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Memory as Resistance In Popular Literature:

A Study of ‘Errata’ in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Alfin Davis

M.A. English IVth Semester

St.Thomas’ College, Thrissur

ABSTRACT

Salman Rushdie’s 1981 book Midnight’s Children which deals with India's transition

from British colonialism to independence and the partition of British India, garnered much

attention with its winning of the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981.

Its enduring popularity saw the book receive the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993 and “Best of

Booker” prize in 2008 by public vote to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary.

This paper proposes to examine the role of the unreliable narrator or ‘errata’ in Midnight’s

Children viz, the protagonist Saleem Sinai, in constructing a resistance to the so called “meta-

narratives”. This paper serves as a case study in the use of the unreliable narrator in popular

literature and also brings to the forefront the question of how ‘memory’ operates within popular

culture providing a new perspective with which to approach history. It also intends to provide

valuable insight into the way in which memory serves as a tool for the construction of a non-

Eurocentric cultural and historical narrative. It is an act of resistance or the beginning of such an

act, towards the authoritarian and logo-centric master narratives of European culture thus

creating a collective memory for a community. The history of a community is oftentimes the

history of its collective memory and it helps in constructing its present and future realities. It’s

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often this collective memory that matters to the uneducated, ignorant and class conscious

community and not the recorded, written history.

Keywords: unreliable narrator, resistance, memory, history, reality

Memory and its usage as a narrative tool in literature, especially novels is a hot topic of

research nowadays. But it is not being researched merely as a narrative tool. It is often connected

to psychological, physiological, ontological and philosophical questions that man has been

seeking answers to since time immemorial. The use of this technique has seen much proliferation

since the modern era. The technique which authors use in order to fully exploit the complex

machinations of human memory is termed in narratology as the “unreliable narrator” or “errata”.

The ‘unreliable narrator’ is practically inspired by human beings themselves.

The term was first coined by Wayne C. Booth in his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction.

Although the unreliable narrator has been in literature for a long time it was Booth who outlined

it and gave it a definitive form. Booth discusses unreliability in relation to the concept of the

implied author and to that of narrative distance. In Booth’s view, a narrator is “reliable when he

speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s

norms), unreliable when he does not” (158–59). If the reader discovers unreliability as encoded

by the implied author for the purpose of generating irony, she/he experiences a narrative distance

between the narrator and the implied author, and a secret communion occurs between the latter

and the reader behind the narrator’s back (300–09).

According to M. H. Abrams’ A Glossary of Literary Terms:

The fallible or unreliable narrator is one whose perception, interpretation, and evaluation

of the matters he or she narrates do not coincide with the implicit opinions and norms

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manifested by the author, which the author expects the alert reader to share. (168)

Memory is an important aspect in the lifespan of a human being. But using memory as a

tool in literary narrative is a more conscious effort rather than unintentional. Scholes and Kellogg

adds further insight to our understanding of the concept of unreliable narrator by contending

that it requires a fairly thoroughgoing conception of reliability before it can be recognized and

exploited in fiction. They saw its frequent use in modern fiction as a reflection of the author’s

desire to make the reader participate in the act of creation (265).

Another perspective for looking at memory is by redefining ‘history’ as being created by

memory. Here ‘history’ is not used merely in the traditional sense of the word. It takes into

account the historiography, the historicity and historical discourse. The historical process is

sometimes supplemented by memory but sometimes the authenticity of the history- the history of

the victors and the marginalized- comes into question when one takes into account the

imperfections of memory.

Another angle from which to investigate the question of ‘errata’ would be that of the

postmodern, post colonial condition. We have already seen that the unreliable narrator is an

opportunity for the reader to take part in the act of creation, to explore the possibility of

multiplicity of narratives instead of settling for a grand narrative. The meta-narratives are

replaced by ‘micro-narratives’ which are partial, fragmented and incomplete. This incomplete,

partial and fragmentary nature is what we see in the unreliable narrator-the narrator that gives

space to an alternative reality which is dictated by subjectivity and epistemological freedom

instead of the violent, tyrannical narratives which follow a totalizing and overarching pattern

which appear to ignore the details and experiences of differences in their effort to construct

patterns which make sense of the world on a grand scale.

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Salman Rushdie is a post-modern writer, who when discussing his own works says that

the imagination is the driving force to synthesis or transformation. It is the imagination that can

liberate us from the simple facts of history, and for Rushdie there are no unqualified facts or an

absolute fiction, since the two categories overlap and leak into each other (Gant 3). Midnight's

Children is a 1981 book by Salman Rushdie that deals with India's transition from British

colonialism to independence and the partition of British India. It is considered an example

of postcolonial literature and magical realism. It garnered much attention with its winning of

the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. Its enduring popularity saw

the book receive the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993 and “Best of Booker” prize in 2008 by public

vote to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary. The New York Times said about

the book: “the literary map of India has to be redrawn…Midnight’s Children sounds like a

continent finding its voice.” The importance of Midnight’s Children lies in it being a faithful

representation of the Indian culture and its psyche. It has managed to bring out the disasters and

triumphs of modern India at its most impossible and glorious.

