“Both masters and victims of their times”: Engaging aporetic time in Midnight’s Children

Abstract

Time in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is characterized by a cacophony of representational forms that the narrator Saleem uses with and against each other, such as cyclical time, timelessness, and revisionary linear historical time. Existing analyses of the novel’s representations of time have generally concluded that one or another of the competing temporal frameworks in the novel is primary and that Rushdie and Saleem ultimately discard or subordinate the others. On the contrary, the novel denies a single coherent temporal structure and instead focuses on productively engaging the diversity of time in keeping with Paul Ricoeur’s theory of aporetic time. Ricoeur theorizes that every framework of representing time includes aporias, blind spots it can’t satisfactorily address, and he argues that we must explore these tensions in representations of time — a task for which narrative is uniquely helpful. Investigating aporetic time in Midnight’s Children develops our understanding of Ricoeur by providing a representation of aporetic time to supplement and challenge Ricoeur’s theoretical model (and Homi K. Bhabha’s thoughts on narrating the nation). Midnight’s Children’s narratorial ambivalence and multivalence with regard to temporal frameworks is closely tied to the novel’s major thematic concerns: constructing an understanding of oneself, one’s nation, and history in the face of conflicting experiences and imperfect narratives of significant and traumatic personal and historical events. Applying Rushdie and Ricoeur to each other productively develops our understanding of how complex, contradictory narrative representations of time and of identities can provide a way forward for individuals and nations between the twin dangers of tyrannical narrative orthodoxy and impotent relativism.

Time is a prominent motif in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) from the title onward. Critical attention, however, has tended to focus on Rushdie’s treatment of time in relation to history while bracketing off all but one or two aspects of the novel’s representations of time. Time in Midnight’s Children is an unruly morass of shifting experiences and constructions whose implications are deadly serious to narrator and protagonist Saleem Sinai. By focusing narrowly on one or two perspectives, previous analyses have missed the significance of the multiplicity of Saleem’s representations of time, a variety central to Saleem’s epistemological crisis. Saleem represents time as diverse: cyclical, linear, and timeless; objective and subjective; remembered, projected, and present; alterable and unassailable/inescapable; variable and consistent. Saleem weaves a narrative from multiple forms of temporal representation to stake out a middle ground between tyrannical orthodoxy and impotent relativism. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem and Rushdie argue that grappling with multiple representations of time is the best way to compensate for the blind spots of each representation, allowing people and nations to make sense of their pasts to inform the creation of better futures.

Homi K. Bhabha’s interpretation of the multiple temporalities of national narrativization in “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation” is a useful entry point to the relationships among time, nation, and narrative explored in Midnight’s Children. Bhabha argues that the present is not the stable centre of the temporality of the nation, pointing to the dual roles of a nation’s people as both “the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy” and “the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification” that consists of erasing the past and rewriting the nation (1990: 297). This duality creates a hybridizing split in the national narrative between “continuist, accumulative temporality […] and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative”, contributing to the ambivalent character of the modern nation, in which “the national memory is always the site of the hybridity of histories and the displacement of narratives” (1990: 297; 319). A “hybrid national narrative” composed of different parts in a non-hegemonic relationship opens the past “to other histories and incommensurable narrative subjects” (1990: 318). Saleem’s narrative performance of the Indian nation in Midnight’s Children expands Bhabha’s argument that the interaction of the narrativized past and the narrating present is central to the concept of the nation. Where Bhabha focuses on ambivalence in relation to “the rhetorical figures of a national past”, Saleem demonstrates that the experience of time as an individual and a national citizen involves many more aspects of time, each offering its own insights and aporias (Bhabha, 1990: 294).

Saleem insists in Midnight’s Children that narratives are doomed to imperfection but nevertheless necessary to the development of individual and national identities capable of driving effective and responsible action in the world. Paul Ricoeur’s assertion in Time and Narrative (Volume 3) “that there has never been a phenomenology of temporality free of every aporia, and that in principle there can never be one” provides a foundation for understanding the role of multiple representations of time in Saleem’s narrative performance of India (1990: 3). Ricoeur explains that narrative depictions of temporal experience are indispensable but always aporetic: any figuration of time will always leave something out because of “the ultimate unrepresentability of time, which makes even phenomenology continually turn to metaphors” (1990: 241; 243). The selective and figurative nature of narrative ensures aporias, structurally unavoidable gaps between the representation and the time being represented. ¹ Ricoeur argues that

the most exemplary attempts to express the lived experience of time in its immediacy result in the multiplication of aporias, as the instrument of analysis becomes ever more precise […] on the epistemological plane […] the multiplication of intermediary links merely extends the mediations without ever breaking the chain. (1990: 241–2)

