1 Ilaria Rigoli THE STENCH OF TRUTH Making history by means of literature in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children Ever since Salman Rushdie's masterpiece Midnight's Children was published in 1981, several scholars and critics have debated about its relationship with the modes and making of history. It is beyond doubts that the main topic of the novel is the original treatment of Indian history through Saleem Sinai's narrative as the protagonist and narrator of the novel. Many scholars have focused on the version of history offered by Saleem's perspective, which is deliberately untrustworthy and partial, drenched in irony and suspiciousness. David W. Price in his essay Salman Rushdie's Use and Abuse of History in Midnight's Children1 highlights Rushdie's interpretation of the three types of history – monumental, critical and documental – individuated by Nietzsche in the essay On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, arguing that Saleem, in Rushdie's intentions, is the representative of critical history and, as a critical historian, he tells the reader his version of the history of India, while condemning the monumental and documental histories symbolized by other characters (William Methwold and the “widow” Indira Gandhi). But what kind of history does Rushdie suggest while he tells us the story of Saleem Sinai? It is clear by now, after Rushdie's nearly thirty years of career as a novelist, that his fiction deals with far more issues besides the mere literal – inventive ones. The author's compromission with political and religious topics, well exampled in the (sometimes dramatic) events that have followed the publication of one of his most famous novels, The Satanic Verses (1989), including the fatwā issued against the writer by Ayatollah Khomeini, is out of discussion. The aim of this essay is to prove that not only Rushdie takes a position in the sociological, religious and political debate of the last decades, but that he also offers an original and polemical version of his idea of metafiction and metahistory, and especially the history of the post-colonial country par excellence, India. Midnight's Children therefore becomes not only a great work of fiction but also an essay about history or, better said, the manifesto of a way of making history “by means of literature”. The “dangerous” question Rushdie asks to historians and to scholars in general is this: can literature take a part in making history, when history is at pains in describing historical events? The postcolonial critic has shown how restrictive the traditional boundaries between academic disciplines can be when they face the issues of the contemporary (postmodern) world. This happens especially when we move in the dangerous field of the history of post-colonial countries, mainly because these 1
D.W. Price, Salman Rushdie's Use and Abuse of History in Midnight's Children, in ARIEL, A Review of
International English Literature, 25:2 (April 1994), pp. 91-107.
2 countries have to face at least two – but possibly, as I will argue, more – versions of their own history: the western (imperial, colonial) one, and the indigenous one. The challenge of solving the contradictions that come out in comparing the two versions would be difficult enough even without taking into account that there are far more versions that must be taken into consideration: exactly what Rushdie argues between the lines of Midnight's Children. The beginning of the book is very clear in this sense: There are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, you'll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me (…)2.
When Saleem says that the reader has to “swallow the lot” to know his story, which, the reader will learn page after page, is nothing but the history of his nation, India, he is saying that there is no possibility of writing a history of India from a chosen singular point of view. Saleem's narration is, consequently, a continuous clashing of contradictory versions and perspectives, and Saleem himself, far from trying to hide the unreliability of this kind of narration, boasts about it with a vengeance. While he declares with absolute certainty that he is telling nothing but the truth, he also lets us understand without great efforts that he may have told us lies from the very beginning of his narration. As Jennifer Santos points out in her article Historical Truth in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children: a question of perspective3, this effect derives from Saleem being a “selfaware” and a “narcissistic” narrator: he “baldly informs the reader of his self-awareness”, and he doesn't leave his errors and uncertainties apart, but on the contrary highlights them: Reality is a question of perspective (…). Re-reading my work, I have discovered an error in chronology. The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi occurs, in these pages, on the wrong date. But I cannot say, now, what the actual sequence of events might have been; in my India, Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time. (…) Am I so far gone, in my desperate need of meaning, that I'm prepared to distort everything – to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role? Today, in my confusion, I can't judge4.
According to Santos, Rushdie's intent is exactly to question the basic assumptions of traditional history; therefore he 2 3
4
S. Rushdie, Midnight's Children, Jonathan Cape, London 1981, p. 9. J. Santos, Historical Truth in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children: a Question of Perspective, Arizona State University 2003. Rushdie, cit., p. 166.
3
portrays history as unreliable when one searches for a single unified historical truth. To emphasize this point, Saleem's narration in equally unreliable, a point the narrator himself acknowledges at several instances. (…) this unreliability serves to address the reader, shocking the audience into forming its own views on history. (…) Rushdie's text (…) introduces a post-modern view of truth that accepts multiple truths and realities as valid forms of history5.
