‘Racing cracks’: Memory and Time in "Midnight's Children" of Salman Rushdie

In her essay ´The Art of Suspense: Rushdie’s 1001 (Mid-)Nights’, Nancy E. Batty identifies this narrative technique as a ’suspense strategy’ employed in order to ‘defer the end of the narrative act’ (Fletcher, Reading Rushdie, 70). She furthermore argues that the narrator’s constant previewing of events to come is ‘the most obvious and effective suspense-creating device in the novel’ (Fletcher 71). Saleem can indeed regularly be found announcing events to come and characters about to enter his narrative’s world: ‘[...] Evelyn Lilith Burns is coming; the Pioneer Café is getting painfully close; and - more vitally – midnight’s other children [...] are pressing extremely hard’ (MC 248). Saleem’s intention must indeed be seen as the creation of suspense as he himself declares early on that ‘there is nothing like a countdown for building suspense’ (MC 142). He thus builds expectation up, deferring its fulfilment as long as he possibly can.

Batty also draws attention to the fact that, ‘like the perforated sheet through which Aadam Aziz views various parts of Naseem’s body, the narrative must always reveal something while concealing everything else’ (Fletcher 72). Saleem can be seen to self-consciously use this technique as a storyteller when he says: ‘[...] I musn’t reveal all my secrets at once’, or when he proclaims that he ‘musn’t get ahead of [himself]’ (MC 10, 233). Thus, we are told that some things cannot be narrated quite yet and need to wait their turn. The effect produced is one of ‘deferment of disclosure’, following a ‘rigid pattern of promise and fulfilment’ (Fletcher 73-74). However, is the narrator here indeed fulfilling his promises, or are we not actually cheated out of this fulfilment by these constant deferments? Meaning is deferred throughout the narrative and in the end, along with Saleem, we have to ask ourselves if we have not been on a futile quest for meaning.

This constant deferment of climaxes, or just even the delaying of events, serves one specific purpose on the metafictional level of Saleem’s narrative: he is forced to preserve his very existence through the continuation of his narrative. As soon as his story is finished, he faces annihilation. Thus, the legitimisation of his existence lies within his narration; while he is narrating, he has ‘the strength to resist the cracks’ (MC 168). In other words, his life is restricted to the narrative space and consequently, he only exists because he his narrating. Telling his story thus becomes his very raison d’être. This is literally true when considering that Saleem is after all only a fictional narrator, created by Rushdie. As a fiction, Saleem can only ever exist within the frame

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work of the narrative. In his essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, Michel Foucault establishes a similar link:

Saleem’s bodily decay is correlated with the progress of his written novel. The faster, and the more he writes, the more rapid his decay. Clearly, when the writing is completed, the end of this process can no longer be deferred.

(Bouchard, Language, 74)

Saleem is thus, paradoxically, racing against himself, assuming a kind of split personality: Saleem the writer, an omniscient god-like narrator in control, versus Saleem the fictional character who fears annihilation.

I think it has become clear by now to what extent Midnight’s Children is preoccupied with the metafictional. It is a piece of fiction that constantly comments on itself and draws attention to its own processes. As Damian Grant points out, Rushdie’s novel is ‘uncompromisingly metafictional’, being a novel about the processes at work within fiction-creation (41). Distinctions between fiction and reality are blurred and questioned, making it an essentially postmodernist work. Rushdie plays with conventional notions of fiction and artificiality. His narrator is persistently trying to convince his readers that he must be believed, no matter how unbelievable his accounts sound. Saleem’s ‘lust for centrality’ can be used as a further example of Rushdie’s interest in the metafictional (Banerjee 171). Again, as a fictional character, Saleem’s wish to be at the centre must be seen as a condition of his being at all, that is of his very existence.

The metafictional dimension gains relevance when related to the novel’s concept of time. Saleem, besides being a fictional character, is a creator of fiction, he is thus in a position of power and hence in control of time. As long as he is re-creating his fictional life story, he masters time and can therefore ignore linearity or chronology, and use time instead as a flexible background to his narrative. In other words, since he invents his narrative, he can also invent any temporal structure he wants to. This explains then why he tries to delay the end of his narrative as long as possible: once the story is told, the fiction is over and reality sets in. As a result, he vanishes along with his re-creations of time and history. This leads towards the conclusion that within Midnight’s Children, ‘meaning is only to be found in the act of telling’ (Banerjee 172).

