This is a 3000-word essay that I submitted for a course in EFL University, Hyderabad.
Neil Nagwekar
H00MAELI20190056
English Literature and its Contexts: A Study of Postmodern Literature (LIT 601)
Professor Jai Singh
24 October 2020
On the Realism of Midnight’s Children in Occidental and Oriental Spaces
A definite indicator of Midnight’s Children’s validity as a postmodern text is its attempted classification into several other schools of thought. I am here thinking of postcolonial perspectives, anti-imperial sentiments, political undertones, its magic realism style of writing, etc. all of which are valid interpretations, yet may pigeonhole Midnight’s Children into a singular category that it seems to attempt resisting.
However, if we are to temporarily discount Barthes’ death-of-the-author theory that would otherwise render Rushdie’s own opinions irrelevant, it becomes interesting to note how the author views himself as a realist. Notably, despite being influenced by the well-documented 19th century European tradition of realism and naturalism, Rushdie instead aligns himself with more modern realists like Benjamin, Brecht and Berger. This alignment is interesting, since none of this trio are nearly as concerned with fastidious material descriptions as writers like Zola, Flaubert or Dickens. The ‘realism’ associated with them has a different connotation. If one recounts Benjamin’s association with Jewish mysticism or Brecht’s experiments with theatre that involved tearing down the fourth wall, it becomes clear that Rushdie—and, by extension, Midnight’s Children—associates himself with a realism that points to the limitations of anyone attempting to be objective narrators, rather than embarking on that journey himself. A snippet from Imaginary Homelands on Rushdie’s writing process for Midnight’s Children, I think, elaborates on this notion:
…the point I want to make is that of course I’m not gifted with total recall, and it was precisely the partial nature of these memories, their fragmentation, that made them so evocative... (Rushdie: 12)
In that case, this novel (for Rushdie, at least) was never meant to be a purely fantastical, escapist fairy-tale for children and low culture, nor was it meant to be an exacting, sobering account of the human condition. The truth appears to lie somewhere in the middle. I believe that, in Midnight’s Children, the ambiguity between the dialectical extremities of reality and fantasy has caused a sizeable interpretative gap between the Orient and the Occident.
Upon delving straight into the text, one may note that the issue of unreality (by both Oriental and Occidental standards) has been introduced from the very beginning. Consider the character of Tai, who claims to have lived through generations, through the birth of mountains and the death of emperors, and has even taken Jesus on his modest boat. Consider his confidence regarding his identification of the magical nature of Aadam Aziz’s nose. It is clear that these are two tall claims by Tai. For convenience, let us henceforth term these allegedly otherworldly, non-normal events (and similar ones in the future) as supernatural.
Tai has made two supernatural claims i.e. claims that cannot be substantiated by empiricists or reputable historians, yet Rushdie makes no attempt to categorically deny them. Instead, he leaves Tai’s claims initially shrouded in ambiguity. One is free to believe if Tai was deluded, if he was a liar, or if he was completely truthful and the reader must believe him.
A digression here is necessary, for the issue of supernatural events is further complicated when Saleem Sinai’s nose is revealed to have supernatural powers that directly affect the action of the story—which means that, within the laws of Midnight’s Children, the powers simply cannot be false. Now, even if Saleem’s nose were not unambiguously supernatural (that is to say, if Rushdie—as in the case of Tai—had chosen to leave that to ambiguity) the issue of realism still exists in another form.
