1

Salman Rushdie: Midnights

Children
Dr. Theresa Thompson
English 4150
Fall 2008
Salman Rushdie
! Gemini: Born in Bombay
(now Mumbai) June 19,
1947.
! Bibliography
Grimus, 1975
Midnight's Children, 1981
Shame, 1983
The Jaguar Smile, 1987
The Satanic Verses, 1988
Haroun and the Sea of Stories, 1990
In Good Faith, 1990
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-
1991, 1991
The Wizard of Oz, 1992
East, West, 1994
The Moor's Last Sigh, 1995
The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1997
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999
Fury, 2001
Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-
2002, 2002
Shalimar The Clown, 2005
The Enchantress of Florence, 2008
! Became a Knight of the
British Empire, 2007
Large Structure
! Book One: Birth
Idea of children fathered by history--or the grand
narratives of Europe.
! Book Two: Childhood
Ideas about love, (trans)formations (recurrence).
Child creates parents.
! Book Three: Maturity?
Amnesia / Memory v. grand narrative / history
Disintegration / Acceleration
2
SOME FEATURES OF POSTMODERNISM
! antiform:
disjunctive, open, paratactic
(lack of connectives) (Rushdie
20)
! anti-narrative:
No stories told to explain
existing belief system.
small personal histories
(Rushdie 8)
! anti-thesis:
no single unifying theme
! sense of absence:
missing author, missing text,
missing reader
! polymorphous, androgynous:
multi-forms, no dominant
aesthetic
! Self-reflective (Rushdie 36, 44).
! intertextuality:
sense of play among different texts,
narratives, forms (Rushdie 11)
! partial objects:
process not completion
Metonymy Perforated sheet
(Rushdie 24-5)
! dispersal:
fragmentation of everything
(Rushdie 43)
! silence/ exhaustion:
what is important often is what is
not stated
! anti-interpretive:
against interpretation, misreading
! readerly:
audience constructs meaning,
creates connections
Linda Hutcheon: The Politics of
Postmodernism
! Habermass argument that the modernist project
(rooted in the Enlightenment) was unfinished;
! Foucaults investigaton of the complicities between
discourses of power & knowledge;
! Derridas challenges to the western metaphysics of
presence;
! Lyotards questioning of the validity of
metanarratives of legitimation & emancipation.
Modernist project liquidated by a history whose
paradigm was the Nazi concentration camp.
From: Ashcroft, Griffin & Tiffins, The Empire
Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial
Literatures (1989)
! Postcolonial literature:
Writings by people formerly colonized by the British Empire;
can apply to works by any people formerly colonized by an
imperialist power.
! Language becomes the medium through which a
hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the
medium through which conceptions of truth, order,
and reality, become established.
This lies at the core of theoretical concerns about art,
appropriation, the cultural imaginary, and identity.
! Many once-colonized (and many still colonized) writers
write back to the dominant culture, leaving the
colonizer in power.
3
Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of
Postmodernism. Cambridge: Blackwell,
1996.
! At its most militant, postmodernism has lent a
voice to the humiliated and reviled, and in
doing so has threatened to shake the imperious
self-identity of the system to its core.
! for all its talk of difference, plurality,
heterogeneity, postmodern theory often
operates with quite rigid binary
oppositions,
! Postmodernism is not delivering another
narrative about history, just denying that
history is in any sense story-shaped.
From Jrgen Habermas, ModernityAn Incomplete
Project. Ch. In Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster,
trans. S. Ben-Habib. London & Sydney: Pluto P, 1985.
! the term modern again and again expresses the
consciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past of
antiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transition
from the old to the new.
! Aesthetic modernity is characterized by attitudes which
find a common focus in a changed consciousness of time.
! The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknown
territory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden shocking
encounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future.
! The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and the
ephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses a
longing for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.
Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Trans:
R. Durand. England: Manchester UP, 1986.
! What, then, is the postmodern?All that has been received, if only
yesterday, must be suspected.
! If it is true that modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real and
according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the
conceivable, it is possible, within this relation, to distinguish two
modes.
! The emphasis can be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty of
presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on
the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything.
The emphasis can be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty to
conceive, on its inhumanity so to speaksince it is not the business of
our understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination can
match what it conceives.
! The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and the
jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it
pictorial, artistic, or any other.
4
From Foucault, History of Sexuality
! Power is exerted implicitly by the way in which our
conversation (i.e., discourse) is formed, often exerted by
denying its own truth, or by myths that misrepresent the
source of power by pointing to less powerful sources.
! In the 17th Century there emerged a political, economic
and technical incitement to talk about sex. And not so much
in the form of a general theory of sexuality as in the form of
analysis, stocktaking, classification and specification, of
quantitative or causal studies.
! "The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many
different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no
longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us;
on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most
secret nature, demands only to surface;..."
Confession reifies us, it makes us objects of study, not desiring
subjects.
Jacques Derrida, Platos Pharmacy (1969)
! Deconstruction critiques Platonic belief that
existence is structured in terms of oppositions &
that the oppositions are hierarchical, with one side
more valuable than the other.
In Platonism, essence is more valuable than appearance.
In deconstruction, we reverse this, making appearance
more valuable than essence.
! Undecideability: Socrates word, pharmakon, can
mean both remedy and poison (Johnson,
Introduction xxiv).
! Dissemination endlessly opens up a snag in
writing that can no longer be mended, a spot where
neither meaning, however plural, nor any form of
presence can pin/pen down the trace (Derrida 26).