Postmodernism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

 

Aspects of postmodernism in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

 

Rushdie’s Midnight’s children is a typical postmodern novel because it makes use of multiple postmodern techniques such as magical realism, metafiction, historiographic metafiction, fragmentation ,intertextuality and ambiguity etc. In addition to those techniques, the author exhibits certain thematic concerns that reflect contemporary Indian culture and history.

 

Postmodernism is a  literary movement / theory which emerged in the late twentieth century specifically after the end of the Second World War. It questions all the existing assumptions of literary analysis and celebrates a set of literary styles such as parody, paranoia, ambiguity, and fragmentation as well as the use of stylistic techniques like: magical realism, pastiche, metafiction and intertextuality.

 

Postmodernism in literature became an international literary movement that influenced not only the European writers but also writers from different parts of the world. Even though it is not so popular in Asian literature, postmodernism is adopted by few Asian writers who went to Britain and established their literary fame there. Salman Rushdie is one of the few but recognized Indian- British writers whose style and thematic concerns reflect the influence of postmodern trends in contemporary literature.

Post modernism rejects and subverts grand narratives and focuses on mini narratives on the destructured, decentred and dehumanized subject. Postmodernists accept the things as they are. There is no despair, no disillusionment no attempt to make meaning of every single act or
event.

 

Salman Rushdie as a Postmodernist

One of the well- known writers of Indian-English Literature is Salman Rushdie. He was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 19 June 1947; the year of India's independence. He was one of the most acclaimed novelists of the 20 the century.

 

Salman Rushdie’s writings have their own stand in the field of postmodern studies. They caught the attention of many critics. Despite the critiques and the disputes he generates, no one can deny that he is an expert in storytelling. He applies the new techniques in his writings with radical experimentation of both matter and the manner. His fiction depicts the complex postmodern world in a postmodern style. All what he writes symbolizes his vision about history and its impact on the reality of his Indian society and life. Also, Rushdie, like most of postmodern writers endeavours to liberate himself from the traditional conventions to create a world that is far away from reality or a reality that has no borders.

 

Postmodern Techniques in Midnight’s Children

Midnight’s Children is Salman Rushdie’s second  and the most celebrated novel which was published in 1981. The novel provides a picture of the Indian culture and society, spans a story of hundred years of British colonization, freedom, partition, the war with Bangladesh and the different minor conflicts and chaos in India. Furthermore, the novel is quite known and celebrated for its grand and high style mostly because Salman Rushdie used various postmodern techniques.

 

The narrator Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children relates his own life tales to the one of Sheherazade (Thousand and One Nights) multiple times. The only thing that help her to survive is the storytelling. Every night, she starts a new novel, which ends until the next night, to keep the process rolling. In the novel, Saleem, the narrator/protagonist of the novel, tells all the stories to his companion Padma.

 

Intertextuality

The word "intertextuality" originated in literary sphere from Julia Kristeva. She  obtained it from Mikhail Bakhtin's argument that the text in literature is not only a conversation, but a discussion with the whole of current society.  Thus, intertextuality is the connection within texts that are implied by references and allegories.

Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is inspired by the German novelist Gunter Grass and this can be clearly in comparison with his novel The Tin Drum. The protagonists Saleem and Oscar start the story with their birth even before the birth exactly and both of them seek for remaking the history. In addition to this, both protagonists share some supernatural powers, Saleem with his power of telepathy and olfactory (sense of smell) then Oskar who has the power of drumming and glass shattering voice. Also Saleem and Oskar share horrible physical deformations and they both experience the terrible pains of physical breakdown by the end of the story.

 

Magical Realism in the novel

Magical realism is a literary technique that blends a world where fantasy and myth are coiled with everyday life. In other words, it is the mixture or the combination of both “real” and “magic” that mix dreams, fantasy and emotions as part of the real world where realistic narratives techniques are joined with elements of dream and fantasy.Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the well-known postmodern authors and who introduced the technique. In his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, he created characters from the real world and made them unusual by giving them some extraordinary powers. Rushdie in Midnight’s Children in the same way invents his characters from the world of fantasy where  they earn magical powers, and through this, he picked out some events from Indian history and matched them with the characters he has created.
According to The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms magic realism is known as “a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical elements are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the reliable tone of objective, realistic report”.

