Criticism
Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and literature in the Chicago area. In this essay, Kelly examines the ways in which the novel can be seen as too rich with possible symbolism to be understood, identifying the central symbolic structure.
Into his sprawling, dense novel Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie packs hundreds of ideas that do not serve any clear purpose in advancing the narrative. There are details that are not only unnecessary but are distracting, little loose ends that do not make any real sense. When a writer does that, it is an open invitation to readers and critics to inquire into the significance of what the author has included. Not all elements must serve the story, and no one even asks that all elements be connected logically, but they all must have some reason for existing. It could well be that the reason some things seem unconnected in Midnight's Children is precisely to keep the story unfocused: starting, as it does, at such a significant time as the very moment of India's independence, the life of the novel's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is bound to have some allegorical meaning, and the allegory just might be that free India has no focus. If this were the case, though, then any sort of nonsense could happen in the novel, to be justified with the excuse that any sort of nonsense could happen in India. Works have been written based on theories of chaos, but Rushdie's prose is just too precise, his characters too intricately connected, and his sense of the society too acute, for one to believe that he is going for nothing more than proof that life in postcolonial India was weird.
The novel does clearly want to walk a balance between sense and nonsense. The protagonist, for instance, is about as far from a dashing leading man as Rushdie could make him. Saleem is a thirty-one-year-old castrated employee in a pickle factory, ugly to the point of gruesome, with no companion except for a woman who cannot read the story that he is writing about his life and who mocks him, apparently finding him more ridiculous than he does himself, which is saying a lot. Much about his life is absurd, but not all of it, and as his story unravels readers are struck by just how much sense there actually is among all of the trivia. His life is not just capricious, but it follows a cyclical pattern, with Saleem's fortune going from good to bad, then good to bad, then bad, then good, ad infinitum (a process the book captures deliberately in its reference to the children's game Snakes and Ladders).
As with many novels, Midnight's Children presents its readers with differing degrees of significance. What makes this a particularly difficult book to understand is that there are so many specifics mentioned that readers are constantly trying to find where each detail fits in the larger scheme of things. Is a detail mentioned for local color and mood, such as the ghost of Joseph D'Costa, haunting his old girlfriend, Saleem's nanny, with no apparent connection to the plot? Is it told for emotional significance, a personal sort of symbolism, such as the spittoon that Saleem carries around with him for years after the destruction of his family? Or maybe, as in the case of his sister Jamila's popular singing career in Pakistan, it could be social satire. Most of the details of the novel can fit into one of these categories, or they can be connected to the book's main stream of symbolism, the duality...
(This entire section contains 1764 words.)
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between Saleem and his archrival, Shiva.
It would be difficult to argue that the relationship between Saleem and Shiva lacks symbolic significance. They are both the true Children of Midnight, born at the same exact time on August 15, 1947: the other 999 referred to as Midnight's Children in the novel are actually born in the minutes and hours following the stroke of twelve. The novel seems built around this conceit, making it both the story of a boy, Saleem, whose destiny is the destiny of free India, but also the story of two children whose lives are forever, inexorably linked, having had their fates inverted, a device with literary echoes of The Prince and the Pauper and A Tale of Two Cities. However, the parallel between Saleem and Shiva is obscured by the fact that Shiva hardly appears in the book. He is a vague presence during childhood; he appears as a menacing presence in Saleem's psychic connection to the other survivors who constitute Saleem's Midnight's Children's Conference when they are all nine; and then he is gone from the story for another twenty years, only coming face-to-face with Saleem at the end of the book.
Putting Shiva in the background does not erase his symbolic significance, but it does make it harder for readers to consider this book as a story of two people. It is the story of one, with the other existing only to highlight his personality. Shiva, in fact, might not even truly exist: his exploits are so unreal, so shadowy, that it is easy to read him as a figment of Saleem's imagination. Of course, the same could be said about most of the fantastic journey that Saleem dictates to Padma throughout this novel, but many other characters and incidents have enough details to make them plausible, even if they rely on magic or coincidence or other supernatural factors. Shiva, by contrast, shows up only when Saleem's psyche seems to need him.
