Ticktocks and Pickles (Peter Wilson)

Hi all. Thanks for tuning in! I’m just going to talk briefly and generally about my comps research into Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the interesting ways in which Rushdie manipulates and exposes notions of national history and the narrative time of the nation. Please excuse me for the overabundance of text on the slides—I know it is not really proper powerpoint etiquette, but I figured that if somebody is really interested, pausing and reading a quote or bullet point might help more than it harms. But don’t fear, there are some pictures. And I’ll keep it short and hopefully to the point—what point, I’m not really sure…

 

Transcript

So, a brief brief introduction to the text: Rushdie’s narrator, Saleem is born at the exact, midnightly, moment that Viceroy Mountbatten’s plan for Indian independence and the India-Pakistan partition took effect. This coincidence leads Saleem to consider himself “handcuffed to history,” his destiny inextricably tied up with that of his country.

 So from the outset, we are dealing with a relationship in time between an individual and a nation—they are each stories told side by side, intertwining even, through time. But Midnight’s Children is not the simple telling of simultaneous events in the life of Saleem Sinai and the life of India. As Saleem says a page into the book: “I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth” (Rushdie, Midnight’s Children 4).

This suggests to me that what is at issue in Midnight’s Children, (obviously among many other things) is not merely the telling of a life, but the telling of the present-tense of that life. That is, we are not reading simply the unfolding of a life living in the present, or that lived in the present, but we are reading the unfolding of the unfolding of the present—Rushdie, through Saleem, perhaps writes the presentation of the present, so as to reveal the mechanics of that presentation. 

On a whim I looked up the Wikipedia page for Midnight’s Children the other day. It says, “Midnight’s Children is a loose allegory for the events in India before and, primarily, after the Independence and partition of India.” This casual observation leads directly into the question I examined in the first part of the paper: why the looseness of Rushdie’s allegory? Why does Rushdie stretch the allegory of Saleem as India to its befuddling and often contradictory limits? How does a reworked allegory open the narration of the national present to examination?

Recognizing that, in the final analysis, allegory, even in a loose and rethought sense, cannot come to terms with all the various ways Rushdie plays with narrative time and the notion of a national narrative, the second part of the paper places this allegory in a larger, book-length scheme of an intensified mode of writing, imagined by Rushdie and embodied by Saleem. 

Okay, so, faced with an allegory seems to exceed the bounds of the relationship it posits—that between Saleem and India, which he proclaims loudly but which fails to ever really become clearly manifested in the novel—I needed a theoretical framework by which to understand what this strange, overwrought and sort of under-developed allegory is doing. For this, I came across Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, as articulated in his investigation into the origin of the baroque trauerspiel, the German mourning play. Where the literary device of the symbol achieves some transcendent unity between the symbol and the symbolized, the allegory for Benjamin does not aim at this unity. Indeed, he writes, and I’m paraphrasing, “in the field of allegorical intuition, the beauty of the symbol evaporates. The false appearance of the totality is extinguished.” Yet there is an insight to be gleaned from such allegory—not a transcendent one, but an insight endemic to the work of art.

 Thus Rushdie’s allegory is not meant to, as Frederic Jameson’s famous conception of the third-world novelist’s allegory would have it, represent faithfully the conditions of the incipient postcolonial nation. Rather, it is meant to probe the problematic character of a narrative art which would claim such a faithful representation—specifically, in its focus on the ruins and fragments of contemporary representation, the allegory reveals this narrative art to be historically constituted, and subject to disruption. So I looked at allegory on various levels of Midnight’s Children, from the characters within it, to the setting, to the mode of the storytelling… In each case, I attempted to locate a tension between an ostensibly smooth, continuous narrative of Saleem and the nation’s simultaneous development, and the fragmentary, temporally disturbed and discontinuous structure underlying such continuity. 

One example: the mythic moment of Saleem’s birth is built up in the novel by constant reference to the countdown to it, constant ticktock phrases, clock images, rhythmic writing, characters that sprinkle the countdown into their speech and gestures. Though this does elevate the countdown to the level of narrative importance, it does it in a way akin to Benjamin’s baroque—Saleem overdoes it, overfills the narrative with allegorical images that emphasize the magic of that midnight moment. Following Benjamin, I argue that this overfilling calls attention to itself precisely to reveal the mechanics by which the narrative emphasizes this magic. That is, the historical significance and mythic quality of the partition moment is shown to rely on the repeated performance of its significance to have the effect a sort of historical monument in Saleem’s narrative—which is also the nation’s narrative.

I’m running out of time so I’ll keep this short. As I said earlier allegory is, in the end, only an example of the ways in which Rushdie stretches and lays open to questioning the narrative of the nation’s present. At various points, Saleem comments quite explicitly on his own writing, retroactively inserting himself into the narrative, theorizing about his mode of narration, about his capacity to narrate himself and the nation, and constantly questions the feasibility of such a task. 

He brings this theorizing to a head at the end of the novel, writing “Every pickle jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time! I, however, have pickled chapters” (Rushdie 529). Hopefully the second part of my paper’s title makes sense. This is where the pickles come from. 

There are many implications to this notion of writing as a pickling of history, but generally I want to suggest that to pickle history means also to leave history, and the time which drives it and which it articulates, in a pickle. That is, Rushdie’s writing, which constantly problematizes the notion of a straightforward narrative present, and indeed folds back upon itself constantly, is positioned at the limits of narrative time, at its most difficult and paradoxical. Saleem throughout the book reminds the reader that he is cracking, exploding, that his body is finite and cannot be an infinite or transcendent vessel of narrative continuity. At the same time, in one infamous passage, Saleem describes his birth and growth as the birth and development of a book, no, an encyclopedia, no, a language! Thus the language, which Saleem embodies, is at the same time subject to the decay of time, and the finitude of life in time. 

This language, this mode of writing, which Rushdie presents as the figure or position of Saleem, operates precisely in this ambivalent narrative time that Homi Bhabha considers crucial to reimaging the nation in a way that’s more open to cultural difference, cultural translation, and new ways of social organization. Though Saleem seems to explode and perish at the end of the book, he places his hopes in the next generations of midnight’s children who will be both “masters and victims of their times.” I take this new generation to suggest a generation of writers, who, like Saleem, recognize the instability and discontinuity of narrative, and also its necessity… Who can attempt again and again to rewrite the nation, always with a delirious dream of success and the inevitable haunting of their finitude and the nation’s infinite, unbound nature… who manage to put in pickle jars not the nation itself, but the feasibility of the nation, and the always-yet-to-come, always hoped-for, narration of it.