Connection Between Magical Realism and Postcolonial Issues
Name:
Divya Parmar
Paper no:
202
Roll no:
5
Enrollment no:
4069206420210024
Email id:
divyaparmar07012@gmail.com
Batch:
2021-2023 (sem 3)
Submitted to:
S. B. Gardi Department of English.
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Introduction:
Midnight’s Children is a 1981 magical realism novel by British American novelist Salman Rushdie. The story follows Saleem, a child born at the moment of India’s independence who possesses strange powers. The novel won many awards, including the Booker of Bookers Prize, which was awarded to the best all-time winner of the Booker Prize on the award’s 40th anniversary. Midnight’s Children has been adapted for theater, radio, and film. This guide uses the 2006 Vintage Canada eBook edition.
Salman Rushdie:
Salman Rushdie, in full Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, (born June 19, 1947, Bombay [now Mumbai], India), Indian-born writer whose allegorical novels examine historical and philosophical issues by means of surreal characters, brooding humour, and an effusive and melodramatic prose style. His treatment of sensitive religious and political subjects made him a controversial figure.
Rushdie, whose father was a prosperous Muslim businessman in India, was educated at Rugby School and the University of Cambridge, where he received an M.A. degree in history in 1968. Throughout most of the 1970s he worked in London as an advertising copywriter. His first published novel, Grimus, appeared in 1975. Rushdie’s next novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), a fable about modern India, was an unexpected critical and popular success that won him international recognition. A film adaptation, for which he drafted the screenplay, was released in 2012.
About Novel:
Exactly at midnight on Aug. 15, 1947, two boys are born in a Bombay (now Mumbai) hospital, where they are switched by a nurse. Saleem Sinai, who will be raised by a well-to-do Muslim couple, is actually the illegitimate son of a low-caste Hindu woman and a departing British colonist. Shiva, the son of the Muslim couple, is given to a poor Hindu street performer whose unfaithful wife has died.
Saleem represents modern India. When he was 30, he wrote his memoir, Midnight’s Children. Shiva is destined to be Saleem’s enemy as well as India’s most honoured war hero. This multilayered novel places Saleem at every significant event that occurred on the Indian subcontinent in the 30 years after independence. Midnight’s Children was awarded the Booker McConnell Prize for fiction in 1981. In 1993 it was chosen as the best Booker Prize novel in 25 years.
Connection Between Magical Realism and Postcolonial Issues:
Salman Rushdie is one of the writers, who emerged in the 1980s with a new form of expression and technical innovation. His ‘Booker Prize’ winning novel Midnight’s Children is often associated with different categories of literary fiction, which include postmodern fiction, postcolonial novel, historical novel, and, most importantly, magical realism. Various characters in the story are gifted with magical power, and the most important of them is the narrator Saleem Sinai. In this novel, both the magical and the realistic world exist simultaneously and promote a complex viewpoint of truth and history referring to the social, political, cultural, and military histories of India and Pakistan, and in this regard magical realism helps to achieve social and political domination. This novel falls within the frame-work of postcolonialism as it reflects the life of the people of the Indian subcontinent in both pre and postindependence era. Midnight’s Children recounts the history of India’s journey from British colonialism to independence.
By using magical realist technique, postcolonial writers can challenge realistic narrative and can
put an alternative reality and in this sense, there is a bridge between postcolonialism and magical realism. The aim of the paper is to show that in Midnight’s Children, magical realism is used within the postcolonial structure and to handle the postcolonial issues. The paper will mainly focus on different postcolonial issues: identity problems, hybridity, reinterpretation of the imperial version of history and emergence of a new colonial and postcolonial history, creation of one’s own story, and so on, and will show that, these postcolonial issues are dealt with and explained by the apt use of magical realism. Last but not least, the paper will show that magical realism is used as a tool to criticize the political condition of India.
The term magic realism was coined by German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe a tendency in German painting which demonstrated an altered reality. Later it was used by Venezuela Arturo Uslar-Pietri to describe the works of Latin American writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Carlos Fuentes. Magic realism is now considered an artistic genre where realistic elements appear in a magical setting. The term is associated with putting magical or supernatural events into realistic narrative without suspecting the improbability of these events. Although it will be quite unfair to say that magical realism is particularly Latin American, the fame of Latin American magical realism has inspired its adaptation by many writers globally. Magical realism is the very opposite to what is called the absolutist and the traditional. Writers like Rushdie have used this technique to open up new opportunities, varieties and wonders as metaphors from the issues they focus on, e.g., celebration of plurality, identity crisis, multiculturalism, and hope for a new nation. Through magical events writers can find new viewpoints, open new windows through which they can see the world differently.
These magical events take place in a real world and through which the stories remain intimate, not unbelievable. Magical realist works are not mere fantasies that can be dismissed; they refuse to be tied by the restrictions of real life rather help us see and think differently of the ordinary events or issues we come across daily.
Characteristics of Magical Realism:
Hybridity:
Magic realists incorporate many techniques that have been linked to post-colonialism, with hybridity being a primary feature. Specifically, magic realism is illustrated in the inharmonious
arenas of such opposites as urban and rural and Western and indigenous. The plots of magic Realist works involve issues of borders, mixing,and change. Authors establish these plots to reveal a crucial purpose of magic realism: a more deep and true reality than conventional realist techniques would illustrate.