The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual

historical events as with historical fiction. Although Midnight’s Children is narrated from first

person point of view, the narrator, Saleem Sinai who is thirty one, does a parallel narration of

both individual and national history. The novel begins with Saleem’s description of the time and

day on which he was born. He uses a conversational tone and his narration runs very fast as he

wants to record his life before he loses his memory completely. Sinai is well aware of the

“imperfections” of his memory and exclaims, “...in words and pickles, I have immortalized my

memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, I'm afraid, with the

shadows of imperfection” (Rushdie, MC 642). In his article “The Reliability of the Narrator in

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Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of

Solitude” Ronan McFadden explains how Saleem’s narrative moves beyond his contro,l that

there are lot of errors in his narration which he openly acknowledges:

I am racing ahead at breakneck speed; errors are possible, and overstatements, and

jarring alterations in tone; I’m racing the cracks, but I remain conscious that errors have

already been made, and that, as my decay accelerates […] the risk of unreliability grows

(Rushdie, MC 270).

Rushdie explicitly states in his collection of essays Imaginary Homelands that the

mistakes of his narrator Saleem "are the mistakes of a fallible memory". He admits that he made

his narrator suspect his narration because his attempt in Midnight's Children was primarily a

novel of memory, and his India was mainly a version, "and no more than one version of all the

hundreds of millions of possible versions"( Rushdie, IH 10). History, in the view of Rushdie, is

characterized by ambiguity. He states:

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 believe, a useful

analogy for the way in which we all, everyday, attempt to 'read' the world (25).

In the course of the novel, he declares that in spite of the mistakes he made in his narrative, he

still believes:

‘I told you the truth,’ I say yet again, ‘Memory’s truth, because memory has its own

special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies

also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent

version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else’s version more than

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his own.’(Rushdie, MC 292)

Saleem reminds the reader that individual perception as created by memory is an illusion

that ultimately comprises a truth for that individual. Rushdie presents this new reality as a reality

created by memory, in which one holds on to that which creates meaning. Re-imagining history

means filling in the gaps of a person’s memory, in a manner that may or may not concur with

recorded fact. Saleem describes the inevitable gaps and errors in memory and proceeds to re-

imagine his history in a manner that provides meaning to him. To emphasize this point, Rushdie

enables Saleem’s narration to catalog the history of Saleem’s grandparents through memories

that cannot possibly exist due to his forthcoming birth, 32 years in the future. In his narcissistic

style of narrative, Saleem reminds the reader that “Most of what matters in your life takes place

in your absence” (Rushdie, MC 328). Saleem consistently reminds the reader of the necessity of

re-imagining history in order to have a concept of one’s own past and even re-imagines the

points from which he was absent.

In the novel Saleem draws attention to the error he makes regarding the elections

of 1957 and the assassination of Gandhi, but significantly adds "in my India, Gandhi will

continue to die at the wrong time" (230). Saleem’s mind contains wrong pictures and he is

careless with facts. For instance he stresses that he is a Muslim who has a great knowledge of the

Hindu tradition. According to Saleem, Ganesha took down the Ramayana from the poet Valmiki.

But the truth is that it was Vyasa who dictated the Mahabharata to Ganesha (Rushdie IH 22).

Rushdie's justification of fantasy is that India itself was: "quite imaginary", a "mass fantasy",

"the new myth — a collective fiction in which anything was possible...." (Rushdie MC 150). The

narrator even confesses to the reader that he had concocted the section on Shiva's death:

To tell

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the truth, I lied about Shiva's death. My first out-and-out lie — although my

presentation of the Emergency in the guise of a six-hundred-and-thirty-five-day- long

midnight was perhaps excessively romantic, and certainly contradicted by the

available meteorological data (619).

Rushdie states that his aim with the novel changed as he wrote it. In the beginning he

tried to reshape the lost times, the India of his youth, but he found that time and migration had

“placed a double filter” (Rushdie IH 24) between him and the subject. As he continued writing

the novel, he found that what was really interesting was “the process of filtration itself. So my

subject changed, was no longer a search for lost time, had become the way in which we remake

the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool.”(24) For instance, when escaping

from the Sundarbans, Saleem claims that they were carried out by a giant tidal wave, but right

after that, he writes that according to the weather forecasts, there was no tidal wave in that part of

the country that year. Despite this, Saleem continues to claim to having been born out of the

jungle on that fictional wave. His truth is too important to him to be changed by a simple weather

report. “It is memory’s truth, he insists, and only a madman would prefer someone else’s version

to his own”. (Rushdie IH 25)

In Origin and Originality in Rushdie’s Fiction, Martine Hennard Dutheil points to the

central idea of Midnight’s Children as “the power of fiction to capture and invent a new reality”

(10). In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie undermines conventional forms of history, narrative, and

truth. Rushdie presents a fragmented view of history that stems from the imperfect and partial

nature of memory, as evinced in Saleem’s narcissistic narration. The fragmentary history gains

emphasis from a narcissistic narration that mimics memory through its orality and destabilizes

not only language but also the idea of recorded history as the one true history.

