Postcolonial Ekphrasis: Salman Rushdie Gives the Finger Back to the Empire

Abstract

alman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children features many descriptions of the visual arts-painting, photography, and film. These examples of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of a visual representation, can be read as reflections on the novel's own politically fraught relations both to an extratextual world and to English high culture. As W. J. T. Mitchell has argued, ekphrasis transfers into the realm of literary art sublimated versions of our ambivalence about social others (Ekphrasis 702). I want to look at one of Rushdie's ekphrastic descriptions in particular: the description of the print of a sentimental Victorian painting that hung on the bedroom wall of the narrator, Saleem Sinai, when he was a child and that was perhaps the first representational object of which he became aware. print stands at the threshold of book 2 and marks Saleem's entry as a character in the narrative of his own life. It also supplies the name of the chapter in which it appears, The Fisherman's Pointing Finger. Saleem does not tell us the name of the painting or the painter and may not know them. postcolonial is not an innocent viewer, however, and Saleem does know that the painting represents Sir Walter Raleigh as a boy. Everything in Saleem's description of the print points to its being a copy of a painting that exists outside the novel and that the reader may consult: Boyhood of Raleigh, painted in 1870 by Sir John Everett Millais, who later be-