“No Means No !”- Analysis of Wide Sargasoo Sea concerning # Me Too Movement

 “No Means No !”- Analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea concerning # Me Too Movement

 

Introduction:-

 

The “Me Too” movement, focuses on the experiences of sexual violence survivors, on the response of sexual harassment and sexual assault. If people are more aware of sexual harassment and how it is treated, then tolerance will decrease, and support for victims will rise.

In The Pink Movie Loyer (Amitabh Bachchan ) Explain about “No Means No” that No is Not a word but it is a statement it does not need any Explanation if someone is telling No then it means No. If the speaking Lady is Friend, Girlfriend, Sex worker or wife “ No Means No”.

 

It is about social change, through social media, where it’s known as #MeToo. It was founded in 2006, it became online in late 2017 when several high-profile actresses opened up about their experiences with sexual harassment in the film industry. Tarana Burke, an American social activist, began to use the phrase “Me too”  on the social networking platform to highlight the sexual harassment, it targeted women. Burke argues that the Me Too movement works on empowerment through empathy by showing the world just how common sexual harassment is and by telling survivors that they aren’t alone and are supported.

 

Analysis of Wide Sargasso Sea concerning # Me Too Movement:-

 

English Literature has been studied from various angles. Yet there are more hidden aspects that need to be explored to understand this novel. This research aims at exploring the growth of the protagonist.

 

 

“It is self-evident that not all sex is rape or should be criminalized as such since the criminalization of rape for which feminists fought would lose all meaning without a rape / not rape distinction.” (Mardorossian,Carine)

Yes, I also agree with this argument that It does not mean that “All Sex is Rape”.It derives from “individual choice ” is not criminalized. A humanist rather than a legalistic understanding of power dynamics defining that sexualized violence is to the “making of culture”.

So, Rochester's sexual play with black servants is not to be criminalized because that sexual play was not done forcefully it was done with their individual choice if that was done without concern then it might be Rape.  

Rape culture was started in the 19^th century. Black women being stereotyped and victimized through sexual violence was invisible and Black male body Rape was brought to the public agenda as a serious, criminal issue.

 

 

 

“It was a large presence but she took it with no thanks and no expression on her face” (140)) when Antoinette calls him out for the small sum his present entailed. His behavior actually prompts Antoinette to make the following link explicit “You abused the planters and made up stories about them, but you do the same thing. You send the girl away quicker, and with no money or less money, and that’s all the difference”.(Mardorossian, Carine)

 

By this statement, it is clear that Rochester's stages with Amelie are not Rape but it was a mutual desire. After that Rochester gave money to Amelia but she tell him No thanks and No Expression so, which means that Amelia does not want money or No less money.

 

Using Fanon White Skin, Black Masks on race consciousness, this paper argues against expecting or requiring a clear stance on the issue or even posing it as a dilemma. Reading Fanon as employing an existential-phenomenological methodology allows us to see how he exposes injustice by writing about the experience and projecting a future shared community of hope and freedom without a clear indication of the role our group identities might play.  (Sarkar,Ausmita)

Fanon’s “Black skim”, “White mask ”is connected with this novel and there is the reference of “white nigger”& “ White cockroach ”in that the main protagonist is frightened after seeing a white cockroach in the novel by that it tries to say that women do not deal with the small creature. In the next part it also saw that how women look beautiful in a white dress so, his husband wanted her wife to wear a white dress because he wants her wife's pretty by that it's clear that there is no liberty of women thought or women opinion. According to a man’s mood, she has to behave.

Black criminals get punished for the same crime at a higher rate and more harshly than white.  Black women have to suffer a lot from the Man and others from white people because she is Black. In society, men are getting more prevelaze than women because they are having more power. Rape is not about race .rape and race both are totally different things . White women and Black women are used and abused for the re-enactments of racial superiority. Black on white v/s White on white rape. Black on white rape is anxiety and consolidation and on the other side white on white rape is no less harsh but it is rape.

 

It is clear that sexual Violence is race-based rather than gender-based and white women are suffering for years in silence alongside. There is any possibility of Rape that whether the “Rape ”of white women was consensual sex or not  ? and if it is consensual sex then it is not rape. Black-on-white rape was real or fabricated. It is always seen that Women have to pay the price.

 

Thus, the objective of the paper is not only to contrast the symbolic from the semiotic in the narratives but also to show the breakdown or over-throwing of the “symbolic” in the “social law” of the Wide Sargasso Sea in the end (Sarkar, Ausmita)

 It discourses the “general Social Law” of the patriarchal, colonizing society and the multiple narratives of their expressions in the colonized society. From the Novel “Bertha” the character is the contrast between the patriarchal. In reality, this character does not exist at all but Rochester is inventing this character to fell Antoinette mad woman so, he wants to play a mind game with here wife and wanted to manipulate her mind so, she can think that what is happening with her and does not take a stand for her rights. It brings the symbolic, semiotic narrative to this paper. In this Novel when Antionetee is frightened from two rates that represent white England. Till the end, Antoinette does not submit to his authority.

It also represents that how the authoritatively patriarchal society of husbands. who just wants her wife to follow his rules if she wants to do something for herself then also she needs to take permission from her family and after her marriage, she has to take permission from her husband. she is not free to put her point in the novel also same things are happening to Antoinette she is first controlled by his family his husband. When women say “I Hate u ” It proves the breakdown of the “Symbolic ”and a shift in the “White male” narration to become almost “disoriented ” and filled with silences and gaps to mimic the “” Semiotic” narration. Semiotic prevails over the symbolic. The epilogue does not belong to the girl Antoinette, with whom the novel began, it belongs to the stranger “Bertha” to whom the reader is not familiarized. “Bertha ”does not exist but when her husband was provoking him calling him Bertha then she got the power to fight against his cruel behavior and in the end, she has then her revenge and gave him the punishment that he deserve.

