Magic Realism in Midnights Children - Essay Example

First Sur Number 10 September Magic realism in Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie is regarded as one of the most famous authors of the Indian Diaspora. He established his settlement in England where he rose to fame via his book, Midnight’s Children. Rushdie uses magical realism, a narrative style, which entailed the use of myth and fantasy blending with the real life. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary describes magic realism (Rushdie) as, “a literary category (Rushdie), or style connected particularly with Latin America that integrates fantastic or mythological fundamentals into otherwise true-to-life fiction. It presents a narrative style that greatly blurs the discrepancy amid reality and fantasy. Magic realism is portrayed by an equivalent recognition of the conventional and the astonishingly unconventional (Rushdie). Midnight’s Children is presented as a loose allegory for the events, both before and after the independence, of India, which occurred at midnight on August 15, 1947. In the chronological sense (Rushdie), Midnight’s Children is presented as post-colonial due to the fact that the body of the narrative transpires after India’s independence. The narrative structure of Midnight’s Children contains tale, which Saleem Sinai narrates verbally to his fiancé Padma. This self-referential story evokes native Indian ethnicity, predominantly the similarly orally communicated Arabian Nights. At the fictional level, the Midnight’s Children portrays the circumstances and occurrences in the lives of the three generations of the family of Sinai. This account starts with their day in Srinagar (Rushdie) and proceeds to their passage through Agra, Bombay and Amritsar towards Karachi starting from where only Saleem returns concealed in the basket (Rushdie) of Parvati which is the witch, only to undergo the Emergency terrors that had been enforced in India. When an analysis of the novel taken there are three main features of Rushdie’s (Rushdie) use of history in the book: The first one is the commingling of (Rushdie) autobiography and narrative, the second is the remarkable breach of chronology and thirdly the search and quest for individuality as well as the meaning of life. In this novel, there is a recurrent forward or backward change in time (Rushdie) that makes it hard to trace the suitable arrangement of actions in the life of the protagonist. After the narrator gives out his date of birth, he somersaults to his 31st birthday. He then plunges far into the past times solely to revert to the present, and later to set out upon the future. Midnight’s Children can be considered as a modern-historicist description. The critics of (Rushdie) the postmodern era pertain the expression ‘modern historicism’ to decode fictitious texts. The phrase ‘new-historicism’ was created by the American denigrator Stephen Greenblatt. Peter Barry in his book, gives a simple explanation of the expression modern historicism as “it is a technique of the ‘parallel’ (Rushdie) reading of fictional and non-literary texts, generally of similar ancient period” (Rushdie) This means that modern historicism declines to honor the literary text (Rushdie); instead of a fictional ‘foreground’ and ancient ‘background’ it visualizes and observes a mode (Rushdie) of study in which both literary and non-literary writings are given equivalent weight and persistently update or cross-examine each other (Rushdie). Usually, a modern historical essay will place the mythical writing within the frame of a non-literary writing. Greenblatt compares the performances of the Renaissance era with ‘the horrific colonialist policies by all the major European powers of the era.’ (Rushdie) When we say that modern historicism includes similar study of fictional and non-literary writings, the word ‘parallel’ summarizes the vital difference between these and former methodologies to literature which had made some use of historical data (Rushdie). These earlier methodologies made a ranked separation between the fictional writing, which was the aim of value, the gem, as it were, and the traditional background, which was only the setting, and by description of lesser worth (Rushdie). Barry is of an opinion that the exercise of giving equivalent weighting to fictional and non-literary writing is the initially the major difference between the current and ancient historicism. Barry proceeds to write: The plea of the current historicism is certainly great, for a variety of reasons (Rushdie). Firstly, although it is established upon post-structuralism reasoning, it is created (Rushdie) in a far more available way (Rushdie), for the most part evading post-structuralism’s typically condensed style and vocabulary. It presents its facts and draws its decisions, and if it is at times easy to challenging the way in which the data is deduced, this is partially because the empirical basis on which the argument holds onto is made openly accessible for examination. Secondly, the material itself is regularly mesmerizing and is entirely unique in the framework of literary studies. Thirdly, the federal edge of modern historicist work is always obvious, but at the same instant it still avoids the predicaments regularly faced in ‘straight’ Marxist criticism. This marked-break in chronology (Rushdie) in the novel discloses the author’s aim of giving not a record of events in order (Rushdie) of the time they occurred but rather projecting the major historical truth (Rushdie) as interacting with and affecting the individual’s life that is mainly, the author himself as characterized by the protagonist (Rushdie). On the hand, we have the personal life of Saleem, and, on the other, conforming to this is the nation’s life and history. The story traces the several events that occur in the central character’s life that match with main happening in the current history of India. The correspondence that is tugged out, though stretched sometimes, is intended to permit an understanding of the life of an individual in relation to the terms of historical forces. Concerning the break in series and successions of proceedings in the novel, it is clearly outlined from the beginning of the novel that the author did not have in mind a constant biological account of the hero’s life or a record of ancient events in order of time (Rushdie). In this novel, Saleem’s personal life (Rushdie), and on the other side (Rushdie), matching to this is the life of the nation. Mitra writes. This story traces several crises in the protagonist’s life that synchronize (Rushdie) with the major events as well as movements in the history of recent India. Every major event that takes place in Saleem’s life is associated with some incident in the nation’s life. After a period of been exiled in Pakistan (Rushdie), Saleem goes back to India. Burning in anger (Rushdie), Saleem resolves to offer the nation with the right to choose a good future, for he takes a look upon the country as not only his twin-in-birth but as also joined to him at the hip, so that what occurred to either of us happened to us both (Rushdie). At this acute moment in Saleem’s life together with the life of the nation, the history’s pace increases and there are several numbers of synchronous events on either of the sides (Rushdie). The midnight children are portrayed as a magic pragmatist device that emphasize on the continued struggle to come to terms with identity within the post-colonial polarities (Rushdie). By the virtue (Rushdie) of their midnight birth they are to as the children of the times as asserted by Rushdie as much as magical creations (Rushdie). At the end of the text, this freedom is described as being now forever extinguished and there exists a sour irony inherent in the thoughts of Saleem’s thoughts that the children (Rushdie) must not develop the bizarre creation of a diseased as well as the rambling mind (Rushdie). Rushdie suggests that the generation of Saleem has failed to consolidate the possibilities inherent in independence (Rushdie). Every generation, as Saleem suggests (Rushdie), will remove the occurrence of a previous generation that has not learnt on how to outline a stable and solid sense identity (Rushdie). The conclusion of this text is open ended though the voice of the individual voice is swamped by the creeping progression of time and history (Rushdie). This novel draws to a close around 15th August 1978 and it ends in a mixes note. Works cited Rushdie, Salman. Midnights children. Random House LLC, 2010. Read More