Salman Rushdie's /Midnight's Children/ · 4:23am Aug 18th, 2022
(If you don't follow me, but find this in your feed anyway, that's because you favorited or followed The Twilight Zone. I'm tired of leaving the "Tagged Story" field blank, and the variety of tales in Midnight's Children reminds me a little bit of the story-salad that is The Twilight Zone. Just enough that if you like one, you might like the other.)
On August 12, while I was driving back from Michigan to Pennsylvania, the author Salman Rushdie was attacked and severely injured in New York. The attacker was obeying the Islamic fatwa declared against him in 1989 by by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeni for writing The Satanic Verses. (Khomeni's successor Khamenei, who reiterated the fatwa on Twitter, mysteriously still has his Twitter account.)
I just read a post by iisaw suggesting we all buy a copy of Rushdie's Satanic Verses right now, to send a message by putting it on the bestseller lists. A very good idea.
It happens I'm in the middle of--well, more like 1/4 of the way through--his massive novel Midnight's Children, and was planning to blog about it when I finished. But I'll never get around to writing a blog post that does justice to this novel, so I'll just let loose the brain-farts that have been rumbling in my head now, while he's still good click-bait.
I bought the book (on audio) intending to hate it. One of my favorite axes to grind is my dislike of contemporary award-winning literary novels, and my favorite example is the Man Booker Prize. But someone convinced me that I haven't read enough award-winning literary novels lately to keep making this accusation. I Googled "Booker Prize" and found that Midnight's Children won the "Booker of Booker Prizes", a prize of high esteem if questionable grammaticality.
I read the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, which were just the same mix of fawning praise for its innovation and scornful disdain for its poor storytelling that I've come to associate with the kind of pretentious literary darlings B. R. Myers defenestrated in A Reader's Manifesto. And Wikipedia calls it "postcolonial, postmodern and magical realist", which sounds like the sort of box-checking that got White Teeth its publication and awards. So I figured, Since it won the Booker of Bookers, I can suffer through just this one book in order to gain the right to go on making fun of the Booker Prize.
But my evil plan was foiled, because I love this book. Not so much as a "literary masterpiece", as an insanely inventive collection of intriguing and interlocking mini-stories.
I'm not quite willing to call it a "great book". I think a great book should say something, and that what it says should be correct. If Midnight's Children has a message, it's something in its prominent "magical realism", which is used to imply just the kind of supernatural guidance of coincidences and destinies which makes me gag and leads people to believe crazy things and then kill each other. There's deep irony in Rushdie using much of the book to show how religions and ideologies led people to abuse and kill each other in India, and tying it all together in a way that promotes the same Indian religious ideas that he is, circuitously, complaining about. If the book says something, I'm 80% sure that what it says is wrong.
But it's definitely great fun. Rushdie narrates a confusing profusion of tales, mini-tales, and micro-tales, often at breakneck speed, and reading it is like running through a bazaar in a foreign land where you barely have time to realize what you're looking at before the next thing swings into view. These tales of many sizes include:
- a Muslim who lost his faith after banging his nose on a rock during prayer
- a Kashmiri boatman who stops bathing for 3 years to chase a doctor out of town
- a family patriarch who fell in love with his future wife one piece at a time, one every few weeks, seen through a small hole in a bedsheet
- a family legacy of fabulous and grotesque noses with magical powers
- a blackmail scheme ruined by an angry baboon
- a father convincing his children he can fight Djinni by lighting the fumes in a gin-bottle
- a British officer's scheme to "civilize" a few families of Indians just before Partition by selling them cheap estates with unusual strings attached
- a movie about a Hindu "cowboy" who roams the range of the Wild West, liberating cows
- how being born at the exact moment of Partition ties a boy for life to the destiny of India
That's just a tiny fraction. And I haven't even mentioned the writing. There are too many perfect word choices and creative descriptions to keep track of. I'll just copy-paste something from the first page:
On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came... 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 country. ... I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me; and guided only by the memory of a large white bedsheet with a roughly circular hole some seven inches in diameter cut into the center, clutching at the dream of that holey, mutilated square of linen, which is my talisman, my open-sesame, I must commence the business of remaking my life from the point at which it really began, some thirty-two years before anything as obvious, as present, as my clock-ridden, crime-stained birth.
