Midnight's Children

 General Introduction

 "The Perforated Sheet"; "Tick, Tock"

 Personal History and National History

 Saleem's History

 Connections Between the Personal and the Public

 The artist figures aiming at all-inclusiveness

 Women and the people

 Rushdie's migrant identity

 Midnight's Children as a Historiographical Metafiction

 Further Study

(Religious allusions: the rivalry between Saleem and Shiva // that between Brahma and Shiva in one Hindu creation myth; the myth: Brahma created the world when Shiva, who had been assigned the task, went into a thousand-year abstinence.  . . .  Shiva returns to destroy the world with fire, angered by Brahma's pre-emptive creation.  When he is finally appeased, he breaks off his linga (that is, castrate himself) and plants it.

The myth is important to Midnight's Children not only because it suggests the aesthetic competitionbetween Rushdie's sources.  It imagines thecompetition between Shiva and Saleem to be one between 'the two valid forms of creation'.  Brahma, as we know, is the god who dreams the world.  Shiva, we learn, is the god who allows it to exist by declining to use his immeasurable power for destroying it.  (Brennan 113)

The author, too, imagines India into existence. . .

the union of Padma and Shiva, and the subsequent bearing of their elephant-headed child Ganesh.
"It is perhaps important to point out in this context that the novel has been read by its Indian audience as being a book unmistakably written by an author with a Muslim upbringing, conveying 'the sensibility of Islamic alienation from the rest of India' (Brennan 109)

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his narration--
associative and accumulative,
foretelling  -- e.g. his family nose 8-9

A. The personal and the national: the relationships between Saleem, his family and the national history
(See a table of parralels between personal and national history)
Saleem as a swallower of lives; contains within him "630 million particles of oblivious dust" (37).
B. the narrative method

beginning of an "autobiography"--where?

associative development--why?; digressions (or overplotting)  e.g. p. 10; 13

the use of Padma

hole--Aziz's nose and the perforated sheet; Pay attention to the uses of "holes" and their symbolic meanings;
 associated with blood and snot (rubies and diamonds)

nose --  the grandfather's

pickle

juxtapostion of the intellectual (chamcha) vs. the People: e.g. Aziz vs. boatman Tai; Saleem vs. Padma 

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• Saleem's view of the relationships between his story and history: p. 285-86

  
   

  • the other links between the personal and the public: leitmotifs--nose (his grandfather's and his own), white skin (his father, Rani's, Indian merchants', and Saleem's), blood (his sister's, the rioters', Mary's blush)
• Saleem's assumption of responsibility:for major national events
  e.g. a.  the partition of the state of Bombay
           "not only did I overthrow a government--I also consigned a president to exile" 349
  "With the fate of the nation in my hands, I shifted condiments and cutlery..." 348
  b. the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 --"the elimination of my benighted family from the face of the earth."
  c. Nehru's death as all my fault too 334
  d. Jamila's fall was, as usual, all my fault.  470
  e. the purpose of the State of Emergency--the smashing of the MC p.510
   
• the critics' views on MC's history and national history--
  • R "Midnight Children and Shame." p. 3) Rushdie claims that his work is not allegory. Instead of using symbol, he uses leitmotif: which "form a kind of non-rational network of connections in the book. ...[e.g.] a sheet with a hole in it, a silver spittoon, a game of snakes and ladders, a hand with a pointing finger, ...these things have very little meaning in themselves. The meaning of the leitmotif is the sum total of the incidents in which it occurs."
  • Neil Ten Kortennar Ariel 1995 26.2 "'Midnight's Children' and the Allegory of History"
    Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India
    --make metaphors historians use "playfully …}literal." E.g. hole, anti-Partition Muslim swept under the carpet,

    "The metaphors underlying the literal narrative of history'history as the record of a body's growth, as the detection of a hidden original crime, and as the product of a transpersonal consciousness'are embodied in the life of Saleem Sinai" (47)

    "The majority of the magical elements in MC derive from allegory and the literalization of metaphor" (59).

    1. literalize+parody the national myth // blood line,
    2. parallels national longing for form
  1. India as a hybrid, textualized identity--search for form, in need of myth and purpose
  (nation, a new myth p. 129; India a collective fiction, mix identity p. 135
   
• non-causal connection (metaphoric/allegoric)

  1) the personal take on public meaning
  (perforated sheet--fragmented viewpoint--memory--national fragmentation)

  S' s heritage p. 124 Tai's teeth and brandy bottle

  Aziz and Naseem's perforated sheet 75--Ahmed and Amina's love in fragments p.75--Saleem's life p. 124 in fragments; 141 daily glimpses of myself--fragmentation

  washing chest as a hole in the world, a place which civilization has put outside itself...