Saleem's (and Rushdie's) initial placement is itself something contradicting the traditional way of making history. Because the historian – even though being history a human science – tries to reach a certain level of objectivity, his or her natural placement is, to begin with, outside the events he or she describes and, moreover, from a very clearly singular perspective. There would be no objectivity in a history written with the premises of “things went this way, but maybe they went this other way as well”. To write a “traditional” work of history from this premises would be falling into an impasse. Or not? In fact, this is what happens in the history of post-colonial countries; moreover, at the time when Rushdie writes Midnight's Children, it is also the position of many post-modern historians and philosophers (e.g. Foucault and Ricoeur). In the case of India, one could say “things went that way – according to the colonizer – but perhaps they went differently – according to the colonized”. So where does the true history of the nation lie? The colonizer writes the history of the dominator; the colonized that of the oppressed. Sometimes these versions of the same events coincide, sometimes they strongly diverge. And more: is there only one version in the perspective of the colonized subject, or are there many, contradictory histories given by different kinds of colonized subjects, according to their social, economical, political conditions? And what happens to the attitude of a colonized subject towards his history once he becomes de-colonized? In Rushdie's version of the history of India given in Midnight's Children, there are at least three main histories: Saleem's – “the colonized” – “alternative” version of history; the “official”, we could say “imperial” version (symbolized by the character of William Methwold), and the widow's version, which is particularly important because it is here that Saleem applies his critique. Doing so, Rushdie reveals all the ambiguous and “oppressive” character of any history which pretends to be unique and universal. The widow could be an “ex-colonized” subject just as well as Saleem, but she is in fact not an oppressed but an oppressor: this is well shown by the narration of the events of the so-called “Emergency”, during which the government of Indira Gandhi (“the widow”) set up a dictatorship, oppressing and eliminating any kind of opponents. As it often happens with such regimes, the version of the historical events diffused by the government, the one that entered the “official” history of India, was a manipulation of reality apt to cover the abuses. In Saleem's narration, 5
Santos, cit., p. 5-6.
4 however, the major aim of Indira's campaign of sterilization is the elimination of the children of midnight, who are one by one imprisoned and deprived of their powers in “the widow's hostel”: No, the Emergency had a black part as well as a white, and here is the secret which has lain concealed for too long beneath the mask of those stifled days: the truest, deepest motive behind the declaration of a State of Emergency was the smashing, the pulverizing, the irreversible discombobulation of the children of midnight6. They were good doctors, they left nothing to chance. Not for us the simple vas- and tubectomies performed on the teeming masses; because there was a chance, just a chance, that such operations could be reversed... ectomies were performed, but irreversibly: testicles were removed from sacs, and wombs vanished forever. Test- and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves...7
The children of midnight, here, can also be seen as the symbol of the other ways of making history and of experiencing reality; and when Indira eliminates them, she is doing nothing but imposing her history upon others – her version oppresses diversity, and history goes hand in hand with political power, just as well as it did during the Empire: Such things happen. Statistics may set my arrest in context; although there is a considerable disagreement about the number of “political” prisoners taken during the Emergency, either thirty thousand or a quarter of a million persons certainly lost their freedom. The Widow said: “It's only a small percentage of the population of India”. All sorts of things happen during the Emergency: trains run on time, black money hoarders are frightened into paying taxes, even the weather is brought to heel, and bumper harvests are reaped; there is, I repeat, a white part as well as a black. But in the black part, I sat barfettered in a tiny room, in a straw palliasse which was the only article of furniture I was permitted, sharing my daily bowl of rice with cockroaches and ants8.
The whole had been foreseen by Saleem in a nightmare, where Rusdhie stages an amazing allegory of this oppression perpetrated by the “widow” as a sort of mother-goddess (cfr. Price: 97-98) who destroys the children of midnight: About the dream, then? I might be able to tell it as a dream. Yes, perhaps a nightmare: green and black the Widow's hair and clutching hands and children mmff and little balls and one-by-one and torn-in-half and little balls go flying flying green and black her hand is green her nails are black as black 9. 6 7 8 9
Rushdie, cit., p. 427. Ibid., p. 438. Italics added. Ibid., p. 434. Italics added. Ibid., p. 422.
