Versions: III. Insidious Nostalgia

Olivia Parker, Site I (from Lost Objects Portfolio)

At the tick-tocking heart of Midnight’s Children beats the mystery of time. Of course, time does not beat; beats give a regular measurement to time, which allows us to coordinate our worldly activities. Time remains, so to speak, underneath measurements of it. Time as such is neither regular nor irregular; time is manageable because we read it through coordinated, regular processes – the movement of the sun through the sky keeps pace with the mechanical ticking of our clocks; the growth of children, the change of the seasons, the span of a human life, the passing of milestones and generations all give time its humanly rhythm. Still, time seems to retain a mysterious  ”objectivity”  -  being beyond the ways we relate ourselves to it. But then again, what would time be without someone counting it, and not just indifferently tallying up the numbers,  but counting on it, in boredom, in fear, in angst, in anticipation, in hope? Without us, or something like us, what would the spinning planets and burning stars mean?

                These contrasting views of time form the basis of the philosophical debate about the nature of time – which basically tries to understand the relationship between these two conceptions of time – subjective and objective. Objective time – time when not viewed by a passenger within it – is a sequence of events – one after the other; and whether these events are connected by causal necessity or random association, one thing's for sure – the events of objective time all bear the characteristic of determination, or definition, of actuality. Objective time is what happened (and we cannot also add what is happening and what will happen, because those tenses are contingent on our being subjects in time; furthermore, the use of the past tense is the closest verb form we can use to describe objective time – since we presume to stand, detached and outside of time, much like we do (or can try to do) with respect to the past and it’s perceived finality). Besides tenses – which depend on a subject in time with respect to whom an event would be past/present/future – objective time, or objective actuality, lacks another essential aspect that belongs to subjective time, and indeed to our common sense notion of time – namely, the phenomenon of passage.          

It has long been known that the laws of physics characterize the physical world no matter which direction time is traveling. To Newton, it doesn’t matter whether time ‘flows’ from past to future or from future to past. In objective time, A follows B with the same necessity that B would follow A if the direction of time were the reverse; objectively speaking, they are events that sit next to each other, indifferent to the arrow of time, indifferent to how time passes, or whether it passes at all. From outside time, from the view from nowhere ie the ultimate ‘frame’ – or rather, the view from never – time looks much more like an unending chain of events, that is, it looks like an arrangement in space. Objective time is visualized with the still images of spatial geometry.

                But to us, to us subjects, nothing could be more important – and obvious – than the (rather brute) fact that time passes. Events do not sit eternally next to each other in their actual sequence from alpha to omega; rather, events pass, the past recedes away, the future approaches, the present drags on, or flies by. And of equal important is the direction of that passage – I’m writing a post now knowing that the act of reading the book is forever behind me (phew!), and the future in which the post is written will not come about unless I write it. There are more telling examples – some happy – I won’t have to be a confused adolescent again (supposing I’m not still one!), I won’t have to go through boot camp again; I have so much to look forward to when you come to visit me!; others sobering – I will never be young again; I still have to go through the death of everyone I know;  I still ‘owe life a death’.

                If objective time is seen spatially, then subjective time is seen as motion. Objectively, I existed in this span of events; subjectively, I am actually, here, now, in the midst of one of those events; and instead of being surrounded on all sides by the actuality of objectivity – of what happens – I am surrounded, behind me, by actuality, and before me, by possibility. What is possibility? In brief, it is a kind of ignorance (as all subjectivity is), ignorance of what’s going to happen next.  The future is, subjectively, open. As it passes, it becomes actual, and closes. That the past shuts us out and the future is open is what we describe as the direction of time.

                I point all this out because I think it is only with a closer understanding of the phenomenon of time can we really come to grasp the trajectory traced by the sad souls in Midnight’s Children. In particular, I want to claim that the story exhibits an intensification of the characteristics of subjective time, and as such a rebellion lament surrender to this frame of all frames, to time itself. This too, I think, provides a basis for talking about Saleem’s “Insidious nostalgia.”

“O insidious nostalgia for times of greater possibility, before history, like a street behind the general post office in Delhi, narrowed down to this final full point” 50

In this passage, we can see the direction of time, the image of the arrow of time – the widened base of possibility narrowing down, bottle-necking,  to the single point actuality: as what lies ahead of us diminishes, we become further enmeshed in actuality, ‘narrowed down’.  But this image also alludes to a past with which we are familiar – the ‘times of greater possibility’ just are Saleem’s own past, full of potential – the promise we felt when he was born, when his birth was announced, when his grandparents met, when we hadn’t even opened the book yet. But for all this promise there is so little payoff. Saleem and his power come to nothing. And in fact, power coming to nothing could very well be a subtitle for this novel. Others for your consideration: Unactualized Possibilities, Broken Promise, Lost Potential and, my personal favorite, Midnight’s Stillborn Children. In fact, while all (subjective) time exhibits the structure of the narrowing motion from possibility to actuality, Midnight’s Children doubles this structure in the events and characters that populate the narrative. Each moves from possibilities (in the more normative sense of ‘promise’ or ‘potential’) to, well, like a street behind the general post office in Delhi, disappointment.  If the possibilities of time narrows with times passage, then the potentials and promise of our characters miscarries or wanes with the story’s passage.  The tragic and inexorable structure of time is itself written into the fates of what transpires in the novel, and it is easy to find examples of this waning potential.

                The first big let down in the book comes when Aadem  leaves Kashmir with his new bride “for the last time.” In fact, Aadem’s gut gives him a premonition of what is to come, “A sensation akin to weightlessness.//Or falling” (28). It is after this point that we begin to see the contrast between the interactions of Aadem and Naseem prior to their wedding – the promisingly romantic and wonderfully paced acquaintanceship through the perforated sheet – and how they interact afterwards. The beautiful girl behind the sheet turns out to be rather backwoods for our European educated doctor.  What began nearly in the realm of fairy tale turns out to be just another unhappy marriage.