"Nose and knees" is one of the book's refrains, characterizing the relationship between Saleem and Shiva as if it covers the whole world. And so it does, if one looks at the two elements simplistically. If Saleem's nose is meant to signify intellect and Shiva's knees are meant to be violent force—interpretations that not only fit their personalities, but also work crudely with one's understanding of the Indian and Pakistani natural characteristics—then, yes, all of nature might be fitted into one category or the other. But these two basic meanings do not capture it all.
For one thing, Shiva's knees are a weak symbol at best. They are supposed to represent physical strength and military prowess: Rushdie relates several times, particularly in the meeting between the two main characters on the battlefield, how Shiva's mighty knees make him something to be feared. Knees, though, are not really effective military weapons. The act of crushing one's opponent in the knees, which is supposed to make Shiva fearsome in this book, is actually more awkward than intimidating. Readers are left to imagine how one would become a world-class slayer with powerful knees, but it only takes a little imagination to see that the conceit is stretched mighty thin. On the other hand, even if the knees are not as powerful as Saleem says in his narration, they do carry with them a lingering hint of defeat: knees are more often associated with supplication, with kneeling in surrender or with paying homage, than they are with destruction.
The nose is just as imperfect a symbol, but the novel at least puts more effort into making it work, starting with the nose of Saleem's grandfather, which, in the first chapter, spews gems, and carrying on through several different meanings attached to Saleem's own nose. For the first years of his life, it is just plain ugly, a large and runny feature in the middle of a face that is marred with birthmarks, and then when he is a schoolboy, he is further disfigured by premature baldness. Rushdie seems determined to make his protagonist almost painfully hideous: this could be fit into the "Saleem-as-India" symbolism scheme, but it could also be a way of marking the book's protagonist as outstanding, unique.
When Saleem is nine, however, his nose becomes the source of his own super power, a match to Shiva's strong knees. It is somehow connected to his telepathic powers, which appear when he has a pajama tie that he has shoved into it yanked out abruptly and disappear after his sinuses have been drained. The connection is never made clear—the narrator accepts this as just one of those things that is bound to happen—leaving readers to determine whether the book is trying to say something symbolically. The situation is rich with possibilities, from Freudian psychology (the telepathy kicks in just after he sees his mother naked; it ends with an operation as feared as Saleem's later forced castration) to political intrigue (while it is working, his nose makes it possible for him and Shiva to vie for control of an army of talented, neglected children).
In the end, though, it is just a segment of Saleem's life, giving way to a different exaggerated power: an ability to smell things well beyond the power of ordinary noses. For the rest of the Saleem's life, he is said to be able to smell, not just people's particular scents, but moods and attitudes as well. When this ability develops, the parallel between Saleem and Shiva is broken. They cease to be two near-twins with matching powers; Saleem's power is still related to his nose, but it is not the power invested in him as a child of midnight. His ability to sniff things out certainly does make him a suitable protagonist for an epic, symbolizing the ability of a good observer to know the story behind what he sees, but it is not the interlocking power that was once the compliment to Shiva's knees.
Midnight's Children is a story that takes its own time, sprawling across the Indian subcontinent, over decades. For the most part, Rushdie makes it difficult for readers to tell what facts, among the thousands related by Saleem, are important: which result from the author's imagination running rampant, and which result from an over-imaginative narrator. The only sure thing is that he has taken special care to force the central relationship, between the two boys born at midnight, to be meaningful, even when it might not be obviously so. Readers who find themselves lost need to bear in mind that, whether it is intrinsically important to the story or not, anything to do with knees or noses will be connected to the world of the novel in a way that gives it power. A hundred years from now, literary critics will still look for signs in this book: Rushdie starts the hunt out by confirming only two.
Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on Midnight's Children, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.
