The 31st Jar

Wow, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, very Saleem-like, as I contemplate leaving Midnight's Children to move on down the road. The cracks widen beneath us, I guess. It seems like there is still so much to talk about, so many passages on which to touch down. Well, if anyone would like to help me fill up this 31st jar, have at it. (A brief announcement, too, by the way: the Homi Bhabha article is now available on the Moodle site, as is a repaired and complete version of the Bakhtin pages from "Discourse in the Novel")

Maybe we can deploy Saleem's recapitulatory tendencies -- you know, the way he's often given to stopping to summarize (for Padma, for us) and recount where the narrative has been to date ("Let me sum up" (196)) -- to help us deal with our own cracks and to counter the linear march of the semester (Midnight's Children recedes, The Satanic Verses advances, etc.). All of which to say, let us be thinking and conversing longitudinally and retrospectively. I find myself still thinking about that fabulous Methwold section early in Midnight's Children. I just by accident opened up to that gem of a sentence on the bottom of page 125: "Rose in lapel, cream hat held stiffly against his chest, center-parting glinting in afternoon light, William Methwold stares straight ahead, past clocktower and Warden Road, beyond Breach's Candy's map-shaped pool, across the golden four o'clock waves, and salutes; while out there, above the horizon, the sun begins its long dive towards the sea." This sentence seems to respond ironically to that bygone phrase of imperial glory, "the sun never sets on the British Empire." As such, it also nearly encapsulates volumes of literature written about the passing of the Raj, the period of British rule in India (literature infused with the same kind of nostalgia and self-righteousness that Methwold is expressing as he stages his own departure; see Rushdie's comments on this nostalgia in his "Outside the Whale" essay). It's extraordinary how Rushdie can take an entire literature, then, and reduce it down to one loaded, suggestive, beguiling sentence. You could use this sentence alone to initiate and govern an entire seminar paper; it makes us realize what we're up against in this course, trying to account for five novels when we can scarcely account for the richness of one.

We didn't devote all that much time last week to Saleem's disappearance into the buddha, when the narrative moves to Pakistan to interrogate purity: "Purity -- that highest of ideals! -- that angelic virtue for which Pakistan was named, and which dripped from every note of my sister's songs!" (377). Since this novel stands so aggressively against purity (in its technique and aesthetic, in its thematic preoccupations, in its approach to personal identity, to history, to political and religious sensibilities, etc.), it makes perfect sense that Saleem and the Brass Monkey should submit to its lures. Every epic needs its trip to the underworld, I think Rushdie has said, and it seems the Sundarbans obliges as the location for the "descent." Saleem escapes the threat, ultimately, and returns to history (and India), only to be pursued by two more apostles of (Hindu) purity, Shiva and the Widow. I can't help but think back to the alternative visions: most obviously the Midnight's Children Conference when it still represented a hybrid, multilingual "third principle," but maybe most movingly that episode from early in the novel when Amina symbolically cuts through "the cloud of the disaster" (80) (which links the Muslim mob with the Ravana gang) and rescues Lifafa Das, the peepshow artist, by opening her door just as the Muslim gang is about to set upon him. In other words, in defending the rights of this Hindu artist, who has the bad luck to be plying his trade in a Muslim area, Amina takes a stand against communalism and becomes a redemptive figure in this novel, a loving bookend to the monologic, purity-seeking efforts of the Widow at the end of the novel. And I guess in this sense Amina joins Tai as a kind of tie -- between generations, between locations, between religious faiths. She herself is a kind of third principle at this moment.

Another character who stands out to me in this regard, and what a relief he is when he appears, is Deshmukh, the "scavenging peasant" who whistles amidst "the terrible fields" (427) -- the killing fields -- and who describes himself as a "vendor of notions by trade" (428). It's the sobering yet clarifying Deshmukh (a distant echo of Tai the Boatman?) who helps return the buddha back to history and to Saleem, and who again espouses the alternative to the purity-seekers: "Ho sirs! Enough fighting has been already. Be normal now, my sirs. I beg. Ho God" (429). In this sense, could it be that this character/moment would be at least a partial answer to question #3 on Xhaty's/James's handout (i.e., "What ... keeps us from 'lifting away' and/or 'falling deeply into' the chaos or dream world of Saleem? Who in particular helps ground us in the story?")? I like Roger Clark's assessment (from Stranger Gods: Salman Rushdie's Other Worlds) in this regard: "Deshmukh is a moving, down-to-earth character who brings the emotional content of Saleem's narrative back into the contours of space and time, back into this world of geography and history, location and memory. In this sense, he closes the door of an other world which is beyond logic, and ushers the reader back into a world which at least has the potential to make sense."

I could go on, but I fear now that I may be misleading you into thinking that the governing aesthetic of this blog is the long posting! As always, I hope to see more of you in these parts, trying to combat the fissiparousness of the texts and the semester, tying up loose ends, raising questions, citing passages, rehearsing possibilities for final papers, etc. I'll see you Tuesday night for Satyajit Ray's great film, Pather Panchali.