 

 

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester uses his power and causes Antoinette to feel her lack of body. Rochester has regarded Antoinette as deficient and he thinks that Antoinette has to choose to become silent and stay in the attic because he has the power. Rochester sees Antoinette as unstable, dangerous, less intelligent, and inferior. Antoinette’s situation is described as an absence, like lack and incompleteness. Rochester, ignoring two women's thoughts and emotions, uses his phallus power. His phallus plays a foundational role in the roots of the difference between Rochester and Antoinette. This difference is supported by patriarchy; this patriarchy uses its own language in the world.(Wick Ramagamage, Carmen)

This statement analyzes women’s situation, madness, and women's struggle in a patriarchal society. Madness is a result of patriarchy and male-dominated societies. Antoinette has shameful and invisible life but at the same time, her madness is a protestation against society. Antoinette loss her temper because she was portrayed as a prostitute, evil, or madwoman. On the other side, his husband was calling him by another name “Bertha”. Women should start to use their own language in the world. she should be the subject of her sentences because the subject is a function of the Language. The male role in the language is different from the of women. She fit herself in the Phallocentric world. The malady is called madness in History. Man and Women's identities are shaped in the masculine perspective. If the Women Reject oppressive structures and powers so they are called mad.

In this Novel Annette depends on her husband and follows all things which her husband is telling, if they accept tradition then they are mad. When Antoinette learns the truth and when she tried to show it to society then she is mad. so, how women can not easily put her point in front of society and when she tries to go against her husband then she has to face many problems as in this Novel When women try to rebel again his husband then she is put in Attic for ten years.

There is no looking glass here and I don't know what I am like now.  Antoinette, (Grace's Watch)(The Wide Sarragesoo Sea)

Antoinette is locked in the attic with Grace Poole. She has lost all sense of self and everything is confused. Her isolation has caused her to lose track of time and place and her past. She exists at the moment with only fleeting and confused recollections of the past. She was locked in Attic for a long time that was a resume that she react like this and burn her house.

Everything was bright or dark. The walls, the blazing colors of the flowers in the garden, the nuns’ habits were bright, but their veils, the Crucifix hanging from their waists, the shadow of the trees, were black. That was how it was; light and dark, sun and shadow, Heaven and hell, for one of the nuns knew all about Hell, and who doesn’t? (1968: 48). (The wide Sarragesoo Sea)

Here, Antoinette’s confused mood is tried to be represented using motifs as brightness/dark, sun/shadow, and heaven and hell. I mean Antoinette tries to find light, brightness just because she needs them so much however the dark or tragic side of life has already been shaped for Antoinette

 

Women should know their rights and use their rights in an appropriate manner not to harm people. she should be educated so, she will be aware of the things going on in the world as compared to men. She should write about their identity without being under the influence of male writers and literature this way women can struggle with patriarchal societies and their laws.

 

The first novel Wide Sargasso Sea contains women’s silence, madness, feminist theories, political and racial oppression against patriarchy.(Gunenc,Mesut)

In This Novel, Bartha is a victim of patriarchy and colonialism. women’s social reality is shaped by gender Female experience in Literature is also gender. In The world, women are getting less privileged in comparison to men. women are inferior to men and lack independence and do not have their own sense of self. Feminists view it as not only women who become oppressed but also Black, poor people who are oppressed in a patriarchal society. Feminist deals with not only gender but also race, Religion, Nationality, Culture, and Age.

In the Novel, Bartha became the victim of colonialism just because she was a white creole. Bartha's situation highlights the need for female emancipation and racial equality in patriarchal and colonial societies.

This Novel represents the voice of women in any historical period of protesting patriarchy and oppression. No matter in 19th-century women searching for independence and equality it refers to Bartha.

Conclusion:-

So, it is clear that how Antoinette was treated as badly by his Family then his Husband, and after marriage also she was not happy because his husband does not trust him he feels that she is hiding about her past but, she has already mentioned her past . Her husband put her in Attic for ten years and then she lost her passion and then at the end she burn the house. by doing that she also feels that now she is able to take revenge for all things from which she has gone throw. This  Me too Movement is also about the same type of approach that if woman has faced any sexual harassment then she should take her to stand.

 1. Gunenc, Mesut. 2021, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283341660_Against_Society_Women_s_Language_Body_and_Madness_in_Wide_Sargasso_Sea_and_Sula. Accessed 20 Dec 2021.

 2. Mardorossian, Carine. 2021, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346022476_Metoo_in_Wide_Sargasso_Sea. Accessed 20 Dec 2021.

 3.Sarkar, Ausmita. 2021, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335652551_Feminist_Theory_in_Rhys's_Wide_Sargasso_Sea. Accessed 20 Dec 2021.

4.Wickramagamage, Carmen. 2021, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322330327_Another_Side_to_AntoinetteBertha_Reading_'Race'_into_Wide_Sargasso_Sea. Accessed 20 Dec 2021.

Assignment :-5

Name : Asari Bhavyang .M 

Roll no :-3

Enrollment No:-3069206420200002

Course:-M.A (English)Sem3

Subject:-Cultural Studies

Topic:-What are postmodernism and popular culture?  

Teacher Name:- Dilip Barad sir 

Batch :- 2021-2023

Email:- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com

Department:- Department of English

Q-1 What are postmodernism and popular culture?  

• Postmodernism and Popular Culture:-

Most contributions to the debate on postmodernism agree that whatever else it is or might be, postmodernism has something to do with the development of popular culture in the late twentieth century in the advanced capitalist democracies of the West. That is, whether postmodernism is seen as a new historical moment, a new sensibility, or a new cultural style, popular culture is cited as a terrain on which these changes can be most readily found.

• POPULAR CULTURE AND THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNISM:-

It is in the late 1950s and early 1960s that we see the beginnings of what is now understood as postmodernism. In the work of the American cultural critic, Susan Sontag , we encounter the celebration of what she calls a ‘new sensibility. As she explains: ‘One important consequence of the new sensibility is that the distinction between  high” and “low” culture seems less and less meaningful.’The postmodern ‘new sensibility’ rejected the cultural elitism of modernism. Although it often ‘quoted’ popular culture, modernism was marked by a deep suspicion of all things popular. Its entry into the museum and the academy as official culture was undoubtedly made easier by its appeal to, and homologous relationship with, the elitism of class society. The response of the postmodern ‘new sensibility’ to modernism’s canonization was a re-evaluation of popular culture. The postmodernism of the 1960s was therefore in part a populist attack on the elitism of modernism. It signaled a refusal of what Andreas Huyssen in After the

Great Divide (1986) calls ‘the great divide … discourse which insists on the categorical distinction between high art and mass culture. Moreover, according to Huyssen, ‘To a large extent, it is by the distance we have traveled from this “great divide” between mass culture and modernism that we can measure our own cultural postmodernity.’ The American and British pop art movement of the 1950s and the 1960s, with its rejection of the distinction between popular and high culture, is postmodernism’s first cultural flowering. As pop art’s first theorist Lawrence Alloway explains:

The area of contact was mass-produced urban culture: movies, advertising, science fiction, pop music. We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture standard among most intellectuals, but accepted it as a fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it enthusiastically. One result of our discussions was to take Pop culture out of the realm of ‘escapism’, ‘sheer entertainment, ‘relaxation’, and to treat it with the seriousness of art.

