This time around I decided to delve deeper into the aesthetics / technical aspects of Rushdie’s narrative techniques to understand how they further the story. What I’ve found is that in Saleem’s narration his manipulation of linear time supports the presence of history as a haunting on life. 

The main way history haunts is in the way it continually repeats itself through this story, thus never dies. For example how Amina has to fall for her husband in pieces, mimicking the effect of the perforated sheet in her parent’s relationship. 

The manipulation of time brings connects and attention to these patterns, highlighting their importance and the haunting feeling it provides. Time and time again history is rehashed in the middle of a present explanation destroying an illusion of the present.

Kyhana Butler:

-How does Saleem relate his genesis story in Midnight’s Children to the Genesis story in The Bible? 

Outline: Rushdie makes allusions to The Bible with no one knowing the true age of Tai. When Aadam asks Tai his age, he replies “I have watched mountains being born … I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir.” In the old world of Kashmir, Tai acts as a sort of stand-in for God. Another allusion would be that Rushdie begins the story with Saleem’s grandfather, who’s name, Aadam, which is similar to Adam in The Bible. Aadam comes from Kashmir which is described as a  place “a man comes to … enjoy life or to end it.” Kashmir, in this representation, could be an allegory for Eden, where man began at God’s creation and ended at original sin. 

Bonnie Atelsek:

-How does Rushdie’s use of negative space relate to postmodernism? 

• “One Kashmir morning in the early Spring of 1915, my grandfather Aadam Aziz hit his nose against a frost hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray … he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man. This decision, however, made a hole in him. A vacancy in a vital inner chamber. 
• “Naseem Aziz, whom [Aadam] had made the mistake of loving in fragments.”

-Perforated sheet (“loving in fragments”).

-Potential death of God/loss of faith.

-Fragmentation of narrative/relationships. 

-loss of meaning in life resulting in literal void. 

-potential distancing from high art of modernism (Aadam has huge religious revelation and yet he is just a normal guy). 

Quote

“I told you the truth,” I say yet again, “Memory’s truth, because memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent versions of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than his own.”

This quote exemplifies what we discussed last time in class about how truth is relative and how a person’s memories are their own individual truths. This is in the section “At the Pioneer Cafe”, as Saleem anxiously explains his narrative to Padma. Saleem is aware of his historical inconsistencies and even addresses them, but he knows his story sounds far-fetched to someone as pragmatic as Padma. What Saleem is trying to get across is that everything that he is saying is true, maybe not necessarily because it happened that way, but because it is the way he remembers it. This rearranging of history allows for his story to have a depth and meaning to him that it wouldn’t have originally and it allows him to carve his own path for his narrative and tell his truths and their effects on his life.

In my Carribean Literature class, we learned about the concepts of roots and rhizomes (Glissant) and their presence in postcolonial texts. He states: “In the course of this journey, identity… consolidates itself implicitly at first (‘my root is the strongest’) and then is explicitly exported as a value (‘a person’s worth is determined by his root’). The conquered or visited peoples are thus forced into a long and painful quest after an identity…” What I find so interesting about Midnight’s Children are the many ways in which Saleem parallels himself to India. In The Kolynos Kid, Saleem says, “I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively…” (272). Saleem never chooses to prove the worth of his root through outward expansion or selling aspects of India as cultural capital, rather his root functions as a self-identifier. It is in this way that Saleem is able to feel that his very being embodies the whole of India.

In Midnight’s Children the protagonist, Salem, is born with special powers that allow him to hear the thoughts and look into the minds of others. He is not the only child who can do this, being one of many “Midnight’s Children,” each with their own unique ability. Among these special children, Saleem has a foil in the form of his twin switches at birth, Shiva the Destroyer. Whereas Saleem’s powers help him bring the Midnight’s Children together in a psychic conference, Saleem’s powers allow him to create war and chaos. As the children grow older, they begin to lose confidence and go their separate ways. This is symbolic of how the idealism of childhoood, here represented by Saleem’s idealism, fades with time and gives way to more jaded thinking. Shiva, who calls Saleem out for his idealism, represents chaos and how all things eventually give way to entropy and disarray. Not only do the children abandon their idealism but, over time, their existence’s dissolve into chaos as they are hunted down and persecuted by The Widow, their powers removed via castration.

The dynamic relationship between Saleem and Shiva, with one acting as a foil for the other, represents the dynamic between the idealism of youth and the indifferent nature of the universe. Saleem wants to maintain the conference and keep the children together, fighting against the nature of people to drift apart and the nature of relationships as meaningless. Shiva sees no point in this as the universe is indifferent and all things must give way to entropy, or ordered chaos. These two ideas eventually intersect in the novel when the children are once again brought together through persecution. 