And though there are catastrophes before this point – both Tai and Ilse die – this is the first time in the book that a certain expectation has been built up only to abruptly come to nothing. And it reiterates ceaselessly in its own wake.  Next is the death of optimism in the form of the assassination of the Hummingbird. This is followed by the failure of the marriage between Mumtaz and Nadir which quite literally falls short. The entrance of Ahmed Sinai is a constant source of failed plans – from his inability to make his wife happy, to win her love from an impotent and feckless poet, to his constant business failures, to the incident with the Ravana mob, to his alcoholism. There is the desertion of the Methwold estate, Saleems’ abandonment by his own parents, all the horrible fallout from Saleem’s revelation that of lover’s infidelities, the war that destroys Saleem’s family. The Brass Monkey’s death. Life has ups and downs of course, But there does not seem to be anything like a balance in this tale. Everything it seems is doomed from the outset. Saleem’s final pessimism – his final vision of his own demise, is an attitude hard learned.

But central to the miscarriages that push the action forward is the broken promise of the novel’s namesake – the promise of the midnight children themselves. In the end - supposing the account is entirely true – all the magic and power of these children is at best a sideshow attraction. How much promise is contained in a child who can turn lead into gold? Or one who can read the thoughts and even desires of other people? Or, in one who can see all the past and all the future – one who has access to time, objectively? The power is infinite and the possibilities endless – and so all the more the disappointment from their squandering and ruin. I find myself repelled from thinking of what these powers could do to change/save the world, deep in the season of Kali Yuga; it is too frustrating to think of what was possible but lost. Nothing perhaps was more shocking to discover that Saleem would lose his powers midway through the book, having effectively used them for nothing except petty voyeurism and jealous revenge.  By the time the Children are rounded up, imprisoned and presumably killed, I don’t think we much care anymore. We too have lost hope in anything redeeming this world, this history of family and nation. We too, have been cured of the disease of optimism (the belief that anything is possible).

So what is nostalgia? Etymologically, it suggests a painful longing for home. For Saleem, on his deathbed, it is an ‘insidious’ longing to reset – to return to the promise of his birth when instead of preserves (chutney) he was surrounded by possibility. Saleem’s own anxious need to find purpose in life is aggravated by what could have been, in light of what his life actually came to. It is not a question of whether a given life is purposeful per se, but whether a life seized the possibilities presented to it. In this way I think there is no question regarding the purposelessness of Saleem’s life. I cannot make sense of Saleem’s life. And I too, want to return to the Kashmir Valley, with the ramblings of Tai, and the innocent adventures – that lost sense of modesty – of the perforated sheet. Back when the story was simple. And beautiful.

But here too the book achieves its effect. This is the nostalgia of the modern from the pre-modern. The creeping belief that what we’ve left behind in our transformation of the world for our convenience is worthier than what we have now; that the modern spirit is a shadow of the ancient; and that the nation state – and all the fighting of the third world over creating national identities within borders drawn up by colonialist occupiers – is not capable of rooting us to the earth in a way that leaves us unalienated. Hence the ambivalence of the dawning of knowledge, and consequent disenchantment of the world. Saleem’s nostalgia is telling: for he does not want to return to the simpler time, the time of innocence and ignorance. Rather, he wants to efface the simpler time – the time of hope and optimism – and begin in a heavy realism:

                 “my irrational notion was born, to grow illogically backwards in time, and arrive fully mature at this earlier-and yes, almost certainly innocent-adventure” (97)

Or, as he says in one of the most mysterious passages in the book:

 “And now I…intend briefly to endow myself –then with the benefits of hindsight; destroying the unities and conventions of fine writing, I make him cognizant of what was to come, purely so that he could be permitted to have the following thoughts” (270)

Saleem’s nostalgia is insidious, so much so that he wishes to deprive his own version of his past of that condition necessary for nostalgia, namely, possibility. Saleem “will be old before he is old” (96).          Saleem  is thus rebelling against the fact of subjective time itself – the perspective that retains the past and goes forward in hope. The demand of his protest is none other than time deprived of possibility – of objective time, or eternity. But this is of course in vain, since even as his tale is told, he is still faced with what are perhaps the heaviest possibilities of all – of justifying or failing to justify his own life to himself.

                And if, at his end, he longs for the promise of beginning, and, conversely and conflictedly, he longs for a beginning already bowed down with the knowledge of its end, then we can make further sense of the title Midnight’s Children (which doesn’t really so heavily on the activities of a few rather disappointing minor characters). Because, after all, midnight is as much the beginning of a new day as the end of the old one.  Midnight – which is just an arbitrary increment that allows us to ground the infinitely problematic notions of ‘beginning’ and ‘ending’ – is the two faces of time: both its promise and expiration. And I suppose midnight’s children then would be, well, everything, uplifted by possibility, and burdened by that necessary possibility which is demise. 