Seen from this perspective, postmodernism first emerges out of a generational refusal of the categorical certainties of high modernism. The insistence on an absolute distinction between high and popular culture came to be regarded as the ‘unhip’ assumption of an older generation. One sign of this collapse can be seen in the merging of art and pop music. For example, Peter Blake designed the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant-Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; Richard Hamilton designed the cover of their ‘white album’; Andy Warhol designed the cover of the Rolling Stones’ album, Sticky Fingers. By the mid-1980s, the postmodern ‘new sensibility’ had become a condition and for many a reason to despair. According to Jean-Francois Lyotard, the postmodern condition is marked by a crisis in the status of knowledge in Western societies. This is expressed as incredulity towards ‘metanarratives‘, such as God, Marxism, scientific progress. Steven Connor suggests that Lyotard‘s analysis may be read ‘as a disguised allegory of the condition of academic knowledge and institutions in the contemporary world’. Lyotard’s ‘diagnosis of the postmodern condition is, in one sense, the diagnosis of the final futility of the intellectual’. Lyotard is himself aware of what he calls the contemporary intellectual’s ‘negative heroism’. Intellectuals have, he argues, been losing their authority since ‘the violence and critique mounted against the academy during the sixties’. Iain Chambers makes much the same point but from a different perspective. He argues that the debate over postmodernism can in part be understood as ‘the symptom of the disruptive ingression of popular culture, its aesthetics, and intimate possibilities, into a previously privileged domain. Theory and academic discourses are confronted by the wider, unsystematized, popular networks of cultural production and knowledge. The intellectual’s privilege to explain and distribute knowledge is threatened.’

Like Chambers, Angela McRobbie welcomes postmodernism, seeing it as ‘the coming into being of those whose voices were historically drowned out by the metanarratives of mastery, which were, in turn, both patriarchal and imperialist’. Postmodernism, she argues, has enfranchised a new body of intellectuals; voices from the margins speaking from positions of difference: ethnic, gender, class, sexual preference; those whom she refers to as ‘the new generation of intellectuals. Kobena Mercer makes a similar point, seeing postmodernism as in part an unacknowledged response to ‘the emerging voices, practices and identities of dispersed African, Caribbean and Asian peoples [who have] crept in from the margins of postimperial Britain to dislocate commonplace certainties and consensual “truths” and thus open up new ways of seeing, and understanding’.

For Jean, Baudrillard hyperrealism is the characteristic mode of postmodernity. In the realm of the hyperreal, the ‘real’ and the imaginary continually implode into each other. The result is that reality and what Baudrillard calls ‘simulations’ are experienced as without difference operating along a roller-coaster continuum. Simulations can often be experienced as more real than the real itself ‘ even better than the real thing’, in the words of the U2 song.

The evidence for hyperrealism is said to be everywhere. For example, we live in a world in which people write letters addressed to characters in soap operas, making them offers of marriage, sympathizing with their current difficulties, offering them new accommodation, or just writing to ask how they are coping with life. Television villains are regularly confronted in the street and warned about the possible future consequences of not altering their behavior. Television doctors, television lawyers, and television detectives regularly receive requests for advice and help. Baudrillard calls this ‘the dissolution of TV into life, the dissolution of life into TV.

John Fiske claims in Media Matters that postmodern media no longer provide ‘secondary representations of reality; they affect and produce the reality that they mediate’. Moreover, in our postmodern world, all events that ‘matter’ are media events. He cites the example of the arrest of O. J. Simpson: ‘Local people watching the chase on TV went to O. J.’s house to be there at the showdown, but took their portable TVs with them in the knowledge that the live event was not a substitute for the mediated one but a complement to it. On seeing themselves on their own TVs, they waved to themselves, for postmodern people have no problem in being simultaneously and indistinguishably live people and media people.’ These people knew implicitly that the media do not simply report or circulate the news, they produce it. Therefore, in order to be part of the news of O. J. Simpson’s arrest, it was not enough to be there, one had to be there on television. In the hyperreal world of the postmodern, there is no longer a clear distinction between a ‘real’ event and its media representation. In the same way, O. J. Simpson’s trial cannot be neatly separated into a ‘real’ event that television then represented as a media event. Anyone who watched the proceedings unfold on TV knows that the trial was conducted at least as much for the television audience as it was for those present in the court. Without the presence of the cameras, this would have been a very different event indeed.

Fredric Jameson is an American Marxist cultural critic who has written a number of very influential essays on postmodernism. According to his account postmodernism is a culture of pastiche, disfigured by the ‘complacent play of historical allusion’. Postmodern culture is a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’. Rather than a culture of pristine creativity, postmodern culture is a culture of quotations. Instead of ‘original’ cultural production, we have cultural production born out of other cultural production. It is a culture ‘of flatness or deathlessness, a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense. A culture’ ~ images and surfaces, without ‘latent’ possibilities, it derives its hermeneutic force from other images, other surfaces. Jameson acknowledges that modernism itself often ‘quoted’ from other cultures and other historical moments, but he insists that there is a fundamental difference postmodern cultural texts do not just quote other cultures, other historical moments, they randomly cannibalize them to the point where any sense of critical or historical distance ceases to exist – there is only pastiche. Perhaps his best-known example of the postmodern culture of pastiche is what he calls the ‘nostalgia film’. The category could include a number of films from the 1980s and 1990s: Back to the Future I and II, Peggy Sue Got Married, Rumble Fish, Angel Heart, Blue Velvet. He argues that the nostalgia film sets out to recapture the atmosphere and stylistic peculiarities of America in the 1950s. But the nostalgia film is not just another name for the historical film. This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that Jameson‘s own list includes Star Wars. Now it might seem strange to suggest that a film about the future can be nostalgic for the past, but as Jameson explains in ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society‘ .

