This page was last updated on 11 June 2002
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, published in 1980, was perhaps the seminal text in conceiving opinions as to interplay of post-modern and post-colonial theory. The title of the novel refers to the birth of Saleem Sinai, the novel’s principal narrator, who is born at midnight August 15th 1947, the precise date of Indian independence. From this remarkable coincidence we are immediately drawn to the conclusion that the novel’s concerns are of the new India, and how someone born into this new state of the ‘Midnight’s child’, if you will, interacts with this post-colonial state. To characterise the novel as one merely concerned with post-colonial India, and its various machinations, is however a reductive practice. While the novel does at various times deal with what it is to be Indian, both pre and post 1947, it is a much more layered and interesting piece of work. Midnight’s Children’s popularity is such that it was to be voted 25th in a poll conducted by the Guardian, listing the 100 best books of the last century, and was also to receive the Booker Prize in 1981 and the coveted ‘Booker of Bookers’ in 1993. http://www.bookerprize.co.uk/
Why Midnight’s Children is much more than of interest to the reader interested in post-colonialism, is possibly due to its strong elements of magic realism, a literary device that goes hand in hand with postmodernism. Perhaps the most notable exponent of magic realism in literature is the Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude written in 1967 came to be seen as the standard bearer for the genre.
Marquez was an undoubted influence on Rushdie’s work and in Midnight’s Children in particular, which was to adopt many of the surrealist ‘flights of fancy’ which characterise One Hundred Years of Solitude. The term was first used in a wider post-colonialist context in an essay by Jacques Stephen Alexis, of the ‘Magical Realism of the Haitians’ (Alexis 1956), although the term itself had been in circulation since Franz Roh the German art critic coined it in 1925. Yet the term only became popularised when it was employed to characterise the work of South American writers such as Marquez. More recently the term has come to refer to the inclusion of any mythic material from local written or oral culture used in contemporary narrative. The material is often used to examine the assumptions of Western narrative, which is usually categorised by its rationality and strict linearity. Magic Realist texts also include Ben Okri’s The Famished Road http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~rbb0/academic/projects/okri/gates.html, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People http://www.constantreader.com/discussions/bonepeople.htm or Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water http://www.ipl.org/cgi/ref/native/browse.pl/A44 . In the texts mentioned above the rational and linear world of Western realist fiction and convention are faced with impossibilities by the native narrative modes used which are there to expose the deep-rooted cultural formations upon which Western narratives are grounded. In Kumkum Sangari’s essay ‘The Politics of the Possible’, he argues that ‘the nonmimetic narrative modes of Marquez and Rushdie inhabit a social and conceptual space in which the problems of ascertaining meaning assume a political dimension qualitatively different from the current post-modern scepticism about meaning in Europe and America.’ Sangari appears to suggest that the writing of Rushdie and Marquez differs from postmodernism in the manner in which it appears to be more politically motivated and although stylistically these authors inhabit a post-modern state, thematically they have a completely disparate raison d’être from authors such as Auster or Borges.
If we think of post-colonialism as the desire of
decolonized communities search for an identity, then this appears as a
distinctly political objective. Yet as Linda Hutcheon points out in her essay
‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’, ‘post-modernism is
politically ambivalent’ (biography available at http://www.athabascau.ca/cll/writers/hutcheon_biblio.html). The practice of magic realism with its challenge to conventionally
accepted distinctions of genre and its questioning of reality is applicable to
both movements. The element of regionalism in magic realist work contests the
centrality of the metropolitan text, that is, often texts which are associated
with magic realism are on the periphery binary, as opposed to the centrality of
what are regarded as more conventional metropolitan texts. Another definition
of magic realism can be found at http://www.qub.ac.uk/english/imperial/india/Magic.htm. and http://artcon.rutgers.edu/artists/magicrealism/magic.html also contains a definition. This genre is often interchangeable with
that of surrealism, here are some examples of surrealist and magic realist art
While modernist art is often characterised by its depressive qualities, post-modernist art is often synonymous with whimsicality and there is an undoubted element of this whimsy in these paintings, especially the magic realist art.
The self-referentiality, which occurs in certain passages of Midnight’s Children, is characteristically post-modern. The narrator, Saleem Sinai is very self-aware as to his role in the narrative, and at various times ‘steps out of the work’ as it were, to communicate with the reader.
Rushdie abandons linear narrative in Midnight’s Children and merges fact with fantastic. Seleem encounters the very real events of Nehru’s first Five-year plan in 1956, the Indo Pakistan war of 1965 and the conviction of Indira Gandhi in 1975 for election malpractice in the Indian ‘Emergency’. Although he is not adverse to giving the Midnight’s child in Saleem Sinai supernatural powers simply due to the fortuitousness of his birthright. Perhaps the best reason given as to this rejection of convention on the part of Rushdie was given by the author himself on a documentary on channel four entitled the Bandung file aired on February 14th 1989 where he stated
One of the thing’s a writer can do is say :here’s the way in which your supposed to look at the world, but actually there are other ways. Let us never believe that there are other ways in which people in power look at the world is the only way in which we can look because if we do that there is an appalling censorship.
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995.
This project was completed under the direction of Dr Leon Litvack as a requirement for the MA degree in Modern Literary Studies in the School of English at the Queen's University of Belfast. The site is evolving and will include contributions from future generations of MA students on other writers and themes.
This page was written by Jason Colhoun.
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