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Article published in «ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature» — 1995 — v. 26 — n. 2, April — pp. 41-62.
Salman Rushdie's <em>Midnight's Children is commonly read as a national allegory giving imaginative form to India and its history. As such, it has become the central text in Indian literature written in English: "it sounds like a continent finding its voice," reads the blurb from the New York Times on the cover of the Picador paperback. Indian critics, in particular, read the novel as a national allegory that can be criticized for the things it has left out or the things it has gotten wrong. Yet Timothy Brennan argues that Midnight's Children is a cosmopolitan text that exposes the false consciousness of nationalism, and many, such as Homi Bhabha and Gyan Prakash, celebrate Rushdie's transcendence of the nation-state. And other critics, such as David Birch, read the novel as a radically unstable postmodern allegory, a denial of the very possibility of meaning. Critical reception of the novel thus has accorded it a paradoxical status: by virtue of its exuberance and ambition it is a celebration (albeit a critical one) of India the modern nation; at the same time it exposes the ideological underpinnings of the nation, which stands revealed as a fiction manipulated by the classes that control the state.
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"Midnight's
Children"
a n d the A l l e g o r y o f H i s t o r y NEIL TEN KORTENAAR
k_^ALMAN RUSHDIE'S Midnight's Children is commonly read as a national allegory giving imaginative form to India and its history. As such, it has become the central text in Indian literature written in English: "it sounds like a continent finding its voice," reads the blurb from the New York Times on the cover of the Picador paperback. Indian critics, in particular, read the novel as a national allegory that can be criticized for the things it has left out or the things it has gotten wrong.1 Yet Timothy Brennan argues that Midnight's Children is a cosmopolitan text that exposes the false consciousness of nationalism, and many, such as Homi Bhabha and Gyan Prakash, celebrate Rushdie's transcendence of the nation-state. And other critics, such as David Birch, read the novel as a radically unstable postmodern allegory, a denial of the very possibility of meaning. Critical reception of the novel thus has accorded it a paradoxical status: by virtue of its exuberance and ambition it is a celebration (albeit a critical one) of India the modern nation; at the same time it exposes the ideological underpinnings of the nation, which stands revealed as a fiction manipulated by the classes that control the state. The novel does expose the fictionality of the nation and of its history, but the denial of the possibility of literal truth does not deny the nation. Where there is no literal truth we must put our faith in fictions. All we have are fictions, but some fictions deserve our assent and others do not. This is Linda Hutcheon's point about postmodern representation: it affirms only in order to subvert, but subverts in order to affirm. Rushdie's novel explodes the notion of the nation having a stable identity and a single ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 26:2, April 1995
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history, then invites a sceptical, provisional faith in the nation that it has exploded. I Rushdie's allegory is not of the nation as that might be imagined to exist outside the world of texts, but of the nation as already mediated by the "pretext" of national history. This is Indian history in its canonical form, as found in encyclopedias and textbooks. David Lipscomb has shown that Rushdie had one such textbook, Stanley Wolpert's A New History of India, beside him when he came to write Midnight's Children.2 Indian history in texts such as Wolp