Fissured Skin, Inner-Ear Radio, and a Telepathic Nose: The Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Abstract

This essay brings the postcolonial novel in relation with an often-overlooked but rich resource: the embedded, materialist figurations of psychoanalysis. It examines Salman Rushdie's use of the alternative register of sensory perception in Midnight's Children to piece together an extant self that corresponds both actively and passively to the new historical and political realities of the subcontinent. In doing so, however, the essay moves beyond critical commonplaces about Rushdie's magical realism and revisionary historiography to align his æsthetic instead to the media conditions under which Freud worked, the emergent ideas of transference and telepathy, and the resultant imperatives of Freudian psychoanalysis. The capaciousness and indeterminate logic of Midnight's Children can be read as those of an analytic medium which indiscriminately receives psychic material, both individual and collective. The narrator, like Freud's analyst, is idealized as amedia technology who/which (imperfectly) reconstructs a story from the derivatives of the national unconscious.