Films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Independence Day, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves operate in a similar way to evoke a sense of the narrative certainties of the past. In this way, according to Jameson, the nostalgia film either recaptures and represents the atmosphere and stylistic features of the past and/or recaptures and represents certain styles of viewing of the past. What is of absolute significance for Jameson Postmodernism is that such films do not attempt to recapture or represent the ‘real’ past, but always make do with certain cultural myths and stereotypes about the past. They offer what he calls ‘false realism’, films about other films, representations of other representations. In this way, history is effaced by ‘historicism … the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion’. Here we might cite films like True Romance or Pulp Fiction. More than this, Jameson insists that our awareness of the play of stylistic allusion ‘is now a constitutive and essential part’ of our experience of the postmodern film. Again, it is an example of a culture ‘in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces “real” history. This relates to a second stylistic feature Jameson identifies, what he calls schizophrenia. The schizophrenic, he claims, experiences time not as a continuum, but as a perpetual present, which is only occasionally marked by the intrusion of the past or the possibility of a future. The ‘reward’ for the loss of conventional selfhood is an intensified sense of the present – what Dick Hebdige, in Hiding the Light, calls ‘acid perspectivism’.

To call postmodern culture schizophrenic is to claim that it has lost its sense of history. It is a culture suffering from ‘historical amnesia, locked into the discontinuous flow of perpetual presents. The temporal culture of modernism has given way to the spatial culture of postmodernism.         

TWO EXAMPLES OF POSTMODERN POPULAR CULTURE 

A discussion of postmodernism and popular culture might highlight any number of different cultural forms and cultural practices: television, music video, film, pop music, advertising. I will consider here two prime examples: pop music and television.

POSTMODERN POP MUSIC :-

As Frith and Home point out in Art into Pop, ‘Pop songs are the soundtrack of postmodern daily life, inescapable in lifts and airports, pubs and restaurants, streets and shopping centers and sports grounds’. Connor argues that pop music is perhaps ‘the most representative of postmodern cultural forms’.Jameson distinguishes between modernist and postmodern pop music, making the argument that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones represent a modernist moment, against which punk rock and the new wave can be seen as postmodern. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones are as different from each other as together they are different from, say, the Clash and Talking Heads. In fact, ‘it would be much easier to make an argument in which the distinction is made between the “artifice” of the Beatles and Talking Heads and the “authenticity” of the Rolling Stones and the Clash’.                       

POSTMODERN TELEVISION

Television, like pop music, does not have a period of modernism to which it can be ‘post’. This claim can be made on the basis of a number of television’s textual and contextual features. If we take a negative view of postmodernism, as the domain of Baudrillardian simulations, then television seems an obvious example of the process – with its supposed reduction of the complexities of the world to an ever-changing flow of depthless and banal visual imagery. If, on the other hand, we take a positive view of postmodernism, then the visual and verbal practices of television can be put forward, say, as the knowing play of intertextuality (the way one text is inscribed with other texts) and ‘radical eclecticism’, encouraging and helping to produce the postmodern ‘sophisticated bricoleur’ . For example, a television series like Twin Peaks, both constitutes an audience as bricoleurs and in turn is watched by an audience who celebrates its bricolage.

Collins uses Twin Peaks as a means of bringing together the different strands of the relationship between postmodernism and television. Twin Peaks is chosen because it ‘epitomizes the multiple dimensions of televisual postmodernism’. He argues that the postmodernism of the series is the result of a number of interrelated factors: David Lynch’s reputation as a filmmaker, the stylistic features of the series, and, finally, its commercial intertextuality. At the economic level, Twin Peaks represents an attempt by American network television to win back affluent sections of the television audience lost to cable and video. In this sense, Twin Peaks marks a new era in network television’s view of the audience. Instead of seeing the audience as a homogeneous mass, the series was part of a strategy in which the audience is seen as fragmented, consisting of different segments – stratified by age, class, gender, geography, and race – of interest to different advertisers. The mass appeal now involves attempts to intertwine the different segments to enable them to be sold to different sections of the advertising market. The significance of Twin Peaks, at least from this perspective, is that it was marketed to appeal to those most likely to have been tempted away from network television by VCR, cable, and cinema. In short, the so-called ‘yuppie’ generation.

Collins demonstrates this by addressing the way the series was promoted. First, there was the intellectual appeal- Lynch as auteur, Twin  Peaks as avant-garde television. This was followed by Twin Peaks as soap opera. Together with the two appeals soon coalesced into a postmodern reading formation in which the series was ‘valorized as would-be cinema and would-be soap opera’. This was supported and sustained by the polysemic play of Twin Peaks itself. The series is, as Collins suggests, ‘aggressively eclectic’, not only in its use of conventions from Gothic horror, police procedural, science fiction, and soap opera but also in the different ways- from straight to parody – these conventions are mobilized in particular scenes. Collins also notes the play of ‘tonal variations … within and across scenes’ moving the audience from moments of parodic distance to moments of emphatic intimacy, continually playing with our expectations. Although this is a known aspect of Lynch’s filmic technique, it is also a characteristic ‘reflective of changes in television entertainment and of viewer involvement in that entertainment’. In other words, this fluctuation in generic conventions ‘describes not just Twin Peaks but the very act of moving up and down the televisual scale of the cable box. Viewing perspectives are no longer mutually exclusive, but set in perpetual alternation.’ What makes Twin Peaks different from other soap operas is not that it produces shifting viewing positions, but that it ‘explicitly acknowledges this oscillation and the suspended nature of television viewing  doesn’t just acknowledge the multiple subject positions that television generates; it recognizes that one of the great pleasures of the televisual text is that very suspension and exploits it for its own sake.’ In this way, Twin Peaks is not a reflection of postmodernism, nor is it an allegory of postmodernism, it is a specific address to the postmodern condition – a postmodern text – and as such it helps to define the possibilities of entertainment in the contemporary capitalist world.

Assignment:-4

Name : Asari Bhavyang .M 

Roll no :-3

Enrollment No:-3069206420200002

Course:-M.A (English)Sem3

Subject:-Contemporary Western Theories and Film Studies

Topic:-What is Deconstruction? Explain with the help of examples?

Teacher Name:- Dilip Barad sir 

Batch :- 2021-2023

Email:- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com

Department:- Department of English

What is Deconstruction? Explain with the help of examples?

 Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) is undoubtedly one of the most influential thinkers in the history of western thought. Derrida is responsible for the pervasive phenomenon in modern literary and cultural theory known as “deconstruction.” While Derrida himself has insisted that Deconstruction is not a theory unified by any set of consistent rules or procedures, it has been widely regarded as a way of reading, a mode of writing, and, above all, a way of challenging interpretations of texts based upon conventional notions of the stability of the human self, the external world, and of language and meaning. Often deconstruction, a French word is described as a ‘method’ of ‘analysis,’ a ‘type’ of ‘critique,’ and ‘act’ of ‘reading’ as a ‘way’ of ‘writing,’ deconstruction as a broad phenomenon has become all of the things.Like the New Criticism in the 1940’s and Structuralism thereafter, Deconstruction is the most influential critical movement of our time. According to the theoru of Deconstruction, no work of literature whatsoever has been able to express exactly what it wanted to say and thus the critics’ business is to deconstruct and re-create them, taking their words as not the outward form of their meaning but only the ‘trace of a quest.’ (Das 31) The purpose of this paper is to show what the theory of deconstruction means and how it is different from earlier theories of literary criticism particularly New Criticism and Structuralism. The deconstructive philosophy of Derrida is a reaction to the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss.Derrida moved from a text oriented deconstructive approach through analysis of politics and institution. The work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960’s is generally considered of crucial moment in the rise of post structuralism. In three seminal works – “Of Grammatology,” “Speech and Phenomenon” and “Writing and Difference.” Derrida calls into question the notion of centres, unity, identity, signification working at a point where he is intensely self-conscious and self-critical of his own writings, Derrida demolishes the boundaries between literature and non-literature. Derrida’s transatlantic influence can be traced to an important seminar held at John Hopkins University in 1966. A number ofleading French theorists, such as Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Lucien Goldmann, spoke at this conference. Derrida himself presented what was quickly recognized as a pioneering paper entitled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” a text which shows both what Derrida owes to structuralism and his paths of  divergence from it. Throughout the 1970’s, it remained an influential piece of critical writing in America. In “Structure Sign and Play” Derrida’s endeavor might be seen as threefold: (i) to characterize certain features of the history of Western metaphysics, as issuing from the fundamental concepts of “Structure” and “Center,” (ii) to announce an “event” – in effect, a complex series of historical movements – whereby these central notions were challenged, using the work of the structuralist anthropolist Levi Strauss as an example; and (iii) to suggest the ways in which current and future modes of thought and language might deploy and adapt Levi-Strauss’ insights in articulating their own relation to metaphysics.

According to Derrida:

“The whole history of the concept of structure must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center... successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms as names. The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymics. Its matrix . . . is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence.” (394-5)Derrida asserts the concept of structure that has dominated Western science and philosophy has always been referred as a “Center or a point of presence, a fixed origin.”(Derrida 278) The function of such center has been both to organize the structure and to limit the free play of terms and concepts within it, in other words, to foreclose such play.

Here in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ he directs his critique specifically to the structuralism of Levi – Strauss’ structural anthropology. That structuralism, Derrida argues, is based on the tacit assumption that is implicit in all conceptions of structure, of an opposition between the “structure” itself and a “center,” which as Derrida says, was not only to orient, balance and organizes the structure – one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure but above all to make sure that organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the free play of the structure.” Such a centre however is not the structuralism, Derrida asserts, was the rupture and disruption that first became aware of the necessity of “free play” of structures what Saussure, for instance, describes as the way signs in the system or “structure” of language can be understood as elements “each suggesting and opposing the others.”But structuralism failed, he implied to explore “the desire for the centre in the constitution of structure.” Derrida explores that desire in Levi-Strauss’ work itself between the desire for the “free play” of functional explanation and at the same time, a tacit desire for center is implicit in the privileging of nature over culture “an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence.” Derrida makes the deconstructive move of demonstrating that the opposition reversed or not can be seen to non-opposition that “free play” and “center” are both functional and organizing principles.

Although the structure thereby depends on the center, the center itself is fixed and “escapes structurality,” since it is beyond the transformative reach of other element in the structure. Hence the center is, paradoxically, outside the structure, and the very concept of a centred structure is only “contradictorily coherent.” Derrida says that the kind of decentering comes into being with Neitzsche, Freud and Heidegger but they too were trapped in a sort of circles a unique circle. For instance, Neitzsche tried to usher in the death of God and Christianity. He said, God or any absolute reference point, really does “die” (does become decentred) for the modern world. Freud engaged in a critique of consciousness and the self identity of the human subject.The word “deconstruction” is Derrida’s coinage in response to the philosopher. Martin Heidegger’s idea of “destructive” analysis. Heidegger re-examined the conventional metaphysics of being and time. The discourse of each of these thinkers put into question some of central concepts and categories that have dominated Western thought since Plato and Aristotle. Derrida borrows a set of binary distinctions from Saussurean linguistics (such as nature/culture, raw/woked etc.) to contest the claims of Western metaphysics. Language, Derrida believes, is a system of signs and the relation between language and reality is taken as the relation between a set of signifiers and a corresponding set of signified.

Derrida comments on the West’s sentimental desire for a guaranteed authority, a finality of essence and meaning the “transcendental signified.” This transcendental signified is the logos where all truth originates, rests and which is irreducible and unquestionable. God’s understanding is the other name for logos as self presence. The logos can be infinite and self present and it does not borrow outside of itself the signifier that it emits and that affects it at the same time.Derrida claimed that the Western tradition of thought repressed meaning by repressing the limitless vitality of language and by moving some thought to the margin. Thus, deconstruction deconstructs itself, in a self-contradictory effort, it manages to leave things the way they were, the only difference being our expanded consciousness of the inherent play of language as thought. Derrida groups metaphysics, linguistic and structuralism into one category.The new concept of writing proposed by Derrida has three complex words: “difference,” “trace” and “archewriting.” Difference has two aspects: differing and deferring. Each sigh according to Derrida performs two functions: differing and deferring, not by signifier and the signified. No sign is adequate and therefore every sign is written “under erasure,” “sous rapture,” a term that Derrida coins to express the “inadequacy of the sign.” The nature of language which conveys meaning through differences between linguistic signs and where the sign present is marked by the traces of the signs absent precludes the possibility of saying anything with finality. Deconstruction attempts to demolish the myth of language by exposing the metaphysical foundation of our understanding of language. Commenting on Derrida’s concept of writing, Gayatri Spivak states that it is “Something that carries within itself the trace of perennial alterity; the structure of the psyche, the structure of the sign. To this structure Derrida gives the name writing.”