Previous analyses of Midnight’s Children have missed that for Saleem, all representations of time are fundamentally aporetic — gappy refigurations and not transparent, comprehensive facsimiles — and yet potent and urgently needed. Midnight’s Children develops Ricoeur’s assertion that imperfect narrative representations of time are nevertheless useful: “[t]his inadequacy will not be seen as a failure if we [remember that] the reply of narrativity to the aporias of time consists less in resolving these aporias than in putting them to work” (Ricoeur, 1990: 260–1). Saleem employs aporetic representations of time as the framework for a multitudinous narrative better able to admit and account for its own imperfections than orthodox narratives that aspire to hegemony at the cost of severe, oppressive distortions and elisions. By admitting his aporias Saleem avoids narratorial tyranny, while by weaving together multiple representations he achieves the breadth and depth of historical perspective that provide a necessary foundation for responsible action.

Saleem’s experience of time has no consistently dominant feature, deepening the anxiety and urgency he feels while constructing a narrative for himself and for India’s next generation. He sees the strengths and the weaknesses of different representations of time and recognizes that mistakenly seizing on any temporal schema as definitive tends toward politically oppressive hegemonic narratives. Saleem responds with a narrative that draws on multiple representations of time to undermine the ability of any one representation of time to claim full explanatory power. Aporetic time is central to Saleem’s representation of his and India’s past and present and to his vision for a more just future. Saleem puts the aporias of time to work in Midnight’s Children by using multiple representations of time to construct a more (but not completely) comprehensive picture of twentieth-century experiences of the Indian nation upon which to base actions and lives in the present. The resultant narrative highlights the strengths and weaknesses of multiple aporetic representations of time along three primary axes: the direction of time, subjectivity and objectivity, and the relationships among past, present, and future.

Aporias and the direction of time

The direction of time is a key axis used by Midnight’s Children to demonstrate the need to combine multiple aporetic representations of time. Saleem provides competing linear historical representations of time subverted by irruptions of cyclical time and timelessness. Each captures aspects of Saleem’s experiences lost in the aporias of the other forms of representation while creating “inevitable distortions” of its own (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 461). ² Midnight’s Children focuses primarily on representations of the period from 1915–1978. Saleem was born at midnight on the precise moment of India’s independence on 15 August, 1947, and “thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks […] had been mysteriously handcuffed to history”, with causation operating in both directions (9; 238).

Some critics such as María Luz González interpret the novel’s convoluted history as remaining basically linear, but most see the linearity of time as at least occasionally disrupted by either timelessness (Rao, 1990) or circular time (Syed, 1994; Jenkins, 2002). ³ In fact, neither circular returns nor experiences of timelessness replace linear time in Midnight’s Children. Because both forms of representation contain their own aporias, Saleem uses them in combination with linearity, not in place of it. Kashmir and the Kashmiri boatman Tai symbolize the timeless, or at least the undated pre-colonial, with Saleem setting “Tai-for-changelessness opposed to Aadam-for-progress” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 107). During his amnesiac period as “the buddha”, Saleem tells a fellow Pakistani soldier, “‘Don’t fill my head with all this history […] I am what I am and that’s all there is’” (357). Saleem also feels “out of the world and out of all time” when alone with the 512-year-old Tai Bibi, and again when in Indira Gandhi’s prison/sterilization facility, “that place outside time, that negation of history” (319; 454). Yet in each of these examples, timelessness is made meaningful in relation to linear time — usually in relation to repressive historical representations such as revisionary narratives of war, a narrow metanarrative of progress, or governmental narrative (and literal) erasure of undesired elements in the Indian populace. While important, the experience of being out of time is never a sufficient means of narrating Saleem’s temporal experiences. Saleem uses cyclical time similarly, as an addition that decentres but does not replace linear time: “history, in my version, entered a new phase on August 15th, 1947 — but in another version, that inescapable date is no more than one fleeting instant in the Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga” (194). Saleem is preoccupied with identifying and constructing patterns of cyclical repetition in time (noses, perforated sheets, countdowns, renamings) that constitute what he calls “the repetitive cycles of my history” and “dynastic webs of recurrence” in his family (415; 422). These varied representations of time produce an informative if confusing multiplicity; they do not assert one true, aporia-free experience of time.

