Betrayal of Form: The “Teeming” Narrative and the Allegorical Impulse in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Abstract

There has been a tendency among postcolonial critics to naturalize the proximity of the postcolonial literary imagination and allegory, with Rushdie’s work and even his career being seen as prominent instances of this proximity. Most such readings view allegory as a straightforward mode of literary expression in which the “message” of the allegorical sign is granted singular importance, while its formal features often go unheeded. Coterminous with such a conception of allegory is the assumption that it is supposed to function at a “critical distance” from the subject-matter in question. This article argues that Rushdie’s allegorical practice works differently. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory, I read the allegorical images in Midnight’s Children as emblematic of a particular symptom of postcoloniality, the impossibility of the postcolonial subject’s breaking free from the colonial legacy, on the one hand, and from the hegemonic nationalist discourse of the postcolonial condition, on the other. Yet it is precisely when the postcolonial subject is overpowered by the hegemonic discourse’s demands that s/he makes sense of the historical condition that the nonsensicality of the hegemony is exposed. I also suggest that a Benjaminian reading helps put in perspective those discussions of Rushdie’s position, which suggest his putative “complicity” with hegemony.