History: Validation of Form and Content

Historical events are a unifying force by which people identify with each other. The question of “where were you were when Kennedy was shot?” was posed for decades during the baby boomer generation and, for the younger generations, the question has become “where were you on 9/11?”  This query is employed as an anchor of identification, with others and with the individual's relationship to the external, iterating that “yes, I was there when this took place and here is my piece of the story” Rushdie utilizes this method of historical identification in Midnight’s Children for a twofold purpose; first, as a linear backdrop which allows him to make sudden temporal shifts without alienating the reader and second, on a individual level, validating the narrator’s tale as meaningful in conjunction with these historical events.

The novel opens with an explanation of the title; the narrator Saleem Sinai is born on 15 Aug 1947 at midnight, the day of India’s Independence from the British Regime. This reference anchors the reader for the temporal shifts that quickly unfold, specifically, a retreat back thirty years to the story of the narrator’s grandfather Dr Aziz. Despite this sudden shift, we are given another historical event to straighten out the narrative chronologically, 11 Nov 1918, Armistice Day. Along the way we pick up other historical events such as the 1918 flu pandemic (“European curse called King’s Evil”) and the 13 April 19 Jallianwala Bagh, or Amritsar, massacre. This construct allows Saleem’s story to fluidly intersperse between decades in his own journalistic conception of the events while maintaining the strong, linear structure provided by history. In comparison, this technique is often used to estrange the reader, as seen in works such as Slaughterhouse Five, where the goal is replicate the amnesia and confusion of its protagonist Billy Pilgrim. Although based around historical events, these events serve to be more fleeting contrasts to the cloudy reverie in which the reader is immersed. This is a strikingly more appropriate use of the form, as these shifts cause discomfiture in Rushdie's text which his ellipses may forewarn but not necessarily overcome (see JDS entry for a more thorough explanation) Nevertheless, by opening with Saleem's birth and immediately reverting back to his familial history, he creates a dimensional intimacy to this character with minimal (but perhaps necessary) disorientation.

The second purpose of these historical events unveils itself on the individual level; as a means to validate a single human existence in the midst of world catastrophe. Saleem Sinai confides in the reader that he intends “to end up meaning –yes, meaning--something” for he “fear (s) absurdity” The correlation between his personal story and the monumental events which occurred in his nation’s history is no coincidence (despite the fact that Saleem writes them off as such) He aligns important events in his personal history, e.g. his grandfather seeing his grandmother for the first time and thus setting into motion Saleem’s own existence, with an historical counterpart, e.g. Armistice Day. Another example would be Aziz’s contribution in the Amritsar massacre, which is argued to be a catalyst for India’s independence, another indelible connection to Saleem’s birth.

One can see the way in which Rushdie employs history to illuminate his character’s story rather than overshadow it, especially by focusing on the events of Dr Aziz in 1918. In an era that left men overwhelmed and anonymous in the face of World War, Rushdie insists that his characters’ stories are meaningful to tell because of their correlation with these historical events and not in spite of them. Their existence is bolstered by riding the coattails of history rather than being dragged along, mute and forgotten, in light of the unconscionable events. He writes, “time settles down and concentrates on the importance of the moment” which diverges radically from the general sentiment of that period, as described by Eliot, “Those who have crossed/With direct eyes [...]As the hollow men/The stuffed men.” Rushdie seeks to lend a voice to the masses of people who were to go out, not with a bang, but a whimper, by realligning the way in which the individual’s narrative corresponds with the international narrative. As the book progresses, it seems clear these events will continue syncopate with Saleem’s story, as he warns the reader “such historical coincidences have littered and perhaps befouled my family’s existence in the world” So it goes.

Random Thoughts;

-Tai’s resentment towards Aziz’s training in Germany symbolizes more than Aziz being from “abroad, full of foreigner’s tricks” and his seeming rejection of his own upbringing but a rejection of his national conscience, as India mobilized over a million troops in the aid of the British in WWI.