Thus, according to Derrida, in spite of the “difference” that the author makes between one word and another, he can never express his meaning accurately and exactly. He must always mean more than and something different from that he indicates through writing. Furthermore, deconstructive readings always seem to start out with a set of conclusion, lacking any sense of suspense about the outcome of the reading. Despite its alleged shortcomings, the value of deconstruction may as a corrective, as some of its cautions are absorbed into other interpretive approaches.

Assignment-3

Name : Asari Bhavyang .M 

Roll no :-3

Enrollment No:-3069206420200002

Course:-M.A (English)Sem3

Subject:-The Postcolonial Studies

Topic:-The Representation of Rochester's Character in Wide Sargasso Sea essay ?

Teacher Name:- Dilip Barad sir 

Batch :- 2021-2023

Email:- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com

Department:- Department of English

Jean Rhys, original name Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams. Her first book, a collection of short stories, The Left Bank was published in 1927, , Voyage in the Dark was published in 1934, and Good Morning, Midnight was published in 1939).

•  The Representation of Rochester's Character in Wide Sargasso Sea essay:-
  
  
  

It is clear that Antoinette is a beautiful thing with a sad destiny, and that Rochester cannot do anything to control it. The circumstances of the situation and each of their backgrounds is what causes their tragedy. Rochester is not a tyrant who ruthlessly seeks out to destroy her, but a victim with his own dilemmas who tries to make his way in the world. Rochester is often seen as untrusting and selfish, but he is justified in many ways. He is hopeful in his situation, he tries to live up to the English standard, and he is given no other option but to attempt to love a madwoman.

Although Rochester speaks to Christophine and calls Jamaica an that is because Jamaica is a reflection of the demented mind of Antoinette. She appears normal to begin with, but as she progresses further into a state of insanity, Jamaica becomes more menacing. When Rochester and Antoinette first arrive to their honeymoon house, Rochester smiles at a little boy and the boy begins to cry. The town is called “massacre” which already has a connotation of death. The man called The Young Bull tells Rochester “This a very wild place-not civilized. Why you come here?”. Jamaica is unwelcoming towards Rochester, and the hostility of the country does not come from his imagination.

Even after being thrust into a shocking new culture, Rochester manages to open his eyes to the beauty of Jamaica. While he is walking through the village and observing the activity of the town, he says “I felt peaceful”. He describes the sea as serene, and when Antoinette asks him to taste the mountain water he says “it was cold, pure and sweet, a beautiful colour against the thick green leaf”. In his letter to his father he mentions that it is very beautiful there. “Standing on the veranda I breathed the sweetness of the air. Cloves I could smell and cinnamon, roses and orange blossom. And an intoxicating freshness as if all this had never been breathed before” . He does not criticize everything about Jamaica, and he stops to acknowledge and admire beauty in the strange area he has been placed in. He tries to find some reassurance in his situation.

The foreignness of Jamaica adds distrust to Rochester’s wide range of emotions because he does not know exactly how to handle himself. “Not night or darkness as I know it but night with blazing stars, and alien moon- night full of strange noises” . This passage describes how Rochester perceives the island and how it is not what he is used to. Clara Thomas writes that “Antoinette’s familiar treatment of Christophine and Antoinette’s whims, which to Rochester are so exotic and therefore troubling, bring distrust and suspicion into their idyll” . When the environment is so new, one is not going to feel comfortable and at ease. He does not understand the customs of the country, and even the natural order of the moon and the stars seems strange to him. Clara Thomas writes, “There is the constant menace of the strange exotic land, the people he distrusts, and something secret that he cannot fathom in Antoinette” . After being put into such a bizarre village, surrounded by its mysterious inhabitants, of course he would have doubts and suspicions since the island and his wife are keeping secrets from him.

Much of Rochester’s removed feelings towards Jamaica are reinforced by his loyalty to England. Rochester finds his identity in England, and being taken out from his homeland affects him deeply. “The two women stood in the doorway of the hut gesticulating, talking not English but the debased French patois they use in this island. The rain began to drip down the back of my neck adding to my feeling of discomfort and melancholy” . Rochester is very distant with Antoinette and that is because they come from different cultures. Silvia Capello writes, “Antoinette’s husband is not depicted as a demonic tyrant but as a victim himself belonging to a patriarchal society, a victim of prejudices, incapable of understanding and acknowledging the ties linking his wife with the black culture and community, thus unable to appreciate and understand the complex personality of Antoinette” . It is all a big cultural misunderstanding. Robert Kendrik writes that “Because Antoinette cannot fulfill the role of a proper English wife, that fact reflects on Rochester’s role as a proper English husband. She is neither English nor a properly Anglicized Creole, and the possibility of madness and alcoholism in her family further distances her from Edward’s imagined normal”. Being in an alien world, Rochester desires to keep a grasp on his identity. Laura Ciolkowski writes that “His identity is left uncertain by the English laws of primogeniture that leave the younger son with nothing to inherit. Only the English tastes and aversions that shape it continue to remind him of his cultural heritage and the colonial power to which it is linked. He defines himself by English tastes to help secure his identity” .

Rochester is not in the wrong by being unable to conform to the ways of Jamaica, because none of the islanders can even comprehend the English culture. Antoinette and Christophine go so far as to mock the English culture, when they cannot even understand what it is like. Rochester attempts to compare the red earth in Jamaica to the earth in England and Antoinette mocks him. “Oh England, England, she called back mockingly, and the sound went on and on like a warning I did not choose to hear” . When Christophine is serving coffee to him, she says “Not horse piss like the English madams drink, I know them. Drink, drink their yellow horse piss, talk, talk, their lying talk” . It is interesting how she says that she knows them when she really does not at all.

 On page 69 she contradicts herself by saying “I don’t say I don’t believe, I say I don’t know, I know what I see with my own eyes and I never see it”. The women ridicule Rochester for his English heritage. The two very different cultures are unable to understand each other. This confusion, and not Rochester’s actions, is what causes the dysfunction between Rochester and Antoinette.

