From Ayah to widow, I’ve been the sort of person to whom things have been done; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing himself as protagonist. Despite Mary’s crime; setting aside typhoid and snake-venom; dismissing two accidents. In washing-chest and circus-ring (when Sonny Ibrahim, master lock-breaker, permitted my budding horns of temples to invade his forcep-hollows, and through this combination unlocked the door to the midnight children); disregarding the effects of Evie’s push and my mother’s infidelity; in spite of losing my hair to the bitter violence of Emil Zagallo and my finger to the lip-licking goads of Masha Miovic; setting my face against all indications to the contrary, I shall now amplify, in the manner and with the proper solemnity of a man of science, my claim to a place at the center of things.
Lost? No worries, that’s just Rushdie’s way of saying “here comes the point; pay attention.” (I felt compelled to use a semicolon, since he seems so fond of them.) To wit:
“...Your life, which will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,” the Prime Minister wrote, obliging me scientifically to face the question: In what sense? How, in what terms, may the career of a single individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation? I must answer in adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our (admirably modern) scientists might term “modes of connection” composed of “dualistically-combined configurations” of the two pairs of opposed adverbs given above. This is why hyphens are necessary: actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world.
And now, evidently, colons (and hyphens). The hyphens are key to understanding this story of a man born at the stroke of midnight on the day of modern India’s birth and who, inexplicably, has a telepathic connection to all the other “midnight children” like him.
Sensing Padma’s unscientific bewilderment, I revert to the inexactitudes of common speech: By the combination of “active” and “literal” I mean, of course, all actions of mine which directly -- literally -- affected, or altered the course of, seminal historical events, for instance the manner in which I provided the language marchers with their battle-cry. The union of “passive” and “metaphorical” encompasses all socio-political trends and events which, merely by existing, affected me metaphorically -- for example, by reading between the lines of the episode entitled “The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger,” you will perceive the unavoidable connection between the infant state’s attempts at rushing towards full-sized adulthood and my own early, explosive efforts at growth … Next, “passive” and “literal,” when hyphenated, cover all moments at which national events had a direct bearing upon the lives of myself and my family -- under this heading you should file the freezing of my father’s assets, and also the explosion at Walkeshwar Reservoir, which unleashed the great cat invasion. And finally there is the “mode” of the “active-metaphorical,” which groups together those occasions on which things done by or to me were mirrored in the macrocosm of public affairs, and my private existence was shown to be symbolically at one with history. The mutilation of my middle finger was a case in point, because when I was detached from my fingertip and blood (neither Alpha nor Omega) rushed out in fountains, a similar thing happened to history, and all sorts of everywhichthings began pouring out all over us; but because history operates on a grander scale that any individual, it took a good deal longer to stitch it back together and mop up the mess.
The life of the narrator and the life of the nation are metaphorically linked -- and what happens to the narrator in his life represents something that happened to the nation of India and its people. That much is clear to anyone, even someone like me, who knows next to nothing about India’s history, its people, its politics.
“Passive-metaphorical,” “passive-literal,” “active-metaphorical”: the Midnight Children’s Conference was all three; but it never became what I most wanted it to be; we never operated in the first, most significant of the “modes of connection.” The “active-literal” passed us by.
And Rushdie offers such a reader no help at all. He purposely hides the “active-literal,” much preferring, it seems, to dance on and explore the knife-edges that separate the “passive-literal” and the “active-metaphorical,” seeing if they, perhaps, may add up to the “passive metaphorical.”
This is clearly his intent. But I don’t know India well enough to tell if he’s doing that well. I can’t tell what is and is not metaphor -- passive or active -- and the fear that he is trying to make everything -- literally everything -- a metaphor frankly exhausted me. When measured on this scale, Midnight’s Children is either the most significant triumph in all literature or it is a rambling, masturbatory mess.
Is that, maybe, its genius? I wish I could tell.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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