Trente Park, Untitled, 2003

Life of Brahma (We're currently in Kali-Yuga, "Age of the demon, Age of Discord or Strife")

Amina's Apology

My name is Amina Sinai and I have sinned. My body serves as a reminder of the spoiled nature of my decisions; the corns and verrucas scream out to the world that I am impure, that I no longer deserve the namesake of truthful, trustworthy and honest. I have sought the cleansing power of sadhu Purushottan, only to exhaust his magic. I have attempted fruitlessly to extricate the impurities; the verrucas on my feet and my hands but oh my soul, my soul is spoiled with the memory of Nadir. Well why not? Things keep coming back to me these days. Seems like you just can’t leave anything behind (179) But where to begin with this most sordid admission? I must go back, way back, when Amina Sinai did not exist, when Mumtaz Aziz was known for being good, dutiful and alone (57) And alone I was, with nary a glance from pitaji to keep me from the silence of those rooms. I took consolation in the dark, where the tone of my skin would finally blend with its surroundings and I would not be castigated for what I could not control. I would be enveloped into the opaque abyss without hesitation – it was my only comfort in those days. Perhaps that is why, when dadi announced the presence of a man, a stranger, a poet of sorts, who was to live for an indefinite amount of time in our basement, my heart soared. Could it be that this man takes refuge in the darkness like me? At the age of 19, my life began and ended almost simultaneously, the moment the name Nadir Khan passed my lips. For although it was the happiest time of Mumtaz Aziz’s life, it would become the cause of great misery for the future Amina Sinai. Once married, I waited patiently for my husband to consummate our bond, for my love to overcome the hesitation which his sensitive constitution insisted upon. Not a word would I complain as we happily ruled our underworld, as marriage should not depend on the thing (64) But alas, my secret came out and my poetic prince abdicated his throne. Then I was unable to even take solace in the darkness, for the memories of my Nadir lingered there the longest. And what can I possibly say for my subsequent actions? Did the abject rejection of my one true love justify me in finding consolation in my sister’s suitor? No. But this inquiry was not pursued back then. In my blind fragility I was convinced of Ahmed’s boredom with Alia and spurned on by the fact that he had spent years in her company without so much as a glance towards matrimony. I was determined to leave the darkness behind and focus on the only road in which a woman of my means and age could demonstrate her worth in such a world; by bearing children. I allowed Ahmed Sinai to reinvent who I was – no longer a creature of the underworld, I was to have a new name and a new life in Dehli. I can still remember standing on that platform as dadi handed over my dowry and whispered to me “in the end, everyone could do without fathers” (71) Why did these have to be the last words imparted to me? Why would you relinquish your paternal duty without forewarning me of the perils of the perforated sheet? But no, this is my admission, not yours. With all the earnestness at my command, I set about providing my new husband with what he deserves in the only way I learned how, by breaking him down bit by bit and charging myself with the task of loving him in fragments. How I wish I could say this was the end of Nadir. I believed that, by giving myself over to a new life dictated for me, that I would no longer suffer the grievous loss I had endured. And what came of this? Despite the piece by piece process, the assiduous care of our home, the insistence and success of having my child be the Times of India child of independence? What I realize now, what I could not see then, is that I had given over in law that which did not belong to me. In my desperation I believed that I could rename, reinvent myself by handling my life, my husband one piece at a time. By not looking at the full picture, I missed how Nadir seeped into the cracks of each fragment. By the time he reappeared in my life, reinvented himself, I was not surprised. He had always been there. Which is how I gradually (seemingly) found myself at the Pioneer Café. As I was so accustomed to the lies I told myself, I found it unremarkable to declare into the telephone “wrong number” or to arrive at the Café under the pretense of grocery shopping. As I think back to the washing chest, where I had mourned once again the absence of my Nadir…

On Versions: II. Frames and Fingers

FRAMES AND FINGERS

Diagram from Appian's Cosmographia,  1539

“Where do you find it?” I pleaded at my window; the fisherman’s finger pointed, misleadingly, out to sea…” (175)

It seems we have moved rather inexplicably from the concept of objectivity to that of frame (in the literary sense); but the two concepts are in fact quite related.  Beyond the particular function of the old-Saleem-narrative-frame touched on above, what, in general, does a frame do? If we said, It protects the edges of your picture, we could mean this in a common sense way and in a wryly profound way. And it’s true – but we should also remark that the edges of your picture already constitute a frame: in fact, the painting (for example) was already framed by the painter the moment he chose the horizontal and vertical limits of his subject. And this framing is not incidental – nor is it peculiar to painting, or visual arts, for that matter. It is an essential aspect of finite representation: only with the imposition of limits can there be sense and content. The limit introduces the possibility of the center/periphery duality, which is itself a prerequisite of meaning. This is the sense of the philosophical concept of “horizon.” 

A telling example: the original model of the cosmos was ‘closed’: at the center was the earth, at the edge was the heavens. Up is heavenward, down is earthward. With the Copernican revolution, both the center and the periphery are lost: there is only orientationless, endless space. There is no up, and there is no down. Or: there is only up and down, relative to x. And what is x? The re-introduction of a (limited) framework – so there is up and down, if we take the earth as center. Or if we take the sun as center. Or the command console of the rocket ship as center, etc. Moreover, frames can be non-spatial – for instance, the choice to describe the world in the terms of the ontology of “medium sized dry goods” - as opposed to atomic physics or quantum physics or organic chemistry – is a choice we all make every day: we impose a lower limit on how we delimit object. The world is infinitely subtle and our language infinitely capable of precision; there must come a point where we say, precise enough, so we can begin to speak. Or: just imagine if we didn’t? It would be senseless. Reductio ad absurdum.

                Rushdie too must impose limits so he can tell a story, otherwise, he fall afoul of the narrator’s own doomed decree that “ to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world” (121). A book that “swallowed” the whole world would be much like a life-sized map which mapped the entire world in perfect detail – qua map, it would be useless (or we would need a ‘limited’, manageable sized map to navigate it!). We represent because we cannot handle the whole of everything at once. So an author must make choices, and any choice is a limitation. Rushdie does this, quite aptly, using the visual horizon (ie, a limit that grounds) itself as metaphor. In the beginning, Aadem is situated in the mountainous valley of his homeland, and, despite its expansion due to the recession of the ice, he notices “the narrowness, the proximity of the horizon” (5), which saddens him and makes him feel “enclosed.” It is from this very limit that the action proceeds from its Genesis-esque opening; and it is to this very limit that the action returns in the Revelations-esque Revelations. But now the ice has returned, and the mountains have closed in further (317).  So here we have Aadem, framed by the mountains, losing his religion; and later, finally dying, framed by those same mountains. Furthermore, the temporal stretch of his grandfather’s life – from Kashmir valley and back again, forms another frame for the first half of the book, which is a Recurrence of this initial Exile – from faith, from family, from childhood and finally, from India itself and the magical powers it bestows on Saleem. The horizon here is both birth and death. Which, or course, is our horizon too.  