5
But right after, apparently denying any sort of plausibility to his hallucination, Saleem goes back to his task of making history: No dreams. Neither the time nor the place for. Facts are remembered. To the best of one's ability. (…) There are imperatives, and logical-consequences, and inevitabilities, and recurrences; there are thingsdone-to, and accidents, and bludgeonings-of-fate; when was there ever a choice? When options? When a decision freely made, to be this or that or the other? No choice10.
Actually, as we are revealed shortly after, the nightmare is more adherent to reality than the plausibility of the “imperatives, and logical-consequences, and inevitabilities” of “traditional” history. While, as a “swallower of lives”, he declares himself as the representative and speaking-voice of “multitudes”, Saleem also introduces – in an apparent contradiction – the necessity of assuming a singular perspective in telling history, because he deliberately chooses his perspective for the retelling of India's history, by virtue of the fact that he is – supposedly – a special person, a person “handcuffed to history”: I was born in the city of Bombay... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15 th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. (…) thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country11.
The difference between this kind of singular perspective and the one chosen by the “traditional” historian is that the historian claims to be neutral, while Saleem is not at all outside the events: on the contrary, he is the protagonist of everything. Thereby Rushdie contradicts in a very short incipit the basic premises of history: plausibility, objectivity and the universal validity of its structure. To do this he brings Saleem's partiality to an extreme level. This sui generis historian, Saleem, chooses a singular point of view – he chooses a version among others, leaving apart all other different versions that would otherwise contradict his historical narration – which is the premise of 10 11
Ibid., p. 422. Ibid., p. 9.
6 plausibility. But he also takes a position, a very partial one indeed; his personal one, thereby eliminating any objectivity and universality from the whole. Doing so, Rushdie actually exposes history to the contradiction that the Jacques Le Goff had detected as innate in the very nature of the discipline, when, quoting Gardiner in History and Memory, he had said The most flagrant contradiction of history is, beyond doubt, the fact that its object is singular: an event, a series of events, characters that exist only once, while its aim, as the one of every science, is to find the universal, the general, the regular12.
Nonetheless Le Goff doesn't really question the status of history as a scientific discipline. As Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin point out in their Post-Colonial Studies Reader, quoting Hayden White, the main characteristic of the nineteenth-century historiography – and, furthermore, something that post-modern history is at pains in getting rid of – is the search of such a status. The ideology that this idea generates therefore aims to “a single narrative truth that was “simply” the closest possible representation of events”. The “emergence of history” then is identified with a “strategic moment of choice between possible discursive options, in which the apparently neutral narrative form succeeded by virtue of its resemblance to the purity of scientific disciplines”. Later on, the authors point out a crucial task for post-colonial literature, which is particularly evident in Rushdie's treatment of history in Midnight's Children: “the post-colonial task, therefore, is not simply to contest the message of history, which has so often relegated individual post-colonial societies to footnotes to the march of progress, but also to engage the medium of narrativity itself, to reinscribe the rhetoric, the heterogeneity of historical representation” 13. Rushdie seems to suggest, then, that the medium of the neutral voice of the objective historian is insufficient in describing this heterogeneity, what he calls an “excess of intertwined lives” and a “commingling of the improbable and the mundane”. He affirms that a history of post-colonial India can be written only from a strictly relativistic, personal point of view: so relativistic that it contests the form of the historical essay itself, suggesting a role for literature in the creative process of “writing history”. The idea that history is, in the end, a creative product, constructed from time to time by different and arbitrary narrators, who are forced to choose a singular, partial version of the events and to put them in a form which is necessarily characterized by a certain level of invention, is indeed the fil rouge that runs through Midnight's Children. Claiming a central role for the writer in the process of narrating history, Rushdie then puts history and literature on the same level, erasing the idea of a 12 13
J. Le Goff, Storia e Memoria, Einaudi, Torino 1988, p. 20. My traslation. B. Ashcroft, G. Griffiths, H. Tiffin, Helen (ed.), The Post Colonial Studies Reader, Routledge, pp. 317-318.
London 2009,
7 history that purely describes the events and proposing a new kind of history by means of literature that, far from hiding its precarious and unreliable sources, loudly proclaims his partiality as a warrant of its “truth” – even when this supposed “truth” is totally unbelievable. Saleem affirms: She eavesdropped on her daughters' dreams, just to know what they were up to. Yes, there's no other explanation, stranger things have been known to happen is this country of ours, just pick up any newspaper and see the daily titbits recounting miracles in this village or that – Reverend Mother began to dream his daughters' dreams. (…) There was no proof. The invasion of dreams – or a mother's knowledge, or a woman's intuition, call it what you like – is not something that will stand up in court 14.