Midnight’s Children combines multiple representations of the movement of time to make up for the aporias of each and capture as much as possible of Saleem’s experiences in India and Pakistan. Saleem invokes the “recurrences” of cyclical time and the “logical-consequences” of linear cause and effect in the same sentence (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 422). His narrative begins in 1915 and ends in 1978, presenting a recognizable historical framework alongside temporal cycles and experiences of timelessness. Even when time seems to stop, as for Saleem-as-the-buddha in the Sundarbans, Saleem returns to the linear representation of time, though not without some slippage:

When they emerged from the jungle, it was October 1971. And I am bound to admit (but, in my opinion, the fact only reinforces my wonder at the time-shifting sorcery of the forest) that there was no tidal wave recorded that month, although, over a year previously, floods had indeed devastated the region. (368)

In telling his story, Saleem feels like “the apex of an isosceles triangle, supported equally by twin deities, the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present”, and he worries about pressure to “become reconciled to the narrow one-dimensionality of a straight line” (150). Temporal tensions play out at the level of grammar in formulations like “The consequences for the sphere of public action, as will be shown, are — were — will be no less profound” and “night is falling has fallen” (237; 462).

These examples reveal Saleem’s representation of time as multiple and aporetic rather than consistently and sufficiently cyclical, timeless, or linear. Saleem strives to balance multiple aporetic representations of time, not to choose the best one. So while Syed is correct to note that Saleem’s nonlinear temporality is in conflict with authoritarian British colonial and then Indian postcolonial nationalist linear histories, unlike Syed I cannot conclude that time for Saleem is circular instead of linear, but assert that both experiences of time must be acknowledged (1994: 100; 98). ⁴ Saleem’s knowledge of his past, refigured as Midnight’s Children, is only possible with the help of progressive time and a sense of the past as distinct from the present: his attempt to begin his story “once upon a time” is immediately followed by a second representation of the time in question because “there’s no getting away from the date […] August 15th, 1947” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 9). “Once upon a time” gets at a mythic, temporally unspecific structure into which Saleem fits his life; “August 15th, 1947” emphasizes the historical specificity of Indian independence. Throughout the novel, as in these opening lines, Saleem resists endorsing linear, cyclical, or timeless time over the others, instead invoking each in his representation to make use of their strengths and mitigate the aporias of the other forms of representation. Saleem’s inclusion of each representation of time signals their importance to his central quest: “to end up meaning — yes, meaning — something” (9). Meaning, for Saleem, is not monopolized by any one experience of temporal direction, but constructed by stitching together a representation of time’s many directions.

Aporias and the subjectivity and objectivity of time

Saleem further complicates his narrative by incorporating representations of both subjective and objective time. Here, as with the direction of time, he denies dominance to either representational model, instead emphasizing the strengths and the aporias inherent in each. This subjectivity–objectivity dichotomy is not the same as the tension between linear and nonlinear representations of time. One could assert, for instance, the objective truth of the nonlinear Hindu cycle of the four yugas (including the “Age of Darkness, Kali-Yuga”, cited by Saleem) (Rushdie, 1995/1981:194). Saleem’s narrative progression from 1915 to 1978 demonstrates how linear representations of time can grapple with subjectivity. Saleem is aware of the subjectivity of his chronology, even pointing out his own misdating of Gandhi’s death and asking, “Am I so far gone, in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything — to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?” (166). Even after he notices his similar misdating of the election of 1957 in relation to his birthday, his “memory refuses, stubbornly, to alter the sequence of events” (222). Later he compares this to the subjectivity of the official Indian and Pakistani histories of their 1965 war, arguing, “I have been only the humblest of jugglers-with-facts […] in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case” (326).