If that reminds you of Tristram Shandy, you get a gold star. And I expected something like Tristram Shandy from the bad reviews, which usually complained that the way the novel is written, all misordered in time and space, was pretentious and confusing. Or perhaps something episodic, like 1001 Nights, which Rushdie's narrator compares his story to in the second chapter.
I guess it is confusing, but I don't think it's pointless confusion. MC is both quite like and quite unlike Tristram Shandy. TS is pure meta-fiction: The novel is famous for its one running joke, which is the endless digressions that keep deferring the story the narrator has promised to tell; but it gets old after just the first dozen times. The digressing stories themselves are only moderately interesting, not worth their wordage. The narrator of TS is deliberately wordy, sometimes bumbling through paragraphs whose only humor is their vacuity. I found it a chore to read, and got perhaps 1/8 of the way through before giving up.
MC has a similar structure, beginning with a narrator who promises to tell his own story but seems unable to get around to it, what with all the preliminary material he feels it necessary to explain. But here the preliminary material is necessary. Everything ties together in a way the stories in Tristram Shandy do not.
That way, unfortunately, is magical realism. Intellectually, I prefer the honest stochasticity of Tristram Shandy; but the seductive mysticism of Midnight Children, in which every story is tied together by unnamed spiritual powers, is a lot more fun to read.
It is dense and difficult at times, particularly in audio form. There are dialogues which are ambiguous when heard rather than read, and the sections which the narrator narrates in a madcap rush, bouncing from one story to another with every clause, must be read more slowly to comprehend--but of course the audio voice actor does just the opposite. Glancing through the text while writing this, I find entire pages which I have no memory of; they rattled through my head faster than I could catch them and file them away.
Certainly I won't get the full meaning of this book, whatever it is, without reading it slowly. Nor could I understand it thoroughly without knowing much more of the history of India, or at least reading it and Googling every incident in the book to find out what's history and what's fabrication. Was a major anti-Partition movement really started by a whistling bicyclist called "The Hummingbird"? I don't know. But I think that, even though the "plot" of this book is in a literal sense quite complex, with its many interlocking incidents, the big-picture "plot" is about as simple as that of Tristram Shandy, except just the opposite. Instead of telling us that life is infinitely unpredictable, MC tells us all stories are predestined and convergent. The narrator, Saleem, knows his whole life before he lives it. (Although, in deference to both Hindu and post-modern theology, it suggests that that predictable life is itself illusion.)
As I've already said, I'm not really interested in that big picture. The words and the stories are enough fun by themselves. This book is like a carnival: You can plunge into it and have fun even while missing most of what's going on.
POSTSCRIPT:
USA Today, August 18:
Salman Rushdie returns to best sellers list, Jennette McCurdy's 'I'm Glad My Mom Died' makes debut
"The Satanic Verses" (Random House, 576 pp.), the novel that led to death threats against author Salman Rushdie, debuts at No. 59 on USA TODAY''s best sellers list following the assault of the writer. The book was originally published in 1988, before the USA TODAY Bestselling Books list began in 1993. This is the seventh novel of Rushdie's to make the list.
I can't claim full credit for this. Some goes to iisaw. 
I am not much for intellectual stunt writing myself, but if you've got to swerve near that sort of thing, Rushdie isn't a bad way to go. Certainly worlds better than Joyce. "Insanely inventive" is a good general description of Rushdie's work. My favorite of his is Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which is more accessible than most. I have to admit that I didn't read anything else of his until the fatwa was proclaimed, and then I peeked into The Satanic Verses in a bookstore and was completely hooked by the opening scene.
I love Magic realism. The last non pony novel I ever read was senior year of high school, 100 Years of Solitude, and it's one of my favorite pieces of literature, and foreshadowed my love of My Little Pony, another magic realism piece of media.
And is real life not a bit magic itself? Consider this crazy world we live in, some kids TV show has brought us together, and I distinctly remember talking with you and regidar while I was high on drugs and you were in your weird spandex horse costume probably at everfree. If that's not a bit magical I don't know what it is.
Anyway, glad you're enjoying the stories.
