Joseph-Rushdie-3/9

I found myself trying to reconcile many things in Midnight's Children, and it's ultimate place in the history of literature. For example, we know that this book is heavily influenced by Arabian Nights. Rushdie mentions it from the start: “I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade , if I am to end up meaning—yes meaning—something”.  Scheherazade's concerns are much more immediate than Saleems. The story needs to go on and on and be prolonged because of the impending death. Saleem has a considerably greater amount of time, and it's apparent that his lengthy prose may do him a disservice in conveying any message before his death. Of course, if we are to consider this, we have to consider that it is all a big ruse and Rushdie has no point to make. For Rushdie(and every satirist) it is hard to avoid destroying something only to end up standing for nothing, or ending up reinforcing the things it is satirizing. It is interesting to wonder how Rushdie has treated these two properties that every Satirist must consider.


In an earlier interview, Rushdie states:


"In a country like India, you are basically never alone. The idea of solitude is a luxury

which only rich people enjoy. For most Indians the idea of privacy is very remote.

When people perform their natural functions in public, you don’t have the same idea

of privacy. So it seemed to me that people lived intermingled with each other in a way

that perhaps they don’t anymore in the west, and that it was therefore idiotic to try

and consider any life as being discrete from all other lives."

This gives clear reasoning as to why the story is told in such a fragmentary, epic comic, and sprawling manner.  Could it possibly also reinforce stereotypes of India? Is Rushdie expressing a static viewpoint of India, and perhaps illustrating it under the manner of all that we've come to expect from postcolonial literature(complete with myths, magic, etc etc? Midnight's Children is a seminal work that merges the influences of both East and West(At one point a boy attends an 'Eastern Western'), and I wonder about how effectively it manages to be a open ended discourse.

In regards to Edward Said, in his book Orientalism he quotes this passage from Flaubert:

"On the road from Cairo to Shubra some time ago a young fellow had himself public

ally buggered by a large monkey—as in the story above to create a good opinion of

himself and make people laugh.

A marabout died a while ago—an idiot—who had long passed as a saint marked

by God; all the Moslem women came to see him and masturbated him—in the end he

died of exhaustion—from morning till night it was a perpetual jacking off."

I thought this could somewhat relate to the Rushdie quote above; this idea of performing 'natural functions' in public.  I think,  for me, it is sometimes difficult to imagine what Rushdie supports and what he is satirizing. That ambiguity seems to to be a fundamental tenant of post-modern literature. Linda Hutcheon states, 'In granting value to (what the centre calls) the margin or Other, the post-modern challenges any hegemonic force that presumes centrality, even as it acknowledges that it cannot privilege the margin without acknowledging the power of the centre'. What is the line between reinforcing something or bringing it to attention so as to remove it? I often find this an interesting question in satire, and I think Midnights Children rewards a wealth of study in this regard. It has clearly succeeded in inspiring a discourse, and I am not reticent to call this book a classic.