The themes of the novel; family history, supernatural events, and politics and its effects on individuals lives, might bear comparison with Gabriel Garcia Marquezs novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. As with Marquezs work, the themes weave around each other, combining to make the other themes acceptable to the reader; these themes challenge the authoritarian figure of the writer-as-omnipotent. In Marquezs novel, the supernatural is described as a normal event; in Midnights Children, the supernatural is an extra-ordinary event which is created in extraordinary circumstances - in addition, the latter novel also describes ordinary events as unusual or magical; for example when Saleem describes his grandfathers nose-bleed: Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth...three drops of blood plopped out of his left nostril, hardened instantly in the brittle air and...transformed into rubies (Rushdie, 4). Despite the regular intrusion of magical realism into the novel, most readers take the view that family history and the political aspects are most important and obvious, choosing to mention other aspects, and ignoring the supernatural features, for example Jung Zus inclusion of an authorial style within the themes of the novel: Midnight's Children centers on three interrelated themes: the quest for personal/familial origins, the mockery of the idea of authenticity, and the crisis of the nascent Third World nation (Zu, 2000, 61). Nevertheless, as a major part of the story is based around Saleems use of his supernatural powers, the magical-realist aspect of the novel should not be discounted.
The mockery of authenticity, which Zu describes above, has its origins in the postmodernist movement. This movement emphasised the fallibility of theories such as Marxism, Freudianism, or Humanism; the latter in particular lead to a movement among writers in which their narrators and characters are seen as unreliable - they lie, they mislead, and are proven wrong. Linda Hutcheon, the theorist of postmodern fiction, describes it as Fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political (Hutcheon, page 5). Rushdies novel fits this description very well; postmodernism also challenges the stability of subjects by removing the building-blocks of identity. Removing family, and history from characters means that they become unstable, a fact which is often accompanied by surrealistic or magical-realist symbols, suggesting that fictional reality itself is destabilized.
Within the world of postmodernism, nothing is quite what it seems to be: Narrators in fiction become either disconcertingly multiple and hard to locate...or resolutely provisional and limited - often undermining their own seeming omniscience (as in Salman Rushdies Midnights Children) (Hutcheon, 11). This is demonstrated in the first book of the novel, where Rushdies narration moves backwards and forwards in time, with events from future decades taking place during the earliest (historical) part of the story. The notion of a story that starts at the beginning and goes on to the end is undermined in postmodernism - often the story starts before the beginning, or begins with the end and works backwards. This also serves to remove the subject from a stable setting; when a beginning has no beginning, the characters themselves are constantly in flux. Naturally, this disturbance of time and story-telling convention breaks down the authenticity of both narrator and author. A novel such as Midnights Children, which deals directly with history and politics, but that is also fragmented and surrealistic, undermines the very notion of historical truth: The postmodernists fictionalize history, but by doing so they imply that history itself may be a form of fiction (McHale, 1996, 96).
The postmodernist ideal most clearly featured in Rushdies novel is that of an unstable authenticity. Much has been made by critics of the unreliable narration of the protagonist, Saleem, in this novel. Saleem gets numerous historical events and dates muddled up as he tries desperately to convince his readers that he is at the centre of India's history' (DCruz). The comments which Rushdie has added to the book (as an introduction) create further ambiguity about the infallibility of the author. There seems to be a curious error in the dates given by Rushdie who states that the novel was Published in London in early April 1981 (Rushdie, xvi), but then says The fact that Midnights Children is still of interest twenty five years after it first appeared (Rushdie, xix) and dates the introduction to December 25th, 2005 (ibid). It could simply be a mistake on his part, but considering that his novel features several similar historical errors by his narrator, its certainly a strange coincidence. It would be fitting for Rushdie to make a deliberate mistake, in order to further emphasise an authors postmodern loss of authenticity.
The traditional literary convention holds that the narrator is generally truthful and frequently omniscient. Within Midnights Children, this is not the case: at one point, the narrator actually confesses that he has lied: To tell the truth, I lied about Shivas death. My first out-and-out lie - although my presentation of the Emergency in the guise of a six-hundred-and-thirty-five-day-long midnight was perhaps excessively romantic....Thats why I fibbed...I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in ones memories (Rushdie, 619). Although this is at the end of the novel, Rushdie repeatedly undermines his own characters through making obvious errors (although how obvious these errors may be to an American audience, or even a European one, is not clear), for example making Saleem say Whats real and whats true arent necessarily the same (Rushdie, 103). Through this device, Rushdie makes the reader question every detail of the narrative, a rather curious event in an historical novel. This is justified by the fact that both reader and writer know that the story is made up; the reader understands that a novel removes itself from the truth, and travels parallel to it; the stability lies in the fixed nature of the fiction; however, when this fragments or is removed, the narrative subject becomes unstable.