And more: because history wants to describe the “public” side of the events, literature assumes the task of telling what is hidden behind the public face of things, unmasking the partiality which Rushdie asks for (together with the vast majority of the post-colonial writers), and that is innate in the very idea of writing history: But she [Indira] had white hair on one side and black on the other; the Emergency, too, had a white part – public, visible, documented, a matter for historians – and a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a matter for us15.
In other words Rushdie, writing Midnight's Children, following Saleem's words “I am India”, and, in the non-fiction world, Indira Gandhi's slogan “India is Indira and Indira is India”, may propose a parallel equation with regard to the relationship between history and literature: “history is literature and literature is history”. This has much to do with Hayden White's theories about the relationship between historiography and narrative contained in The Content of the Form (1987). For White, history and literature are far more similar fields than historians would admit. This happens by virtue of their common form of discourse, namely, the fact that they both are narrations and use narrativity as a code – but not only – with which to describe events. Quoting Ricoeur, White says that both literature and history have to symbolize events in order to give them a meaning (which is ultimately the aim of a historical analysis, at least the one of “narrative history” as White calls it). This process of symbolization, in which the historian “shapes” real events conforming them to a plot, a structure, that is what allows us to find a meaning in the historical process, is exactly how literature structures imaginary events. But in a novel like Rushdie's, where real and imaginary events are mixed at the point that they are almost indistinguishable, and where the border between reality and invention is incredibly 14 15
Rushdie, cit., pp. 55-56. Ibid., p. 421. Italics added.
8 ambiguous, this discourse leads inevitably to the question of what is the distinction between “history” and “literature” or, better said: Where is the point in which history finishes and literature starts? Thus, are we allowed to regard a novel like Midnight's Children as a work of history? Because if the aim of history is to find “the truth” through the analysis of real events, then a literature like the one of Rushdie in this novel could also make a similar claim. In fact it has a much wider aim than that of “entertaining” us, as usually a work of fiction is supposed to do. And because Rushdie claims that the matter of his literature is to tell what is “secret macabre untold”, we could easily argue that literature has an important task in revealing those aspects of the events that history left apart, unmasking, at the same time, the latter's pretension for an all-embracing narration of the historical facts. Even though this can be said for history in general, as already pointed out, it is valid in particular for the history of the post-colonial countries. If we assume that every history is partial at least in one aspect, namely, for the fact that it is only one version of how things happened, then the history of post-colonial countries is partial and problematic also for another set of reasons: first, it has been written by historians that were deeply influenced by the colonial ideology, while the version of the colonized populations has almost always been ignored; and, second, the complicate and sometimes tragic political turns of these countries have in some cases re-created other kinds of oppression that, far from deleting the imperial structures, have often recycled them in an “indigenous” version, thereby writing a history that once again leaves a great part of the “truth” out. This is the case of India during Indira's Emergency and after, as Rushdie, through Saleem's narration, strongly shows us. As Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests in his article Postcoloniality and the artifice of History16, a “suitable” history for the post-colonial countries is yet to be founded, because, much the same as what happens for politicians, Third World historians are forced to negotiate with the traditional narratives of history in Europe and the First World in general. Chaktabarty's wish, then, is oriented forward the creation of a new historiography which should follow a project of “cultural relativism” because of the dangerous equation (quoted from Jameson) between totalitarianism and the philosophical conception of totality. Though any serious proposal of a new history cannot simply reject “modernity, liberal values, universal, science, reason, grand narratives, totalizing explanation, and so on”, what contaminates this kind of totalizing action, according to Chakrabarty, is history itself:
16
In Ashcroft et a., cit.
9 contradictory, plural, and heterogeneous struggles whose outcomes are never predictable, even retrospectively, in accordance with schemes that seek to naturalize and domesticate this heterogeneity. These struggles include coercion (…), physical, institutional, and symbolic violence, often dispensed with dreamy-eyed idealism – and it is this violence that plays a decisive role in the establishment of meaning, in the creation of truth regimes, in deciding, as it were, whose and which “universal” wins (…) The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalence, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it17.
