General Issues:
 

•  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)

Questions:

• 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?

Book I

• 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 (fju)--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

Book II
Reality is a matter of perspective 197 -- his error p. 198; p. 265
Binaries --  Snake and Ladder (166 - 67; the episode of Mary - Musa 171-72); dialectics of center/margin:

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

Washing Chest and then the gradual fall from the center in a series of mutilation (the first on p. 275 at school)

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

--490  S "I have allowed his account too much space"
the rivalry between Saleem and Sinai=the age 515
 
Elements of Magic Realism:

• 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

Female Characters:
Brass Monkey an ally p. 180;
Evie Burns 269 --
Monkey and Evie's fight -- blood;
=Jamila Singer
subject to the exaggeration and simplification of self  and right-and-wrong nationalism375

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]

external: Postmodern Theories and Texts