The central character of the novel is Saleem Sinai, as noted above. He is both narrator and protagonist, even before his birth (or rather the birth of the son who he replaces). The reader learns a great deal about his family before his birth: since heredity is an essential element in Identity, some of these ordeals are repeated from generation to generation in the narrative which opens with the protagonist's grandfather and ends with his son (Naik and Narayan, 40); very much like traditional tales where the hero is introduced by a thorough listing of his ancestry; and then it is taken away by this Saffron swaddled me as, thanks to the crime of Mary Pereira, I became the chosen child of midnight, whose parents were not his parents, whose son would not be his son (Rushdie, 157). Here, Rushdie has cut at the very core of the narrators authenticity: his identity. Despite the fact that the first book is wholly concentrated upon Saleems family history, the ancestors that make him a suitable hero, Rushdie strips this away; and now he is an unknown quantity: Saleem, who had for a long time hidden from the readers which of Aadam Aziz three daughters was his mother, reveals now, more than 100 pages in the book, to the readers another secret regarding his descent - it turns out that Saleem is not actually the offspring of Ahmed and Amina Sinai, but at the moment of confusion in the hospital, one of the nurses switched the son of the Sinais with another child as an act of loyalty to her radical suitor. (Zova, 2003, chapter 1). Even his name is not authentic, and his identity is divided between his real name and his assumed one - nothing is authentic: Identity is in turn, shown as a sham, as mistaken and confused, subjected to oblivion, fractured, dwarfed and reduced to animal level; as barren, sterile and totally lost (Naik and Narayan, 40). With this device, Rushdie essentially shatters his narrator, fragmenting him as easily as the narrative had been fragmented before. It should not be surprising that Padma, the female who represents the reader, responds with anger to this announcement, feeling tricked: All the time Padma wails angrily, you tricked me...Im no monster. Nor have I been guilty of trickery. I provided clues... (Rushdie, 158).
Although Saleem argues that he is no monster, in fact the narrative shows how fragile his body is, and he becomes deformed during the process of telling his story: The chutnification of history in Midnights Children turns on the actually body of the male subject...Saleem loses part of a finger and a piece of his scalp and hair (Hutcheon, 163). This can be seen as part of the fragmentation of the narrators identity and authenticity. His bodily injuries are also a vital part of his narration: at one point he reveals that he has suffered a head injury which has resulted in the loss of his memory (Rushdie, 477); as narrator, history and authenticity are all unstable, so too is the fictional body: In a novel like Midnights Children, nothing not even the selfs physical body, survives the instability caused by the rethinking of the past (Hutcheon, 118). Saleem is literally torn apart by the narrative.
As a displaced person, with no history beyond that which he can take from his adopted parents, Saleem is a less authoritative figure in the narration: Despite the presence of a single insistent, controlling narrator - a writer who knows he both reports and creates public and private history - the (male) center of this novel is constantly displaced and dispersed (Hutcheon, 1988, page 161-2). By fragmenting and undermining the history of his own narrator, Rushdie also presents the fragmented history of India, who is represented by Saleem, as that of a deliberately switched child: Saleem, who represents the new-born Indian nation is actually a changeling, the son of an Englishman and an Indian woman (Naik and Narayan, 40). As in all mythologies, the changing child is one of immense power, who might save or destroy a family or tribe as it chooses; the changeling child is typically swapped by fairies for one of their own, making Saleem at once narrator and myth - it is interesting that Rushdie leads up to this swap by referring to Jesus Christ: All available evidence, my daughter, suggests that Our Lord Christ Jesus was the most beauteous, crystal shade of pale sky blue (Rushdie, 137), son of a woman married to another man. In an even more blatant mythologizing, Rushdie makes the authentic child, Shiva, into Saleems mortal enemy. That his temporal twin, who he has replaced, becomes his rival is another example of Rushdie mirroring Indian history, this time the partition of Pakistan. In fact, while Saleem is the hero and the personification if India, all of the other Midnights Children are also part of the history of the country: They, and especially their spokesman Saleem, are microcosms of the Indian macrocosm, paralleling or mirroring public history in their private histories (McHale, 95). Without identity, virtually a monster or a changeling, Saleem is destabilized within the narrative; he now has no fixed points, his story is a fiction within the novel, with only his connection to history to keep his character from completely unravelling.
