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.