For, while it may seem unrealistic for the atheist, academician, naturalist, empiricist, etc. to believe in the existence of a thousand-year-old boat-rower from Kashmir, a theist, mystic or occult scientist might be more tolerant toward this point of view. People who create and develop entire belief-systems on the basis of omnipotence, divinity, transcendence, etc. have in turn created their own paradigm of rationality that might view Tai and Aziz as perfectly realistic characters. Realism, then, becomes constrained not only to Oriental and Occidental groups, but also to the individual. I am here reminded of a brief passage in Sayeed Syed’s Cross-Cultural Rationality:
We make judgements regarding the total behaviour of a person or culture on the basis of our interpretation of the rationality of that person in particular situations. At the same time, we judge the rationality of particular actions only against the backdrop of our assumptions… (Syed: 20)
Multiplicity in rationality is a distinctly postmodern phenomenon, and is of course also a phenomenon in Midnight’s Children. However, the point of the digression is to remind ourselves that, whilst judging the truth-value of the novel across the binary groups of ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’, any analysis must of course accommodate for the everlasting possibility of individual interpretation that transcends these groups. At the same time, this possibility cannot undermine the fact that there do exist distinct patterns in how Midnight’s Children has been reviewed by the West versus in the East; patterns that this paper attempts to pinpoint. To quote Rushdie himself: “In the West people tended to read Midnight’s Children as a fantasy, while in India people thought of it as pretty realistic, almost a history book.” (Rushdie: xv)
Why is Midnight’s Children considered a fantasy in the Occident, the opposite of Rushdie’s intent as a realist writer? The progression of the novel offers some clues to this interpretation. We have already explored the ambiguities in Tai’s identification of the supernatural in the early parts of the book (lest we forget, the fact that Saleem’s nose is unambiguously supernatural is not revealed in the beginning). There are other examples of this ambiguity in recounting initial supernatural events, most notably the ‘rumours’ of the hundreds of stray dogs assaulting the Muslim League at the point of Mian Abdulla’s death. By consigning this supernatural event to rumours, Rushdie once again allows for the reader room for realistic interpretation.
What is particularly interesting is how Rushdie intensifies the ambiguity in supernatural events by incorporating, among other devices, a very real-world conflict between the Orient and the Occident. It begins with Tai’s open disdain for Aziz’s bag of Western medicine. It continues with Aziz’s attempts to modernize Naseem. This theme, I am not the first to mention, is ever-present in Midnight’s Children. For the Occidental reader, who has been acclimatized to modernity far longer than the Oriental reader, the initial mention of this dichotomy in value-systems is intriguing, for it hints at whether their technologically reliant, capital-dominated world has sucked away any possibility of supernatural events.
At this point it must be noted that Midnight’s Children was a novel written primarily for Western audiences. It translates most Indian expletives in English. Incidents like the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre—a well-known event in world history—were included in the book despite it having little to do with the main action. Rushdie’s work was accepted for publication by Jonathan Cape. He chose to initially publish it in London, where it attained fame—quickly selling a million copies—before the book came to India. Therefore, the fact that Midnight’s Children is a global bestseller today, cannot discount the fact that it was written primarily with the Occidental consumer in mind.
I cannot imagine that it was an easy task for Rushdie’s writing to be palatable to postmodern Western audiences. After all, the characters of Midnight’s Children travel to Kashmir, Agra, Mumbai, Karachi, the Sunderbans, etc., foreign locations for the Occident. Rushdie’s writing style is nonlinear, slippery and highly metaphorical. His constant foreshadowing of future events while narrating present events appears to mirror Derrida’s conception of differance, where meaning is continually postponed until one reaches the end of the text. All this is to say that Midnight’s Children’s writing style is, of course, distinctly postmodern. However, while critical acclaim for the text is richly deserved, how can a novel with such an array of characters, locations and stories, primarily set in a foreign, exotic land like India, and written primarily for a Western audience, manage to attain commercial success?