The distance from “traditional history” and its methods in the novel is also evident in the media chosen by Saleem for experiencing the world, the very same media on which he relies as warrants of reliability in his version of history. One of the main points of what I have called here the “traditional” way of making history is that it is strongly characterized by the quasi-exclusive use of the sense of sight. The historian can claim that he is telling the truth either because he/she was there when things happened (and then he would better be called a chronicler) or because he/she has read (seen) the documentary texts that propose a certain version of how things happened. This assumption lies in the ancient past of the discipline, well-exampled, for instance, by the passage of the Gospel of John (probably the first “historian” of Christendom) in the New Testament “(...) And the man who saw this is our witness: his evidence is true. (He is certain that he is speaking the truth, so that you may believe as well)” 18. Jacques Le Goff has clearly reasserted this idea as one of the founding concepts not only of the discipline of history but also of the philosophy of knowledge in the Western world, in his etymology of the term “history”: The word “history” (in all the Romanic languages and in English) comes from the Greek ἱστορίη, in the Ionic dialect. This form derives from the Indo-european root wid-, weid-, “to see”. Thereby the Sanscrit term vettas “witness”, and the Greek ἵστωρ “witness” in the meaning of “the one who sees”. This conception of the sight as the essential source of knowledge brings to the idea that ἵστωρ “the one who sees” is also the one who knows: ἱστορεῖν, in ancient Greek, means “to try and know”, “to inquire” (…). To see ergo to know, this is the first problem19.
It would be too long here to cite how many philosophers through the centuries have relied on the sense of sight as “the king of the senses” and the channel through which we experience the world outside (and not only: when we say “the eyes are the mirrors of the soul” we also imply that the sight can be the channel to experience our inner life). To this pre-eminence of the sight, that connotes documental history most of all – founded as it is on the analysis of documents (alias: 17 18 19
Ibid., p. 342. The Gospel according to John, 19, 36. Italics added. Le Goff, cit., p. 5. My translation.
10 readable, visible texts) – but also the critical one, which of course recognizes the problematic character of the text but doesn't discuss its importance in the making of history, Rushdie opposes a series of other histories, all different but in one particular: that they are constructed on the preeminence of a different sense, from time to time the sense of taste, of smell, of hearing. All these original and eccentric ways of telling the history of the nation are impersonated by a series of characters who are opposed to a representatives of the merely “seen” history. In other words, in Midnight's Children Rushdie shows us that history can not only be seen ergo told/written, but also smelled, tasted, heard/listened ergo told. When, at the beginning of the book, we meet the character of Tai the boatman, Rushdie throws his first challenge to the traditional way of making history, symbolized at this point by Aadam Aziz, Saleem's grandfather. It is not by chance that Aadam has recently returned from the West (Germany) after finishing his studies in medicine. Very soon Tai reveals to Aadam the supremacy of the sense of smell in the process of knowledge: Tai tapped his left nostril. “You know what this is nakkoo? It's the place where the outside world meets the world inside you. If they don't get on, you feel it in there. (…) A nose like that, little idiot, is a great gift. I say: trust it. When it warns you, look out or you'll be finished20.
But Aadam, even though being gifted with a portentous nose, a nose with “a patriarchal aspect”, once he has become a doctor, he is westernized and begins to watch everything behind his glasses. Therefore he is rejected by his former friend Tai in a very peculiar way: Tai refuses to wash himself for years and, passing by, contaminates Aziz's “pure” world with his stench: Meanwhile, the boatman, Tai, had taken his unexplained decision to give up washing. In a valley drenched in freshwater lakes, where even the very poorest people could (and did) pride themselves on their cleanliness, Tai chose to stink. (…) He took to drifting past the Aziz household, releasing the dreadful fumes of his body across the small garden and onto the house. (…) The story went around the lake that Tai's wife, driven to distraction by the old man's sudden filthiness, pleaded for a reason. He had answered: “Ask our foreign doctor, ask that nakkoo, that German Aziz”. Was it, then, an attempt to offend the Doctor's hypersensitive nostrils (…)? Or a gesture of unchanginess in defiance of the invasion of the doctori-attaché from Heidelberg? Once Aziz asked the ancient, straight out, what it was for all; but Tai had only breathed on him and rowed away. The breath nearly felled Aziz; it was sharp as an axe21.
This is Tai's vengeance – or the vengeance of another kind of telling how history went. 20 21
Rushdie, cit., pp. 17-18. Ibid., p. 32.
