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Salman Rushdie:Midnights

Children

Dr. Theresa Thompson

English 4150

Fall 2008

Salman Rushdie

! Gemini: Born in Bombay(now Mumbai) June 19,1947.

! Bibliography Grimus, 1975

Midnight's Children , 1981

Shame, 1983

The Jaguar Smile, 1987

The Satanic Verses, 1988

Haroun and the Sea of Stories , 1990

In Good Faith , 1990

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 , 1991

The Wizard of Oz , 1992

East, West, 1994

The Moor's Last Sigh, 1995

The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1997

The Ground Beneath Her Feet , 1999

Fury, 2001

Step Across This Line: Collected Non-fiction 1992-2002 , 2002

Shalimar The Clown , 2005

The Enchantress of Florence, 2008

! Became a Knight of the

British Empire, 2007

Large Structure

! Book One: Birth

Idea of children fathered by history--or the grand

narratives of Europe.

! Book Two: Childhood

Ideas about love, (trans)formations (recurrence). Child creates parents.

! Book Three: Maturity?

Amnesia / Memory v. grand narrative / history

Disintegration / Acceleration

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SOME FEATURES OF POSTMODERNISM

! antiform:

disjunctive, open, paratactic

(lack of connectives) (Rushdie20)

! anti-narrative:

No stories told to explainexisting belief system.

small personal histories(Rushdie 8)

! anti-thesis:

no single unifying theme

! sense of absence:

missing author, missing text,missing reader

! polymorphous, androgynous:

multi-forms, no dominantaesthetic

! Self-reflective(Rushdie 36, 44).

! intertextuality:

sense of play among different texts,

narratives, forms (Rushdie 11)

! partial objects:

process not completion

Metonymy Perforated sheet(Rushdie 24-5)

! dispersal:

fragmentation of everything(Rushdie 43)

! silence/ exhaustion:

what is important often is what isnot stated

! anti-interpretive:

against interpretation, misreading

! readerly:

audience constructs meaning,creates connections

Linda Hutcheon: The Politics of

Postmodernism

! Habermass argument that the modernist project

(rooted in the Enlightenment) was unfinished;

! Foucaults investigaton of the complicities between

discourses of power & knowledge;

! Derridas challenges to the western metaphysics of

presence;

! Lyotards questioning of the validity of

metanarratives of legitimation & emancipation.

Modernist project liquidated by a history whose

paradigm was the Nazi concentration camp.

From: Ashcroft, Griffin & Tiffins, The Empire

Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial

Literatures(1989)

! Postcolonial literature:

Writings by people formerly colonized by the British Empire;

can apply to works by any people formerly colonized by an

imperialist power.

! Language becomes the medium through which a

hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and themedium through which conceptions of truth, order,

and reality, become established.

This lies at the core of theoretical concerns about art,

appropriation, the cultural imaginary, and identity.

! Many once-colonized (and many still colonized) writers

write back to the dominant culture, leaving the

colonizer in power.

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Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of

Postmodernism. Cambridge: Blackwell,

1996.

! At its most militant, postmodernism has lent avoice to the humiliated and reviled, and indoing so has threatened to shake the imperiousself-identity of the system to its core.

! for all its talk of difference, plurality,heterogeneity, postmodern theory oftenoperates with quite rigid binaryoppositions,

! Postmodernism is not delivering anothernarrative about history, just denying thathistory is in any sense story-shaped.

From Jrgen Habermas, ModernityAn Incomplete

Project. Ch. In Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster,

trans. S. Ben-Habib. London & Sydney: Pluto P, 1985.

! the term modern again and again expresses theconsciousness of an epoch that relates itself to the past ofantiquity, in order to view itself as the result of a transitionfrom the old to the new.

! Aesthetic modernity is characterized by attitudes whichfind a common focus in a changed consciousness of time.

! The avant-garde understands itself as invading unknownterritory, exposing itself to the dangers of sudden shockingencounters, conquering an as yet unoccupied future.

! The new value placed on the transitory, the elusive and theephemeral, the very celebration of dynamism, discloses alonging for an undefiled, immaculate and stable present.

Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Trans:

R. Durand. England: Manchester UP, 1986.

! What, then, is the postmodern?All that has been received, if onlyyesterday, must be suspected.

! If it is true that modernity takes place in the withdrawal of the real andaccording to the sublime relation between the presentable and theconceivable, it is possible, within this relation, to distinguish twomodes.

!

The emphasis can be placed on the powerlessness of the faculty ofpresentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, onthe obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything.The emphasis can be placed, rather, on the power of the faculty toconceive, on its inhumanity so to speaksince it is not the business ofour understanding whether or not human sensibility or imagination canmatch what it conceives.

! The emphasis can also be placed on the increase of being and thejubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be itpictorial, artistic, or any other.

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From Foucault,History of Sexuality! Power is exerted implicitly by the way in which our

conversation (i.e., discourse) is formed, often exerted bydenying its own truth, or by myths that misrepresent thesource of power by pointing to less powerful sources.

! In the 17th Century there emerged a political, economicand technical incitement to talk about sex. And not so muchin the form of a general theory of sexuality as in the form ofanalysis, stocktaking, classification and specification, ofquantitative or causal studies.

! "The obligation to confess is now relayed through so manydifferent points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we nolonger perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us;on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our mostsecret nature, demands only to surface;..." Confession reifies us, it makes us objects of study, not desiring

subjects.

Jacques Derrida,Platos Pharmacy(1969)

! Deconstruction critiques Platonic belief thatexistence is structured in terms of oppositions &that the oppositions are hierarchical, with one sidemore valuable than the other. In Platonism, essence is more valuable than appearance.

In deconstruction, we reverse this, making appearancemore valuable than essence.

! Undecideability: Socrates word,pharmakon, canmean both remedy and poison (Johnson,Introduction xxiv).

! Dissemination endlessly opens up a snaginwriting that can no longer be mended, a spot whereneither meaning, however plural, nor any form of

presence can pin/pen down the trace (Derrida 26).