Magic realism combines ordinary reality and obstructs it with unusual, unlikely and extraordinary events and abilities. Magic realism as a postmodern technique is used by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children on purpose to present the real and the imaginary dimension of India. Rushdie explains the colonial past and postcolonial present of India, in a combination of national history and personal memory, so the history post-India is constructed through the imagination
and the memory of Saleem Sinai, because without magical realism, the novel could have ended up as a historical documentary.

 

However, through applying magic realism it becomes more interesting and enjoyable. The events of the novel are described by their explanation by a sense of mystery.

Characters, as has been mentioned earlier, are both realistic and fantastic. On 15th August 1947, exactly at midnight, Midnight’s Children begins by the birth of 1001 children. These ones were born on the exact date and time when India gained its freedom and they owned some innate magical powers in them. Saleem Senai discovered that he has the capacity to discover and determine other’s emotions and thoughts.

Another instance in the novel where Rushdie applies magic realism is Mian Abdullah or ‘the Hummingbird’. This character has the ability of humming (vibrating/ buzzing sound) at high pitch that he was survived by thousands of dogs when he was about to be killed. It is said of Abdullah that “His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him.

 

Ambiguity
Another major postmodern technique that is clearly shown in the novel is ambiguity. Saleem mentions that Adam Aziz is his grandfather in the beginning of the Narrative. Mary Pereira; a midwife who just after Saleem and Shiva were born, she switches the two babies exchanging the wealthy with the poor. Saleem claims that Ahmed and Amina are his parents and he belongs to Islamic religion. But in the middle of his story he says that his father is William Methwold who is an English man and his mother Vanita who is Hindu-Indian women .Therefore, he is from Hindu origins. On the other hand, Shiva is Ahmed and Amina's biological son but he is born in a Hindu family. So, it is difficult to determine whether Saleem is a Muslim or a Hindu likewise whether Shiva is a Hindu or a Muslim.  

Also, Saleem falls in love with more than one woman. First, he falls in love with Jamila Singer; Ahmed and Amina‘s daughter; since she is not his biological sister, but this kind of love is forbidden. Later, he falls in love with Parvathi the witch but he did not accept to marry her. Consequently, Parvathi have a secret relationship with Shiva and she gives birth to his son as a result of their relation who becomes the adopted son of Saleem.

Rushdie plays with the readers’ minds by stating a lot of ambiguous relationships. All these relationships in the story are very complicated and in the end of the narration, Rushdie states that this kind of ambiguity in the relationships will continue to exist in the future too.

Reconstructing History (historiographic meta-fiction)

The term “historiographic meta-fiction” was first coined by literary theorist Linda Hutcheon in her work ‘The poetics of postmodernism’. As claimed by her, they are self-reflective (seriously or purposefully constructed) works and yet question historical events and characters. In addition, those works are the rewriting of the history but in a fictional way not as historically documentary.

Saleem is the autobiographical narrator in the novel. The birth of Saleem, which coincides with the birth of the Indian nation at the midnight hour on 15 August, 1947, means that Saleem is "handcuffed with history" i.e his destiny ‘‘chained’’ to India’s, and Saleem embodies the often violent link of the personal and the political. Hence the historiographic  claims about the real representation of the past are questioned by Saleem, therefore by blending history and fiction. Through the character of Saleem, Rushdie chutnifies history with fictional events.

Furthermore, reconstructing history is highly demonstrated in Midnight’s Children’s. This is evident when Saleem tells the readers that he will rebuild and reconstruct history based on his memory, from about thirty-two years before his own birth.

Linda Hutcheon believes that the historical novel is known by “the relative unimportance of its use of detail, which he saw as “only a means of achieving historical faithfulness, for making concretely clear the historical necessity of a concrete situation.”  Thus, she recreates the history in a fictional way so that it can fill the gaps and the untold aspects.

 

Midnight’s Children is a historiographic meta-fiction because Rushdie reconstructs new history by rewriting the current historical events with making some changes on it .