Kashmir Valley (and beyond!)

So what has any of this to do with objectivity? Just this: our subjectivity, our always-coming-from-a-perspective, our need to impose limits in order to make sense, means that we only ever approach the Object, reality, from one angle at a time. (Horizon commonly means – the limit of the current state of knowledge). The fact of perspective sets up the never ending conflict between the finite perspective and the infinite, between belief and truth, between being as it is for us and being as such, ie, objectivity. This tension, which has been the spirit of the times since Descartes, is the strain and stress of doubt, uncertainty, and, at its extreme, solipsism. Since at least Kant we have had to deal with the threat of vicious idealism: that we – as a species, as a people, as an individual even – are, due to our “conceptual scheme” or framework, irreparably out of touch with reality. So even though a framework is a prerequisite of meaning, it also bears within it the inexpungible threat of radical doubt, relativism, falsity and meaninglessness.

                 There have been philosophical attempts to anchor our point-of-viewedness in objective reality (which would be tantamount to framing our frame in the ultimate frame, the Real). Early 20^th century empiricism was troubled by the question, how do we know we all mean the same things by our concepts? One concept is defined or explicated in terms of another, so finding agreement in definition just defers the problem – how do we know we mean the same thing by our definiens  and explicans ? How can we ever know that we mean the same things by our words, if we only ever verify our agreement through further words? Okay, so Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. It seems language is spinning in a frictionless void, never making contact with reality. What can you do? The empiricist solution was reductionist – all abstract concepts reduced to basic experiential concepts – and these basic concepts were not related to each other by verbal definition, but were related directly to the world through ostensive definition: When our concepts become simple enough, we can simply point to the thing referred to.

Millais, The Boyhood of Raleigh

This discussion, I think, gives us a way of reading the strangely dwelt on topic and chapter namesake: the Fisherman’s Pointing Finger. Purportedly, it is via ostension that language breaks out of itself and anchors its meaning in the thing as such: symbolically, the fisherman points beyond the frame (139). Baby Saleem looks out his window (a widely used metaphor for a frame/perspective ) asking where he can find meaning (175), and he follows the fisherman’s pointing finger “even further than that shimmering horizon”  within the painting itself, and “beyond [the]teak frame…’ (139)…where? Out to sea… Here our gaze follows baby Naseem’s own: from the fingers, then beyond the horizon of the painted sea, beyond the painting’s frame, then out past his window frame, stopping on the sea. This radical de-framing, widening of context has its final resting place in what else but that never ending sign of the All, of the Object, of time and eternity, of alpha and omega: the sea.

This thrust – from finger-tip to Being – resonates with the Empiricist’s thrust beyond subjectivity; indeed, this thrust is in turn mirrored in Baby Saleem’s own first attempts to “acquire the essential characteristics of human beings” (144), that is, his attempt to ground himself, to stand on his own two feet:

‘[E]veryday, and only in those rare moments when I was left alone with the fisherman’s pointing finger, I tried to heave myself erect in my cot” (144).

“Alone” with the fisherman’s ostensive motion, what is symbolized is none other than the empiricist’s own vision of the attainment of truth: the (semantically) self-grounding movement that is at once the transcendence of all frames (objective reference) which is in turn contact with objective being (truth). What adds weight to this interpretation is the narrator’s own switching, in a single passage, between the subjective, first personal pronoun (“I tried to heave myself erect…”) to the objective, third personal pronoun (“the moment he would acquire the essential characteristics…”). From the attempt to the attainment, the limited individual perspective is transformed to the impersonal, omniscient third.

                But there have already been hints that this transformation is doomed from the outset. When our narrator tries to understand how his own future hung over his baby-crib in this painting (140) he has trouble determining just what is being pointed to. The finger may be pointing to another frame – the framed copy of his headlined birth announcement in the Times of India. Or, it points to the fishermen out to sea, to the “dispossessed” making their living in the shadow of men like Sir Walter Raleigh, the purported subject of the portrait, whose role in the Colonization and expansion of the Empire contrasts sharply with the referent of the Fishman’s ‘accusing’ gesture. Or, thirdly, the author considers that its purpose is “to draw attention to itself” (139). The author does not settle on one of these readings – he doesn’t even present them as though a choice is necessary or even desirable. But at any rate, we already see a problem with ostensive definition, namely, it does not escape the equivocality and ambiguity of its verbal counterpart. Pointing is not opposed to concepts, the latter being grounded in the former; rather, pointing and concepts are both part of a single framework – the symbolic. And the symbolic is sui generis – signs and symbols are grounded in signs and symbols and thus susceptible to interpretation and divergent meaning. So pointing too has different meanings, which are only determined contextually against a background of shared beliefs, intentions, values and projects.