  2) the public become the personal
  a. spittoon--the old men's
  --Saleem's family heritage
  --an agent of his "purification"
  --substituted by an empty Dalda Vanaspati can
  Spittoon-- p. 68; p. 104; p. 45-46 vs. the Raj; summary of its history 342; 535--appropriated by Saleem, the intellectuals, as well as Nadir Khan, to mean several different things ; lost it forever 515

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(criticized by Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory and Revathi Krishnaswamy in Ariel 1995 26.1)

the past 12

It maybe be argued that the past is a country from which we have all migrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. ...Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved.

p. 17 This is what the triple disruption of reality teaches migrants: that reality is an artifact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artefact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of course, be unmade. ...The migrant intellect roots itself in itself, in its own capacity for imagining and reimagining the world.

Pakistan and Migrants Rushdie
Although I have known Pakistan for a long time, I have never lived there for longer than six months at a stretch...I have learned Pakistan by slices...however I choose to write about over-there, I am forced to reflect that in fragments of broken mirrors...I must reconcile myself to the inevitability of the missing bits. ...

What is the best thing about migrant peoples and seceded nations? I think it is their hopefulness...

And what is the worst thing? It is the emptiness of one's luggage....We have floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time. (70-71)

"the ability to see at once from inside and out is a great thing, a piece of good fortune which the indigenous writer cannot enjoy." ("A Dangerous Art Form" 4)

Ahmad: As formulations of this kind become the manifest common sense of the metropolitan intelligensia, dutifully reproduced in the literary productions and pronouncements of 'Third World intellectuals' located within that milieu, one wonders what these cultural positions--the idea of origin being a mere 'myth'; the doubleness of arriving at an excess of belonging by not belonging; the project of mining the resource and raw material of 'Third World Literature' for archival accumulation and generic classification in the metropolitan university--might have to do with this age of late capitalism in which the most powerful capitalist firms, originating in particular imperialist countries but commanding global investments and networks of transport and communication, proclaim themselves nevertheless to be multinationals and transnationals." (In Theory. p. 130)

Krishnaswamy--1. Myth of migrancy vs. historical reality:

"Rushdie dematerializes the migrant into an abstract idea." (132) Indians of different classes and gender migrate to different places.

2. [Naipaul's eternal exile and Rushdie's permanent migrancy share one feature]: "a deterritorialized consciousness freed from such collectivities as race, class, gender, or nation, an unattached imagination that conveniently can become cosmopolitan and subaltern" (139).

Issue for discussion: compare Rushdie's identity politics with B. Muherjee's (loss-of-face meltdown," "reincarnation") or Suleri's (meatlessness)?

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•  metafictional parody of novelistic conventions --ab ovo; foregrounding narrative threads, foreshadowing, overplotting

• the intertext of the novel:Tristram Shandy (a parody of parody?) -- Tin Drum, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• other colonial intertext: Passage to India
• self-reflexivity: the use of artisit/entertainer figure, his writing and his dialogue with the reader.

• Binary opposition: between the historical/elevated and the personal/trivial,
  Snake and Ladder, Nose and Knees, Middle class and lower class (Tai and Aziz; Shiva and Saleem) , Center and Periphery,  author and reader, artist and entertainer, history and myth, national unification and fragmentation,
• Parody --
  • overdoing the plot; literalizing symbolic/metaphoric relations (e.g. national birth // personal birth; national long for form // personal search for meaning; national fragmentation // bodily fragmentation)
  • the myth of growth and unification debunked: pluralized, textualized, source of magic power, negative results (bodily fragmentation, the failure of MCC)
   
• Elements of Magic Realism:
  e.g. multiplied fantasies, its introduction of the supernatural into the everyday; its hauntings and "traffic of the dead".
  Rushdie sees Magic Realism as "a genuinely 'Third World' consciouslness" (Merivale, Magic Realism 331)
  Magic Realism and Postmodernism: 1. Since 1980's, these terms are "allowed spillage into other linguistic or geographical areas";
  2. De-Centering: "Magic realism . . . reveals itself as a ruse to invade and take over dominant discourse(s).  It is a way of access to the main body of 'Western' literature for authors not sharing in, or not writing from the perspective of, the privileged centers of this literature for reasons of language, class, race, or gender, and yet avoiding epigonism by avoiding the adoption the views of the hegemonic forces together with their discourse.  Alternatively, it is a means for writers coming from the privileged centers of literature to dissociate themselves from their own discourses of power, and speak on behalf of the ex-centric and un-privileged (with the risk of being judged 'patronizing' by those on whose behalf such writers seek to speak). " (195)

• Is Saleem's/Rushdie's history plural?  How is Saleem a swallower of lives?   Is it another Grand narrative in Lyotard's sense?
• Is Rushdie an anti-colonial writer or a migrant writer?