-Tai contracts the “King’s Evil” which is possibly a reference to King Alfonso XIII of Spain, who also recovered from it during this time period and was the most well known figure to ail from it as other countries refused disclosure of who was affected

-Omission of India’s aid in WWI in Dr Aziz’s story is interesting as it is considered a precipitating factor for India’s independence. As the background of Saleem’s grandfather seem to be leading up to India’s independence and, consequently, Saleem’s birth, it would seem to be a natural addition.

Apollo and Ellipsis

Shikara

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Our story begins - or attempts to begin - with an ellipses: “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time”. If an event can be made definite in terms of its spatial-temporal coordinates, then we have a specified place  and…what? What is elided? To be sure, a definite time - viz., that of the narrator's birth. This of course is wholly specified in the following sentences and this gives us a first clue to the meaning of the book’s title. But how to understand the initial omission of the clock-time that will it seems form the backbone of the story? It might be stylistic, a mere literary form of politeness: ellipses as a sort of discrete indirectness, as opposed to charging forth, first sentence, with such a literal clue to the title and indeed the story itself. But reading on, we see that the author in a moment of weakness is trying to “get[] away from the date”, trying to forget that “time matters too”, instead hiding, with tongue in cheek, in perhaps the most clichéd and intentionally ‘elliptical’ temporal settings: once upon a time – a setting the very hackney and vagueness of which promise a fantastic never-land. His immediate “No, that won’t do” in turn raises the question: won’t do for what? Within a sentence and a half, the narrator (as distinct from the author) has begun, halted, and begun again to tell the story (which we know at any rate is coming) and consequently he has also called into question the very purpose of autobiographical storytelling, or perhaps more tellingly, of recollection: why, in the face of this reluctance, whose motive is yet unknown, won’t ellipses ‘do’? The response seems to be that we find the narrator in a ‘crumbling, overused body’ seemingly facing death, whose time is "running out": running out, given his intention of “meaning something”. Time it seems has ‘handcuffed’ the narrator to his country’s history, and used him up by the age of 31, whereupon he now reveals to us his greatest fear – absurdity, the inability to make sense of one’s experience: a project which, like any, has a deadline, so to speak.  At this point the original ellipses reveals all the punctuation form’s latent ambiguity. Any ellipsis is a reference to an absence - an absence that is not merely passed over but is referred to as being passed over. But in the given case, rather than motivated by untruth and escapism, perhaps the narrator is motivated by the shear mortal urgency that he finds himself facing – not reluctance but impatience or haste. How much detail must a man include who must work faster than Scheherazade? Maybe the ellipses is necessary to create a wry contrast between the omitted time and 'once upon a time'.  There are, of course, many reasons that a speaker would want to indicate that they haven't told the whole story. It is I think safe to say that in this case the narrator's presenting an absence - his stalling reluctance to reveal - is indeed motivated by untruth, grounded precisely in the will to forget, the will to untruth, illusion and escape, which is not only a willful forgetting of the events that take place in time, but a willful forgetting of time itself – the rather weighty double reading the narrator's uttering, “the time matters too” – viz., that the date is important to the story and also that time as the transitory, time as the creator and destroyer, must be made sense of, ie. is a matter for thought. So the narrator, for fear of the Absurd, must start his story, must find the words that ‘will do’- a short but indicative phrase that at once reveals the performative and futural aspects of recollection – what remains to be done is make sense of one’s lived history, and perhaps on the more ambitious reading of 'time' , to make sense of fate, time and destiny as such. Any such attempts will be done despite the inertial will to forgetfulness, the will to ellipses, and the absurdity that is bound to result from such negligence.

                This initial hesitation, which indeed is quite quickly resolved against, at the very least shows the author as conflicted, even metaphysically conflicted. It also originates a theme that will surely carry throughout the story – the play of omission and recollection.  Indeed, we depart this narrative frame with the image of a ‘perforated sheet’, perhaps the most striking aspect of which is the ‘three drops of old faded redness’ – the  typographical symbol of an ellipses (which is a speech act before it is such a symbol) and itself a functioning act of ellipses – the story immediately glosses back over two generations to the sense-making moments the marks were made, a move which calls attention to the way the omission of information is essential to our ability to make sense, which in turn complicates the original theme of a simple opposition between forgetfulness and sense making:” three drops of old faded redness” are explained as drops of blood falling from his grandfather’s nose at the moment he loses his faith. Here the omission of historical detail is seen as part of the commonplace way we explain the lineage of things – skipping over to the point of origin, the place of birth (a convention which is again seen in the narrator’s choice of opening with the circumstances of his own birth).

