Midnight,_S_Children

Midnight’s Children as a Postmodern novel No matter how hard one searches, there is no single , unifying definition of postmodernism . As an aesthetic practice, a cultural epoch or philosophy it is plural, fluid and open. Indeed any attempt to define postmodernism immediately undermines and betrays its values , principles and practices. Postmodernism is loose, flexible and contingent. It is possible to declare, with any degree of confidence, only that Postmodernism is a site of conflict, negotiation, and debate. Regarding literature one might say that Postmodernist fiction is an international phenomenon with immense diversity and it is not easy to map Postmodern fictions. Raymond Federman argues in the same vein when he says, in Self- Reflexive Fiction, “it can not be said that these writers ……formed a unified movement for which a coherent theory could be formulated.” Still there had been attempts to chart the Postmodern qualities of literature as has been done by Barry Lewis, in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, “ Some of the dominant features of their postmodernist fictions include: temporal disorder; the erosion of the sense of the time; a pervasive and pointless use of pastiche; a foregrounding of words as fragmenting material signs; the loose association of ideas ; paranoia; and vicious circles or a loss of distinction between logically separate levels of discourse.” John W. Aldridge posits the same idea in The American Novel and the Way We Live Now with a little more vehemence, “ In the fiction of Postmodern writers …….virtually everything and everyone exists in such a radical state of disorder an aberration that there is no way of determining from which conditions in the real world they have been derived or from what standard of sanity they may be said to depart.” Salman Rushdie is undoubtedly one of the major authors of Postmodern fiction as well as an important theoretician whose Haroun and the Sea of Stories , according to Chris- Snipp Walmsley “ provides the third, transient ‘authority , of the postmodern discourse.” Though one may trace a hint of irony in Stuart Sim’s comment in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism on Midnight’s Children, “ As in all of his fictions , Rushdie wears his Postmodernism a little heavily: reality is a sham, or rather a construct – the true reality is the story , the narrative through which and for which we live”, his major novels are always triumphs of Postmodernism revealing an ongoing effort to deconstruct cultural constructs that are inherently violent due to their binary and therefore hierarchical structure. According to Sabrina Hassumani, “ Even though he is not always successful in putting both terms of any binary under erasure , it is his continuous impulse to attempt to do so that places him in Husseyn’s third constellation of Postmodernism”. (Salman Rushdie:a Postmodern reading of his major works” p.17) Further his response to colonizer/colonized binary hooks into Husseyn’s idea of a post modernism of resistance that actively challenges the projects of imperialism, politically and culturally. One might comfortably assert that that Rushdie is a Postmodern writer whose subject is postcolonial moment. Rushdie’s fiction is, in part, a retelling of the history of the subcontinent from a postmodern perspective in which heterogeneity and difference are foregrounded. Linda Hutcheon in A Poetics of Postmodernism:History, theory and fiction, argues that Postmodernist writing is best represented by those works of ‘ historiographic metafiction ‘ which self-consciously distort history. In Midnight’s Childeren the protagonist Saleem Sinai retells the history of his family and in doing so provides an individualized history of the Indian subcontinent itself. The story we receive approximately covers sixty years of India’s pre and postcolonial twentieth century. Saleem who is born during the first hour of Indian independence , actually begins his narrative thirty two years before his birth, telling us about his grandfather , Aadam Aziz. This strategy helps set the stage for an ongoing blurring of time-boundaries throughout the novel. It also gives Rushdie the opportunity to insert a narrative voice other than Saleem’s first person perspective. Thus even though Saleem tells us that his quest throughout the novel is for centrality and meaning , an ongoing alternative narrative voice in the text reveals ‘identity’ to be a construct and ‘meaning’ to be available in versions. As the story progresses we learn that Saleem is not really Aadam Aziz’s grandson:Saleem is switched at birth by the nurse Mary Pereira with Aziz’s biological grandson , Shiva. Saleem turns out to be the illegitimate offspring of Vanita, the wife of a poor Hindu accordionist and Methold, a colonial British who leaves India after the end of the Raj. At Pereira’s pickle factory Saleem writes and reads aloud his story to the illiterate Padma, his friend and coworker. Thus the story we receive is ostensibly the one Saleem has been recalling and retelling. It is only through distorted fragments that one remembers and then recreates the past. Saleem compares the act of remembering to ‘pickling’ which according to Saleem is an ‘impure’ act of love. The implication is here that we are alive because of our constant acts of recreating the world, the reality as we remember it and as we experience it. As history is ‘chutnified’, there are inevitable distortions that arise in the process. This recreating of a Hybrid history, of a “pickling” is to give a certain alteration, “a slight intensification of taste “. In appreciating this very postmodern trait of an altered and recreated as well as re- membered history as seen in Midnight’s Children one needs to remember Barthes’s essay entitled, ‘Myth Today’ in Mythologies where I t is stated that myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things : in it …… “reality is turned inside out , emptied of history and filled with nature.” An entangled web of cracks, disintegration and fragmentation in the narrative as well as in the persona of Saleem is an useful tool handled carefully by Rushdie in achieving the aforesaid quality Factual errors and dubious claims are essential aspects of Saleem’s fantastic narrative. He willfully acknowledges that he misplaced Gandhi’s death, an obviously seminal moment in India’s history, as well as willfully misremembers the