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Salman Rushdie: Midnight’sChildren

Dr. Theresa Thompson

English 4150

Fall 2008

Salman Rushdie Gemini: Born in Bombay

(now Mumbai) June 19,1947.

Bibliography– Grimus, 1975– Midnight's Children, 1981– Shame, 1983– The Jaguar Smile, 1987– The Satanic Verses, 1988– Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1990– In Good Faith, 1990– Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-

1991, 1991– The Wizard of Oz, 1992– East, West, 1994– The Moor's Last Sigh, 1995– The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1997– The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999– Fury, 2001– Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-

2002, 2002– Shalimar The Clown, 2005– The Enchantress of Florence, 2008

Became a Knight of theBritish Empire, 2007

Large Structure

Book One: Birth– Idea of children fathered by “history”--or the grand

narratives of Europe.

Book Two: Childhood– Ideas about love, (trans)formations (recurrence).

– Child creates parents.

Book Three: Maturity?– Amnesia / Memory v. grand narrative / “history”

– Disintegration / Acceleration

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SOME FEATURES OF POSTMODERNISM

antiform:– disjunctive, open, paratactic

(lack of connectives) (Rushdie20)

anti-narrative:– No stories told to explain

existing belief system.– small personal histories

(Rushdie 8) anti-thesis:

– no single unifying theme sense of absence:

– missing author, missing text,missing reader

polymorphous, androgynous:– multi-forms, no dominant

aesthetic

Self-reflective (Rushdie 36, 44).

intertextuality:– sense of play among different texts,

narratives, forms (Rushdie 11) “partial objects”:

– process not completion– Metonymy “Perforated sheet”

(Rushdie 24-5)

dispersal:– fragmentation of everything

(Rushdie 43)

silence/ exhaustion:– what is important often is what is

not stated anti-interpretive:

– against interpretation, misreading

readerly:– audience constructs meaning,

creates connections

Linda Hutcheon: The Politics ofPostmodernism

Habermas’s argument that the modernist project(rooted in the Enlightenment) was unfinished;

Foucault’s investigaton of the complicities betweendiscourses of power & knowledge;

Derrida’s challenges to the western metaphysics ofpresence;

Lyotard’s questioning of the validity ofmetanarratives of legitimation & emancipation.– Modernist project liquidated by a history whose

paradigm was the Nazi concentration camp.

From: Ashcroft, Griffin & Tiffins, The EmpireWrites Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial

Literatures (1989)

Postcolonial literature:– Writings by people formerly colonized by the British Empire;

– can apply to works by any people formerly colonized by animperialist power.

“Language becomes the medium through which ahierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and themedium through which conceptions of ‘truth,’ ‘order,’and ‘reality,’ become established.”– “This lies at the core of theoretical concerns about art,

appropriation, the cultural imaginary, and identity.”

“Many once-colonized (and many still colonized) writerswrite “back” to the dominant culture, leaving thecolonizer in power.”

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Terry Eagleton, The Illusions ofPostmodernism. Cambridge: Blackwell,

1996. “At its most militant, postmodernism has lent a

voice to the humiliated and reviled, and indoing so has threatened to shake the imperiousself-identity of the system to its core.”

“…for all its talk of difference, plurality,heterogeneity, postmodern theory oftenoperates with quite rigid binaryoppositions,…”

“Postmodernism is not delivering anothernarrative about history, just denying thathistory is in any sense story-shaped.”

From Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An IncompleteProject.” Ch. In Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster,trans. S. Ben-Habib. London & Sydney: Pluto P, 1985.

“… the term ‘modern’ again and again expresses theconsciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past ofantiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transitionfrom the old to the new.…”

“Aesthetic modernity is characterized by attitudes whichfind a common focus in a changed consciousness of time.”

“The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknownterritory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden shockingencounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future.…”

“The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and theephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses alonging for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.”

François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Trans:R. Durand. England: Manchester UP, 1986.

“What, then, is the postmodern?…All that has been received, if onlyyesterday,… must be suspected.…

“If it is true that modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real andaccording to the sublime relation between the presentable and theconceivable, it is possible, within this relation, to distinguish twomodes.…”

“The emphasis can be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty ofpresentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, onthe obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything.The emphasis can be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty toconceive, on its ‘inhumanity’ so to speak…since it is not the business ofour understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination canmatch what it conceives.”

“The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and thejubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be itpictorial, artistic, or any other.”

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From Foucault, History of Sexuality Power is exerted implicitly by the way in which our

conversation (i.e., discourse) is formed, often exerted bydenying its own truth, or by myths that misrepresent thesource of power by pointing to less powerful sources.

In the 17th Century “…there emerged a political, economicand technical incitement to talk about sex. And not so muchin the form of a general theory of sexuality as in the form ofanalysis, stocktaking, classification and specification, ofquantitative or causal studies.”

"The obligation to confess is now relayed through so manydifferent points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we nolonger perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us;on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our mostsecret nature, ‘demands’ only to surface;..."– Confession reifies us, it makes us objects of study, not desiring

subjects.

Jacques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy (1969)

Deconstruction critiques Platonic belief thatexistence is structured in terms of oppositions &that the oppositions are hierarchical, with one sidemore valuable than the other.– In Platonism, essence is more valuable than appearance.

In deconstruction, we reverse this, making appearancemore valuable than essence.

Undecideability: Socrates’ word, pharmakon, “canmean both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’ (Johnson,“Introduction” xxiv).

“Dissemination endlessly opens up a snag inwriting that can no longer be mended, a spot whereneither meaning, however plural, nor any form ofpresence can pin/pen down the trace” (Derrida 26).