            As Quine “points out”: imagine trying to translate the utterances of someone from a radically new and different linguistic tradition – they say gavagaii when they point to what we take as a rabbit. But since we do not know how they conceptually carve up the world, we have no way in principle of deciding, when they point and utter, ‘gavagaii’, whether they are pointing to a rabbit, or an “undetached rabbit part”: everything they point at, and any way they point at it, will be consistent with both interpretations. But of course, in our mapping of their lexicon, we will take them to be referring to the whole rabbit, and thus attribute to them the same concept as we use. How else could we begin to translate any foreign symbolic system, with all its potential ambiguities, without already assuming not: a ground of shared, non-verbal experiences which are anchored ostensively and from which meaning flows upwards; but assuming rather: a stratum of shared concepts, from which meaning flows downwards, and disambiguates given instances of ostension.  Ostensive reference does not ground the meaning of concepts. Rather, the assumption of shared concepts make possible the disambiguation of ostensive reference.

                Moreover, this ‘ambiguity of ostensive reference’ has a meta- layer: for just as the possible meanings of the fisherman’s finger indicate a sort of failure of univocality qua falling sort of objectivity, so too these possible interpretations suggest certain ways of reading Midnight’s Children itself – the first, pointing to the photograph of his birth, is the straightforward, mimetic reading: the story as representation of events; the second is the social realist reading: ostensibly a ‘story’, but really as a critique of existing social order and its “dispossessions”; the third, the finger pointing to itself, is clearly the modernist reading, where the text’s principle effect is self-referential: it raises questions about textuality and the literary as such. Of course, there is no need to decide here. What’s important is that we see, once again, how the attempt to transcend subjectivity is a self-defeating behavior: here in the attempt to univocally fix symbolic meaning the result is rather the proliferation of meanings, ambiguity and equivocality.  Or: the quest for monophony ends in polyphony. (A fate awaiting our narrator himself.)

             Any attempts to have a frameless interaction with Being are at worst paradoxical, and at best, ineffable. (Early 20^th Century Empiricism learned this lesson too.) Here’s why (in the form of a two pronged dilemma): either (1) the subject must exempt herself (her subjectivity, her framing activity) from being, in which case she sacrifices her ability to represent her experience (for any such presentation would involve framing—after all, language is a frame, as is any particular language); or (2) the subject must  attempt to account for the whole of (o) objective reality – ie the reality without her - and then add herself and her (S(o)) subjective representation to that – for this too, is part of (r) reality. So she represents thus: r = (o) & (S(o)). But part of her (S(o)) subjectivity is what she’s just represented, namelyS(r), which is defined as (o) &(S(o)). So that means she must represent r’,  which is equal to: (o) & (S(o) & S(r)). But part of her (S(o)) is this S(r’), which is defined as = (o) & (S(o) & S(r)), so that means r’’ = (o) & (S(o) & S(r) & S(r’)). And so on, ad infinitum. By including her representation of reality in reality, she makes reality a little bigger – and then must include this representation in reality – which makes it a little bigger… Or consider what happens when a video camera is pointed at its own display: reality is not contained but multiplied endlessly. Or, just watch the movie Synecdoche, New York...
            And we have seen these ill-fated attempts before: The (1) first horn is that of the mystic. He dies outside of Saleem’s house waiting for the truth to drip into him. The (2) second horn is that of Nadir Khan’s roommate  when he was a young man, a painter “whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into art” (49). He kills himself.

Girolamo Andrea Martignoni, Spiegazione della Carta Istorica dell' Italia

On Versions: I. Introduction: Objectivity and Eschatology

ON VERSIONS

“There are as many versions of India as Indians” (308)

version (n.): 1580s, "a translation," from Middle French version, from Medieval Latin versionem (nominative versio) "a turning," from past participle stem of Latin vertere "to turn" (see versus). Also with a Middle English sense of "destruction;" the meaning "particular form of a description" is first attested 1788.

INTRODUCTION: OBJECTIVITY AND ESCHATOLOGY

Stephan Lochner, The Last Judgment

“…we would have no meaning until we were destroyed” (262)

The mythical Biblical progression from Genesis to Revelations can be read as a dialectic of objectivity. Things begin prior to history and the knowledge of good and evil; man’s relationship to being is timeless and non-evaluative – beyond change and carefree – classical criteria for the objectivity of the object and subject respectively. Nothing Ever Happens. Until the fall. This exile into worldly concern throws the subject into need, and the object into its service. In the realm of value things are no longer disinterestedly seen changelessly in themselves but rather are seen for the sake of. Man, the measure of all things, judges. Subjectivity predominates. History historicizes (a not- even-half serious Heidegger reference). Perspectives – “versions” – multiply exponentially…Things end when the infinitely equivocal possibilities of judgment are deter-mined, are de-fin-ed:  the final judgment, the impossibility of further appeal.  Objectivity re-appropriates its Other - namely, value, good and evil - in the ultimate synthesis of the Objective Good: and Nothing Ever Happens again. A telos worthy of Plato’s cave-dweller.

                Likewise (and hitherto) our story has a similar framing structure – from its already Eden-like initiation through its epoch-ending Revelations. And, similarly, at issue is the question, or questions, of objectivity – more precisely, of the varied relations of the object and the subject, of being and thinking, of fact and fantasy, of world and concept: truth, certainty, illusion, distortion and so on. What follows will be more of an exploration than an argument – a “versio,” or turning, about subjects, which are, I hope, thematically related enough to have congregated in a single essay. And yet this style already has this much going for it: it emulates Saleem’s own narrative style.  One thing I remarked to myself (as I noticed that I had more pages read than pages to read) is that I have no idea where this book is going. What the narrator is relating – his childhood and onward – doesn’t have the classic dramatic structure – exposition, rising action, climax, etc. (Under that rubric, I suppose we’d still be in the exposition.) His tale (not Rushdie’s—which is classically a novel)is rather unified as a memoire – recounting the significant events that led him to be who he turns out to be, viz., the man writing the memoire.  And, like all memoires, what happened, if unknown, is at least settled: there is no conflict regarding what becomes of the author. In fact, it is because we already know what’s become of a person that we choose to investigate the tale of his past in the first place. What we what to know is: just how he got there. Of course Midnight’s Children is not a memoire – it is the story of a man writing his memoire. But this framing technique – a history framed by a man struggling to make sense of that history – not only introduces a tremendous amount of uncertainty – and indeed, the more the further we go along – but it exposes the fact that the act of composing a memoire bears the same relation to the author as the finished product will bear to its prospective reader – ie., the author too is trying to figure out just how he got there.