• Overdoing the plot-lines: Rushdie not only "inscribes and blurs" the line between history and fiction; he exaggerates the "longing for form" of a nation or national history.  The following are some examples of his imposition of a narrative form (plot) on the personal and historical events:
  • The Connections between National History and Personal History--hyperbolic assumption of responsibilities for national events happening during or even before his lifetime.
  • foregrounding of plot lines -- The narrator foretells and summarizes his story frequently (e.g.  pp. 7; 13; his bodily disintegration p. 37; the whole chapter of "Tick, Tock"); 2 threads of his life (pp. 46-47)
  • the use of motifs to make connections between events which do not have the usual kind of causal connections.
  • (e.g. nose, spittoon, hole)
    • hole on Aziz's nose -- holes on the bed sheet -- the way Amina loves Ahmed p. 75
    • spittoon--the old men's  p. 68; p. 104; p. 45-46 vs. the Raj;
                --Saleem's family heritage
                --an agent of his "purification"
                --substituted by an empty Dalda Vanaspati can
      "Elegant in the salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, it permitted intelllectuals to practice the art-forms of the masses; gleaming in a cellar, it transformed Nadir Khan's underworld into a second Taj Mahal; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it was nevertheless present throughout my history, ..." (342)
     
  By thus exaggerating the need for form or national myth, Rushdie shows the artificiality of both, and the disintegration of India's national identity.
   
• One example of his literalizing the metaphors used: The relationships between (women's and Saleem's) body and history
  Tai's skin disease 29; Naseem's as a partitioned and then unified woman (p. 23),  the mother's public announcement 86;  Saleem's bodily disintegration p. 37; cracks or no cracks? p. 72;

• The novel's self-reflexivity shown in
  A. His discussion of his writing
  e.g. p. 38 pickling and writing as both great work of preserving.
   
  B. in the use of the artist/entertainer-figures
  The artists who aim at all-inclusiveness in their arts:
  "To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world" (126)

  "the Role of the artists       Harrison 65
  As Keith Wilson has pointed out, ...there is an above-average number of failed, quasi-, or would-be artists in the novel.  They include Nadir Khan the poet, his painter friend whose pictures grow and grow, Lifafa Das and his expanding peep show, Hanif  the film director, Picture Singh the snake charmer, Jamila the singer, and most importantly, of course, Saleem the writer.  For he too, like the others, illustrates the unattainability of either universality or the kind of perfection that Hanif aims at in playing rummy--in a word, the essential fallibility of the artist and of whatever medium he or she uses." (Harrison, James.  Salman Rushdie.  NY: Twayne Publishers, 1992.)

  e.g. painter who Nadir Khan lives with p. 50
  Lifafa Das p. 82
  Wee Willie Winkie p. 116
  Hanif's documentary realism  292 --the story of a pickle factory                 

  C. The role of the reader: Padma

  A. Padma as a realist reader
   [Her] earthiness leaking into me , urges me back to the world of linear narrative p.38; as a realist reader  impatient p. 116-17; complain that he lies 136; discontented, critical p. 142;
  B. Padma as one from the lower class in India
  Padma name p.21;  dung-paean 30;lotus-goddess of the present 177, her dream of become his wife 460
  C. Padma is Saleem's connection to reality
    misses her when she is away 187; certainties falling apart 197; praises her when she is back 233; admire her leg-muscle 324-25
  • gone 177-78---back 231
  D. growth textualized: e.g. --textualized foetus growing from a full stop to ..p. 115
  thirty chapters = thirty pickle jars = thirty years of age

• fisherman's finger--p. 143, 144; Mary to Saleem "you can be just what-all you want!" 184

• Saleem vs. Shiva  307; Shiva the commander; the war hero 486

• Source of Magic power: 1956  the Washing Chest Accident; 1957  the Circus ring accident p. 223
  Washing Chest incident -- juxtaposition of high and low: magic power and the washing chest.  "a place which civilization has put outside itself, beyond the pale; this makes it the finest of hiding places" (184)
  the magic moment pp. 192 -95; after retreating to himself, 200
   
