Comments following today’s presentations by Cecily and Francie.
13 thoughts on “Midnight’s Children 2”
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Comments following today’s presentations by Cecily and Francie.
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Midnight’s Children Week 2
Francie
To add to our discussion on the motif of failed relationships, I’d like to point out that Saleem sleeps with the janitor girl when he is Buddha and can’t feel anything. He just likes her smell. She stops sleeping with him because he gets electrocuted while urinating and shocks whoever touches him. Then he and his 3 soldier companions sleep with 4 illusory women in the temple of the rain forest. They turn out to be spirits derived from piles of charred bones. Despite grounding us in the physical and the grotesque, does Rushdie find sex an unnecessary and illusory/ violent act? After all, Mumtaz was in love with her (impotent?) first husband) and birth is always portrayed as troubling somehow (child with two heads, Vanita’s death, Shiva’s disgust, Amina’s aging).
Cecily
Someone mentioned that this novel’s politics is hybrid—with Western ideals (against Gandhi’s return to Eastern tradition) mapped onto Eastern events. I wonder if this is applicable to the entire novel—if the novel is handling Eastern subject matter in a Western manner. There are many cultural allusions as well as political ones (such as the 4 women in the temple). Many of them I can’t quite place in terms of their allegorical significance. I wonder if this matter-of-fact treatment of these allusions (without added explanation) means that it was tailored to a knowing Eastern audience, meant to appeal through its exoticism to a Western audience or if what Junot Diaz said about his own work applies, that reading this book is meant to be communal.
Cecily –
I thought you did a great job giving us the history of modern India. I found it extremely helpful but I think what’s especially interesting is that knowing the history doesn’t really make a significant change in our reading of the novel, probably because we all know that Saleem is meant to be an unreliable narrator but also, I think, because the personal history/myth that Saleem creates – even if it’s meant to serve as an allegory for the nation and even if it’s inextricable from it – is the more important history in the book. So if Saleem bungles up the facts it’s not a big deal. That said, it might be interesting to look into what other details (besides dates) Rushdie changes. The one mentioned in class – the change in the make-up of Dyer’s troops from Indian sepoys to Englishmen – strikes me as significant one. It’s also a little surprising considering Rushdie’s general avoidance of easy dichotomies in favor of ambivalence and hybridity – so why rob the incident of its nuance and reduce it to a clear-cut English-Indian/Colonizer-colonized incident?
Francie-
I thought your presentation on the failed relationships in the novel was fascinating. One thing that you mentioned was that there was an indication that the relationship between Saleem and Padma might work out –I don’t know if I misheard or misunderstood you there. I’m wondering then, how you interpret the ending, where Saleem predicts: ‘I will be separated from Padma, my dung-lotus extending an arm towards me across the turbulent sea, until she drowns in the crowd and I am alone in the vastness of the numbers…” (532).
On a different note, I appreciated Ty’s comment on not liking the book because it was about ugly people (I think you said it ruins the escapism?). Not because I agree (I have a soft spot for ugly anti-heroes) but because I think it gets to what’s different about Rushdie’s brand of magic realism. (Qualifier: I don’t think I’ve read nearly enough magic realist literature so this could be very untrue) Magic realism is a genre that’s attacked in many postcolonial debates – VS Naipaul being a prime example of someone very against the genre, professing to be on the side of the ‘rational’ and ‘real’ – because some people perceive it as a sort of self-orientalism by postcolonial writers or find the (assumed) escapism that it entails unproductive, etc. But I think that the general ugliness that is such a big part of “Midnight’s Children” – not just the ugly people but the unpalatable or grotesque qualities that Cecily brought up – really ground the book in some way, presenting a fantastical story that isn’t quite escapist. On a broader level, I think Saleem’s comment about the existence of the miraculous children of midnight speaks to this debate: ‘Reality can have metaphorical content; that does not make it less real.’ (230)
I think that Cecily’s comment that the novel stems from both Eastern and Western traditions neatly pulls together Ty’s comment at the end of class about the ugliness of the characters and their actions and Francie’s suggestions that all relationships in the novel fail. To elaborate, perhaps Rushdie is saying that when the East and West meld together, as they have in India, the result is recognizable, but grotesque and dysfunctional. The characters of the book are human and as such have all the basic human flaws we would expect from realistic characters, but they also have another deeper level of flaws. They cannot maintain relationships. The men are often impotent for periods of time. Many of the characters are unsatisfied with their single relationships and seek distraction in the form of other relationships (in short, they feel pulled between two different people, two different traditions and histories): Saleem’s father and his secretaries, Saleem’s mother and Nadir, Saleem himself is haunted by the image of his sister and cannot love his wife. The very features of their faces are mutilated and weird. They get fat. They starve each other. They are so wrapped up in their own affairs that they shut out an entire magical world that could be beautiful but instead is simply a battlefield for ego. The idea is that when too many things come together, nothing works. People end up divided and open to being conquered and ruined instead of strong and unified with an identity to come back to when the rest of life falls apart. Without any solid foundation to stand on, the characters are doomed to fail.
