The Magical Real and Postcolonial Historicity in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
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This paper aims to examine how Midnight Children’s use of magical realism challenges the limits of historical imagination by putting together what belongs to different registers to question our conception of what is real. Approaching the question of historicity through the metaphoric union between Self and Nation as literally embodied in the narrator and protagonist Saleem, the novel presents issues of heritage and identity in the postcolonial nation struggling between colonial legacies and alternate paths for its future. While recording the coexistence of the improbable and the real and conflicting perceptions of reality in the Post-Independence subcontinent of India, Saleem’s memoir also tries to find possibilities for a new form of the nation in retracing the past memories and historical events. As illustrated in Saleem’s journey into the Sundarbans, a place of otherness that functions as “a space of illusion,” the mode of the fantastic or magical realism can point to alternate perceptions of reality beyond the frame of nationalism or realism built upon the accepted boundaries between the nations, or between humans and non-humans. By fusing the fabulous with the factual, Rushdie strives to work toward “future-oriented codes” through Saleem’s re-visioning of history.
Abstract
This paper aims to examine how Midnight Children’s use of magical realism challenges the limits of historical imagination by putting together what belongs to different registers to question our conception of what is real. Approaching the question of historicity through the metaphoric union between Self and Nation as literally embodied in the narrator and protagonist Saleem, the novel presents issues of heritage and identity in the postcolonial nation struggling between colonial legacies and alternate paths for its future. While recording the coexistence of the improbable and the real and conflicting perceptions of reality in the Post-Independence subcontinent of India, Saleem’s memoir also tries to find possibilities for a new form of the nation in retracing the past memories and historical events. As illustrated in Saleem’s journey into the Sundarbans, a place of otherness that functions as “a space of illusion,” the mode of the fantastic or magical realism can point to alternate perceptions of reality beyond the frame of nationalism or realism built upon the accepted boundaries between the nations, or between humans and non-humans. By fusing the fabulous with the factual, Rushdie strives to work toward “future-oriented codes” through Saleem’s re-visioning of history.
참고문헌 (23)
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