Saleem’s Perforated Sheet and Guido’s Handkerchief: Allegorical Representation of History in Midnight’s Children and Nightwood
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This essay explores the structural commonalities between Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. In appearance, the two novels seem vastly different, even opposite. Midnight’s Children, often considered a typical modern epic and national allegory, engages the national history of modern India through Rushdie’s deployment of a vertical and chronological narrative technique. In contrast, Nightwood, a typical modernist avant-garde novel, dramatizes an interlocked, multi-character web of perverse sexuality that Barnes unfolds in the form of a spatial and horizontal narrative structure. Despite this superficial discrepancy, careful scrutiny reveals a significant commonality in their narrative structures, for both novels represent the main characters’ journeys as epic quests which conclude in failure. Critical understanding of this common structure of two radically different texts is made possible, I argue, by virtue of Benjamin’s notion of allegory, the device though which he challenges the immense violence embedded in historical construction. Far from the conventional allegory, Benjamin’s modern allegory highlights the dualistic nature of allegorical images: the symbolic function which creates a narrative bearing coherent, organic, and unitary signification and, simultaneously, the rigorous materiality which resists and undermines the symbolic function. By focusing on the two fetishistic images that first appear in the opening scenes of the novels and then recur in the subsequent narratives, Saleem’s “perforated sheet” and Guido’s “handkerchief,” I argue that these two allegorical images serve as the key elements that enable Rushdie and Barnes to construct the symbolic narratives of their protagonists’ epic quests while also frustrating and deconstructing their symbolic function by revealing the fundamental limitation and incommensurability of signification and narrative construction. In fact, this allegorical representation of history constitutes the structural core of the two novels, and provides the internal force which dislodges them from conventional forms of epic and national allegory. Instead, by representing the characters’ failed epic quests and presenting the futility of their desire and will to write a symbolic and monumental history, I assert, Rushdie and Barnes elevate their novels to a higher ethical dimension, creating liberational modern epics for the oppressed, deprived, and marginalized.
Abstract
This essay explores the structural commonalities between Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. In appearance, the two novels seem vastly different, even opposite. Midnight’s Children, often considered a typical modern epic and national allegory, engages the national history of modern India through Rushdie’s deployment of a vertical and chronological narrative technique. In contrast, Nightwood, a typical modernist avant-garde novel, dramatizes an interlocked, multi-character web of perverse sexuality that Barnes unfolds in the form of a spatial and horizontal narrative structure. Despite this superficial discrepancy, careful scrutiny reveals a significant commonality in their narrative structures, for both novels represent the main characters’ journeys as epic quests which conclude in failure. Critical understanding of this common structure of two radically different texts is made possible, I argue, by virtue of Benjamin’s notion of allegory, the device though which he challenges the immense violence embedded in historical construction. Far from the conventional allegory, Benjamin’s modern allegory highlights the dualistic nature of allegorical images: the symbolic function which creates a narrative bearing coherent, organic, and unitary signification and, simultaneously, the rigorous materiality which resists and undermines the symbolic function. By focusing on the two fetishistic images that first appear in the opening scenes of the novels and then recur in the subsequent narratives, Saleem’s “perforated sheet” and Guido’s “handkerchief,” I argue that these two allegorical images serve as the key elements that enable Rushdie and Barnes to construct the symbolic narratives of their protagonists’ epic quests while also frustrating and deconstructing their symbolic function by revealing the fundamental limitation and incommensurability of signification and narrative construction. In fact, this allegorical representation of history constitutes the structural core of the two novels, and provides the internal force which dislodges them from conventional forms of epic and national allegory. Instead, by representing the characters’ failed epic quests and presenting the futility of their desire and will to write a symbolic and monumental history, I assert, Rushdie and Barnes elevate their novels to a higher ethical dimension, creating liberational modern epics for the oppressed, deprived, and marginalized.
참고문헌 (28)
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