Rochester is a victim of his circumstance. He entered into the situation not because he wanted to drastically change his life, but because he had no other option. As the second-born son to his father, Rochester was left with no inheritance and agreed to marry Antoinette so that he would be able to survive financially. Clara Thomas writes, “He has been duped by Mr. Mason, married to a girl who perhaps has a taint of colour and perhaps madness in her blood. He also has to deal with his own self-contempt, the recognition, that following his father’s instructions, he married for money–he was bought”.The act of marrying Antoinette for financial gain was actually selfless in a way. He is trying to please his father. In the letter to his father he writes, “I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother, the son you love. No begging letters, no mean requests. None of the furtive shabby maneuvers of a younger son” . In another letter he writes, “All is well and has gone according to your plans and wishes” . Notice he does not include the word “my” or the word “our”. He tries desperately to find legitimacy and acceptance in his father’s eyes, and in doing so he puts aside his plans and wishes in order to avoid being a disgrace to the family name with no means of support. Rochester simply has to make decisions according to his birthright.

The way that Antoinette treats Rochester is a signal to the fact that she is undeniably going insane. Antoinette went crazy before she even met Rochester. “I never wished to live before I knew you. I always thought it would be better if I died. Such a long time to wait before it’s over” . Even while she is married, in the present tense she says “say die and I will die. You don’t believe me? Then try try, say die and watch me die”. Rochester says, “I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers” . Rochester reads that “a zombie, is a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person that is dead” . Many times Rochester tries to kiss her fervently, touch her face gently, but she gives no response. Rochester watches Antoinette as she sleeps and he notices how inanimate she looks. 

On page 88 he says “I drew the sheet over gently as if I covered a dead girl”. He describes her as cold in several passages. Antoinette is hard to love because she is unresponsive and she is dead on the inside. While Antoinette is walking through the garden at Coulibri she says “The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living ones” . This foreshadows and symbolizes Antoinette’s world as she is caught between the living and the dead .

There is a lot of truth in Daniel Cosway’s letter to Rochester when he writes “there is madness in that family” . Antoinette is following in the footsteps of her mother. When Christophine instructs her to leave Rochester, Antoinette replies with, “Go, go where? To some strange place where I shall never see him? No, I will not, then everyone, not only the servants, will laugh at me” . Antoinette’s mother was always worried about people laughing at her. Clara Thomas says “She cannot forget the causes of her mother’s ruin and degradation though she does not completely understand them. She dreads the same fate for herself but at the same time, in a doomed way, she expects it” . The pattern according to the family history was inevitable, and Rochester is not to be held accountable for the fact that he was assigned a bad bargain.

It is impossible to put the “blame” of the tragedy on a single person or event, due to the fact that every factor contributed to the demise of Antoinette in the end. Rochester is often put to blame, but he was also a victim of a tragedy that they could not foresee. An interesting image tells the story of Antoinette and Rochester. When they are sitting in the dining room, a moth flies into the candle and falls to the floor. Antoinette has been burned throughout her life, but for a brief moment she is taken away from her past, she becomes rescued, and she is still. In the same way that he examines the soft brilliant colors of the wings, just a page before Rochester notices that he can see the red and gold lights in her face. For a moment he can see her beauty, until she is gently disturbed with his handkerchief and she flies away. Antoinette is a fragile zombie, leaning towards death or life at any given moment Rochester is a victim who has tried to prosper with the conditions he was given, but could never succeed.

Rochester's anonymity underscores the implied authority of his account. He is the nameless creator and, as a white man, his authority and privilege allow him to confer identity on others. For instance, he decides to rename his wife, calling her "Bertha" in an attempt to distance her from her lunatic mother, whose full name was Antoinette. Later, he takes away Antoinette's voice along with her name, refusing to listen to her side of the story. As he continues to fragment her identity, he creates the new name of "Marionetta," a cruel joke that reflects Antoinette's doll-like pliability. He ultimately refashions Antoinette into a raving madwoman and treats her as a ghost. Having totally rejected his Creole wife and her native customs, Rochester exaggerates his own cool, logical, and distinctly English rationale; he asserts his total English control over the Caribbean landscape and people.

Assignment :-2

Name : Asari Bhavyang .M 

Roll no :-3

Enrollment No:-3069206420200002

Course:-M.A (English)Sem3

Subject:-Indian English Literature – Post-Independence

Topic:-Write an essay on narrative technique in Midnight’s Children.

Teacher Name:- Dilip Barad sir 

Batch :- 2021-2023

Email:- asaribhavyang7874@gmail.com

Department:- Department of English

Salman Rushdie Full Name is Ahmed Salman Rushdie. He was Known For his Novelist, essayist, etc...He was Born at June 19, 1947 in Bombay, India which is now known as Mumbai. He has done his Education in  King's College, University of Cambridge. His  Selected Works  Midnight’s Children was published at 1981 The Satanic Verses , Haroun and the Sea of Stories .He has also got  Booker Prize for Fiction ,James Joyce Award. His work a unique ability to cut through the cultural noise, but has also brought danger and controversy. Rushdie has published both adult and children’s fiction to universal . Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian writer whose allegorical novels combine magical realism and Indian culture to explore history, politics, and religious themes.

Midnight’s Children begins as narrator Saleem Sinai tells the story of his life. He talks about the children who are Born at the exact moment of India’s independence from British rule.  Saleem’s entire body is cracking under the stress  and he is slowly dying, into  six hundred and thirty million particles of dust.  Saleem must work fast if he is to tell his story before he dies, and he begins with his Kashmiri grandfather, Aadam Aziz who has just returned to Kashmir from medical school in Germany, and   One morning, while kneeling to pray, Aadam strikes his nose on the ground, and three small drops of blood escape from his nose. From that moment, he vows “never again to bow to any man or god. Over several years and many illnesses, Aadam and Naseem fall in love and are finally married, and the two prepare to move to Agra for Aadam’s new university job. In Agra, Aadam and Naseem are witnesses to  the violence of the British military, and in the aftermath of a massacre, Aadam befriends the Hummingbird, a Pro-Indian Muslim politician who inspires optimism throughout Agra. Aadam also meets Nadir Khan, the Hummingbird’s private secretary, and after the Hummingbird is murdered by assassins, Nadir takes refuge under Aadam’s floorboards, much to the dismay of his wife Naseem, known in her marriage as Reverend Mother. While living under the floor, Nadir falls in love with Aadam’s daughter, Mumtaz, and the two are married, spending three blissful years together underground. Ultimately, it is discovered that Nadir is impotent, and he is forced to divorce Mumtaz, who is left heartbroken. Mumtaz soon remarries Ahmed Sinai, who changes her name to Amina, and the two move to Bombay after she becomes pregnant.