According to David Harvey in Time-space Compression and the Postmodern Condition, the West from the 1970s underwent a transition from Fordism-Keynesianism to flexible accumulation, where free circulation of capital was combined with an increasing number of producers and distributors competing for their share in the market space. This, along with the compression of time (which is to say, the decreasing attention-spans of consumers along with low shelf-life of commodities) created an uncertain, ‘volatile’ field, a field where everything appeared temporary. One may argue that this exists till today, a fundamental part of the postmodern condition. Fashions, products, production techniques, labour processes, even ideas and ideologies become ephemeral in an economy that may go boom or bust at any second. A consequence of this culture is the never-ending construction of newer signs and systems in the form of advertisements, logos, and images in general, designed to catch the eye of consumers. Harvey writes:
…intervening actively in the production of volatility […] entails manipulation of taste and opinion, either through being a fashion leader or by so saturating the market with images as to shape the volatility to particular ends. This means, in either case, the construction of new sign systems and imagery, which is itself an important aspect of the postmodern condition… (Harvey: 287)
While one must be wary of lapses in translation when equating Harvey’s economic theories with a literary work like Midnight’s Children, it must be noted that even Harvey attempts to describe the Occident postmodern condition on a cultural level, not just a purely capital-oriented one. Bearing that in mind, it becomes clearer how Rushdie’s work mirrors the general cultural postmodern sentiment as proposed by Harvey. The chronology of Midnight’s Children, for one, covers pre-independence struggles, the two World Wars, Gandhi’s death, the wars against China, Pakistan and Bangladesh and Indira Gandhi’s era of Emergency—an apt approximation for a ‘volatile’ atmosphere. Amid this sea of volatility is a bombardment of numerous images and symbols, a striking feature of Rushdie’s writing style. The silver spittoon, the washing-chest, Alpha-Omega, the fisherman’s pointing finger, the vulture-dropped hand… all images and buzzwords repeated several times across the book, that help remind the reader of the many events they symbolize.
A consequence of this writing style, I think, is that Western audiences, who are rather acquainted to the cultural postmodern condition as described by Harvey, find in Midnight’s Children a kindred spirit, a form of writing that mirrors their own state—ephemeral, volatile, fragmented and littered with characters, stories and images. In this sense Midnight’s Children must be very much real to the Occident. Here is Harvey again:
Dazed and distracted characters wander through these [postmodern] worlds without a clear sense of location, wondering, ‘Which world am I in and which of my personalities do I deploy?’ […] Disruptive spatiality triumphs over the coherence of perspective and narrative in postmodern fiction, in exactly the same way that imported beers coexist with local brews... (Harvey: 301-302)
This realistic representation of the postmodern condition is, of course, on a subliminal, psychological level. It cannot avoid the existence of supernatural events in the concrete material world of Midnight’s Children; events that become decidedly less ambiguous as the novel progresses—from ‘word-of-mouth’ supernatural accounts by Tai, from ‘rumours’ of an army of stray dogs, to Shri Ramram’s accurate prophesies, to Saleem’s powers of connecting with the children of midnight, to his highly attuned sense of smell, to Parvati-the-witch’s powers of conjuration and sorcery.
Theoretically, one may always be able to argue against the existence of each and every supernatural event in Midnight’s’ Children by invoking the notion of unreliable narrator; a notion that holds special credence to Saleem, since he loses his memory by the end of Book Two. However, skepticism aside, it is fair to assume that most Occidental consumers of Midnight’s Children, who are unlikely to have read Harvey’s theories on image-production industries and postmodern culture, read such overtly supernatural events and thought them to be pure fantasy. Rushdie’s observation attests to that.
We must, then, enter into the more philosophical question of what is reality; or, more particularly, what is reality in the postmodern Occident world. Harvey often mentions Jean Baudrillard in his analysis, who has a conception of reality that may be applicable here. Baudrillard, in The Precession of Simulacra, opines that any map, model, object, etc. that is meant to represent or reflect basic reality, begins to mask or pervert this reality over time. As time passes, even the very absence of this basic reality is masked by this so-called referent. The result (in, at least, the Occidental postmodern world) is that the referent becomes a simulacrum, an object that stops bearing resemblance to reality altogether. More simulacrum models are built on this model, and on and on it goes.