Fantastical elements: Magic realism in literature is defined as "a kind of modern fiction in which fabulous and fantastical events are included in a narrative that otherwise maintains the 'reliable' tone of objective realistic report, designating a tendency of the modern novel to reach beyond the confines of realism and draw upon the energies of fable, folk tale, and myth while maintaining a strong contemporary social relevance”. The fantastic attributes given to characters in such novels, levitation, flight, telepathy, telekinesis, etc. are among the means that magic realism adopts in order to encompass the often phantasmagorical political realities of the 20th century
Sense of mystery:
Something that most critics agree on is this major theme. Magic realist literature tends to read at an intensified level. Taking the seminal work of the style, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)by Gabriel García Márquez, the reader must let go of preexisting ties to conventional exposition, plot advancement, linear time structure, scientific reason, etc., to strive for a state of heightened awareness of life's connectedness or hidden meanings. Carpentier articulates this feeling as „to seize the mystery that breathes behind things‟, and supports the claim by saying a writer must heighten his senses to the point of „estado limite‟ (limit state) in order to realize all levels of reality, most importantly that of mystery.
Irony Regarding Author’s Perspective:
The writer must have ironic distance from the magical world view for the realism not to be
compromised. Simultaneously, the writer must strongly respect the magic, or else the magic
dissolves into simple folk belief or complete fantasy, split from the real instead of synchronized with it.
The Supernatural and Natural:
In magic realism, the supernatural is not displayed as questionable. While the reader realizes that the rational and irrational are opposite and conflicting polarities, they are not disconcerted because the supernatural is integrated within the norms of perception of the narrator and characters in the fictional world.
Metafiction:
This trait centers on the reader's role in literature. With its multiple realities and specific reference to the reader's world, magic realism explores the impact fiction has on reality, reality on fiction and the reader's role in between; as such, it is well suited for drawing attention to social or political criticism. Furthermore, it is the tool paramount in the execution of a related and major magic realist phenomenon: textualization. This term defines two conditions first, where a fictitious reader enters the story within a story while reading it, making us self-conscious of our status as reader and secondly, where the textual world enters into the reader's world. Good sense would negate this process but magic is the flexible topos that allows it.
Political critique:
Magic realism contains an "implicit criticism of society, particularly the elite". Especially with
Regarding Latin America, the style breaks from the inarguable discourse of "privileged centers of literature". This is a mode primarily about and for "ex-centrics": the geographically, socially and economically marginalized. Therefore, magic realism's alternative world works to correct the reality of established viewpoints (like realism, naturalism, modernism). Magic realist texts, under this logic, are subversive texts, revolutionary against socially dominant forces. Alternatively, the socially dominant may implement magic realism to disassociate themselves from their "Power discourse".
Midnight’s Children: Magical Realism and Postcolonial Issues :
Midnight’s Children recounts the history of India’s transition from British colonialism to independence. The whole story is expressed through various characters gifted with magical powers. The narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai who willingly tells his family history to the reader and to his lonely listener,Padma. In describing his grandparents’ personal history, he mixes Indian history with his own narrative.
Saleem’s arrival in the world in midnight August 15, 1947 parallels the birth of independent India which gained its independence from British power. The novel creates a symbolic reading of Saleem’s character by supporting his narrative to the narrative of a newborn nation, India. “I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country. For the next three decades there was to be no escape”. “At a simple level, the novel is the story of Saleem Sinai, and, at a deep level, the story of his country where Saleem is important as an individual, a representative of Independence and a literary mechanism”. Saleem hints that when his body falls apart, he will crumble into 630 million pieces, the total number of India’s population. His story is written for his son who, like his father, is both tied and supernaturally gifted by history.
The mixture of the fantastic and the normal is an important aspect of magical realism. In the
starting of the novel, the passage which deals with Saleem’s grandfather in Kashmir is a wonderful example of blending the magical and the real elements. In one spring of 1915, Saleem’s grandfather Aadam Aziz hits the ground while praying and three drops of blood fall from his nose and turn into rubies; his tears become solid like diamonds. In a magical realist text, we find the conflict between the world of fantasy and the reality, and each world works for creating a fictional world from the other; in Midnight’s Children through the magical, the realistic creates its voice and makes it heard. Rushdie has used magical realist elements by mixing the real and the fantastic, twisting time, and by including myth
and folklore. His magic realism has its origin more in the inner and psychological worlds, inner conflicts, moment of uncertainty, the style of storytelling of the unreliable narrator, and less in the beliefs, rituals and illusions of people as a whole.
Another appearance of magical realism in the novel is the character of Tai, the boatman, particularly, Tai’s claim to being of great antiquity. He claims himself so old that he has “watched the mountains being born” and “seen emperors die” he also says that he “saw that
Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. The reason why Rushdie had shown such impossible longevity of Tai is that he wanted Tai to represent old and pre-colonial India.
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Image : 1
Work Citation:
Abdullah, Dr. Abu Shahid. “Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children: Connection between Magical Realism and Postcolonial Issues.” Academia.edu, 29 Nov. 2017, https://www.academia.edu/34044147/Salman_Rushdies_Midnights_Children_Connection_between_Magical_Realism_and_Postcolonial_Issues.
Benny, Christy P. “Magic Realism as a Post Colonial Device in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.” Academia.edu, 26 Mar. 2020, https://www.academia.edu/42330387/MAGIC_REALISM_AS_A_POST_COLONIAL_DEVICE_IN_SALMAN_RUSHDIES_MIDNIGHTS_CHILDREN#:~:
“Salman Rushdie.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/biography/Salman-Rushdie.
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