I think we lose something when we think of the novel in only allegorical terms. We lose sight of the humanity of the novel. At the same time, however, seeing the failure of relationships and the lack of beauty as allegory can bring us back to Ghandi, and the idea that India will never be whole as long as it is trying to be itself and be Britain simultaneously. As we discussed, I don’t think Rushdie fully supports Ghandi in this. It is not as if India can completely eschew it’s past in order to create a new identity. Rushdie, in fact, could not be clearer on this point. Saleem, again and again, insists that “to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world” (441). It is not as if we can understand India without both the English and the Indian side, the past and the future. It is an ugly past, but supporting the idea that India could simply forget and create its own system of government and life without the influences of the past would be, to Rushdie, a mistake, or as he might say, it would be the disease of optimism at its worst. Saleem comments that his failed relationships and mistakes are directly preceded and influenced by the mistakes and failures of those who went before him. And this is all regardless of whether or not they are related to him by blood. It does not matter. Related or not, they are still the primary influence, and they always will be. The optimism of the present day cannot alter ugly realities of the past. This is true for people and for nations. My problem with the novel is that it starts ugly, stays ugly, and ends ugly. It lays out problems and no solutions. Though, to be fair, as Francie pointed out, maybe Padma is the solution. Is the suggestion, though, that India needs to be more down to earth, to rise from the shit of its past and make something new out of it, or to simply stand by its magical, messed up history through all the crazy stories until that history can make sense of itself?
Cecily,
Giving us a little context I think really helped us look at the novel in retrospect. I think if we had all that information in our minds while we were reading it could have been very distracting and probably make us reduce the novel to a historical context (the novel is much more than just historical context……… or is it?) I think bringing up Gandhi was very important because I strongly believe some of what Rushdie is mimicking Gandhi’s rhetoric from his Autobiography, but also drawing upon some of Gandhi’s notions of Indian Purity.
Francie,
To have you lay out the failed loves in the novel was great. It sometimes hard to lose sight of a structure like that in the novel when the work feels so chaotic. While i agree very much with most of the comments made in class regarding the romances, I would also try to make us think of love as a western concept. Part of me to read love in the novel as part of the colonial project that cannot be left behind. And in my mind most of the discussion of the novel is discussing India after it’s culture has been affected by the colonial period and attempting to reconnect with a “pure India”. But I think Rushdie is trying to say we cannot completely leave everything behind. Isn’t that what the last part of the novel is all about. Saleem turns into a dust. And while that dust doesn’t speak it will always be there. No matter how hard we try to leave behind part of history, culture, or memory the remains of it will always be there.
I found both of yesterday’s presentations very helpful to my understanding of Midnight’s Children.
Cecily, your overview of Indian history and explication of certain issues helped give us a historical framework that can be placed over the plot to see where it lines up and diverges. The bumbling nature of British rule (Partitioning Bengal then cancelling it, for example), really stuck out to me, as well as your (quite correct) emphasis on Ghandi’s individuality as a reason for self-rule. To me this was important in the conversation we have been having all along about who gets to tell history , or to paraphrase Junot Diaz whose narrative we choose to empower. (Could that talk possibly have come at a better time?) It seems that both your talk and Midnight’s Children suggest a view of history that is shaped by individuals and minute acts, as opposed to broader, more inevitable, socioeconomic trends. Cool.
Frankie: your list of failed relationships in the novel was so impactful. I would ask next, along the lines of what Cecily was saying, whether the representations of love were only unsatisfying to a western concept of love. It seems to me in many instances that love is almost like a personal curse, something individual rather than communal. Mary’s long desire for Joseph is a prime example. When we talk about the relationships “failing” totally, I think it might be trying to read the text too literally or realistically and missing the poetry behind the longing. Is a normal, loving relationship an appropriate thing to ask of such a wild text?