( speaking of 1001 nights, the movie version, which I'm guessing is from the 80s, is extremely important to me because it showed me at least a decade and a half before I started studying systems, the central thesis that any one system has features you can apply to other systems, via the really cool climax which uses elements from previous stories to help defeat the evil invading general or king or emperor or whatever.
I picked this up for airport/plane reading to and from EFNW. Looks like I made a good choice.
Sounds like it's worth the read for that alone.
I wasn't that impressed with the satanic verses, myself. It was okay. Better than I could write, not as bad as some of the critics wanted to believe, but also not something that would have really grabbed the fame and adulation it did, if Khomeni had only had a little thicker skin. Or had actually read the book. I could probably go off on a longer rant about the idiocy of the desire to respond to fiction and words with violence and death, but I think we've all heard that one already.
It looks like a few people have had the idea of buying midnight's children already, as it's completely out of stock everywhere I've looked. I'll have to pick up The Moor's Last Sigh instead. Apparently it follows a similar theme, with a dose of wondering about where the past went.
If people want to see a shorter, non-book version of Myers' "A Reader's Manifesto" on the internet, there's https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/
5680357
That's probably why you're a commie.
I usually love magic realism--see for instance The Blues Brothers as magic realism. But I don't like when it's set forth as a theory of how the universe actually works, like I think it is in Midnight's Children and in Marxism (and all other varieties of Hegelianism, including Unitarianism Universalism, Nazism, and the Social Justice movement 1, which are all historicist, meaning they assume some godlike hand is guiding history along a pre-destined path by directing the actions of some group of "chosen people").
For example, consider Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It isn't magic realism; it's straightforward magic fantasy. I have no issue with orcs, dragons, trolls, Ents, and so forth, because we know these are imaginary. I have a huge issue with LOTR's racism (in which, as in Gone With the Wind, every person from the good races is an individual, while everyone from the bad races is generic and almost indistinguishable), its assumption that anything called "progress" is always decay, and its thematic argument that good intentions are 100% reliable, while reason leads to temptation and sin. These are also fantasy, but people who read those books soak them up as truths about the world without even realizing they've done so. People have often cited events from The Lord of the Rings to me as evidence about how real life works.
[1] A question, then, is how to distinguish magic realism from religion. Perhaps the difference is that religion is more specific, while magic realism is vague. The magical forces guiding karma, the chosen people, or the direction of history are left implicit and unnamed in both magic realism and most Hegelianisms.
Or perhaps we could distinguish religion as that subset of magical belief systems which try to systematize magical forces enough to use them to get something, whether that's blessings, the eternal life of an individual or of a race, or the perfect society. That would make the Hegelianisms religions, which seems right to me (and Hitler explicitly called Nazism a religion many times). But it might also make Hogwarts a religious institution, and that feels wrong.
Actually this sounds like The Canterbury Tales, Or maybe The Pickwick Papers.
5680385
"I vant mine Holsteins, cowboy."
"Krishna-hari-yi-yay, motherf*cker."
5680499
Ah, I see the gap to be bridged, at least for me. I have no illusions progress and justice and love and goodness and beneficial growth and pleasure and evolution and biological life and uplift and light and joy and humanity and (pertinent to my recent musings and studies) system complexity and the richness of experience and whatever other positive paradigms you please are pre ordained, inevitable, certain, guaranteed, written in stone, manifest destiny, divinely guided, natural laws, etc., though my study of systems has shown me does seem to be on the whole a common tendency for systems that evolve over time with some sort of non random feedback system that rewards upward motion, even only very slightly.
Rather, I wield the most powerful Human Weapon of all: hope.
5680759
That is much more reasonable! I'll try in the future not to assume you're an orthodox Marxist.
What sort of complex systems have you been studying?
