Postmodern Elements in Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Introduction to Postmodernism and Its Literary Context

Salman Rushdie is one of the most famous authors of the modern era. In the tradition of Gabriel García Márquez, Rushdie sweeps the reader up in his novel Midnight's Children. Like One Hundred Years of Solitude — the Márquez novel that clearly had a great deal of influence on Rushdie — Midnight's Children is a postmodern look at the modern fairytale that Rushdie weaves for those who wish to pick up the book.

This paper includes a brief description of postmodernism followed by a closer look at Salman Rushdie. Most scholars agree that this novel fits into the category of postmodernist fiction, but how so? What specific elements of postmodernism does the book contain that make it a postmodern work? The analysis that follows examines various elements of postmodernism including the contrast of information and knowledge, the idea that the novel parallels history, decolonization, feminism and post-feminism, dispersion philosophy, ontology and the role of chance, and the use of fantasy in Rushdie's novel.

Postmodernism is a word that critics and the general public like to use whether or not they fully understand what it means. The term emerged in academic literature during the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is difficult to define because it appears across a wide variety of fields — art, architecture, music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and technology. Furthermore, postmodernism cannot be described as a purely temporal phenomenon; it is difficult to pin a date on it in the way one might date the Baroque period.

In order to understand postmodernism in literature, it is helpful to look at the movement from which it grew: modernism. The main characteristics of modern literature include:

An emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing — on how perception takes place rather than what is perceived — such as stream-of-consciousness writing. A movement away from objectivity provided by omniscient third-person narrators and clear-cut moral positions. A blurring of the distinction between genres, where poetry becomes more documentary and prose becomes more poetic. An emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives, and random-seeming collages of different materials. A tendency toward reflexivity, or self-consciousness. Rejection of formal aesthetics. And rejection of the high/low distinction in popular culture.

Postmodernism follows most of these same principles, but there are important differences. Modernism presents a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history and treats that fragmentation as tragic. Postmodernism, by contrast, does not present fragmentation as something tragic but rather celebrates the fragmented nature of existence. In other words, postmodernism is more lighthearted than modernism and tends not to take itself as seriously.

According to Fredric Jameson, modernism and postmodernism are cultural formations that accompany particular stages of capitalism. Jameson outlines three primary phases of capitalism that dictate particular cultural practices, including the kind of art and literature produced. The first is market capitalism, the type that prevailed in Western Europe, England, the United States, and their colonies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This first phase is associated with a particular kind of aesthetic now called realism. The second phase ran from the late nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, ending around World War II. This period is referred to as the era of monopoly capitalism and is associated with electric and internal combustion motors, as well as with the cultural period called modernism. The third and current stage is multinational or consumer capitalism, in which the emphasis falls on marketing, selling, and consuming rather than on production. This era is associated with nuclear and electronic technologies and corresponds in time to postmodernism.

Jameson's characterization of postmodernism in terms of production, economic models, and technology is more closely associated with history and sociology than with literature or the arts. He defines postmodernism in terms of an entire era of civilization — much more aligned with a definition like "the Bronze Age" than with the Baroque.

Salman Rushdie: Author and Context

Given this framework, what are we to think of Midnight's Children in postmodern terms? It is helpful to know something about the author in order to answer questions such as: how did an Indian writer come to be associated with a movement so closely linked to the Western world — Australia, Canada, the United States, Western Europe, and England?

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, on June 19, 1947, to a middle-class Muslim family. In 1968 he graduated with honors from King's College, Cambridge. He worked for a year as an actor in his early twenties and for ten years worked as a freelance advertising copywriter. In 1975 his first novel, Grimus, was published. He married his first wife the following year. Midnight's Children was published in 1981. For this book he won the Booker McConnell Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and a literary award from the English Speaking Union. In 1983, Shame, Rushdie's second major novel, was published.

Rushdie's work has brought him into serious conflict with Islamic leaders. He was condemned to death by former Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini on Valentine's Day, 1989, after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Initially defended by other Islamic writers, his peers — including Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz — eventually argued that Rushdie did not have the right to insult a prophet or anything considered holy. Khomeini's fatwa against Rushdie was described by Nobel writer V. S. Naipaul as "an extreme form of literary criticism."

The Satanic Verses was banned in India and South Africa and burned on the streets of Bradford, Yorkshire. Rushdie was forced into hiding when Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa against him and his publisher. An aide to Khomeini offered a million-dollar reward for his death. In 1993, Rushdie's Norwegian publisher was wounded in an attack outside his home. In 1997, the bounty on Rushdie's head was doubled, and Iran's highest state prosecutor reaffirmed the fatwa in 1998. During this period, violent protests in India, Pakistan, and Egypt killed several people. Despite living in hiding, Rushdie continued to write and publish, with his novel Fury appearing in 2001.