When we jumped off relationships to talking about Padma, did we look closely at p.170? Here Saleem asks “how to dispense with Padma? How give up her ignorance and superstition, necessary counterweights to my miracle-laden omni-science? How to do without her paradoxical earthiness of spirit, which keeps-kept!-my feet on the ground?” which seems to nicely encapsulate what we thought of as her role in their relationship.
The truth is, I was really waiting for Cecily’s presentation all along. I suppose I could have looked up the historical events mentioned in the book as I read, but since I knew Cecily’s presentation was coming, I decided to wait until then to draw any sort of definitive opinion on the book. What it made me wonder, and I suppose this would be a logical topic for a third research-based presentation on Midnight’s Children if there were to be another, is the extent to which Salman Rushdie would have had a personal relationship with these historical events/movements (again, this is something I could look up, but I prefer to just pontificate here instead). As was briefly discussed in class, was Salman Rushdie just sitting there on his proverbial 1981 MacBook, using the “Spaces” hotkeys to whip back and forth between http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_independence and “Midnight’s Children Rough Draft.doc [Compatibility Mode]”? Or had Rushdie spent years committing himself to a rigorous study of India’s 20th century history (he was, after all, a history major in college)? Or did he live through many of these events and thus need no research to recount them in stunning vividness? Is Saleem’s attempt to tell a true story but not necessarily a historically accurate one a reflection on Rushdie’s own writing process? For me, learning about the historical background of Midnight’s Children, as one might expect, opened up a whole slew of possibilities for interpretation.
Francie struck upon a very keen insight in her presentation, and armed with one piece of textual evidence for every person living on the Indian subcontinent (hyperbole FYI), she very successfully defended her ideas. There are very few novels that are void of romantic love; I gather human beings are a little obsessed. I had been so focused on thinking about temporality and historiography and the idea of nationhood in the book I had almost completely forgotten about this notable string of failed relationships. I think there is definitely something significant about the ways in which the failures of past relationships in the book seem to fuel the failure of future ones. Aadam’s piece-by-piece courtship of Naseem is later reflected in Amina’s piece-by-piece attempt to love her husband. Both couples fall out of love. As I mentioned in class, Saleem’s love of Evie (as in biblical Eve: the mother of all sexual relationships and thereby the progenitor of all failed relationships?) led him to a habit of trying to show off for girls, which then ruined his chances with Masha when he got his fingertip cut off, the stump of which he used to touch his aunt’s breast, which gave him a comfort with incest which in turn allowed him to fall for his sister, whose face he could not help but see every time he tried to consummate his relationship with Parvati, which was the beginning of his impotence, the very impotence that would later cause Padma endless vexation. Just as Cecily’s presentation had before it, Francie’s presentation opened up the floodgates of interpretive possibilities.
Cecily,
I appreciated the outline of events in Indian history in helping to provide more of a context for the novel, and I found our subsequent discussion of Rushdie’s depiction of the Amritsar Massacre (April 13th, 1919) particularly interesting. Professor Billings noted that narrator Saleem described Dyer’s offending troops as British soldiers, while in reality the troops belonged to the British Indian Army, a group composed of native Indians. This example serves to support Saleem’s narrative unreliability, a topic we discussed more than once. However, a brief Google search for information about the Massacre results in articles that specify “British Indian Army” troops, “British troops”, or “British colonial government troops.” While the first term implies native Indian troops, the latter two are quite vague. Saleem/Rushdie, failing to identify the country of origin of the attackers, only specifies “fifty crack troops” as entering the scene with Dyer (pg. 34). Whether this is of any importance remains debatable; while Saleem admits more than once to having an imperfect memory, it is fully possible that Rushdie found the example of brutality and description of a failed moment of levity in Naseem and Aadam’s relationship (when she thinks the blood is Mercurochrome) more important to the story than just providing another example of Saleem’s historical inaccuracies.
Francie,
I enjoyed your presentation on the failed relationships that kept recurring throughout the novel and have a few thoughts on it and some of the other blog posts that have come before mine. Emily Scarisbrick mentioned that “love is almost like a personal curse, something individual rather than communal” and the idea of a “personal curse” really resonated with me in our consideration of the allegorical aspects of the novel. Saleem’s birth at the same time as India’s serves to make him and his personal story sort of a de facto allegory for Indian history, whether this was Rushdie’s intention or not. While the ending of the novel leaves some hope for Saleem/India, who would, in this case, be the other half of India’s “personal curse”? Great Britain, of course. It’s every bit the fragmented “love story”; while it certainly didn’t work out, each culture still holds on to some parts of the other (things like cricket, curry, and tea come to mind). Maybe love is a curse, but the fragmented nature of it presented in the novel leaves some hope for at least one or two good things to emerge from a failed romance.
