Will - Rushdie - 2/23 - Bakhtin

The dominant ideology of the Sinai family is that Saleem, the son born at the moment of Indian independence, is destined for great things.  Amina and Mary Pereira lavish attention on the baby, and Saleem is in such high demand that Amina agrees to "lend" Saleem "on a kind of rota basis, to the various families on the hill" (146).  Even the image of happiness and prosperity projected by the Sinai family seems to be geared toward making their son great.  Saleem writes, "For their attentions, they expected, from me, the immense dividend of greatness" (178).  This expectation is a burden for Saleem, and even at nearly-nine he is confused about how to go about achieving this greatness to the satisfaction of his family. 

Saleem's confusion vanishes when he begins hearing voices.  He sees his gift as "the beginning of the repayment of their investment" (187).  Everything in the family is ordered around the ideal of the son destined for greatness, and Saleem cleaves so closely to this ideal that he believes he is become a prophet like Muhammad or Moses.  This special condition is the utmost expression of the hegemonic ideal of the family.  Yet when Saleem reveals his gift, the family is horrified, perhaps because the essence of their ideal has been amplified to the level of obscenity, or because when made so plain by Saleem the family's ideal becomes unrecognizable.  Saleem has accidentally subverted the hegemony of the family by giving the ideal its utmost expression, and the family's reaction is extremely violent.

Listening to his family's thoughts, Saleem continues to see the crack's in the family ideal.

He discovers his father's lust for secretaries, his uncle Hanif's depression over his failing film career (194), and his mother's yearning for Nadir Khan (195).  Saleem's mind becomes a carnival, described by Bakhtin in the reading as offering "the chance to have a new outlook on the world, to realize the relative nature of all that exists, and to enter a completely new order of things."  Central to the carnival is the concept of dialogism, "the plurality of 'fully valid consciousnesses,' each bringing with them a different point of view, a different way of seeing the world."  The voices entering into Saleem's head are part of that dialogism, "the unconscious beacons of the children of midnight, signalling nothing more than their existence, transmitting simply:  'I'" (192).  Each voice he hears helps him see the world in a different way, beyond that of existing hegemonic ideals.

According to Bakhtin, only by "being outside of a culture can one understand his own culture."  It may be that Saleem can tell the story of all India because he can hear the voices of every Indian, seeing beyond hegemonic ideals.  Paradoxically, his gift of hearing all voices makes him a figure on the margins of culture.  Because he is "outside" the culture, he can better understand and represent that culture.