Swallowing a world: Midnight's Children

FINALLY. Maybe I'll pick up a bottle of champagne on the way home.

Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Vintage Canada 2006 (originally published 1981 by Jonathan Cape)
560 pages
ISBN 978-0676970654






All in all, it took me about two and a half months to read this book-- because I was busy, and because it is long and complex, and because I felt pretty ambivalent about it for a long time. It has suffered the inevitable consequences of being read over such a long time in an occasionally fairly lackadaisical manner-- in cafes, on buses, and so forth. I've forgotten things that have happened and how some things relate to others, and I'm sure this is a consequence of the manner in which I read it and also the nature of the book itself. However, at the end it won me over with a spectacular, sprawling, gigantic, breathless run-on sentence reminiscent of the last sentence of James Joyce's Ulysses. (No, I haven't read Ulysses. No, I am not going to. In this I unite my innate tendency to slack off with a protest against the elitist literary establishment and the tyranny of the Western canon. Mostly though, it's the slacking off.)

A brief and inadequate synopsis: Midnight's Children is the fictional autobiography of Saleem Sinai, born on the stroke of midnight on August 15th 1947, the date India achieved independence. Saleem's life is inextricably (throughout the course of the novel anyway) tied to the life of the newly independent nation of India; the personal struggles of his life parallel the religious, political, economic struggles of his nation. The story itself is told orally, as he writes, to his peasant wife-to-be, Padma, who interrupts him constantly, question the veracity of the admittedly outrageous claims he is making, pointing out errors in his chronology, encouraging him to stop and rest. The couple articles I read before writing this emphasise this metafictional aspect of the novel, pointing out its relationship with Indian oral tradition and the 1001 Nights-- in which the narrative is of necessity shaped by the listener-- would not exist without the character of the one to whom the story is told. As the article in the Literary Encyclopedia points out, Padma's presence also somewhat prevents Saleem from characterising himself as a martyr in quite the way he would like to-- although his life has been "chained" to the life of India from the moment of his birth, Padma is "the physical reminder of those people in India who suffer the real pangs and vicissitudes of the Indian reality that Saleem is attempting to encapsulate in the story of his individual life."

As I read, I marked sections that seemed important; this is an old habit. According to this, these are the themes that most are as follows.

Firstly, the blurred distinction between fragmentation and unity, recalling for me David Hume's characterisation of the self-- that each of is the arena, the location, in which events take place, in which personalities pass through, and it is the sum total of these and not an inherent, unchangeable, essentialised self-ness that is what we mean when we talk about a "self." Or, famously, in Walt Whitman's Song of Myself: "I am large, I contain multitudes." Saleem reflects, towards the end of the novel:

“Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything tha thappens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each “I”, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world.” (440, italics mine.)

And elsewhere:

“... I suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every Pakistani heart. In those days, [Pakistan's] East and West Wings were separated by the unbridgeable land-mass of India; but past and present, too, are divided by an unbridgeable gulf. Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past an present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and now.” (404)

Difference between nations, difference within the nation, difference within the self; is it not in the efforts to eradicate these differences that all kinds of violences have their roots?

Secondly, the tension between-- not speaking and silence, which is a particular interest of mine-- but between exposition and circumlocution. I knew the basic premise of the novel before I read and had been told, by the very nice man at McNally Robinson who complimented by taste in literature (I was also picking up Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being-- it is very hard to find either of those books secondhand) that Rushdie was quite difficult, and so I expected the parallels between Saleem's life and the life of the Indian nation to take a little bit of work to unearth. Not the case; throughout the narrative, Saleem/Rushdie makes completely explicit where the parallels exist and how they function. Metaphors and recurring themes are explained, for the benefit of Padma/the reader, I can only assume. (See, for example, page 459: "The problems of the magician's ghetto were the problems of the Communist movement in India..." and ensuing explanation, for one example.) However, Saleem is often very indirect, pointing readers toward a revelation by a series of questions at the end of which it is obvious what the answer is, but without every explicitly revealing it. This occurs when he follows his mother to the Pioneer Cafe to meet with, of course, Nadir Qasim; similarly, but not identical, when he eventually reveals the identity of the Widow whose role in his life he has hinted at throughout the course of the novel, he struggles, wishing to keep it a secret, talking around it, until he finally convinces himself that is a secret necessary to reveal.

I don't know how important this is-- if its primary purpose is to lend veracity to the supposedly oral character of the narrative, or it is something more. I remember Wittgenstein's "That about which we cannot speak we must consign to silence" (or something like that), and Nietzsche's "That for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is a kind of contempt in the act of speaking." And as well, the apophatic and cataphatic traditions in Christianity in regards to speaking about God-- simply, some things are too big, too important, too secret, too shameful, to put directly into words; we must, figuratively speaking, lower our gaze and only peek from under lowered lashes.

And with that, I finally put Rushdie back on the shelf and pick up the next one-- Daver Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I imagine sometime pretty soon I will post something about how much and why I dislike literature about family. Teaser: it's not just because it's boring!