In her study of Salman Rushdie’s work, Catherine Cundy rightly notes that ‘Midnight’s Children draws on the models of the seemingly endless and digressive

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Indian epics’ (27). More specifically, ‘[this] technique of circling back from the past, of building tale within tale, and persistently delaying climaxes are all features of traditional narration and orature’ (Ashcroft 184). Rushdie thus borrows elements of traditional Indian storytelling and weaves them into his Western and predominantly postmodernist narrative. The final product is a hybrid postcolonial text, a successful fusion of East and West in terms of both form and content. Grant adds that Rushdie uses a ‘double-sided, reversible formula from oral tradition’, a ‘formula that asserts nothing, that leaves everything suspended in the light wind of fictional hypothesis’ (47). If nothing is asserted, nothing is fixed and hence everything becomes mouldable and changeable. Grant uses the following analogy to describe this narrative structure:

This is a process we might call ´tessellation’, after the way tiles are laid to overlap on a roof, whereby the narrative is always looping back in recapitulation, and also looking forward (‘proleptically’) in anticipation. The effect is to bring a depth of field to the present moment, creating an impression of simultaneity and temporal suspension – as the fluid present, the elusive now, is always pressed on by the past and foreshadowed, drawn forward. (39)

This takes us directly to the novel’s fluid concept of time. The narrative is not linear, not following a chronological mode of narration, but one that ’veers between past, present and future, presaging not only the arrival of events and characters which will later be revealed, but also his own annihilation’ (Cundy 28). Cundy uses the analogy of a ‘pendulum’ (28) to visualise the movement of this narrative that, starting from Saleem’s present standpoint in the pickling factory, takes us from the time before his birth, moving backwards and forwards, allowing us glimpses of things to come. It is what Saleem calls ‘the metronome music of Mountbatten’s countdown calendar’ to independence (MC 97). Cundy furthermore observes that, [just] as a metronome or pendulum picks up the speed and regularity of its beat from the initially wider swing which provides it with its momentum, so the narrative intermittently takes a swing further back into family and national history before resuming its steady tick-tock drift between two historical points. (28)

Past, present and future become one single entity and space in which Saleem travels freely, ignoring temporal boundaries. Any clear borders disappear, so that the narrative

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exists in a state and space of fluidity and flux. In Midnight’s Children, time does not obey the laws of cause and effect, but creates its own universe of endless ‘swoops, spirals, digression and reiteration’ (Cundy 28). One might compare the novel’s time frame to Benedict Anderson’s notion of a ‘homogeneous, empty time’, in which, he claims, such autobiographical narratives are mostly set (204). He argues that ‘[this] is why so many autobiographies begin with the circumstances of parents and grandparents, for which the autobiographer can have only circumstantial, textual evidence’ (204).

The recurring motif of endings and beginnings fits into this idea of homogeneous time. Saleem admits at his ‘story’s half-way point’ that it ‘reeks of beginnings and ends, when you could say it should be more concerned with middles’ (MC 309). After each build up, the narrative implodes in a sense and then begins all over again. The endings are never terminal in Midnight’s Children. Although Saleem’s disintegration is the end of his personal hybrid existence, it must be understood as a new beginning for India. Thus, Grant is right in claiming that the narrative is ‘open at both ends’, reflecting once more the novel’s fluid temporality (Grant 42). The idea of flux can also be found in the way the concept of identity is treated in Midnight’s Children. Saleem perfectly exemplifies the model of a flexible and hybrid identity. He slips into various different roles and identities throughout the course of the story, with each new identity adding a new layer to his personality. He goes from Saleem to Buddha to ‘basketed ghost’ to ‘would-be-saviour of the nation’, with each new assumed role adding something to his profile (MC 610). He is not Saleem or Buddha, he is both at the same time. His identity, like all identities, is a construction, ever-changing and multitudinous. In Saleem’s words:

I am the sum total of everything that went on before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’ve gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each ´I’, every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. [...] to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world. (MC 535)

The motifs of fluid identities and endless beginnings are closely linked to the birth theme that runs through Midnight’s Children. The birth of Saleem, representative

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