5680845
But Orthodox Marxist is a misnomer, because Marxist thought is meant to evolve, with the disclaimer that 99% of my theory knowledge comes from shitposts but as I understand it dialectical materialism is literally just take your original Theory look at reality, adjust your theory. That's why we talk about for example MLM not men loving men or essential oils but Marxist Linus and maoist thought being now building on and modifying linen who built on and modified marks. The secular show to speak Wikipedia article on this would be if I remember correctly double loop feedback or double feedback loop or two stage let me just go find it the point is, even Stalin has a passage somewhere where he's like you fucking idiots don't hero worship me I'm just a guy like you figuring shit out as I go I mean maybe it was Lenin who said that linen was kind of less of a douchebag though he had his own issues fuck I'm going to have to voice correct this just you know, assume all typos are from voice to text anyway the point is Mark's new he couldn't know what the future would hold so he talked about modifying his theories as conditions changed and knowledge improved. Which, you know, is how stuff should work in general hold on let me publish this so I don't lose it accidentally and then go find that double feedback loop Wikipedia article
5680845
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-loop_learning?wprov=sfla1
Shout out to past me having little faith in my ability to find the article on Wikipedia without getting distracted. Anyway here's my system studies copy paste
Systems Studies by Bryan Chandler
If you are reading this, it means I think you will find my personal studies of systems if not insightful and informative, then at least interesting:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SvdkPwlmFp6FLGE9Mm1J26r897x QQPOSm3tuwFWJ3k0/edit?usp=drivesdk
Intro/summary/background (written 3/7/22):
Around November 2021, (surprisingly, for once NOT while on acid) I realized that systems are the perfect thing for me to study. Because I've long been interested in designs and how things work since I was a kid from roller coasters to K'nex to writing crappy My Little Pony fanfiction to composing and performing a variety of music on a variety of instruments in a variety of genres, and politics and economics, memes, and more. And one of my struggles when consuming large amounts of my ADHD meds has long been many hour, occasionally multi-day Wikipedia binges hopping between hundreds of articles.
And then one day, for the first time I just suddenly realized that these are all systems and that I could study ALL of these things, looking for commonalities and how they worked and what principles they followed, and how the fractal nature of the universe means that if you understand how one system works, you can apply those principles to other systems, and how perfect this is for me because I've always considered my creativity and ability to find parallels between disparate phenomena a strength, and long have recognized since middle school that I'm vastly better at understanding concepts than memorizing things, and in recent years recognized that I'm great at connecting people because friendship is magic and networking is just applied friendship.
So in recent months, armed with usually-legally-prescribed stimulants and a thirst for understanding, I've really dived in, and it's pretty overwhelming, because I'm literally trying to understand *Everything*. But it's raining rewards. The first system I chose to intensely study was myself, because I'm a very dysfunctional system. And while I continue to be very dysfunctional, I understand that this functionality a lot better and it has helped me be more cognizant of why I do things the way I do, and More in awe of how incredible and incomprehensible life, the universe, and existence are. And also why it's impossible for me to get addicted to drugs. From neurochemistry to statistics I have a lot of work to do, but literally everything in life is a system, and armed with knowledge of how it all works, I know I can help make this world a better place.
Anyway, here's over 8, 000 rambling thoughts about that organized by date. Still need to scan a few of the old school pencil and paper brainstorming sessions I did. Especially the one where I made this crazy flow chart between the brain the body the mind actions and the external environment, and how they all interact, which led to me for the first time understanding on a deeper level the concept of consciousness being an emergent property of quadrillions of chemical reactions between trillions of molecules in billions of cells in millions of unimaginably complex feedback networks every single second, and that like gender, my identity is a construct and that I, Bryan, do not actually exist. Or as I put it humorously upon this original enlightenment, "I'm literally just a shit posting differential equation."
That was a bit shocking of a paradigm shift, for sure.
Anyway, here's all the typed out stuff. I've been understanding and realizing how important connections are and how good I am at connecting people and how every single system is made up of the two component elements of stuff and the way that stuff is connected.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SvdkPwlmFp6FLGE9Mm1J26r897xQQPOSm3tuwFWJ3k0/edit?usp=drivesdk
Please feel free but not obligated to leave comments on the doc, and happy reading!
~~~~~~
Hi, I'm Bryan: pianist, singer, actor, driver, writer, meme lord, networker, systems theorist, and friend! Quickly reach me texting (714) 496-3119 . Less urgent matters: bchandleremail@gmail.com . Spread love, laughter, and kindness, and have a blessed day!
Huh. So the abyss finally gazed back.
Is it a "proof" by contradiction?