11 Furthermore, Tai also alienates Aadam by branding him “as a foreigner, and therefore a person not completely to be trusted”: “Aziz found himself suspected, even ostracized, by the poor; and it hurt him badly”22. Here Rushdie subtly introduces a sort of social implication: Aziz, the man who sees, is rejected as a foreigner (a westerner) by “the poor” (the indigenous). His history “through the sense of sight” is seen as hostile by the people, who prefer to trust Tai's history “by means of olfaction”. This different channel of knowledge remains mysterious to those who have chosen to rely only on the sense of sight, as Aadam Aziz. Nonetheless it still disturbs them, “sharp as an axe”. By the way, Aziz will soon find out how inefficient and sometimes useless sight can be, when, later on, he will get to know his soon-to-be wife through a perforated sheet. Which allows him to see Naseem, the girl he will marry, only in a fragmentary way, little by little, and never as a whole... strangely enough. The topic of the sense of smell as a way of reaching the truth behind the appearance (what we see, which is very often deceptive and misleading) returns of course in the second part of Midnight's Children, when Saleem, deprived of his previous superhuman ability (he has a sort of telepathic ear, as we shall see), recounts his extraordinary capacity of smelling (odors, but also feelings and the thoughts of the people). In fact Saleem founds the reliability of his narration on the assumption that, being gifted with this magical power, he and only he has been able to know what was really happening behind what people saw and took for granted. although no voices spoke in my head, and never would again – there was one compensation: namely that, for the first time in my life, I was discovering the astonishing delights of possessing a sense of smell. (…) … But what a sense of smell it was! Most of us are conditioned, from the cradle onwards, into recognizing the narrowest possible spectrum of fragrances; I, however, had been incapable of smelling a thing in my life, and was accordingly ignorant of all olfactory taboos. (…) more important (…) was my nasal freedom to inhale a very great deal more than the scents of pure physical origin with which all the rest of the human race has chosen to be content. (…) I began to learn the secret aromas of the world, the heady but quick-fading perfume of new love, and also the deeper, longer-lasting pungency of hate. (…) A nose will give you knowledge, but not power-over-events; my invasion of Pakistan, armed (in that's the right word) only with a new manifestation of my nasal inheritance, gave me the powers of sniffing-thetruth, of smelling what-was-in-the-air, of following trails (…) Capable of smelling sadness and joy, of sniffing out intelligence and stupidity with my eyes closed, I arrived at Karachi23.
22 23
Ibid., p. 28 Ibid., pp. 306-309.
12 Another challenge has been thrown to the traditional way of experiencing the world, which, in Saleem's opinion, is something at least reductive, for it relies only on the fallible and deceptive sense of sight. Saleem's ability of “smelling-the-truth”, and moreover “with my eyes closed” opposes a new kind of perception of reality to the traditional, sight-based one. And through this new media Saleem is then able to write a new history, which is of course a history of the oppressed (“a nose will give you knowledge, but not power-over-events”). And even though Saleem claims to be truthful, what Rushdie implies in this operation is that, like any other, his history of India, as told by Saleem Sinai, is equally ambiguous and ambivalent: it relies on a way of experiencing things which is the most personal and relativistic possible. For, unlike the sight, the sense of smell has no tangible prop to be founded on. It is a history without texts – without documents. Rushdie's irony, again, plays his game with Saleem in his claim to truth. Because it is clear, against Saleem's conviction, that his version has no proof; that we have to accept his assumptions, however incredible they may be, if we want to believe him. Lorna Milne has analyzed this implication of the theme of olfaction in her article comparing Midnight's Children with two other novels, each strongly characterized by this topic (Suskind's Das Parfum and Tournier's Le Roi des Aulnes): when Saleem also asserts that his personal story is intimately bound up with political history, and links his numerous gifts to the symbolic moment of his birth, the reader is invited to accept his supernatural powers, in part because and equally fabulous set of affirmations (…) is recounted as objectively true and confirmed by witnesses. (…) the theme of olfaction echoes and supports their claims to higher spiritual and intellectual knowledge, and it invites the reader (…) to accept the authority of each protagonist's perspective and to submit to the megalomania of the characters24.
But is this not what we always have to do when we face a historical account? We have to trust the historian, who assures us that he is telling the truth, even though we cannot be sure of it. With this hyperbolic parallel, then, Rushdie unmasks the fallibility of any historical account. He brings to light the fact that, somehow, every historian is a “megalomaniac” in his/her pretension of telling the truth, and, moreover, in his/her pretension of reality to be coherent and plausible. History by means of sight, he seems to say, may be more plausible, but this doesn't make it more truthful. For sometimes the events of history can be incoherent, contradictory, and ultimately unbelievable, and yet real. 24
L. Milne, Olfaction, Authority, and the Interpretation of History in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Patrick Suskind's Das Parfum and Michel Tournier's Le Roi Des Aulnes, in Symposium: a Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 53:1, p. 29.