Tai, the spirit of nonsense and forgetting (in its complex form as both a vice and virtue) makes it's entrance appropriately as the narrator's grandfather Aadam is waiting, a hiatus, an ellipsis on the banks of the river that would see the "last peace of his [Aadam's] life" - which again hints at the connection between the elliptical and the point of origin- here in the form of a sort of uneventful and peaceful 'hiatus' from out of which the conflict that is to form the plot emerges. The messenger of this news is Tai. Mundanely, Tai is a local ferryman who operates a Shikara. Little else is known of him. His own life is obscure: "Nobody could remember when Tai had been young" And his very origin is denied in common knowledge: "He had been plying this same boat...for ever. As far as anyone knew". Indeed, the most memorable interactions that Aadam has with Tai are those where the former asks the latter his age, "the single terrifying question". Tai, illiterate and alcoholic, is also thought to be quite mad, due to his "chatter" described as "fantastic,  grandiloquent, and ceaseless" as well as "addressed only to himself" (the very solipsistic fantasizing that threatened our narrator, once upon a time). Tai is thus referred to as the "storyteller" but with its sense of that which is "reverse of the truth". Such untruths are what Tai tells Aadam when he asks the only question that has "the power to silence the storyteller" - precisely because the revelation of the origin has at least twice in the brief span of this chapter been used to make sense, to re-collect, while Tai as a character and as a story teller is a refusal to make sense. Tai is without origin or history. It is even suspected that he is beyond change - he is not an actor on time's stage, but part of the ever cycling and meaningless background, a harbinger ever year that the lake has thawed and that spring has arrived - a meaningful symbol, but for a meaningless process ( Think, Edna St. Vincent-Millay's spring: To what purpose, April, do you return again?/.../It is not enough that yearly, down this hill/April/Comes like an idiot, babbling, strewing flowers.) It is hard further not to see the symbolism of the originless ferryman living on the river as as the personification of the river, or of time and change, as the strange yet familiar form of the absurd, that which resists the origin story, a manifestation of the Dionysian in its unceasing struggle with the Apollonian. Indeed, one of the skills that Tai has taught Aadam is how to cook lotus-root, which, according to Greek mythology, was the principle food source of an infamously forgetful and carefree people whom Odysseus met.

The "Lotus-Eaters" incarnate in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?

But where the Dionysian intoxication is present so it can be expected that the Apollonian rationality won't be far. Other than the obvious fear of the absurd that grips our author, the Apollonian makes its appearance at the residence of the landowner, where Aadam is brought after waiting and receiving the message from Tai that will break his peace forever. Here is found a portrait of Diana the huntress - who bears several significances in this context. The first is that she is the goddess of childbirth, which we have already seen is becoming the way that the narrator defines the positive space in his story. Second, is that she is the twin sister of Apollo. Finally, as a sort of strange coincidence that is worth mentioning, Diana is the roman Artemis (ie, they were goddesses of the same jurisdiction) however Artemis was not simply renamed Diana by the Roman, but rather had her own independent origin in Italy, and was later assimilated with the Greek goddess. Here then, we see a case in which the criterion for identity and difference rests solely in the revelation of the origin. It is also of note that immediately after describing the scene in this painting of Diana, abruptly and without transition, the narrator goes on to say, "Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence: but I seem to have found from somewhere the trick of filling in the gaps in my knowledge..." [Ellipsis not in the original, but a citation convention!]

So things to look for as we push on: the interplay between ellipses and explanation, between forgetting and recollection, or, to use the familiar Nietzschean figures, between the Dionysian and the Apollonian.