This, then, is where we find the dramatic conflict: between Saleem-the-midnight-child and Saleem-the-storytelling-old-man; between the past events and the present attempt to make sense of them; between the story and the frame, a concept which will be under much discussion soon. So we ask:  How did the most powerful of the midnight children end up on his deathbed, impotent and disintegrating, next to his grossly competent Padma, in a room above a pickling factory, threatened by a burdening sense of purposelessness? Will he, against the forces that erode his body and memory, succeed in making sense of what happened? Is he, now, telling the truth, about then?

The appearance of old Saleem, or the narrator qua narrator – this panning outwards which exposes the frame – means: all the events of his past are deprived of true possibility. There is a path from Kashmir valley to the pickle factory; and all that remains is to map it…and, to make sense of it. The mission is over; it just has to be debriefed. Closed up are the events in a single determined sequence (which is already closed on the first page of the novel).  What hangs open – to gain and loss and suspense and resolution – is not the events but his appraisal of them.  The conflict, then, is the endless equivocal possibilities, interpretations, and perspectives which mediate between Saleem and own his past. The resolution, which transpires in the narrative frame, then would be univocal meaning – would be Final Judgment: the deed is done, the life is lived – but was it purposeless? (But can we expect uni-vocality from a man with so many voices in his head?) Let’s try reframing the problem.

Fragmented.

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images”

-TS Eliot, The Waste Land

While reading Midnight’s Children, I have been unable to ignore how fragmentation pervades the text; not only through the lives of the characters but in the structure of the narrative as well. I offer an excerpt of Eliot to begin with because, although fragmentation is not a novel concept in the 20^th century, it is certainly where this displaced sentiment (and form) has found its stride. I intend to explore this theme on an interpersonal, individual and national level as conveyed through the lives of Aadem/Naseem, Amina/Ahmed, and Saleem Sinai, as both an individual and a representation of India.

The first relationship to develop in the narrative exists between Aadem and

Naseem. As her physician, he is charged with the examination of the landowner’s

daughter through a perforated sheet, as she is a “decent girl….she does not flaunt her body under the noses of strange men.” (19) Over the proceeding years, Aadem falls under the spell of the perforated sheet, falling in love with Naseem one body part at a time, as “a badly-fitting collage of her severally-inspected parts.” (22) Nevertheless, this collage is regarded by Aadem as something “sacred and magical” (23) and it is through these partial, magical glimpses that Aadem chooses to marry Naseem. The ensuing marriage and family is beset with consternation as Aadem discovers the woman he has constructed in his mind via the perforated sheet is not, in reality, the same woman he has pledged his life to. Here is the first example in which fragmentation leads to a loss of identity; as Aadem has built a picture of Naseem piece by piece, he is unable to accept her whole identity and particularly as she changes with time into the woman known as “Reverend Mother” Aadem “more or less {gives} up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain.” (40)

The second relationship which follows very closely to Aadem and Naseem is their daughter, Amina. In love with a basement dweller who is unable to consummate their marriage, Amina is obliged to marry Ahmed Sinai in order to produce children. She does not love Ahmed, however, possibly taking a cue from her father whom she is most like and connected with in the family, she forces herself to learn to love him, “to do this she divided him, mentally, into every single one of his component parts, physical as well as behavioral, compartmentalizing him into lips and verbal tics and prejudices and likes…in short, she fell under the spell of the perforated sheet.” (73) Here again is an example of a character being unable to accept the identity of their partner as a whole and, in this case, a premeditated attempt to break them into palatable pieces, pieces that she will form into her own collage resembling the man she loves, Nadir.

Both of the aforementioned relationships convey the sense of something missing, something, which I would argue, is identity. For Aadem, this began with the rejection of his faith, as he was “knocked forever in that middle place, unable to worship  a God whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve” a result of which “a permanent alteration: a hole” formed within him. Aadem’s inability to reconcile his former spiritual life with the new life he discovered while studying in Germany has left him at an impasse and left him vulnerable to the allure of the perforated sheet. For Naseem, it is only after she has married Aadem that we begin to see her as “adrift in the universe” (41) and is unable to specify the environment around her, relying on the phrase “whatsitsname” as an ever debilitating crutch. As for Amina and Ahmed, they each develop their own coping mechanisms at the racetrack and the bottle, respectively.

            Although not biologically related, Saleem relays the history of Aadem, Naseem, Amina and Ahmed as if they are inextricably linked to his own existence. And they are.  He comes to discover that “"the ghostly essence of the perforated sheet, which doomed my mother to learn to love a man in segments, and which condemned me to see my own life -- its meaning, its structures -- in fragments also; so that by the time I understood it, it was far too late" (119) As he physically fragments and disintegrates, so too does his narrative; the oscillations from his present state of affairs and the story which he is attempting to convey become more frequent and cumbersome, erstwhile he beseeches the reader, “please believe me that I am falling apart.” (36)

He claims that he is falling into 630 million pieces, which, at the time of publication, was the estimated population of India. Saleem could then be viewed as the representation of India as a nation (his birth coinciding with the birth of the nation is another clear connection)  It is with this piece that we can then take the theme of fragmentation to a national level; from partition to independence to discussion of dividing India along religious or linguistic lines, Rushdie utilizes his characters to demonstrate how, by breaking down into individual pieces, one loses the essence of the whole and thus India would cease to exist if it were to fragment along these lines.

