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")