Rushdie for 2/16: unity and partiality

In Nabokovian fashion, Rushdie has written a novel that is composed of many details and a complex time scheme (as in Nabokov's Ada). As a result, it is difficult to discuss the book in a linear fashion. So, in our posts, let's embrace the particulars - the details. In class on Wednesday, we will discuss (close read) six or seven key passages from the text. Please choose more than one of the following motifs / themes / questions in the atomistic world of Midnight's Children as a basis for your post about pages 3-133. Please read through them all; they are intended as an incomplete list of themes: What are the significances of:  i) Mumtaz skin color and her "underground" first marriage and the reasons for its failure; iii) different ways of falling in love or learning to love; i.e. the case of Aadam and that of Mumtaz/Amina in her attempt to love Ahmed; iv) pickles, pencils, potency; v) colors: red (mercurochrome, blood, betel juice), blue (Krishna); vi) knees and nose and powerful physical attributes; vii) the prophecies of Saleem's birth and significance: "even fortune tellers have limited gifts" (131); viii) monkeys (Amina is the Brass Monkey; "the mnkeys are possessed of an overriding sense of mission" (93), snakes (Saleem plays Snakes and Ladders), or birds (Mian Abdullah is known as the Hummingbird; Aziz's father is deprived of birds due to cold weather in Kashmir);  ix) various uses of the ideas of spitting: "despite everything she tries, I cannot hit her spittoon"; spitting is also an old man's game and a marital activity for Mumtaz and Nadir Khan), etcetera;  (18); x) paradox of partitioning as unification - relation of this to Methwold's center-parted hair; xi) theme of history as myth in MC and in Naipaulr's BITR; xii) view of sexuality in MC and in Naipaul's BITR; xiii) "magical elements" in postcolonial fiction: what purpose do they serve that is peculiar to this kind of fiction? xiv) Naipaul's realism and focused, subjective (from one person's point of view) storytelling versus Rushdie's approach - do their styles conceal differing political attitudes? xv) who loves truly in this story and why? xvi) Rushdie's use of an intense build-up to Saleem's birth - ironic or satiric? xvii) heritage and ancestry; xviii) find one verifiable historical event: is it presented as truth or folkloric storytelling?; xix) find one reference to Judaism, one to Catholicism, one to Hinduism - Islam is hidden in plain sight; xx) Naipaul's attitude toward superstition appears to be negative; how does Rushdie's apparent attitude differ? xxi) we know there are references to A Thousand and One Nights: does the double birth echo any well-known sources? xxii) the first passage contains three genres of discourse: autobiography, fairy tale, and history... does the book contain drama, the major mode of fictional narratives? xxiii) often when we read first-person narratives, we ask: are the events "true" or just the character's fabrication? how would you answer that question here or is it even relevant - is it the wrong question for this kind of fiction? xxiv) on page 129, Rushdie quotes at length from Nehru's "Tryst with Destiny" speech: how does this historical document relate to the story at hand?; xxv) failed or foiled attempts to have children - Mumtaz/Nadir; Saleem's childlessness; Saleem's unrelatedness to the Sinai family; Alia's childlessness; India's "children" in the form of Pakistan and Bangladesh; Wee Willie Winky's cuckolding by Methwold; Dr. Narlikar's campaign to promote birth control; xxvi) the peforated sheet is not the only thing with holes in it; before we get to it, on page 5, about Aadam: "Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up with hate, and he came to sacrifice himself..." People, throughout the book, have holes in them.