Beauty and the Beast: Dualism as Despotism in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie

Abstract

One of the most telling and significant passages in all of the complex fiction of Salman Rushdie occurs in his discussion of the game of Snakes and in Midnight's Children. For one thing, this passage illustrates Rushdie's ability to evoke memories of childhood with a tenderness and nostalgia that rivals a Proust or a Nabokov. For another, it shows the way in which he so effectively employs images from popular culture in the construction of his highly literary fictions, since Snakes and itself is of central thematic importance to the structure of Midnight's Children. In this simple children's game, alternatives are clear and unproblematic. Ladders lead upward and are good; snakes send one sliding downward and are bad. But Rushdie's narrator, the harried Saleem Sinai, notes the way in which this apparently innocent game figures a much less innocent tendency toward dualistic thinking: implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil . . . metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother.' In the world of Rushdie, however, things are never quite so simple, and Sinai finds that such neat polar oppositions inevitably fall apart: I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity ... it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake(167). This crucial element of ambiguity and multiple possibilities, emphasized as it is by the self-contradictory Shandean narrative excesses of Sinai himself, becomes in fact a central thematic element of the entire book. But, like Tristram Shandy, Sinai is actually quite charming in his contradictoriness, and, as Mario Couto points out, his inconsistency enhances one of the novel's most engaging qualities-its pervasive tone of uncertainty.2 In the case of Midnight's Children this theme is linked in an obvious way to the use of Tristram Shandy as a narrative model, but in fact all of Rushdie's narrators operate much in the same way.3 For example, the narrator of Shame explains his ability to be unbothered by apparent contradiction: The inconsistency doesn't matter; I myself manage to