Something I noticed while reading through Midnight’s Children was Saleem’s seeming obsession with making himself the center of everything. There is even an instance in the chapter “All-India Radio” where Saleem is remarking on the fact that he had Ghandi’s assassination on the wrong date. During this error in memory, he states “Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything – to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?” It absolutely seems like Saleem is willing to place himself in the center of everything in his history. There are multiple times where he claims he was to blame for both good and bad things happening around him. Things where his father has a successful business venture, or his mother wins money gambling, Saleem claims responsibility for these actions. He even places himself at the center of the fight between The Monkey and Evie, claiming they clearly fought over him. It seems Saleem just can’t help but force himself upon people, whether it be within his story telling of events, or his invading of their minds through telepathy.

Alex Lotti

From the get-go, Midnight’s Children is all about how Saleem’s personal life is inextricably tied to the course of India’s history, since he and his nation are born at the exact same time. Consequently, the novel frequently and explicitly highlights its setting’s cultural and political conditions, and Rushdie goes about dropping the details of such conditions through varying degrees of subtlety. He will sometimes dedicate blocks of text to a brief history lesson in order to supply that chapter’s episode with necessary context, and other times he will seamlessly weave hints of the current state of India’s affairs into Saleem’s personal life that go overlooked by young Saleem. My favorite instance of the latter is when Saleem cuts snippets from newspapers and advertisements to comprise his revenge letter and the headlines he steals from betray current events.

Many of the story’s political conflicts involve language-based territory disputes that are not relevant to modern America, but the way in which ordinary citizens, specifically children, perceive political issues is. The constant stream of news regarding the hopeless turmoil found in every direction, whether it pertains to India or the U.S., is too big for a single individual to swallow, especially when preoccupied with personal problems. It is much easier for people to focus on what they feel they have a grasp of and can immediately affect, meanwhile ignoring news of national distress.

A noticeable symbol in Saleem’s life is the possession of long trousers. When describing his state of mind before the School Social, he mentions his “longing for long trousers.” The possession of long trousers is Saleem’s way of describing his longing for adulthood. This idea of only men wearing long trousers, and young boys wearing shorter ones is common among many cultures. This notion of manliness is reiterated by Mary Pereira after Saleem’s indecent touching of his aunt. She tells him, “You are a big man now: look, your mother has sent you two pairs of nice, white long trousers.” Despite the fact that Saleem had been rather eager to progress through childhood and gain his long trousers, he comes pretty quickly to the conclusion that having them, and thus having the responsibility that goes with them, is not all it’s cracked up to be. He voices this opinion after his parents’ affections shift from himself to his sister, stating, “Now it was my turn; long-trousered, I was required to be adult about my demotion. ‘This growing up,’ I told myself, ‘is harder than I expected.'” The struggles Saleem faces when it comes to growing up and leaving behind his childhood, are ones that are highly relateable to most anyone. Most people tend to want what they can not have, and so children often wish to be treated as adults, and adults often wish to relinquish their responsibility in exchange for the carefree days of their childhood. Unfortunately for Saleem and us however, these steps of life can neither be sped up nor reversed.

Rushdie through Saleem is attempting to write a new history of India, one that encompasses all that India has to offer, and takes all aspects of the nation into account. Saleem too is “writing” this new history of India. The way that Saleem interacts with India proves, or at least indicates, there is more than one way to interpret history. History doesn’t have to be written in one specific fashion but can be experienced in multiple ways from multiple perspectives. How we perceive our history is how it is written. Perception is important. All the facts in the world hardly alter our perceptions of it or history. Saleem is redefining language and therefore his reality, mashing it together just as his very identity is mixed with India’s political history. However in Revelations when Mary reveals the truth about his birth the history he once had freedom to warp becomes concrete in his “new” reality and affects his present. History is never dead, not as maleable as we and Saleem would like to believe, and that very same history can quite literally come back to haunt you. Here in this chapter it came back to haunt him. It came back to destroy his illusions. 

At the beginning of the chapter entitled “At the Pioneer Café” we are presented with a prophecy or dream of the death of midnight’s children. Okay, in all honesty it took me reading this passage three times to understand this! The chapter starts with, “No colors except green and black” (Rushdie 238). Green typically represents growth, nature, and life. Black represents fear, mystery, death, and evil. I took these colors as representative of the mystery surrounding the midnight’s children, and the evil that lurks around the corners of their lives. On page 229, Saleem recalls, “I’m afraid, in the midst of the age of darkness; so that although we found it easy to be brilliant, we were always confused about being good.”

So, I felt like my interpretation of this passage was accurate. However, as I was reading if a fourth time, I started to wonder if this interpretation was accurate. This passage just has an eerie air to it. The widow’s skin is green, and her hair is parted down the center—part of it is green and part of it is black (Was anyone else reminded of the Wicked Witch of the West?). Her snake-like arm is green; her fingernails are black. For every one thing that is green there is one thing that is black. A balance—which kind of relates back to my original interpretation. I feel like this passage has multiple interpretations. I certainly saw several different interpretations as I was reading this passage, but I kept coming back to my original interpretation. I am interested to see how the rest of the book plays out, and I am curious as to the widow’s role in the plot of the story.