Creation and Leviathan: Water Symbolism through Chapter 4

“In the beginning there were the Waters restrained within a shell, which was personified as a wicked withholding demon named Vᶉtra, the “Encloser.” There existed a natural force for expansion, which in its turn was personified as the god Varuᶇa. But the power of contraction or conservatism, Vᶉtra, was greater than that of liberation and growth. Meanwhile besides the withheld Waters there was a Fashioner god, named Tvastr, who created Heaven and Earth to be his house. Of those two was born a son Indra, who drank the soma that made him expand and be strong, and he forced apart Heaven and Earth, filling the space between them and being, we may suppose, the informing power of the atmosphere. He split the covering within which lay the Waters, so that they came forth. They were impregnated and gave birth to the Sun, and themselves flowed into the atmospheric ocean. By this great deed Indra separated the Sat from the Asat, the Existent from the Non-existent. This was creation”

-          Norman Brown, The Creation Myth of the Rig Veda

Indra killing Vrtra with thunderbolt

As in the ancient Indian myth, water has a prevalent symbolic role in the opening chapters of Midnight’s Children. Water does not ground more abstract concepts (change, time, etc.) as a fundamentally basic or simple concept; instead, it illuminates them by analogy with our intimately familiar experience of water.  In what follows I will explore some of the ways that Rushdie draws on this familiarity to introduce and sustain the more abstract, existential themes at issue in his story.

                Water as such -- or rather, the lack of water as such -- appears as our background mirror in chapters 3 and 4. In our characters’ lives, it is a period of drought, of failed harvest (68), which, on the historical level and individual levels respectively, sees the seeds of both the optimism “pandemic” and a marriage bear no fruit. According to the narrator, the rains “failed”, and to a native Indian, this would immediately refer to the failure of the southwest monsoon: each summer the land heats faster than the ocean, which causes lifting, lower pressure, and the transport of moist air over the subcontinent. This annual cyclic phenomenon accounts for over 80% of India’s rainfall; and in 1942 - the period covered in chapters 3 and 4 -its failure resulted in a drought that killed over 1.5 million people; it has its own effects on the lives of our characters.  

The drought means not only failed harvest but also, the splitting, the dis-integration of the earth: the desiccated ground forms “huge gaping fissures …in the midst of macadamed intersections” (38). This same dis-integration has appeared earlier: the narrator has hinted at his gift of “filling in the gaps” (14) (which he also more describes more explicitly aquatically as the past dripping into him (37)); and in that context the fissure represents the forgotten past. This ability to fill in gaps is what makes the narrator omniscient (in the literary, not theological, sense). And if the completely integrated earth takes on the role of an unlimited recollection, than the completely disintegrated and desiccated earth, viz., dust, symbolizes an ultimate forgetting: Saleem anticipates his own death thus: -“I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust” (36).

Not only is dust oblivious, incapable of memory, but it is also anonymousand we’ve already seen the inability to name – his grandmother’s ‘whatitsname’ exclamation – as an inability to make sense, a being “adrift in the universe” (41).  Relatedly, the drought itself is a time of silence (and ‘unspeakable’ acts (63)) in the Aziz household.  Conversely, when the rains return, the basement becomes moist, Mumtaz falls ill, her father inspects her and perepeteia: the truth is exposed and the silence is broken: the Deluge begins. “Three years of words poured out of [Naseem]”, speech returns to the household, so much so that the “house was full of puddles” (64). Indeed, the link between water and cathartic, purifying, revelatory speech is so tight that Rushdie leaves it ambiguous whether the house is flooded from the literal storm going on outside or the one going on in the drawing room. So at the very least, the withheld water corresponds to failure, to disintegration, to forgetting, to silence: to the absurd. Indeed, it is only with the Flood that we can move past all the “false starts” of these drought-ridden chapters.

Water, like all elements, goes through phase changes. Indeed, the fact that the freezing temperature and the boiling point of water are used to create the scale for temperature shows how central these phase changes are to us. If water as drought - as evaporated, as vapor neither condensing nor precipitating – is one polarity on this spectrum, then we can expect to see, and do see, themes developed out of water’s other polarity: viz., ice.

Indeed, the story begins with the images of Aadem’s blood and tears falling from his face and freezing before they hit his prayer mat. This is complicated imagery, but it deserves special attention, considering that it is rather a suspect situation: after all it is early spring, the lake is thawed, and so too the ice that closes in the valley each winter has melted. His fluids freeze, we can conclude, for a non-chemical reason, and, relatedly, this entire opening sequence raises itself to an almost mythical level: a retelling of the Fall. His prayer is in the garden, the appearance of doubt in the form of his western education – fruits of the tree of knowledge of good and evil – his loss of faith. The sequence ends with his being dispatched to tend to a sick girl, which is at once the “end of his peace”, and his entrance into history: family, procreation and so on. Reading the opening sequence through the fall, as a paradise lost, connects the phenomenon of freezing  to the timeless and the pre-historic. His fluids becoming rubies and diamonds then can be seen to give rise to themes of everlastingness, of unchanging purity and splendor, and moreover, to the livelihood of his parents, who deal in gems. But, more importantly, the three drops of blood that fall from his grandfather’s nose allude immediately to the “three drops of old, faded redness” on the perforated sheet introduced in the previous paragraph. These stains on the sheet, with their suggestion of the onset of fertility (and so birth, change, history) and even the sheet itself qua veil for nakedness (and so shame, good, and evil) all reinforce the Fall allegory, and also makes the following contrast clear: what is frozen does not stain. It leaves no mark, and so retains no history.    