date of an election. He frets over the accuracy of his story and worries about future errors he might make. Yet, at the same time, after acknowledging his error, Saleem decides to maintain his version of events, since that’s how they appeared to occur to him and now there can be no going back. Despite its potential historical inaccuracies, Saleem sees his story as being of equal importance as the world’s most important religious texts. This is not only his story but also the story of India. The errors in his story, in addition to casting a shadow of doubt over some of what he claims, point to one of the novel’s essential claims: that truth is not just a matter of verifiable facts. Genuine historical truth depends on perspective—and a willingness to believe. The story is told in a form which resembles the old Indian way of oral storytelling which according to Michael Gorra in After Empire is “ a badly fitting collage” and is often interrupted by Saleem making prophecies and predictions. The story goes back and forth in time, circling the events. The way the story is told , when Saleem picks up stories within story and introduces new characters and new marvels he piles digression upon digression to keep from ever getting to the end,. He wants the reader to go on reading, to be eager to see what happens next. But , he is also afraid that the story will as well as his own cracking body will disintegrate into “tiny, unconstructable pieces”. Saleem claims that, much like his narrative, he is physically falling apart. His body is riddled with cracks, and, as a result, the past is spilling out of him. Saleem is losing his hair, he looses his sinuses and is castrated by the widow and as a result he is disintegrated into six hundred and thirty million fragments which is the same number as of the inhabitants of India when the novel ends in 1978. Saleem repeatedly says that to understand him one needs to swallow a world and he tries to understand his own fragmented identity. Salim’s identity is divided in many layers . When he was born , his biological mother was a Hindu woman and his father a British and later he grows up under the care of a Christian ayah.The father who raises him is a Muslim businessman who becomes white as all the businessmen of India seems to have become after the British left the subcontinent. Since Saleem is a result of many different languages, religions and cultures, his sense of self is contradictory and conflicted. In addition to the narrative and physical fragmentation, India itself is fragmented. Torn apart by Partition, it is divided into two separate countries, with the east and west sections of Pakistan on either side of India. This division is taken even further when East and West Pakistan are reclassified as two separate countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Within India, language marchers agitate for further partitions based upon linguistic lines. New nationalities are created, and with them come new forms of cultural identity that reflect the constant divisions. At the beginning of the novel the episode of perforated sheet sets the tone of the whole experience of the narrative and the narrator. The perforated sheet through which Aadam Aziz falls in love with his future wife performs several different symbolic functions throughout the novel. Unable to see his future wife as a whole, Aadam falls in love with her in pieces. As a result, their love never has a cohesive unity that holds them together. Their love is fragmented, just as their daughter Amina’s attempts to fall in love with her husband are also fragmented. Haunted by the memory of her previous husband, Amina embarks on a campaign to fall in love with her new husband in sections, just as her father once fell in love with her mother. Despite her best attempts, Amina and Ahmed’s love also lacks the completion and unity necessary for genuine love to thrive. The hole of the perforated sheet represents a portal for vision but also a void that goes unfilled. The perforated sheet makes one final appearance with Jamila Singer: in an attempt to preserve her purity, she shrouds herself completely, except for a single hole for her lips. The perforated sheet, in addition to preserving her purity, also reduces to her to nothing more than a voice. The sheet becomes a veil that separates her from the rest of the world and reflects her inability to accept affection. Saleem’s continuous fear about his own disintegration as well as about the fragmentation of his story brings to notice the element of paranoia that is an essential ingredient of some of the major achievements of postmodern fictions. Paranoia ,as stated by Barry Lewis in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism “the threat of total engulfment by somebody else’s system is keenly felt by many of the dramatis personae of Postmodernist fiction.”In case of Saleem the knowledge that his fate is chained to that of his country and people lets him be in a perpetual state of anxiety. Thus he fantastically explains the rash act of mass castration during the emergency period as an attempt by the widow to leave him incapable of spreading his clan. The paranoia might not have led Saleem to total annihilation as has been the case with Billy Pilgrim in The Slaughterhouse five or Randle Mcmurphy in One Flew over the cuckoo’s nest , still it is important enough to get Saleem rather decentered though he pretends to search for a centrality in his life and in his story. Linda Hutcheon observed that postmodern humanity is decentered but one needs to remember that to be decentered is not just to be fragmented as fragmentation still bear the marks of a original unity. Rushdie in Midnight’s Children has not just fragmented the existence of the narrator and the narrative but also had been able to enter into a discomfiting zone where centre remains an unobserved and blurred entity and where an absence of absolute truth marks all exploration of knowledge, about the self as well as about history. …………………………………………………………………………… The Routledge companion to Postmodernism Literary theory and Criticism--------Patricia Waugh. Salman Rushdie: postmodern reading of his major works. –Sabrina Hassumani ( Internet ) Historical truth in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children—Jennifer Santos (internet article) Taking a stance while lacking a centre : Rushdie’s postmodern politics – Kathryn Hume ( internet article)