Epic of Failure: Disappointment as Utopian Fantasy in Midnight’s Children

Abstract

And so, by strange and melancholy paradox, moment of failure is moment of value; comprehending and experiencing of life's refusals is source from which fullness of life seems to flow, What is depicted [in novel] is total absence of any fulfillment of meaning, yet work contains rich and rounded fullness of true totality of Georg Lukacs (126) What I tried to do was to set up tension in [Midnight's Children], paradoxical opposition between and content of narrative. The story of Saleem does indeed lead him to despair. But story is told in manner designed to echo, as closely as my abilities allowed, Indian talent for non-stop self-regeneration. This is why narrative constantly throws up new stories, why teems. The form--multitudinous, hinting at infinite possibilities of country--is optimistic counterweight to Saleem's personal tragedy. Salman Rushdie (Imaginary Homelands 16) Ever since Salman Rushdie described Indian longing for form in his novel Midnight's Children (359), questions of have been central topic for Rushdie scholarship. Form, or, to use slightly more specific term, genre, is so central because addresses both aesthetics and politics; indeed, represents crucial intersection between two. As Tzvetan Todorov and M. M. Bakhtin teach us, genre is less matter of taxonomy than of how we give meaning to stories, events, and actions that occur in literature and everyday (1) Ideological conflicts are played out in literature, and literary scholars keep returning to Midnight's Children because defies efforts to determine what might be most appropriate to depict history of postindependence India. The problem lies in essential ambiguity of Midnight's Children: should literature even try to satisfy longing for form? This epic longing, for Rushdie, represents dangerous desire for consistency, coherence, and meaning that can efface cultural diversity of Indian peoples and lead readers to be complacent in face of history of sectarian violence and governmental betrayal. Yet Rushdie himself composes work that self-consciously asserts its own epic status. The narrator, Saleem Sinai, reconciles this apparent contradiction by conceding that longing for form is inescapable: Form--once again, recurrence and shape!--no escape from it (524). At same time, he composes history that he foresees to be threat as much as comfort, story waiting to be unleashed upon amnesiac nation (549).The story of intertwined destinies of Saleem and India asserts that failures of Indian nationalism are appropriate subject material for true epic of nat ion. To extent that Rushdie answers national longing for form, then, he does so by creating an epic of failure. Although Rushdie scholarship has frequently condemned him for his pessimism, there are theories that associate failure with insight and discovery. Georg Lukacs, for example, asserts that moment of failure in novel is the moment of value (126). By drawing attention to its own inability to achieve aesthetic totality of epic, novel can convey a true totality of life. Bakhtin makes similar case, arguing that novel's failure to maintain monologic and authoritative voice of epic makes possible to convey heteroglossia that characterizes everyday life, Thus, novel's supposed failure of representation makes possible to perceive world in terms of its multiplicity, not homogeneity. Lukacs and Bakhtin both claim that this formal or generic failure is novel's defining feature and key to understanding its potential contribution to politics. (2) Drawing upon their claim that aesthetic forms imply particular political values, I will suggest that Midnight's Children can be read as an effort to imagine more egalitarian India through depicting personal tragedy of Saleem Sinai. …