Saleem’s and the governments’ subjective representations of linear time serve different purposes and present different aporias. The government histories lie in service of “the will to nationhood” and the “totalizing pedagogy of the will” that demand “a strange forgetting of the history of the nation’s past”, creating strategic aporias in the national narrative (Bhabha, 1990: 310). ⁵ Saleem’s own subjective representations of linear time have a different goal. Where the authorities juggle facts in order to make inconvenient ones disappear, Saleem juggles them because there are too many to grasp all at once and his experiences conflict with some of them. By accusing himself of misdating, Saleem asserts the objectivity of time while emphasizing that human psychology and the subjective experience of time are often at odds with objective linear sequence. This reveals aporias where experience fails to match facts and facts fail to account for experience. Saleem suggests that subjective distortions in representations of linear time influence the construction of narrative meaning when we don’t notice them — and even when we do.

Subjective representations of time are not always in conflict with objective sequencing for Saleem. Subjectivity can be a matter of felt pace, as when the announcement of an opportunity “sends time into a speeding, whirligig, blurry fluster of excitement” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 18). Subjective representations of time can capture interpretive incoherence, as in the observation that Saleem’s son Aadam is “the child of a time which damaged reality so badly that nobody ever managed to put it together again” (420). And subjective representations help express the preservation of time through memory and record, as in Saleem’s narrative pursuit of “the chutnification of history […] the pickling of time”, in which “distortions are inevitable […] We must live, I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfection” (459). The productive potential for subjective and objective representations of time to coexist is highlighted by Saleem’s refusal to privilege either at the expense of the other; the multiplicity of representations produces insights into time not captured by either representation alone.

The multiplicity of representations of time in Saleem’s narrative is not the same as absolute temporal relativism or subjectivity. Saleem asserts the existence of aporias in all representations of time but maintains that some histories correspond better to reality than others, limiting his temporal relativism in a way overlooked by critics stressing the subjectivity of the novel’s representation of time. Jenkins asserts that in Midnight’s Children “the exotic, the fragmented, the illusory, the ephemeral, and the circular stand in precisely for what was once called the real, the certain, the factual, and the linear” (2002: 62), but the real and factual are hardly exiled from a narrative in which Saleem tries to minimize the aporias present between representations of time (including his own) and verifiable events and chronologies. Though representations of time and history influence how events are understood, Saleem stresses the limits of that power, warning against “the illusion that […] it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 443). ⁶ Saleem struggles not to choose between subjective or objective views of time, but to determine which parts of reality are objective, to what extent objective reality is accessible, and what parts of the subjective experience of time are worth representing, even (or especially) when they contradict verifiable objective sequencing.

Despite the considerable control he exerts as narrator, Saleem does not attempt to wholly overthrow concepts of temporal progression, instead emphasizing that objective chronology is best understood in relation to other representations of time. Saleem seeks to highlight the dangers of a linear history becoming oppressively hegemonic: when a government’s history and the aporias of its selective narration become canon, the hope for justice for those left “outside time” in “negation of history” languishes (454). Saleem refuses to reject linear, narrativized history despite the potential for abuse. He eventually disavows the buddha’s amnesia-as-timelessness, saying he “had come through amnesia and been shown the extent of its immorality” (445). Representations of time as nonlinear and subjective in Rushdie’s novel complicate rather than eliminate the linear and the objective, and emphasize the challenge of dealing with aporias in representing experiences of time that involve all of the above. In Midnight’s Children, neither representations of objective, nor of subjective aspects of time can tell the whole story. Attending to both improves Saleem’s understanding of his experiences, the legacy he intends to leave his son and nation to help remedy a dysfunctional present in which “people have no memories, families, or past; here is for now, for nothing except right now” (454 ;emphasis in original).

Aporias and relationships among past, present, and future

Midnight’s Children explores a final axis of multiplicity of representations and aporias in its depiction of the relationships among past, present, and future. Saleem frequently employs both diegetic and narratorial forms of prolepsis and analepsis. ⁷ Common forms of diegetic analepsis (characters returning to the past) include memory, hindsight, and reflection. Laurent Milesi describes Saleem’s multiple forms of narratorial analepses (the narrator returning to the past), including “willful recollections, anamnesis (involuntary Proustian memory) […] amnesia […] and downright paramnesia (misrecollection) shaped by the novel’s distorting and creative act of re(-)membering” (2001: 199). “[T]he chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time”, which serves as Saleem’s primary metaphor for his autobiographical narration, also leads to Proustian anamnesis when “the taste of the chutney” has “the power of bringing back the past as if it had never been away” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 459; 456).

