Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, when read meticulously, may reveal a number of factual errors which, though pointed out to the author, were not expunged from the text. Rushdie admits that some of these errors were deliberate, others were not. But he never felt the urge to correct the errata. Rushdie answered his readers across the globe, questioning him about these glaring slips, through an article “Errata: Or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children”. This article is a classical example of how a postmodern historical metafiction such as Midnight’s Children deserves to be written.
Two reasons, as to why the text is full of errors are beautifully explained:
Saleem’s greatest desire is for what he calls meaning, and near the end of his broken life he sets out to write himself, in the hope that by doing so he may achieve the significance that the events of his adulthood have drained from him…He is cutting up history to suit himself…The small errors in the text may be read as clues, as indications that Saleem is capable of distortions both great and small. He is an interested party in the events he narrates.
He is also remembering, of course, and one of the simplest truths about any set of memories is that many of them will be false. I myself have a clear memory of having been in India during the China War. I ‘remember’ how frightened we all were, I ‘recall’ people making nervy little jokes about needing to buy themselves a Chinese phrase book or two, because the Chinese Army was not expected to stop until it reached Delhi. I also know that I could not possibly have been in India at that time. I was interested to find that even after I found out that my memory was playing tricks my brain simply refused to unscramble itself. It clung to the false memory…
Thereafter, as I wrote the novel, and whenever, a conflict arose between literal and remembered truth, I would favour the remembered version.
Actually “remembered versions” of history are so powerful that they can effortlessly deconstruct the official version to uncover the naked truth, for the official truth is always invariably false. Therefore, Rushdie chooses to ‘play’ with history, history as remembered, not as a given truth. And this is extremely important for it helps to demolish the hegemony of the state-controlled version of the past. This is exactly why a critic observes that through Midnight’s Children an entire subcontinent finds its voice. Midnight’s Children records the past as it is lived, not as it is chronicled in history books.
As Saleem “cut(s) up history to suit himself”, he plays with the very form of the novel, to fit in his story. Even when the novel ends, the reader keeps wondering what he has been reading all this time; was it a bildungsroman or a fantasy or a historical novel or was it a jazzy Hindi film of the seventies in print? It is difficult to settle on one, for Midnight’s Children is actually all of these yet none.
While conflating myriad genres, Rushdie self-effacingly draws from existing literary texts. Apart from several Indian folk tales and the epics, a conscious reader cannot miss the heavy influence of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Gunter Grass’ The Tin Drum, or Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. An ardent fan of Bollywood would be delighted to find several tropes often used in Hindi films.
The acknowledgement (through borrowing from existing texts) that no work of art can be completely original, is most original about Midnight’s Children. According to Michel Foucault, “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and in its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node with the network.” Writing a new story is to juggle up several other tales drawn from what Rushdie calls “the Ocean of the Streams of Story”. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, he writes: “…the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library of the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.” That’s why it is often said that a text is always already written. In other words, a given text contains within it several intertexts of already existing texts.
Midnight’s Children is a text that never ceases to surprise literary critics. It nearly epitomises literary postmodernism. Readers are bewildered, for the text appears to move on more than one plane: certain events within the text seem to elude rational explanation. A very serious approach to the novel deprives the reader of enjoying the text. Rather a light-hearted approach, say a mindset with which a fairy tale is read, is advisable. Meaning has to be culled from something totally meaningless, irrational and fantastic.
Here I would like to cite one incident from the text to substantiate my point. On one occasion, young Saleem Sinai happens to see his mother naked. Immediately, he develops a telepathic connection with all the midnight’s children - the children born at the priced moment of India winning its independence. Consequently, they form the MCC (Midnight’s Children Conference), a community which upholds the ideologies of a democratic nation, believes in and tries to realize the nationalist dream of what India should be like post-Independence. Although this might seem bizarre, the reason is not far to seek. Like Saleem, all the other children share an Oedipal relationship with their mother. By extension, a similar kind of relationship is shared with the nation, imagined as the mother — Mother India. Therefore, all the midnight’s children, the sons and daughters of the soil who are supposed to act as the true liberators of the nation, are necessarily connected, even if they do not realise that they are.
In one of his lectures on human values, Rushdie said:
The crossing of borders, of language, geography and culture; the examination of the permeable frontier between the world of things and deeds and the world of imagination; the lowering of the intolerable frontiers created by the world’s many different kinds of thought police: these matters have been at the heart of the literary project that was given to me by the circumstances of life, rather than chosen by me for intellectual or ‘artistic’ reasons.
These are the factors that condition our lives, no matter where we are located. Perhaps this is the reason why a novel like Midnight’s Children continues to appeal to all and sundry, irrespective of race, class or gender. Getting Booker recognition thrice is certainly an extraordinary achievement; but that’s not surprising at all. Midnight’s Children deserves nothing less.
by Kaustav Bakshi
Lecturer, Department of English, Haldia Govt. College
As a visionary and charismatic writer, Salman Rushdie is known to create fury with his satanic verses that can well crumble the ground beneath anybody’s feet. The infamous death sentence, fatwa, issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini against him is a case in point. Stepping across this line of fundamentalist regime made him a captive for nine years but he emerged as the champion of free speech in good faith of one and all.
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay on 19 June 1947 to a middle-class Muslim family. He spent 14 years of his life here after which he was sent to Rugby School in England. With a firm foothold in both east and west, Rushdie went on to study history at King’s College, Cambridge.
After dabbling in television, theatre and advertising, he wrote his first novel, Grimus in 1975. He was awarded the coveted Booker Prize in 1981 for his next novel Midnight’s Children that later received the “Booker of Bookers” Prize as the best of the award’s recipients in its 25-year history. The highly acclaimed work also won the "Best of the Booker" prize in 2008. Along with Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes and others, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British novelists in 1983. The British Book Awards chose him the Author of the Year in 1995. The Moor’s Last Sigh won him the Aristeion Prize in 1996. His other awards include the French Prix Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Whitebread Prize for Best Novel, the Writer’s Guild Award and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.
East, West: The merging of cultures and imagery
East, West transcribes an interesting confluence of the two so-called dichotomous cultures. Subverting our fixed conventional notions about east and west, the short stories enamour us with an intricate portrayal of life in two time zones of the world. But these are fluid spaces and the threshold is imaginary. In the final story, the enlightened narrator asserts,
“…I choose neither of you, and both. Do you hear? I refuse to choose.”
It is this personal epiphany that Salman Rushdie gives expression to in
East, West, a ‘syllogistic’ work comprising nine thought-provoking short stories.
Playing around with the reader’s curiousity, Rushdie begins with a mundane portrayal of east in the first three stories of this collection. What deceives the reader is the exotic flavour of a title like Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies. The story narrates the intelligent manoeuvrings of Miss Rehana, which frees her from the bondage of an arranged marriage with an immigrant to England. The authorities refuse to give the passport that she is apparently seeking but that is exactly what she intended to achieve by her “absolutely topsy-turvy” demeanour. The Free Radio shows the dangerously sad lure of fantasies over ordinary mortals like Ramani, the rickshaw driver. A religious metaphor pervades The Prophet’s Hair that lends to the moralistic tone of the story.
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Designed by Subhadip Mukherjee
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