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Inviting the reader to participate in the discovery of alternative truths, the narration

exemplifies Hutcheon’s concept of the ‘narcissistic narrative’ as it undermines conventional

forms and suggests memory and individual perception as a means of grasping a reality. The limit

of the idea of alternate truths resides in memory and how one manipulates that memory. One

may choose to alter memory by the definition of others or one may retain that which provides the

best meaning. Because memory is alterable, both inwardly and outwardly, it is imperfect.

Inwardly, one may misremember an event yet the sense of reality memory gives to that false

event makes it as valid as the recorded truth. Outwardly, one may alter memory according to the

recorded truth of history. However, individual perception and participation allows Saleem, as

well as the individual, to accept that which makes the most meaning to that person. Rushdie

invites the reader to analyze the function of memory and the definition of historical truth.

Rushdie is trying to tell us that this is reality nowadays, to be more precise, in this

postmodern post colonial world. Rebuilding the past through one’s own memory is the best one

can get close to reality. It is built not upon unchallenged facts and verifiable, quantifiable

descriptions of events, but upon our prejudices, misconceptions and mistakes as well as on our

perceptiveness and knowledge. The unreliable narration of Salem Sinai might be taken as a

useful analogy for the way in which we try to construct our own reality in this imperfect,

fragmented and error-ridden world. The memories of Saleem which reconstructs his past life is

not only significant as private memories but as collective memories. Sometimes these collective

memories become part of history. Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is both a pointer and a

reminder to the operations of history and its errors. The history of a community is oftentimes the

history of its collective memory and it helps in constructing its present and future realities. It is

often this collective memory that matters to the community and not the recorded-written history.

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For them, memory is the reality even if it’s biased, mistaken and challenged by something

scientific and authentic.

The narrative landscape of MC echoes the postcolonial and postmodern concerns.

Memory serves as a tool for the construction of a non- Eurocentric cultural and historical

narrative. The narrative provides an alternative version of history, albeit an erratic one, a history

that ratifies the feelings of the victimized. It is an act of resistance or to be more specific, the

beginning of such an act, towards the authoritarian master narratives of European culture. It also

acts as a rebuilding tool of the past that is the ‘home’ for the diasporic writer.

Memory is the healing balm for postcolonial trauma. In Imaginary Homelands Rushdie

reflects upon the process of writing the novel Midnight’s Children which was set in India and

Pakistan while living in north London. The narration in the novel was an attempt from Rushdie’s

part to restore the childhood home, distant both in time and space, to the present. Speaking of

Indian migrants Rushdie writes that ‘our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means

that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing we lost; that we will in short, create

fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the

mind(10). Memory helps the migrant create an in-between position in a world where the

experience and legacy of migration are altering the ways in which individuals think of their

relation to place.

The reader who follows closely the workings of the mind of the unreliable narrator

couldn’t help but gain a new understanding of how memory works. It gives one the idea that

memory is not merely a physiological function or in the least a standalone cognitive process,

rather it works in conjunction with imagination and other such faculties of the brain to construct

an individual reality, a reality which is not only valid with respect to the perceptive capabilities

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of human beings, but which could carve out an existential niche for the individual thus making

sense of his past, present and the future. This memory might be a false one, but in a world where

distinguishing between false and true memories is impossible, where no one could have an

objective idea of reality , where memory is unreliable in the sense that it is constantly

reimagined, created and destroyed by our psyche, the truths created by our memory is the only

ray of hope. This might be viewed as a pessimistic and foolish notion. Some might even argue

that one could access reality and not rely on one’s own memory. But to understand the

importance of memory one need only to look at history. Memories forge the human psyche,

which we know is the motive force behind all human actions which in turn becomes memory.

We have seen the memories of the narrator in MC operate in a way in which it protects

him from traumatic incidents of the past. It creates a reality which makes them feel good. In

other words it gives importance to other versions of reality. The narrator is mindful of the fact

that their versions of reality might be different from others. He even doubts his memories

frequently. But this doesn’t discourage him from creating a reality from his own memories. The

narrator is implicitly in support of the opinion that only a fool would prefer the literal truth to the

remembered version. The operations of memory as evident in the use of the unreliable narrator

creates a site of resistance against the generalization, erasure and bowdlerization of history, and

acts as a last resort, an unencumbered space for the less fortunate common folk as well as the

popular culture that they represent.

References

Abrams, M.H., Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms.USA: Cengage Learning,

2009. Print.

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Blaise, Clark. “A Novel of India’s Coming of Age”. New York Times 19 April 1981. Print.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1983. 2nd

ed.. Print.

Dutheil, Hennard Martine. Origin and Originality in Rushdie’s Fiction. Switzerland:Peter

Lang, 1999. Print.

Gant, Damian. Salman Rushdie. Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers Ltd,1999. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier

UP, 1980.Print.

Lodge, David. The Art of Fiction. London: Vintage, 1992. Print.

McFadden, Ronan. “The Reliability of the Narrator in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude”. Opticon 1826 8

(2008): n.pag. Web. 10 Feb 2015.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. London: Vintage, 2010. Print.

---. Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage, 1981. Print.

Scholes, Robert., James Phelan, Robert Kellog. The Nature of Narrative. New York: OUP,

2006. Print.