Saleem explores the various relationships of both past and present to the future as well. Milesi concludes that Saleem turns “not only to a postmodern (Lyotardian) ana-mnesis as an analytic working through […] but also to a more political and historical ‘remembering forward’ or ‘promnesia’ that would help to forge the amnesiac nation’s ‘re-membrance of future things’” (2001: 202). Saleem represents many other relationships to the future, including prophecies and omens. Some of these are rather inconsequential, like the fare dodgers he saw as a child who “were a prophecy” of his own fare-dodging future and the prophecies and warnings of the decorations in baby Saleem’s bedroom (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 67; 122–3). Others are more central to his narrative, such as Ramram the seer’s foreknowledge of the yet-unborn Saleem and Shiva and a time-travelling child of midnight’s ignored warnings of the children’s bleak future (87–8; 199). The novel concludes with Saleem’s own prognostication, written “as I have written the past […] with the absolute certainty of a prophet”, though Saleem acknowledges, by admitting that the future “cannot be pickled, because it has not taken place”, that this certainty is unwarranted (462).

Saleem reminds us that time is experienced not only as it happens, but also through acts of reflection and projection, reversion and progression. His representations of these relationships among past, present, and future validate experiences of time lost in the aporias of simpler representations focused only on what happens at any single point in time. By representing these relationships among times, Saleem can, for instance, identify the influence of the past in “atavistic longings” and “old ways” that cause “the past of India [to rise] up to confound her present” and, through his narrative, he can pass those insights on to the next generation (245).

Narrativity putting aporias to work

For Saleem, our understanding of time is key to our self-awareness and identities. He asserts that “consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality, holding together our then and our now” (351). In this formulation, he anticipates Ricoeur’s assertion of a “narrative identity” (as opposed to “a substantial or formal identity”) that combines instances of a subject “through the diversity of its different states” but “is not a stable and seamless identity” (Ricoeur, 1990: 248). Self-awareness is characterized by selective narrativization and aporetic blind spots — no one constructs an identity by remembering every moment of their life. Sometimes these aporias are wilful. Saleem experiences timelessness in the Sundarbans not because time doesn’t exist but because he has “murdered the hours and forgotten the date”, and he wilfully manipulates his experience of time again when he “record[s] a merciful blank in [his] memory. Nothing can induce [him] to remember” the details of his betrayal, under torture, of the rest of midnight’s children (359; 433). At other times, aporias in experiences of time are beyond our control. Saleem claims that “time, in my experience, has been as variable and inconstant as Bombay’s electric power supply”, and wonders if people might be to blame for the perceived temporal inconstancy: “[u]nless we’re the ones who are wrong […] no people whose word for ‘yesterday’ is the same as their word for ‘tomorrow’ can be said to have a firm grip on the time” (106).

Faced with the imperfect, aporetic nature of all representations of time and the manipulation of influential historical representations by the powers that be, Saleem enacts in his narrative Ricoeur’s assertion that “the reply of narrativity to the aporias of time consists less in resolving these aporias than in putting them to work” (1990: 261). Saleem puts aporias to work by emphasizing them in his and others’ representations of time as a warning against expressing (oneself) or accepting (from others) the tyrannical certainty that provokes attempts to eliminate competing narratives and narrators. Saleem’s insistence on nuanced multiplicity has sometimes been interpreted as self-defeating. Michael Tratner identifies in Midnight’s Children a hybridity logic that seeks to replace “the logic of class” with “the logic of difference” (2008: 119). For Tratner, hybridity logic renders Saleem and other advocates politically (and, in Saleem’s case, literally) impotent, stuck calling the rich different than the poor rather than oppressive. But Tratner goes too far in arguing that “[w]hen Saleem says that ‘there is good and bad in all,’ he is saying that he wants to preserve and bring together all groups within society, not eliminate any as Singh would” (2008: 119). Saleem’s objection to Picture Singh’s “portrayal […] of the unrelieved vilenesses of the rich” and denial that the rich are completely evil are not the same as saying that they should stay rich and the poor should stay poor (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 413). Having asserted the hybrid, both-good-and-evil nature of the oppressors, though, Saleem must determine how best to act against oppression.

