Joseph-Rushdie-3/2

1. p. 273, beginning "Sensing Padma's..." and ending "...passed us by." 


It's obvious in this passage that we are meeting the poetic and linguistic narrator. This narrator is one who cannot find meaning unless he covers all grounds, and this is an instance in which he must explain terms mentioned in an earlier paragraph to a "bewildered"  Padma. It's largely a paragraph that attempts to poeticize the hyphen, and link each term to an academic study of 'Midnight's Children("passive-metaphorical", "passive-literal", and "active metaphorical"). This passage seems made for Spark Notes or term papers,and it's easy to see Rushdie is having fun(at one point he says "Under this heading you should file", as if he knows we are making handy analyses in our spiral notebooks). To link it to another work that pokes fun of it's audience(Nabokov's "Pale Fire"), it would be like if John Shade had left a poem, complete with handwritten annotations and a study guide, for Charles Kinbote , instead of Kinbote explicating little on the actual text and interpreting through his own idiosyncratic and delusional lens. Saleem may be having a go at jabbing his reader with scholarly humor, but he is also deadly serious and concerned about how he is to be interpreted. He leaves no room for ambiguity, unlike the deceased poet of 'Pale Fire'.

For Saleem, his outlook is mostly "active metaphorical": He imagines his life to run parallel with India's, and he actively goes seeking for connections. If reached for long or far enough, almost any event in our own lives can be made "active metaphorical" to match with history.  Saleem attributes only one event to being "active-literal": The rallying cry he gave the people. This is of course humorous, because Saleem states earlier that the words are "A nonsense; a nothing; nine words of emptiness". The most active thing he has done was essentially unintentional. These nine words of emptiness  played a role in the partition of Bombay(although, like many other things, perhaps Saleem overstates his influence).

On a structural level, the paragraph is very passive and serves to recount many things have occurred, or in the event that Saleem is reflecting on something which is to occur. It's a long, extended paragraph that does not have the one thing the passage ultimately addresses: action. As the passage comes to an end, Saleem laments that the Midnight's Children group had "passive-literal", "passive-metaphorical", and "active-metaphorical":What they did not have was "active-literal", and in terms of the narrative, neither did this passage.