From a model representing reality, then, the model becomes neo-real and later hyperreal, where its defining features are predetermined and exaggerated, till the point that the simulacrum, and/or the hyperreal, assumes the position of the real. This is Baudrillard’s essential position, a position that also prompted him to write The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, where he argued that propagandist, stylized, imagery by news agencies ultimately misrepresented the true reality of the war between America and Iraq to the masses.
Interestingly, even though Midnight’s Children was written a decade before The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Rushdie’s description of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 is eerily similar. Here are some snippets:
And on the radio, what destruction, what mayhem! […] Was it true that the city was virtually defenceless, because the Pak Army and Air Force were all in the Kashmir sector? […] Was that how it happened? Or was All-India Radio – great tank battle, huge Pak losses, 450 tanks destroyed – telling the truth? Nothing was real; nothing was certain. (Rushdie: 471-473)
Even a cursory reading of Rushdie’s book provides clues that the themes of Midnight’s Children parallel Baudrillard’s theories.
Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality… (Rushdie: 229)
Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and other postcolonial theorists have already explored the notions of latent and manifest Orientalism, where Occidental countries assume the realities of Oriental cultures with a prejudiced eye. Of course, one does not need the aid of postcolonial theorists to know that the Occident has, for a long enough time, perceived India as a part-mythic, part-magical, fossilized land of gods, ascetics and exotic animals. Midnight’s Children, then, builds upon this very Occidental perception of Indian reality and makes it hyperreal, or supernatural.
We have already noted how initial supernatural moments are more ambiguous, while later moments become more and more explicit. Note how these supernatural moments becoming gradually more and more hyperreal, in fact paralleling Baudrillard’s conception of postmodern life veering farther and farther from reality!
True multiplicity in interpretations is evident when Midnight’s Children is explored in an Oriental context, for the text remains very real to Indians. Ultimately, Rushdie manages to add a certain charisma to the Dal Lake, to Malabar Hills and Breach Candy, to Karachi and the Sunderbans; a charm its natives would identify with and find real the most. He shows Hindus fighting Muslims, Muslims fighting Hindus, the marginalization of the poor, the typically Indian sense of patriarchy in families, the pitfalls of war, etc. The clearest evidence that Midnight’s Children was taken to mirror reality by many Indians, was in Indira Gandhi suing Rushdie over a single sentence.
For the Oriental reader, however, the supernatural events throw a spanner in the works, for in my mind they threaten to undermine the realism in Rushdie’s words. It is hard to find an example to validate this purely personal notion, especially in a country as multicultural as India, but I think the film version released in 2012 offers valuable clues. Though it was distributed by Mongrel, a Canadian agency, it features popular Indian actors and was meant to earn its revenue from an Indian audience.
An obvious theme of the film is that, wherever possible, it omits as many supernatural elements as it possibly can. Aadam Aziz’s nose cannot smell any dangers, there are no army of stray dogs, Shri Ramram as a character is omitted and so is Aalia’s revenge through the medium of food. The only supernatural element retained is the power of the children of midnight, particularly Saleem’s and Parvati’s, since without them the plot simply cannot progress. Not only does the film remove most supernatural elements, there are overt attempts to ground the film into realism (as the term is widely understood), particularly in exploring the plight of the poor like Wee Willie Winkie and Shiva.
In the final analysis, whether the statue of Shivaji coming to life and galloping the streets of Mumbai at night is real or not, is irrelevant. It is of course an exaggeration, a hyperrealism, of what the Occident already half-expect the land of India to be capable of. If the Occident perceive Midnight’s Children as a fantasy, that is merely the encapsulation of Midnight’s Children being perfectly real to them, since in the postmodern world the simulacrum is reality, and no longer intends to represent what it has now replaced. Conversely, for the Indian, Oriental reader, who finds pleasure in the more realist elements of Midnight’s Children, its supernatural elements are viewed more as a footnote. In the end, how supernatural one wants Rushdie’s magnum opus to be, is left entirely to the interpretation of the reader, further highlighting not only its uniqueness as a work of literature, but also as a postmodern text.
Originally written: 24 October 2020
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