Joseph-Rushdie-2/23-Bakhtin

For Bahtkin and his theory of dialogism, “Everything means, is understood, as a part of a greater whole — there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance.” Bathkin writes,"Two voices is the minimum for life, the minimum for existence'. A dialogic work carries on a relationship with other texts, and we can observe this in the works of Salman Rushdie. Catherine Pesso-Miquel writes that Rushdie often states that “India only possesses unity and wholeness, purity and authenticity, in a myth invented by the Brahmins.
 India was never one and whole before the English colonization, and the departing English colonizers have left traces which cannot be erased.”


We can see multiple instances of this intertextuality and cultural hybridity in 'Midnight's Children', most notably when comparing it to the works of 'Tristram Shandy' and '1001 Nights'. Rushdie uses Sterne's narrative technique to create a contemporary critique of ideology and identity(Both authors(and books) have fragmented relationships with Britain(Sterne was born in Ireland/Rushdie in India), Both books deal with descent, and both address the nose/penis as a part of identity). In Tristam Shandy, Sterne depicts his characters as people clinging to ideologies, and he enjoys parodying them as the changes in human thought occur. It is a consistent undermining, and one that justifies a rising and falling narrative structure . Rushdie employs this same tactic to raise questions about identity in a much more fragmentary manner: Tristram Shandy describes a book as “a history-book, Sir (which may possibly recommend it to the world) of what passes in a man’s own mind”  while Saleem Sinai describes the book he is creating as a much more robust and wide attempt; a 'swallowing of worlds" where he is everything that came before and everything that will come after. I find it interesting to contemplate the relationship between these two texts, how the execution differs, and how it relates to Bahtkin.