Awareness of hybridity can engender impotence politically (as also in Saleem’s power struggle with Shiva for control of the Midnight Children’s Conference) and in representing time — but all impotences in Midnight’s Children are qualified rather than absolute. Saleem is never a biological father, but the narrative symbolically and practically qualifies his impotence by making him an influential adoptive father for Shiva’s biological child, “our son, Aadam, our synthesis”, the child of a new generation who, “when he acts […] will be impossible to resist” (425). Saleem’s political and narrative impotences are similarly qualified. As a narrator, Saleem enjoys politically significant power over the representation of time. His narrative of India subverts the versions offered by the Indian, Pakistani, and British governments. His frequent use of prolepsis and analepsis attests to his power over the order in which events are represented, which helps determine their contexts and most readily available meanings. Saleem also controls the placement of those privileged narrative–temporal milestones, beginnings and endings. Gaura Shankar Narayan (2008) points out that Saleem’s inclusion of colonial context from 1915 onward is a decision not to emphasize India’s (and Saleem’s) pre-colonial origins. Saleem’s vacillation as to how to end his tale is explicitly about time: “I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the future cannot be preserved in a jar; one jar must remain empty” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 462). This establishes a limit to Saleem’s narratorial power over time and attests to the responsibility he feels not to misuse his power of temporal representation. It also testifies to his conscious struggle to express a firm understanding of time despite his conviction that, even in a hybrid narrative composed of multiple representations of time, no fully coherent representation is possible. More importantly, his rejection of hegemonic relationships among linear, circular, and timeless time and between subjective and objective representations of time resists the tendency towards politically oppressive hegemonic historical narratives. By highlighting the aporias endemic to all representations of time and demonstrating how various representations all add valuable insights, Saleem fights against oppressive simplifications and elisions. His understanding of India, built on multiplicity and awareness of the aporetic imperfections of each component perspective, will be put to work helping him guide young Aadam’s “Emergency-born” generation (425). As Saleem tells his old ayah when she suggests he shift his attention from writing to raising Aadam, “But Mary, I did it for him” (458).

The discourse of impotence, then, offers a helpful but limited way of thinking about Saleem’s struggles. As a narrator representing time, Saleem asks not whether he has power, but how much he has and how best to employ it. David Birch asserts, “[i]t is critical choice that determines whether a single perspective becomes absolutist; it is fear of this critical choice that motivates postmodernism to keep on the move; never stopping, a fugitive, like Saleem, from both past and future” (1991: 5). This tension motivates Saleem to structure multiplicity into his narrative and to set that narrative in dialogue with other existing narratives that his readers may also be contending with, such as official histories. Saleem exerts narratorial power not to support an absolutist perspective but to emphasize the relevance of multiple representations of time, with their assorted aporias, as when describing the buddha’s timeless amnesia: “for the moment, anyway, there is was only the buddha” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 356). In the buddha’s temporality there is only the buddha, now and forever, and all other aspects of time are lost; in Saleem’s, however, there was only the buddha, at that moment, but for Saleem that moment has passed. In narrating constellations of multiple temporalities — each incomplete but adding something to a combinatory overall representation superior to any of its component parts — Saleem applies Ricoeur’s insight that there is no complete representation of time in order to combat the oppressive narrative absolutism of powerful “jugglers-with-facts” (326).

Saleem’s representation of the events and times of India and his emphasis on the aporias that remain in that representation encourage his readers — and his son’s generation — to recognize the politically relevant aporias inherent in simpler representations of time that omit a wider range of facts and experiences. The fear of absolutist critical choice complicates Saleem’s representations of time but does not translate into total impotence. Saleem draws connections between his act of narration and India’s ongoing struggles with self-determination in order to offer his history as an admittedly imperfect alternative to the national amnesia he deems immoral, monstrous, and dangerously unproblematized. Saleem’s final chapter is preoccupied with the new India’s tendency to forget the past, embodied in the magicians’ “losing their memories” and focusing monomaniacally on the present; the washwoman Durga, “a monster who forgot each day the moment it ended”; and the (Midnite- or) Midnight-Confidential Club, popular with Bombay’s young elite because “here people have no memories, families or past; here is for now, for nothing except right now” (444; 445; 454). The novel’s conclusion argues against the solipsistic extremes of this “live in the present” amnesiac mentality, whose representations of time omit all but the present. Saleem’s warning will not solve all of India’s problems, but his reminder that ignoring the past renders people “incapable of judgment, having forgotten everything to which they could compare anything that happened”, aims to guide India towards a future informed by lessons learned from its past (444). He will not seek to force his will on the Indian people like others have tried before him, but he hopes that they will choose to remember as they build India’s future: “still the children of midnight deserve, now, after everything, to be left alone; perhaps to forget; but I hope (against hope) to remember” (199). In this process Saleem chooses, as the best alternative to amnesia or a hegemonic official history, to weave together multiple representations of time and to reveal rather than obscure their aporias.

