In the next sections we will see that the chosen techniques are those of the Magic Realism ; the “bricks”, both naturalistic elements of the traditional realism and Fantasy and formal licenses of Experimentalism, and the shape, a hybrid between historical novel and fantastic fiction.
a) THE MAGIC REALISM OF SALMAN RUSHDIE
In the reading of Rushdie´s fiction, a medium-versed in literature audience could easily distinguish a series of resonances which the author himself has recognised. Among these influences we could mention :
-the eighteenth century classics (the satire of Fielding)
-the pre-modernism of Sterne
-the decimononic realistic models (Dickens)
-Faulkner
-the current metafiction
-the oriental oral tradition
...
and with special strength, the Magic Realism of America (García Márquez) and of Europe (Grass and Kundera).
The fact of emigration has drawn a frontier between American Magic Realism and that of Rushdie. According to Galván Reula, the ethnic and cultural multiplicity of Great Britain, besides the apprehension of a physical space which is far away, adds more difficulty to the construction of his Reality ( Formas Nuevas ... 81 ).
In spite of this difference, all of them coincide in their socio-political disposition and in their critical consciousness of what is literature and how the writer should use it to reproduce reality.
b) VEROSIMILITUDE AND FANTASY
If my intention is not to enter into an exhaustive analysis of these two kind of elements, at least I will emphasize the fact that the election of them is not in any case gratuitous ; he seems to believe, as García Marquez has said, << in a reality which is pregnant of extraordinary and disproportionate elements >>, and in this way his writing must reflect the three levels of reality : << the true, the believable, the impossible >> ( Santoalalla ). Will be the startling imaginative licentiousness of Magic Realism the responsible of that aspiration through the mixing up of Reality and Fiction.
The NATURALISTIC elements add that verisimilitude the reader needs to locate the facts and identify them :
-concrete historical information : time account of Indian History since Independence.
space Bombay
-a great variety of characters giving a multitudinous sense
-realistic descriptions
-recognisable topics :
1. Family (element of structural and thematic cohesion)
2. Religion (mixture of myths and traditions from Hinduism, Islamism and Christianity)
3. Humour (ironic and sharp comments ; customs and habits ;...)
4. Real political conflicts (with real characters such as Indira Gandhi)
etc.
The FANTASTIC elements contribute to sink reality into a marvellous atmosphere, not with an escapist purpose, but trying to help the reader to understand characters and actions, an in this way, to increase verisimilitude ; as Galván Reula has explained :
If you live in a society where most people believe in God, then you live in a society where the miraculous is accepted at the same level as, for instance, the political. But if you are to construct a book which expresses that reality, you have to write in such a way that is the way that permits the miraculous an the every day to coexist on the page as the same kind of event...and that cannot be done within the conventions of realism, and you have to find a new form.
Concerning content, we can find all kind of magic manifestations, supernatural phenomena, and a wide and overwhelming repertoire of surprising characters with incredible abilities (the Midnight's Children, aunt Alia, etc.).
Regarding form, Rushdie´s exploitation of Magic Realism, has dept his literary style into a magnificent complexity of excess and artificiality ; we could mention among his techniques :
-instruments of cohesion (recurrent elements, summaries and periodical repetitions, parallelism, prophecies,...)
-plenty of rhetorical figures (metaphors, ironies and parodies, hyperbolas, alliterations,...)
-elaborated vocabulary (Indian autochthonous words and phrases ; word formation by juxtaposition ; puns ; Spanish terms ; etc.)
-referenciality (doubts, questions, reference to the reader, orally, adaptation of rhythm and syntax to the moment depicted, etc.)
-narrative self-consciousness :Rushdie recovers the old oral tradition of Orient -in which, variation according to the audience and to the moment, and improvisation, are essential-, to give to his novel a shocking structure based on the STORY-TELLING ; the novel is full of the narrator's subjective comments, doubts, errors, oblivion of important dates, wrong interpretations, as well as the presence of an implied reader (Padma) who, with her taking part in the process of narration, adds even more arbitrariness to the novel.
c) Result
We could consider Midnight's Children a personal and subjective version of reality which gives place to fantasy .