Liquidity and time, as well as solidity and timelessness, are not new symbols. But Rushdie does enhance them a bit. Water, in its liquid form, has the ability to receive -to mix – and to deposit – to stain. Again, then, we see water suggesting recollection, as the theme of staining – it’s ability to leave a mark – is used again and again to mark the incidents in Saleem’s family history: from the stains on the perforated sheet, to the mercurochrome on Aadem’s shirt and it’s sinister repetition as blood, to the jets of betel-juice that stain Major Zulphy’s pants. It is no coincidence that what the water carries in each of these instances is a red substance. The narrator himself equates the “redness” and blood” (62) of a history with what is ‘unspeakable’ – not in the sense of anonymity mentioned above, but in the sense of what withdraws into secret, what asks to be covered up, which of course has application in each of the above instances of staining, as well as in the entire story itself, which the narrator uncovers, not without some reluctance (a theme begun in my first post).  

Water, as what is capable of mixing and changing, is strongly related to the notion of recollection, and with it, the further notions of temporal endurance: of retaining, of being laden, with an ever-growing past. This moisture holds us together, and delays our inevitable transformation into dust. We are thrown, in the world, toward death – and water still serves as the medium of our being as well as our angst: “Panic - like a bubbling sea-beast comes up for air, boils on the surface, but eventually returns to the deep. It is impossible…to remain calm” (36). The spittoon too takes on a deeper significance, as it preserves our fluids from disappearing into the “dust of the street” (44). At one point our narrator espouses the motto, “expectorate and rise above the fissures” (38), which suggests a sort of playful -even disdainful - self-consciously wasteful expenditure of one’s precious fluids in the face of desiccation, of drought and disintegration.  This hitting-the-spittoon is also contrasted with an activity involving many of the same body parts, viz., whistling, which is in turn associated with the hollow optimism of the time.

                But if we begin in ice then so too will we end. So says, Tai in all his twisted and ancient wisdom, that “The ice is always waiting…under the water’s skin” (7). What waits is what no longer mixes, what no longer flows through, or stains; it only cracks. If dust scatters itself, then ice shuts closes itself off. Such fissures and cracks, so foreign to the nature liquid water, bound its phases at both extremes. And like his mortal fear of disintegrating, so too, Saleem fears his eventual transformation into the ice that waits under the water’s skin: “My own hand…has begun to wobble…because I have noticed a thin crack, like a hair, appearing in my wrist, beneath the skin…No matter. We all own death a life” (35)

 

Titian, Perseus and Andromeda

Reference Material

http://dart.columbia.edu/southasia/timeline/#nationalist-movements

http://www.kamat.com/database/content/20th_century/

http://storyofpakistan.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-12641776

http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/6308/The-Modernist-Art-Movement-from-India/#vars!date=1828-11-03_10:23:05!


Listed above are links to timelines of 20th century India, as well as biographical information on many of the names mentioned in Book I of Midnight's Children. (Please note that the last link is simply an interesting compilation of images throughout this period and does not provide detailed historical or biographical information)

Interpretation of the Proust Phenomenon

          "When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection."

                         --Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time : Swann's Way

          Psychology and literature has a long history of illustrating how odors are extraordinarily vigorous reminders of autobiographical experience, an effect which has become known as the Proust phenomenon. The ability of, for example, a madeleine to evoke seemingly forgotten memories of childhood has interested psychologists, poets and authors alike for generations. The general consensus is that the hippocampus, located in the temporal lobe as the consolidator of short term and long term memory sends axons to the main olfactory bulb and therefore provides a connection between smell and memory which other senses lack. Rushdie continues this tradition in Midnight's Children as embodied in the Aziz/Sinai family's most prevalent trait, the "proboscissmus" or the "cyranose" (8)

          The initial source of action which takes place in the novel involves Aadam Aziz hitting his nose "against a frost hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray." (4) This propels the story into motion as it symbolizes an awakening of sorts to Aadam. He is quickly thereafter indoctrinated by Tai regarding the "great gift" he possesses with his nose, as "it's the place where the outside world meets the inside you."(13) He is further advised to follow the cues provided by his nose (e.g. in the form of itching) and consequently, the precedent is set for the importance this nose will subsequently play in the text.

          Rushdie takes this olfactory importance further by adding an element of the fantastic to his version of the Proust phenomenon. More than recollecting one's own biography through olfaction, he posits that Saleem is able to recall his generational history through the power of his great gift. The idea here is that just as genetics determines the cosmetic makeup of the individual, allowing for physical traits to be passed down from (grand)father to (grand)son, so too can familial memories be passed. Saleem exemplifies this by describing "the sharp stink of {his} grandmother's curiosity and strength" (54) The suggestion that concepts such as strength and curiosity have scents and moreover that their scents are putrid is a ludicrous claim prima facie. However, by considering Saleem's gift as allowing him to recall the situations in which Naseem's stalwart insolence created friction within the Aziz family and a general air of malcontent, it is clearer to see why his grandmother's "strength" would sharply stink. Although it may be argued that this simply a literary flourish, another example provides edification; Saleem describes "using my nose (because although it has lost the powers which enabled it, so recently, to make history, it has required other compensatory gifts)--turning it inwards, I've been sniffing out the atmosphere in my grandfather's house." (54) This suggests that Saleem is able to use his sense of smell to recall long term memories beyond that of his earliest childhood. Specifically, this passage intimates that Aadam has passed down to Saleem a hippocampus indented with memories of his own experience.  Rather than stating that his grandfather told him stories of massacre and mercurochrome, or that he has read as much in journals or newspapers, Saleem defers to his sense of smell as the authority which bolsters him to tell this tale.

          Rushdie's mixture of fact and fantasy seems all but assured to subsist throughout the narrative and further promulgate the "folklore" of the Proust phenomenon.