Cecily – Finally I feel as if I know a bit about India! Thank you! Whether or not that knowledge would have impacted the way I perceived the novel though leaves me wondering if perhaps Midnight’s Children can be read two ways: for the historical view or for the sweeping “family drama”? Going back to it, I’m sure that armed with a more concrete historical basis would allow me to catch the moments when the narrative and the facts don’t quite line up, or when Saleem view as himself as India was indeed being justified. However, I think I would lose the focus I had on the way instead that the history was impacting the daily lives and loves of everyone else.
Francie – Brilliant! I’m not sure how I missed just how many failed relationships Rushdie presented us with, but you’re laying them bare makes the number seem even more astonishing. I think that he spends a great deal of the novel debating the merits of pessimism vs optimism, and on which lens shall be used to look at India’s future. The novels relationships are a projection of this struggle, and how each character fairs in love seems to somehow point to Rushdie’s view on how India will continue as a country. The question of Padma and Saleem is the crux of such a view, and I think that you are correct in saying they have a chance of making it, but Rushdie refuses to see it as easy, just as India will struggle as well.
Also, on a side note. In Phoebe’s post she mentioned the idea that Rushdie views sex in a negative way, perhaps thinking it unnecessary. I think that reading is spot on and while I don’t quite know where to go with it myself, it would be something to look at for sure.
Cecily-
In line with what many people have said, that presentation really was something I’d been hoping someone would do–a concise overview of Indian history. One thing that stuck out to me was your idea about Tai as Gandhi–that not only were events (Amritsar, for instance, or the Emergency) depicted, but that philosophies and doctrines were as well. It made me wonder about where various major politician’s philosophies (Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Indira, Sanjay) were reflected, explicitly or not, in the words of the other characters. It also made me think of the way my textbook in AP US History would describe the early history of the US–as a collection of themes and forces. How would a textbook of contemporary Indian history compare to Midnight’s Children?
Francie-
Lovely presentation on love. I found it a really fascinating lens through which to view the novel. One thing that stuck out, that you mentioned, was that Saleem gets his ectomy done at the Widow’s hostel, by the Widow–this detail seemed particularly resonant, the idea of wives (why only women?) who have lost half of their marriage. Forcible separation from the “tools” of love, as well as the objects of affection, seems also to be a theme. The other thing that occured to me, listening to your presentation–given that Saleem is an unreliable narrator (or, at least, an extremely confused one), is it possible that these failed relationships are caused by Saleem’s desire to remember them like this? Perhaps Padma is also changing his mind.
Cecily-
Your research was the prefect follow-up to Siau Rui’s presentation last week and a really helpful supplement to the novel. One thing you said just kind of off-hand that I found really shocking was that the fictional Sabarmati family in the novel corresponded to a REAL Sabarmati family. So, I just did a little google search. I couldn’t find anything related to a historical “Commander Sabarmati” (that could just be because all the results were Midnight’s Children-related), but I found this: “The Sabarmati River is a river in western India and one of the biggest rivers of north Gujarat…During India’s independence struggle, Mahatma Gandhi established Sabarmati Ashram as his home on the banks of this river.” It seems like more than just Gandhi’s rhetoric made it into the novel. I’m not sure what to make of the idea that Commander Sabarmati, or even Lila, could be some kind of Gandhi stand-in. They cheat, they kill, they smuggle, they want to flee to Britain (seemingly un-Gandhi)—but the Commander becomes a national hero. Is Rushdie taking a shot at India’s greatest national hero here?
Francie-
That list of failed relationships was insane. I think the obvious conclusion that the failed romance theme leads to is that the “failed romance” between India and Britain is to blame. Georgia put it nicely when she said the characters “feel pulled between two different people, two different traditions and histories.” I am left wondering, though, why the relationship between Saleem and Padma should be any different. Sure, Padma’s name seems to indicate hope, and their relationship seems grounded in genuine love, but so did some of the eventual “failed” relationships in the novel. The only piece of evidence that I can find to suggest that Saleem and Padma will have a different fate is that they are the only couple that (theoretically) exists outside the fiction of Saleem’s narrative. It is the only relationship that Saleem’s pen does not have the power to end.
