Magic Realism MDC
Magic Realism MDC
4, 2017
Abstract
Salman Rushdie is a British writer whose force and originality derives from
his strong and demanding voice. Rushdie turned his back on the Victorian and
Indian tradition, favouring the post-colonial impulses and attitudes, delightfully
employing the post-modern techniques such as discontinued narrative, cinematic
images and metaphors, mirror games, myths and legends. His novel Midnight
Children is surrealist fiction that deals with history of India from the year 1910to
the declaration of the emergency in 1976. The book is endowed with magical
powers of telepathy which allow the narrator to clearly review himself and
the world around him. The history is often mingled with unexpected and the
inexplicable events, real places are reintroduced in a distorted form; mythology
is combined with elements of fairy tale, dream and reality. The author explores
the boundaries of fiction and reality, whereas the book is characterized by a
wonderful mixture of languages by even creating a modern epic. The characters
are transformed into symbols and archetypes so that their stories are interpreted
at some levels in the same time: real and fantastic, metaphorical and symbolic.
Thus the paper aims to read and utterly analyze Midnight Children focusing on
the post-modern techniques and the “magical realism” used by Salman Rushdie.
The paper will briefly present the features of post-modern techniques and analyse
the originality in this novel.
Key Words: Post-modern, post-Victorian, magic realism, dream,
mythology etc.
1
turku_marsela@yahoo.com; “Aleksander Moisiu” University; Department of Foreign
Languages ‘ Durres, Albania
2
Paper presneted in “3 International Conference ‘Foreign Languages in a Global World,
Linguistics, Literature, Didactics” Durres, June 2017”
Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 51
Introduction
“As the fifty-one men march down the alleyway a tickle replaces the itch in
my grandfather’s nose… Adam Aziz ceases to concentrate on the events around
him as the tickle mounts to unbearable intensities. As Brigadier Dyer issues a
command the sneeze hits my grandfather full in the face. “Yaaaakh-thoooo!”
he sneezes and falls forward, losing his balance, following his nose and thereby
saving his life” (Rushdie, 41).The sneeze adds a sense of humourto the brutal
attack, distracting the reader from the massacre itself.
Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, opens the novel by
explaining that he was born at midnight on 15th August, 1947, at the exact
moment India gained its independence from British rule. He thinks that his
timed birth ties him to the fate of his country and he later discovers that all
children born in India between 12 AM and 1 AM on 15th August, 1947, are
gifted with special powers. Saleem thus attempts to use these powers to convene
the Midnight Childrens Conference. He acts as a telepathic conduit, bringing
hundreds of geographically disparate children into contact while also attempting
to discover the meaning of their gifts.
The incorporation of the elements of magical powers or events to the realty
not only gives beauty and meaning to Midnight’s Children but can be seen as
a device binding Indian culture of the past to the contemporary multicultural
interface. Whereas narrative technique of magic realism is appropriate to portray
the postcolonial life in this novel.
fictitious with the images which emerge from what they read or listen to lies
in the fact that nothing is certain. What is real or unreal is often uncertain not
only to the reader but also to the narrator himself. The realty has so many facets
as to blur reality borders itself. The language of fantasy is not emblematic and
it does not place borders or clear cuts between facts, stories, perceptions or
realty; instead it fabricates the present, revives the past and foreshadows the
future. What is fact and reality is not important. At times the language becomes
metaphorical:
“Nobody could remember when Tai had been young. He had been playing
this same boat, standing in the same hunched position, across the Dal and
Nageen Lakes… forever” (10).
But as the narrator observes, “Reality can have metaphorical content; that
does not make it less real” and sometimes magic realism shows the truth more
faithfully, “Anima is a drift in a sea that consists of wave’s of excitement” and
“hollow of fear” (112).
Midnight’s Children as a postcolonial text is seen in the twofold model
of colonizer vs. colonized. Protagonists in postcolonial texts are often found
to be fighting with the questions of identity, facing the conflict while living
between two worlds and two different cultures. Postcolonial writings occur
in the process of re-writing and re-reading the past and constructing a new
paradigm of a decolonized identity. Thus, the novel remains a continuous and
delicate investigation of the relations between reality and fantasywhere the
narrator Saleem constantly relates his life to that of his country, even his birth,
growth, development and destruction are related to that, “I was born in the city
of Bombay … once upon a time” (9). This connection not only is a metaphorof
Saleem’s life as a representative of India, but also provides an alternative history
to the one written by the colonizers.
The other characters seem to wander through the pages of history,
bumpinginto with important development in India apparently by accident.
Jackson points out, “The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture
that has been silenced, made invisible, covered over or made “absent” ”. So
through his novel, Rushdie traces and uncover the true identity of India.
Conclusions
At the surface level, Midnight’s Children is the story of Saleem Sinai and
the other children of India’s historic midnight of August 15, 1947. At a deeper
level, this book is the story of arising nation which has just gained independence
and trying to come into its own. The narrator implies that there is an essential
Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 55
relation between the private destiny of an individualand the public destiny. Thus
Rushdie’s topic is identity, both national and personal. He tries to confine a
cultural identity by using literary techniques such as fragmentation, plurality
and magical realism to rebuild the post-colonial India.
Midnight’s Children is a typical example of a postcolonial novel that
integrates magic realism into it. by connecting and combining historical events,
mythological stories and fictional narratives, it is created a true picture of Indian
postcolonialism and India’s colonial past.
56 Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017
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