“Memory’s Truth” and the Question of Temporality in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Abstract

The act of remembering by which one tries to retrieve one’s own past is an important motif in recent novels. This paper examines the ways Rushdie’s Midnight's Children presents “memory’s truth” through Saleem Sinai’s discontinuous and disjunctive narrative to address the question of temporality in postmodern narratives of memory. Saleem, the narrator and protagonist, compares his writing to the process of pickling his past, “the chutnification of history”: struggling against his imminent end, whether literal or symbolic, he is giving immortality to his memories by pickling his thirty years’ lives in thirty jars. In the novel, the act of retrospection creates a tension between young-Saleem-then and the narrator-Saleem-now, which runs through Saleem's narrative of memory in the form of possibilities and restrictions of possibility in the past. With his simultaneous sense of fatedness and contingencies, Saleem invites us to rethink the nature of human fate we inherit from our past as including the unfulfilled possibilities of the past as well as the realized potentialities. I argue that the disjunctive structure of storytelling can be seen as a way of breaking the closed structure and the movement of regression in the narrative. The genealogy of storytellers presented in the novel is then oriented toward a future to which the listener or reader of the story belongs as a next generation, whether he/she is a character in the story or the common reader of the novel.