Ricostruzioni della Storia in 'Midnight's Children'

Abstract


As the studies of Steven Connor, Christopher Butler and Paola Splendore point out, the interest in the relationship between official history and personal story arises as one of the main topics in the work of Salman Rushdie. In this dissertation the issue of representation of history in Midnight’s Children’s postcolonial world will be discussed.
Chapter 1 provides the reader with an outlook on the ideas of postmodernism according to McHale, on narrative devices analysed by Patricia Waugh in Metafiction and by Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author, and on problems of postcolonial literature. This first chapter deals with a general discussion about issues of history and representation in postmodernist literature, which is followed by a more specific discussion focused on Rushdie’s ideas about literature’s ability to represent reality and the validity of official history as opposed to individual stories, as it arises from the essays of the collection Imaginary Homelands.
After this introductive discussion, chapter 2 and 3 focus on the novel’s content and on recurring images, characters and metaphors, which hint at the issues of history vs. story, already discussed in chapter 1. By supporting Uma Parameswaran’s analysis of Salman Rushdie’s works, in chapter 2 the metaphor of the perforated sheet is considered as fundamental both in the representation of reality and of the relationship of the individual with the rest of the world. This metaphor, which is one of the most famous together with the metaphor of the chutney, is extended, then, considering the hole as one of the main images in Midnight’s Children, which hints at the intimate necessity of the postcolonial subject to reconstruct and preserve his/her history, even when this act implies an alteration of the original reality and a rendering of the single and imperfect part as an authoritative whole. Through an analysis of the character of Aadam Aziz and of several characters which work as portraits of the artist according to Rushdie, all the different possible meanings of the image of the hole are explained.
Chapter 3, instead, concentrates on images of the body as a representation of a whole and on its illnesses and imperfections as a representation of the relationship of the individual with the external world, and of the stories of the individual with the official history. A few characters are took as an example in the first paragraph, but great part of this third chapter deals with an analysis of the main character, Saleem Sinai, of representations of his body and the link between his self and the imaginary self of the nation, on which the core of the novel is centred.
In chapter 4 the reader is provided with an analysis of the very structure of the text. The analysis deals with Bachtin’s concept of polyphonic novel, as pointed out by Philip Engblom in his study about carnivalization and dialogicality in Midnight’s Children, and with the influence of oral tradition in Salman Rushdie’s works. A discussion is held also about the character of Padma and the relationship between narrator and narratee, with an outlook on the studies of Keith Wilson and Nancy E. Batty. At the end of this analysis, we deal with considerations about the final chapter of the novel, and whether it should be considered pessimistic or optimistic. As a matter of fact, many critics, and also Uma Parameswaran, have considered Midnight’s Children a pessimistic novel, because of the final melting of the self-important ego of Saleem with the teeming multitudes, and his final surrender to the rules of history. The discussion about the opposition between the individual and the crowd is parallel to that between stories and history in the novel, and that is why, taking into consideration Rushdie’s responses to critics, we show how his work achieves a balance between form, which represents the self-regenerating history of the teeming multitudes, and content, which mirrors the seemingly disappointing story of an individual.