I found Cecily’s overview of Indian history quite helpful, as in it helped enlarge the text in my eyes – all the little holes comprised of political references were filled in. I wish somehow that more research could be done regarding Ghandhi and the text. I mean I have to be honest, as I read Midnight’s Children I kept asking myself: how can this story not deal with Ghandi in any huge way? Some hinted in class that it have done so in subtle ways. I think the comparison with Tai is rather weak, but Rex’s idea that Rushdie attempted to mimic Ghandi’s autobiography and its style is quite fascinating. In a way, Rushdie would then be proposing that Ghandi’s ideal India lies within the text – as a story as fictional as the dream of a united India, but a story that shapes and transforms real lives around the general history of the continent.
Francie I think your critical analysis hit many strong points. You really did some hard work to tie all these relationships together – especially in how you showed the relationships weaving into one another, how one affected the other – almost like karmic traces woven throughout this particular family history when it comes to love. Emily said something along the lines of: “are we experiencing this ‘failure’ of love because of Western expectations.” I think that’s a great point. And really, western cultural and ideal expectations – I think that we’ll find that most relationships begin and end similarly to the ones in Midnight’s Children, and that we might be more hesitant to call them failures once we reach their end. Love is never perfect, and always ends, whether with death or some other reason. Love, like the text itself, is also a mix of cultural signs and personal feelings – just take Saleem’s first love, Evy, who is something like an American cowgirl. Rushdie argues that “love” as we imagine it is a fiction of the cinema and of literature, and that “true” love is something dirtier. A lotus rising from the dung heap of misunderstandings and disappointments.
Cecily: Your presentation on the history was incredibly helpful albeit overwhelming. It highlighted the span of the novel to chronologically try and whiz through the history. It was great to get a refresher on Gandhi’s political and philosophical points and to begin to imagine his unspoken impact in the novel. To imagine the efficacy of satyagraha (resistance to tyranny through total nonviolence) and ahimsa (kindness and generosity toward all living creatures including animals) within Saleem’s world, full of chaos and darkness highlighted the difficulties Gandhi’s followers must have encountered. It brings a new perspective to the struggle of these people when it remains just out of sight. Also interesting to think of Shiva’s character as a force creating that chaos, dissent, and violence but simultaneously birthing the children of new India.
Francie: Similar to what others have pointed out simply hearing the list of failed relationships and all the odd and sometimes oddly absurd ways they all went wrong was a powerful angle to take. I thought the discussion regarding Bollywood and the expectations for Indian romance were particularly interesting as an offshoot of that. Alongside the elements forbidding explicit physical interactions these films are often characterized by an overpowering familial element. A love match is made and the conflict in the story comes from the parents and nuclear family disapproving of that choice. In the end all is resolved with song and dance and often the film ends with a wedding. But as with western fairy stories rarely is the couple followed into their married life. The drama of courtship, of seeing the other person through the perforated sheet is idolized and not taken much further. In Midnights Children it is played out by a number of couples who, as we have discussed, fall short of our expectations for functional relationships immediately rendering their interactions more complicated and interesting. Saleem ostensibly with a nuclear family, but one unrelated by blood, flouts all convention by falling in love with his sister, attempting to have sex with his aunt, watching his mother at her most private moments etc. Shiva without the protection of family sows his seed with abandon and wreaks havoc on the traditional family structure. Not only does Rushdie make a comment on romantic love, he intertwines dysfunctional familial relationships in a fascinating and unusual way.
Cecily’s presentation came to me as a great relief. It helped me understand many of Rushdie’s allusions to historical events. I guess the historical context didn’t change the reading of the book in general like Cecily commented, but it definitely revealed aspects that I hadn’t really thought much over, especially when I learned that the soldiers at the Amritsar were actually Sepoys. With this big piece of puzzle in place, it was funny to remember the point where Saleem urges the reader to check if his story is true early on and my first reaction to the book, wondering if I would need to do a research on Indian history to make sense of what was going on. I still am not sure what Rushdie had in mind as his primary audience, but the book seems to be purposefully written to perplex everyone. This brought me back to the line where Saleem describes Aadam to be caught in the middle: “neither this nor that, a half-and-halfer…”(13)
It was also very interesting to have all the list of relationships that didn’t work out in Francie’s presentation. Going off of what we talked about what these failures might mean– especially the relationship between Padma and Saleem—I wonder if we could view Saleem’s infertility with optimism. I thought that perhaps, Saleem’s physical destruction and the impossibility of procreation could mean a total destruction of the old and impotent India, which then can be rebuilt, the only way Saleem can break away from the recurring family curse (“…And already I can see the repetitions beginning; because didn’t my grandmother also find enormous…and the stroke, too, was not the only…and the Brass Monkey had her birds… the curse beings already, and we haven’t even got to the noses yet!” (7))