This mirroring of private and public history in the novel has led some critics to suggest that it is possible to mistake the novel for historical fiction (Zu, 61). This confusion of history and fiction is due to the frequent mention of historical changes within the story which seem almost like an academic essay on the events; however, as demonstrated above, Saleem is not a reliable narrator - not even a reliable son - and so his history is also open to challenge. Rushdies history is vital to the events of the story; none of his characters can escape it: In a kind of collective failure of imagination, we learned that we simply could not think our way out of our pasts... (Rushdie, page 158). The pressure of history is such that, when revealed as a flaw, it also adds to the destruction of the narrative authenticity: it would be not difficult to discern that Saleem's re-inscription of the significant historical events represents an individual attempt to critique such grand narratives as essentialist nationalism, nativism, and religious absolutism with critical memories (Zu, 61). Critical memories, moving against the traditions of paternalistic history, challenge and correct it, but instead of combining to make one coherent tale of history, the critical memories destroy authenticity. The search for unity (narrative, historical, subjective) is constantly frustrated (Hutcheon, 162).
By far the most problematical feature of the novel is the way in which the false family history is presented: The connection between the family and the nation in Rushdies novels, especially in Midnights Children has often been viewed as one based on allegory, where both the protagonist and his family function as microcosms which refer to the macrocosm of the nation (Zova, chapter 2); and yet this microcosm is false - suggesting that the macrocosm is also false, and that its origins are not authentic. By suggesting, or allowing Saleem to suggest, that his father is English, Rushdie takes away part of his link to Indian history, further disturbing the character.
It has become obvious from the examples presented that Saleem is not a stable author; his voice, and his memories, destroy the system of history; his knowledge is out of sync with that of everyone else, and: Despite his insistent, male narrative voice, Saleem offers no final point of reference; all he affirms is personal and historical knowledge as perspective (Hutcheon, 162). His relationship with Padma, the novels voice of the reader, is strained because of his inability to confirm history. Saleem is the author, attempting to have a relationship with the reader/Padma; like a reader, Padma edits and comments upon Saleems creation, resisting his attempts to write a story as he chooses: I must interrupt myself. I wasnt going to today, because Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever, like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings (Rushdie, 83). Because he cannot provide his reader with an authentic history, he gives her instead recollections, myths and half-truths: Instead of satisfaction, he offers her [Padma] he offers her sublimation; instead of History, he offers Padma his histories. By overtly producing these histories for her, Saleem subverts both the causality and continuity of what is traditionally conceived of as patriarchal History (Hutcheon, 162-3). The force of Padma, the reader, is enough to make Saleem repeatedly interrupt his own narrative: Nose and knees and knees and nose...listen carefully, Padma; the fellow got nothing wrong! (Rushdie, 114), destroying his narrative voice; this is demonstrated clearly on pages 99-100, where Saleem does not really make clear who is talking, or what part of the conversation is speech: And Zohra, Come back, sisterji! And the oily quiff Why speak for this goonda, Begum Sahiba? This is not right acting And Amina, I know this man. He is a decent type (Rushdie, 100).
Saleems inability to combine the subject within history means that he removes authenticity from his tales; he also takes history into the streets, making a mess of it as he does so: Midnight Children parodies historiography, with its affirmation of scientific impartiality and reliance on the use of dry statistics, which are supposed to create an objective picture of reality, and reveals the underlying selectioning process by which events are turned into facts (Zova, chapter 2). As noted above, Saleem is unable to establish his authority over the narrative, which changes and develops without him, and he even admits to lying to the reader: his claims are frequently contested even within his own narrative: for example, he feels compelled to announce that he lied about Shivas death, and that meteorological data do not support his description of the Emergency as a continuous night (MC 443). All this underlines his unreliability as a witness; but unusually, he is a witness who confesses his own subjectivity (Zova, chapter 2). Despite this lack of control, despite undermining himself, and even despite lying, the reader does not abandon him - the lying confession occurs thirty-odd pages before the end of the novel. This suggests that, as unreliable as Saleem is, he retains an internal, authoritative voice, and that despite being unstable as a character, his repeated fictions are not part of the greater fiction of the novel.
In conclusion, the evidence suggests that Midnights Children challenges traditional ideas of identity and self, extrapolating from that to question the very existence of a social identity from which order might emerge. By following a postmodern tradition, which undermines the narrative in order to expose flaws in theories and systems, Rushdie creates a narrator with identity and history, only to demolish both and leave nothing in its place. By demonstrating that identity and history are potentially fictional creations, Rushdie forces the reader to rethink established traditions; this of course threatens the stability of the subject, removing what gives them form and body, and leaving a gap to be filled by a flawed narrative. In this book, the subject is not one form, but a multiple of shifting bodies, perhaps loosely tied to history, literary tradition, or geography, but ultimately torn free of such bonds, and left to exist beyond these systems.
Works Cited
DCruz, Jason R. (date unknown) Death, Mutation and Rebirth: the Migrant in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie
Evans, Fred (2004) Multi-voiced Society: Philosophical Nuances of Rushdies Midnights Children Florida Journal of International Law September 2004
Hutcheon, Linda (1988) The Politics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction London, Routledge, 1988
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