SALMAN RUSHDIE'S MIDNIGHTS CHILDREN: OF FORGETTING AND RE-MEMBERING

This episode will focus on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. We will see how Rushdie places questions of narrative perspective and narration at the center of his mode of magical realism. Unlike Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Allende’s The House of Spirits, the reader is persistently invoked by the novel as an implied interlocutor inside of the novel itself, either in the person of Padma, or as someone in a position to approve or disapprove of various parts of the narrative. The implied interlocutor or reader takes the place of the audience listening to an oral storyteller. Taking the moment of the birth of the nation of India as its organizing conceit, the novel is about the children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15th, 1947. These are the midnight’s children of the title, and they all have different magical powers. The narrator Salim Sinai’s power is that he can read the mind of others. His mind is like a radio station and is the meeting place of the midnight’s children, where they meet regularly to debate the many strange things that have happened to them and also to their country. The novel also raises the question of the national longing for form, and Rushdie suggests that Indians penchant for omens and the taking of signs for wonders is a reflection of that longing. Midnight’s Children is full of predictions and anticipations, as well as variant reversals of fortunes that afflict all the central characters. It is also very funny, with many laugh-out-loud moments that make it the most light-hearted magical realist texts in the genre.

Suggested Reading
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press.
Wendy B. Faris, "Scheherezade's Children: Magical Realism and Postmodernist Fiction, " in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, Duke: Duke University Press, 1995.
Neil ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004.
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991, London: Penguin, 1992.
Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation, London: Macmillan, 1989.