Midnight’s Children by
Salman Rushdie is a fiction novel written in the magical realism style, and
spans the genealogical history of its one narrator, Saleem, from his birth at
the birth of India’s independence from Great Britain, to his destiny. The book is written in three parts and first
begins with Saleem’s grandfather, Doctor Adam Aziz, then continues with
Saleem’s childhood in book two, and finally ends depicting Saleem as an adult
in the last book.
The novel is heavy on magical realism tropes from the size
of Saleem’s nose leading to telepathic style powers, a buildup of snot, some
pickles for preservation, and an island that seems to forget time. The novel however also deals heavily with the
philosophical concepts of fatalism.
Fatalism is a philosophical viewpoint, which argues around
the logistics of certainty. In fatalism,
an individual is powerless in performing any task, which may ultimately alter
his future existence. Fatalists also
argue that any individual is inescapably tied to predetermined events and thus
should not resist, that some future events are unavoidable, and that if actions
are to be thought of as free, there is no free point because all actions will
lead to a predetermined conclusion.
Now it’s very easy to argue against fatalism, simply with
chaos theory alone, but the novel itself provides a clear example of this
philosophical theory. Saleem is not Adam
Aziz’s biological son. Early in the
novel we learn Saleem was switched with Shiva, therefore altering his
destiny. However, Saleem is exiled into
the poor slums of Pakistan and is therefor unable to avoid the fate set from
his birth. This also repeats with The
Brass Monkey Son. However Saleem’s son
is not his own biological. As it turns
out, he is in fact Adam Aziz’s biological grandson and a true child of India. Rushdie portrays a fatalism of generational
hierarchies, and writes about the inescapable destinies of the children of
India.
The artifact which aligns rather well with this example is
the above clip from the movie, Mr. Nobody
staring Jared Leto and directed by Jaco Van Dormael. Mr.
Nobody is a science fiction drama about a young boy named Nemo Nobody, who
is forced to decide between the care of recently divorced parents. The film develops a thesis in that if no
single decision is made, than a multitude of decisions is possible. As Nemo contemplates care with his mother
versus father, he also contemplates the different scenarios involved in the
decision of a particular female childhood friend. Depending on which character receives the
affection of his love, the movie drastically alters the narrative structure of
the film, and even bends the rules of linear timelines, allowing multiple
stories to continue on.
The scene above shows the end of the film, the climax in
which Nemo runs away in fear. However,
he still ends up with Anna, the most significant of his love interests. This argues that indeed the film was left to
fatalism, and that Nemo, much like Saleem, was destined for a inevitable
outcome.
I have never seen Mr.Nobody, although now it's on my list. A few things stood out to me about the selected scene that are quite interesting symbols in correspondence with “Midnight's Children.”
ReplyDeleteat 3:05 the city falls into literal pieces, just as Saleem says he will by the end of the novel. The old man in the clip says the child is “taking it apart because he doesn't need it any more,” which is an interesting nod to the fact that Saleem was cracking in the beginning of the novel but by the time he was finished writing his pieces of pickles, to pass down to his son, he was certain he would be reduced to a “voiceless dust”(533). I also have no idea what the significance is of the chalk circle which Jared Leto's love interest was standing it at the end of the clip, but it was a beautiful antithesis to the perforated sheet of Saleem's past coming full circle, literally.
Your argument for the existence of fatalism in Rushdie's text is quite interesting. Rushdie's portrayal of the fatalism of generational hierarchies" brings to mind a theme Saleem addresses often in "Midnight's Children" which I began to call the “baggage of birth.” (Saleem might call it that too somewhere in the text but, it would be a small and difficult gem to locate.) Saleem takes painstaking care to acquaint the reader with his "family" even though he is well aware that the family he describes is not his own.
Even in his realization of this, he never veers away from the metaphorical baggage which he already had fastened to him at the time of his birth. "On that day, my inheritance began to form - the blue of Kashmiri sky which dripped into my grandfather's eyes; the long suffering of my great-grandmother which would become the forbearance of my own mother and the late steeliness of Naseem Aziz; my great-grandfather's gift of conversing with the birds which would descend through meandering bloodlines into the veins of my sister the Brass Monkey...and above all the ghostly essence of that perforated sheet, which doomed my mother to learn to love a man in segments, and which condemned me to see my own life - its meanings, its structures--in fragments also; so by the time I understood it, it was far too late" (119). His realization that it was “far to late” is fatalistic in the sense that he realizes that his family and circumstance was never up to him. Long before he realized he wasn't actually a blood relative to the Aziz family,the Kashmiri blue of his grandfather’s eyes became Saleems'. He was born with the baggage of a linage that wasn't his, but the baggage that comes with the family just the same.
-Aubrey Helm