• MMC -- 240; Metro Cub Club = Midnihgt Children's Conference 247;
  from being an All-India Radio to a speaker, an organizer p. 263
  a conference with a center
  Shiva 263 sees MCC as a gang--S sees it as a sort of "loose federation of equals";
  the lure of leadership 272

the magicians' ghetto 474-//the Communist movement in India 476
Picture Singh
 plot   time line
1915-1942 Mian Abudullah--1945 8/9 revelation and arrest p. 68
1946 6  Mumtaz(Amina)+ Ahmed
1947 8/15
1956  the Washing Chest Accident
1957  the Circus ring accident p. 223
 581 of the 1001 survive
1958  the Midnight Children's Conference
passive victim; understanding, with a sense of purpose--
smell anything that stinks--
oblivion--as a bhudha, a basketed ghost, a would-be-savious of the nation,
anger--calm, no longer want to be anything except what who I am.  ..I am the sum total of ...457
1975 6/25  the birth of Aadam Sinai
1976   420 in captivity
1977  1/18 ectomy
 

[Relevant Issues of Postcolonial Identities]

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Pickles in Midnight's Children       W. Glasgow Philips '92         original site from Brown U.

Salman Rushdie uses food as a recurring motif in Midnight's Children; so much, in fact, that it has been suggested by one scholar (I have forgotten her name; she was in one of my classes, and very cheerful, with dark hair) that the entire text can be approached as a feast, with Saleem as the cook, setting different dishes of memory and experience before the reader. At times we become overly stuffed, and have to sit back from the text for a moment, letting it all settle and digest a little before continuing; at times the little morsels placed on our plates are too small, and we beg for more (where did they come from? what is in them? what is that curious tinge of bitterness that lingers after the sweet of this dessert?). Make of it what you will; though it lacks the pedantic particularity and scholarly seriousness that seems to be required by most T.A.'s when grading time comes, the "book as a feast" approach can provide a useful interpretive angle in the case of Midnight's children.

Rushdie himself forthrightly acknowledges the link between the preservation of memory and the preservation of food: Saleem, of course, is a cook. But no average cook:

"You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings -- by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks." (p. 38)

The notion of the feast can be extended from the pickle trope, to take in other portions of Midnight's Children. Food abounds in the text: Saleem's various organs are likened to cucumbers, his grandmother uses food as the battleground where she wages her battles against her husband, Saleem's genitals are curried and fed to dogs near the end of the book, food is poisoned and spiced with emotion by its cooks . . . . Each of these topics provides a fresh starting point for interpreting the text.

Spit and Memory     W. Glasgow Philips '92 

Spittoons appear through out Midnight's Children. The motif of the spittoon allows the narrative to circle back on itself without losing its forward momentum; by reintroducing it in different contexts, Rushdie builds meaning into the image and provides the reader with a reference point and familiar angle of insight into the meaning of his tale.

One particular spittoon, and extraordinary silver spittoon inlaid with lapis lazuli, appears at the beginning of the story at the house of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, and follows the course of the narrative almost until the end, where it is eventually buried under the rubble of civic reconstruction by a bulldozer. Rushdie's character Saleem comments on the significance of the spittoon at several junctures in the novel, though spittoons and betel-nut chewing (the Indian version of BeechNut chewing) take on wider and vaguer significance in other sections. The silver spittoon becomes a link to reality for Saleem. The following quotation occurs when Parvati-the-Witch has dematerialized Saleem:

"What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon. Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a reminder of the outside . . . clutching finely-wrought silver, which glittered even in that nameless dark, I survived. Despite head-to-toe numbness, I was saved, perhaps, by the glints of my precious souvenir." (p. 456)

I lost something else that day, besides my freedom: bulldozers swallowed a silver spittoon. Deprived of the last object connecting me to my more tangible, historically verifiable past, I was taken to Benares to face the consequences of my inner, midnight-given life. (p. 515)

Spittoons, and betel-chewing, are endowed with other significance through the course of the novel, though never so explicitly as in the quotations above. Memory, truth, and storytelling are entwined into the motif of the spittoon. The group of old betel-chewers that make their appearance in several places in the novel serve as a kind of repository of common memory, and their stories are wrapped up in the game of "hit-the-spittoon," in which the spittoon is placed a distance away from the chewers and they attempt to direct their streams of red spittle into its waiting mouth. Rushdie warms up to the topics of memory and spit at the beginning of the chapter entitled, appropriately enough, "Hit-the-Spittoon:"

Please believe that I am falling apart . . . . This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)

There are moments of terror, but they go away. Panic like a bubbling sea-beast comes up for air, boils of the surface, but eventually returns tro the deep. It is important for me to remain calm. I chew betel-nut and expectorate in the direction of a cheap brassy bowl, playing the ancient game of hit-the-spittoon: Nadir Khan's game, which he learned from the old men in Agra.

And now the old men place the spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting place, and aim longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. "Oh, too good, yara!" The street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams, super-imposing the game of chicken upon this art of hit-the-spittoon . . . But here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes . . . here, Brigadier Dodson, the town's military commander, stifling with heat . . and here, his A.D.C., Major Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of the Raj.

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