13 It is, to use Hayden White's words once again, just a matter of authority and narrative coherency: Unless at least to versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened. The authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows this reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess. (…) we can comprehend the appeal of historical discourse by recognizing the extent to which it makes the real desirable, makes the real into an object of desire, and does so by its imposition, upon events that are represented as real, of the formal coherency that stories possess. (…) the historical narrative, as against the chronicle, reveals to us a world that is putatively “finished”, done with, over, and yet not dissolved, not falling apart. In this world, reality wears the mask of meaning, the completedness and fullness of which we can only imagine, never experience. (…) What I have sought to suggest is that this value attached to narrativity in the representation of real events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginary25.
The sense of smell is not the only sense through which Saleem tells us his story (and the history of his nation). The chapter All India Radio stages another feature if this alternative way of making history, the sense of hearing. Saleem argues that, as one of the children born “at the stroke of midnight” on August 15th 1947, he has been gifted with a paranormal power. Moreover, Saleem also says that his power – the power of telepathy, which makes him capable of hearing what people say and think at any time and place within his head – is a kind of princeps power that will allow him to reunite a “conference” of all the children of midnight and start a sort of revolution (later on destroyed by the widow in Rushdie's great allegoric narration of the so-called Emergency and the sterilization campaign perpetrated by the government of Indira Gandhi in the years 1975-1977). The same attitude brings Saleem to compare his tale about the history of India to a “pickling process”. Saleem directly compares his ability to prepare “pickles”, chutneys – at the moment when he narrates his story, he supervises a pickle factory – to the process of “history-telling”: “Every picklejar (…) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!”26 The process of pickling contains both the idea of “immortalizing”, because it implies that something is being preserved, and the idea of “choosing”, because a chutney is a mixture of carefully selected ingredients. Therefore, telling India's (and his personal) history by means of “chutnification”, Saleem implies that history is always a selection that immortalizes; but that it is always partial, and 25 26
H. White, The Content of the Form, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1987, pp. 21-25. Rushdie, cit., p. 459. Italics added.
14 it is a partiality that it pretends to carry on through the centuries. When we read a historical account, then, we always have to be aware that it is a selection (which claims to be all-comprehensive), and that some “ingredients”, some details – sometimes important – have necessarily been left out. It may be a perfect blending (perfectly plausible), but who tells us that it wouldn't have been equally tasteful with another combination of ingredients? Once again, then, Rusdhie puts no effort in trying to tell us that the foundation of this kind of history is reliable. Saleem argues that he has heard and smelled a whole sort of things and events, but there is no possibility of proving that he is right, or that he is a liar and/or an insane person. Rushdie is not interested in giving his version of history any feature of “truthfulness” just because he is convinced that the claim of being founded on “the truth” renders any type of history, both his history-by-means-of-literature and all the other histories of India, a tale. That is well-proved by the contradictions that emerge in comparing the different versions of the history of India offered by, one at a time, Imperial historians and chroniclers, indigenous narrations, the post-colonial Indian government, and its indigenous and foreign opponents. Rushdie may be challenging the very foundation of the objectivity of history itself, and therefore the validity of history as a scientific discipline, because he seems to argue that a history made – as he does – by means of literature, or by means of poetry, metaphor, inventiveness, narrative, fiction, could be a more honest way of trying to tell how things also went in the history of India. What Rushdie does in Midnight's Children (mainly, but the same could be easily said for his other novels) is exactly to propose a new kind of history that is, we could say, set free from the “violent” pretension of being scientific and, on the contrary, claims a singular, creative and imaginative character instead. About the writing process of the novel , the author has said: I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been, unaffected by the distortions of memory), (…) my India was just that: “my” India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible version. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (…) was, let us say, willing to admit I belonged. This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and of circumstances, and his vision is fragmentary27.
27
S. Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, Granta Books, London 1991, p. 10.