Aporetic time and the search for narrative identities

Saleem’s ability to narrate himself and his country is in constant flux. Robert Alter’s suggestion that Midnight’s Children is characterized by “an unstable oscillation between impotence and omnipotence in the narrative command of the past” applies also to the present and future (1985–86: 94). Saleem’s power certainly oscillates: thanks to his narrative reworkings, “[m]emory […] is being saved from the corruption of the clocks”, but when he goes too far while redressing perceived imbalances in the representation of time, his collaborator in the pickling of time, Padma, “bull[ies him] back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 38). When counterbalanced by other representations of time, linear narrative can avoid the authoritarian excesses characteristic of official histories and help Saleem ground his narrative in a fundamental experience of time that Padma pressures him not to wholly ignore. For Alter, “Midnight’s Children […] is a great deal more than an assemblage of shards”, in that it represents the complex experience of living with the past (1985–86: 106). Alter’s reading privileges the point later in the novel when Saleem “begins to feel […] that perhaps the ‘truth’ of narrating the past is to evoke its necessary incoherence” rather than to advocate for the supremacy of any one narrative representation of time (1985–86: 105). The incoherent, aporetic nature of the past is not the endpoint of Saleem’s understanding of time, though — it is the starting point of his quest to represent time as well as possible despite the impossibility of a perfectly coherent, aporia-free representation. Saleem confesses, “I’m tearing myself apart, can’t even agree with myself […] only fragments remain, none of it makes sense any more!” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 421–2). But soon he has recommitted himself to giving his narrative “shape and form — that is to say, meaning”, and to capture “the authentic taste of truth” in “the pickles of history” despite “the inevitable distortions of the pickling process” (461). In the novel’s conclusion, Saleem emphasizes the conflict between “now”-centred forgetfulness, represented by Durga, and Saleem’s own obsessive focus (at one narrating moment) on the past and disinterest “in anything new” (445). Each relationship to time has attractions, strengths, and problematic aporias. Saleem is preoccupied not only by the incoherences and aporias of temporal representations but also by the tension between the insights of each: in this case, the need to forget in order to move forward and to remember in order not to move forward blindly or tyrannically.

Saleem’s isosceles triangle metaphor suggests that despite his rant about what-happens-nextism, “the wild god of memory and the lotus-goddess of the present” often work together to support his narrative endeavours (150). Saleem’s narration in multiple tenses at once highlights resonances between the experience of an event and the experience of its narration (“there is, was, worse to come”; 271). The multiple representations of time in Saleem’s story produce more than just incoherence by both representing and enabling what Jean-Pierre Durix calls the chief accomplishment of postcolonial literature: “a profound dialogue between different conceptions of reality” (1998: 189–90). ⁸ Saleem’s narrative process demonstrates that imperfect coherence can spur productive analysis of different conceptions of reality not only between people, nations, or narrative representations of time, but also within them.

Midnight’s Children expresses the anxiety of constructing narratives of time while remaining aware of the aporetic nature of all such representations. Rushdie develops Ricoeur’s theory by exploring how aporetic representations of time affect the realms of human and national experience. Saleem narrates many responses to the problem of trying to grasp time with representations that inevitably prove aporetic and insufficient. Ignoring the past leaves us barbarians like Shiva or powerless amnesiacs like Picture Singh. Attempts to control narrative representations of time create tyrants like the British Raj and the Widow. Refusal to narrate assertively for fear of tyranny leads to the political impotence warned against by Tratner and illustrated by Saleem’s weak leadership of the Midnight Children’s Conference. Though partially paralyzed by awareness of the failures and distortions of narration, Saleem strikes a balance between the need to engage the past and future and the violence of constructing a representation that excludes some experiences of time. Midnight’s Children argues that narratives — and understandings of the epistemic violence they can never completely avoid — are an imperfect but necessary step along the path towards better lives and nations. Distortion is the inevitable cost of the shape and meaning that narratives give to experience, but this price is worth the advantage to future generations of learning from the past — as long as narrators are careful to minimize and diffuse distortions by constructing inclusively hybrid rather than oppressively orthodox narratives.