The presence of the three level of reality Rafael Martinez speaks about (the official objective history ; the version manipulated by Communication Media ; the author interpretation of reality as something sometimes extraordinary) makes difficult to catalogue this novel as historical or fantastic ; it many times depends on the AUDIENCE :
in India and Pakistan the books are read completely differently because people are of course intimately acquainted with, and much of the material in these books comes very directly out of events that many people are familiar with, so they are not really read there as fantasy novels at all but more as... well, as reconstructions of history, but as books which discuss the nature of contemporary reality, because fantasy always is a kind of escape, you know, and in that sense they are not escapist books.
d) Creative Process
It would be interesting to analyse how the writer develops that process of creating his own Reality; an artificial process of giving ORDER to a chaotic Reality he does not like, through Narration.
According to María del Mar Gallego Durán, this CREATION OF (HI)STORY corresponds to a post-colonial attempt of search for self-definition and identity, in which the personal interpretation has the maximum acceptance and variability and ambiguity are allowed, in opposition to the Imperialistic imposition of an official version at Colonial times, when only one Truth, absolute and inmutable, was the accepted ( 169-170 ).
She distinguishes a three levelled process that I will sum up as follows :
WRITING
Writer :
as leader of a collective he has the mission of redefining and reinterpreting history ;
he is a kind of GOD who controls and invents reality through narrator's voice.
Concept of History :
it is the raw material ready for literary creation ;
a reality ready to be shaped, to be given a structure, to be ordered as the writer desires .
Aim :
the SEARCH of COLLECTIVE MEANING he intends it to bear ;
a political task of giving IDENTITY to his ethnic group.
Techniques :
LINGUISTIC CREATION - the writer, as God, has the capacity of creating just by saying ; from here emerges the great importance of the NAME, the act of RE-NAMING , since it provides the possibility of giving NEW EXISTENCE.NARRATING
Narrator :
as an individual he acts as an story-teller ;
he is the core, the central point of this creative process, from where the narrative is irradiated.
Concept of History :
it consists in the telling of one possible version among many other possible versions ;
it is the narrator's subjective reality and, in that sense, the “how”, the form with which he endows his narration will be extremely important ;
history, since is something personal and individual (as opposite to the fixed version of Colonialism more relative to the notion of “country” and “nation” than to that of “person”) , becomes a living, mutable process.
Aim :
the SEARCH of HIS MEANING :
his fear of absurdity and surrealism obliques the narrator, who is lost in the middle of chaos, to look for meaning and giving it to History : inextricably linked to his nation by having been born just at the precise moment of India's Independence, Salem's biography is a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs that mirrors the course of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.
Techniques :
filling up the gaps and avoid fragmentation : Saleem has to rearrange history, to provide missing information according to his own experiences and believes.
MEMORY
“Narrative is something remembered”( Imaginative Maps )
From the Collective Memory of the writer and his ethnic group (the fight of a nation to find its own voice from a marginal position that decentralise the creation of any sense of reality). We move to the Individual Memory of Saleem, who has to create he (hi)story out of scarps and diffuse “remembered truths” (Imaginative Maps ).
Memory acts as a filter in this Creative Process whose result is a fragmented, disintegrated and decaying post-colonial India which strives for its Independence.
MEMORY, therefore, prevails as the only Truth ; the real narrator, the real writer, and the real God which controls not only the act of Writing but also Reality as a whole ; the only Creative force that makes Literature and History possible.
But, is Memory dependant of another superior level ?
-a physical level (the individual's intellectual and mental faculties) ?
-a metaphysical level (Fate) ?
-a Political level (Mass Media) ?
 |
 |