15 Saleem then becomes not only Rushdie's alter ego in writing his version of the history of India, but also the object of Rushdie's criticism of the historical methods of analysis. Saleem is indeed a historian, even though a very particular one; and while Saleem portrays himself as the depositary of the only real truth, Rushdie exposes him to his fallibility, thereby revealing his own character's illusory conviction of the possibility of a singular true version of the events. Saleem-the-historian is as he claims to be a “swallower of lives”, and his creator makes him “suspect” and unreliable. On the other hand Saleem-the-storyteller, precisely because he doesn't have any pretension of totality and truthfulness, gives the more plausible version of history. For, as Rushdie asserts, in Imaginary Homelands, that he was “obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost” – as it always happens when we “unlock the gates of lost time” (the same as when we make history, for instance) – at the same time he also says that “the broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed”. The fragments of this “broken glass” are then the only sources onto which we can rely in writing about the past; it would be an illusive pretension to describe things as whole, for, as postmodernism has taught us, “human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions”. It is the desire for totality that dictates the demand for the universality of history . Nevertheless, Rushdie doesn't actually want Midnight's Children to be a work of history, just because it would be history in its traditional, all-embracing character, he is suspicious of. It is by now obvious, I hope, that Saleem Sinai is an unreliable narrator, and that Midnight's Children is far from being an authoritative guide to the history of post-independence India. (…) Saleem Sinai is not an oracle; he's only adopting a kind of oracular language. His story is not history, but it plays with historical shapes. (…) History is always ambiguous. Facts are hard to establish, and capable of being given many meanings. Reality is built on our prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge. The reading of Saleem's unreliable narration might be, I believed, a useful analogy for the way in which we all, every day, attempt to “read” the world 28.
So what Rushdie brings out, in the end, is exactly the same innate contradiction of history Le Goff had highlighted: it is a discipline that deals with ambiguity and pretends to be universal. The authority of history comes only from its being traditionally seen as a science and not on the actual reliability of its sources, that remain fragments of a broken mirror. If we leave this pretension apart, and play on the ground of literature, where we are allowed much more creative freedom in the treatment of these fragments, then we may reach a more honest result. It will not be “authoritative”, of course. But it may suggest a “truth” that is equally valid as the one offered by history. 28
Ibid., pp. 22-25.
16 Does literature win over history? Or is this just an assertion in favor of a collaboration between the two, on the grounds of the conviction that, rather than being the former a “science”, the two share the common status of narratives, creative discourses – fantasies?
17 BIBLIOGRAPHY Amanuddin, Syed, The Novels of Salman Rushdie: Mediated Reality as Fantasy, in World Literature Today, 63:1 (Winter 1989), pp. 42-45 Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth and Tiffin, Helen (editors), The Post Colonial Studies Reader, Routledge, London 2009 Brigg, Peter, Salman Rushdie's Novels: the Disorder in Fantastic Order, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the fiction of Salman Rushdie (ed. D.M. Fletcher), Rodopi, Amsterdam/Atlanta 1994, pp. 173185. Chen, Chun-Yen, Betrayal of Form: the “Teeming� Narrative and the Allegorical Impulse in Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 44: 143 (2009), pp. 143-161 Dayal, Samir, Talking Dirty: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in College English, 54:4 (April 1992), pp. 431-445 Heffernan, Theresa, Apocalyptic Narratives: the Nation in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in Twentieth Century Literature, 46:4 (Winter 2000), pp. 470-491 Kane, Jean M., The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History, in Contemporary Literature, 37:1 (Spring 1996), pp. 94-118 Le Goff, Jacques, Storia e Memoria, Einaudi, Torino 1988 Milne, Lorna, Olfaction, Authority, and the Interpretation of History in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Patrick Suskind's Das Parfum and Michel Tournier's Le Roi Des Aulnes, in Symposium: a Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, 53:1, pp. 23-36 Mukherjee, Ankhi, Fissured Skin, Inner-Ear Radio, and a Telepathic Nose: the Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, in Paragraph, 29:3 (2006), pp. 55-76 Parameswaran, Uma, Handcuffed to History: Salman Rushdie's Art, in ARIEL, A Review of International English Literature, 14: 4 (1983), pp. 34-45 Price, David W., Salman Rushdie's Use and Abuse of History in Midnight's Children, in ARIEL, A Review of International English Literature, 25:2 (April 1994), pp. 91-107 Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands, Granta Books, London 1991 Rushdie, Salman, Midnight's Children, Jonathan Cape, London 1981 Santos, Jennifer, Historical Truth in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children: a Question of Perspective, Arizona State University 2003 Torri, Michelguglielmo, Storia dell'India, Laterza, Roma-Bari 2007 White, Hayden, The Content of the Form, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1987 Wilson, Keith,Midnight's Children and Reader Responsibility, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the fiction of Salman Rushdie (ed. D.M. Fletcher), Rodopi, Amsterdam/Atlanta 1994, pp. 55-68.