By acknowledging and working through its aporias despite the impossibility of resolving them, Saleem’s multifaceted representation of time gives him and us a flexible framework for critiquing and improving temporal representations. Incorporating multiple representations of time helps us understand the strengths and weaknesses of each inevitably aporetic approach, so we can find other representations of time with complementary strengths. We can then use improved understandings of our (and others’) experiences to inform our actions as individuals and as national subjects performing the “repeating and reproductive process” of turning “[t]he scraps, patches, and rags of daily life […] into the signs of a national culture” and producing “the nation as narration” (Bhabha, 1990: 297). Representations of time are crucial to this work. Bhabha argues, “[i]t is indeed only in the disjunctive time of the nation’s modernity […] that questions of nation as narration come to be posed”, and his questions look much like Saleem’s:

How do we plot the narrative of the nation that must mediate between the teleology of progress tipping over into the ‘timeless’ discourse of irrationality? How do we understand that ‘homogeneity’ of modernity — the people — which, if pushed too far, may assume something resembling the archaic body of the despotic or totalitarian mass? (Bhabha, 1990: 294)

Saleem answers that our representations of individuals’ and nations’ experiences must incorporate both the progressive and the timeless, the unifying and the diversifying — that the narrative concepts of consciousness (“awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time”) and nation (“India, the new myth — a collective fiction in which anything was possible”) are incoherent and incomplete but powerful and worth pursuing in the cautious knowledge of their opportunities and dangers (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 351; 112).

The symbolic power of narrative representations of time gives Saleem a final way to put temporal aporias to work. Time is the titular symbol of Rushdie’s novel about the children of midnight, and the symbolic is a consistently important aspect of Saleem’s representations of time. In opening his story with both “once upon a time” and the specific yet multiply symbolic stroke of midnight on 15 August, 1947, Saleem draws on the power of symbolic as well as linear historical representations of time (9). The nationalist symbolism of “the happy accident of [Saleem’s] moment of birth” is celebrated by the media and by Prime Minister Nehru, who declares Saleem’s life “the mirror of our own” (122). The buddha’s time in the Sundarbans is both an experience wherein “Time lies dead in a rice-paddy” and also a “time of punishment”, depending on the symbolic interpretation (359; 363). Saleem often characterizes progressive clock time as a constraining consequence of colonialism: “Mountbatten’s ticktock” is the legacy of “a dream of a British Bombay […] a notion of such force that it set time in motion” (92). Yet in the end, Saleem also represents clock time as compassionate, as he predicts his disintegration to the sound of “at last somewhere the striking of a clock, twelve chimes, release” (463).

The symbolic meanings of time that begin with the novel’s title reach their conclusion in the final line, in which it is “their times” of which midnight’s children must be “both masters and victims” (463). They must be masters because consciousness demands “the awareness of oneself as a homogeneous entity in time” and because they “must build reality” from “the few clues” and “pieces of information” they are given (351; 427). They must be victims because their representations of time will always remain aporetic and their control over it partial at best; there will always be things unknown and forgotten as well as “imperatives, and logical-consequences, and inevitabilities […] and accidents, and bludgeonings-of-fate” that will leave them “unable to live or die in peace” (422; 463). Rushdie’s use of the plural “their times” rather than the singular “their time” is crucial — temporal representation, in this final formulation, is still multiple rather than singular and unified. Ricoeur ends Time and Narrative with the conclusion that “[t]he mystery of time is not equivalent to a prohibition directed against language. Rather it gives rise to the exigence to think more and to speak differently” and “requires […] the search, by individuals and by the communities to which they belong, for their respective narrative identities” (1990: 274). This is both the anxiety and the hope offered by Saleem’s narrative representation of time: “the privilege and the curse […] to be both masters and victims of [our] times” (Rushdie, 1995/1981: 463), to develop narrative understandings of time and of individual and collective identity that acknowledge aporias without surrendering to impotence, as with great care we exert partial control over the politically charged processes of structuring and narrating our multitudinous selves, societies, and times.