Ahmed and Amina buy a mansion from William Methwold, a British colonist who is preparing to return to London after India’s independence, and they quickly move in, living amongst the Englishman’s belongings and customs. Growing increasingly pregnant, Amina goes into labor on the eve of India’s independence, along with another pregnant woman from Methwold’s Estate named Vanita, the wife of a poor accordionist who entertains the residents on the estate. Both women give birth at the stroke of midnight; however, Vanita dies shortly after, leaving her infant son, Shiva. Alone with the two children of midnight, a midwife named Mary Pereira switches the nametags of the children, effectively replacing rich with poor, in her own “private act of revolution.” In the days following, Mary’s guilt is so severe that she offers her services to Amina Sinai as an ayah to care for her infant Saleem, and she readily accepts. Mary returns to Methwold’s Estate with the Sinais, where she continues to keep her secret for several years before finally blurting it out, a victim of her own guilt.

The voices in Saleem’s head are the voices of the other children born during the midnight hour of independence, the “metaphorical mirror of a nation,” who each also happen to be endowed with different magical powers. Saleem attempts to organize the children, creating a forum for them in his mind, but their prejudices get the better of them, and they are unable to band together. Ultimately, it is Shiva who succeeds in dividing the children, and Saleem is left helpless.

Saleem continues to grow and moves with his family to Pakistan. As civil unrest brews leading up to the Indo-Pakistani War, he is again left helpless as bombs from an air-strike kill his family. In the chaos of the bombing, Saleem is hit in the head by an airborne spittoon, causing him to forget his name and identity. Saleem is soon drafted into the Pakistani army and he witnesses unspeakable events, finally running away into the jungle to avoid further violence. When he emerges from the jungle, the war is ending, India is victorious, and Saleem is still not sure who he is. During a celebratory parade, he runs into Parvati-the-witch, a fellow child of midnight who immediately recognizes Saleem. The two fall in love, and when Saleem is unable to father her children, Parvati puts a spell on Shiva, and he soon impregnates her. He quickly loses interest, and Parvati is free to marry Saleem, who has agreed to father her unborn child.

As Parvati goes into labor, civil unrest in India continues and Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minster, declares a state of emergency. Parvati finally gives birth to a son but, sadly, she is killed. At the same time, Saleem is kidnapped by Shiva and dragged in a van, where he is taken, along with the other children of midnight, and forcibly sterilized during Mrs. Gandhi’s sterilization program. Finally, Indira Gandhi’s Emergency ends, and Saleem and the other children of midnight are released from their imprisonment. Saleem soon finds his son and he moves back to Bombay, where he discovers that Mary Pereira is the owner of a local pickle factory. As Saleem finishes the telling of his story, he decides to begin telling his future, and he starts with his wedding to Padma, his companion and audience for the telling of his story. Padma and Saleem are to be married in Kashmir; however, before they are, Saleem finally succumbs to the cracks in his skin, and he crumbles into six hundred million pieces of dust.

Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, pioneers a new wave of Indian English novels and he deliberately goes against the previously dominant Forsterian literary discourse. In an interview with BBC, Rushdie recounted that when reading such novels as E.M. Forster’s A Passage To India, he was struck by the realisation that this was not the India that he was familiar with. Rushdie told BBC that India wasn’t “cool and classicist”, it was “noisy and sensual”. The NY times reported that in Midnight’s Children, “the literary map of India is about to be redrawn”. Rushdie believes that India should be portrayed in the entirety of its multifaceted reality, not dimming the lights on the British and westernised elements of India, but also not merely writing about “village life and social ills”. Rushdie’s novel is of paramount importance in the post-colonial Indian discourse, due to its ability to truly represent the plurality and diversity of Indian culture in its entirety, pioneering a new wave of Indian English novels.

Midnight’s Children is an exploration of India’s post-colonial national identity, after ‘Partition’, the division of British India into two separate states, India and Pakistan in 1947 and the resulting cultural fragmentation and chaos that caused events such as the language riots in Bombay between the Gujarat and Marathi speaking people in 1956. However, to understand the concept of national identity, the concept of ‘nation’ itself must first be explored. Many philosophers and scholars have attempted to assign a definition to this often elusive concept. Benedict Anderson, a renowned Irish political scientist and historian, defined the nation as “an imagined political community” and the philosopher, Michel Foucault, defined ‘nation’ as a “discursive formation”. Rushdie introduces his own concept of nation that is specifically applicable to the post-colonial situation of India, saying that “the nature of Indian tradition has always been multiplicity and plurality and mingling… the idea of a pure culture is something which in India is, let’s say, even politically important to resist”. Rushdie reveals that the Indian nation is a diverse discourse that exists in many different fashions and that is defined by its diversity. Rushdie recognises that no singular definition can be placed on such a vast concept and that ‘nation’ is not a term waiting for a proper definition, but it is the combination of the variegated cultural influences from across the broad Indian social landscape, that form a nation that is united through its chaos. Saleem states that “To understand just one life you have to swallow the world … do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”. This macrocosmic metaphor emphasises Rushdie’s portrayal of the nation as multiplicitious and dense, something that cannot be constrained to a singular definition. Instead of limiting the discourse of ‘nation’ to a singular reality, Rushdie explores the concepts of nation and national identity in post-colonial India, symbolically through the character of Saleem Sinai.

Rushdie presents Saleem’s life as an allegory for India’s post-colonial experience after Independence and the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. Saleem laments that “thanks to the occult tyrannies of those blandly saluting clocks, I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history”. Saleem receives a letter, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, who writes “you are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally young” and this metaphor instantly links Saleem with the nation of India. Rushdie’s choice to explore the story of India’s post-colonial history symbolically, using Saleem, not only creates a more personal recount that inspires extraordinary empathy from his audience, but “the symbol creates the illusion that we have grasped an undefined term”. Rushdie succeeds in grounding in reality, an idea of nation that seemingly defies traditional rationality and this symbol allows him to exhibit India in the way that it deserves, in the full splendor of the multiplicity of humanity that it possesses.

Rushdie uses Saleem to unite the main three conflicting religious presences in India harmoniously under one roof, illustrating once again that “Midnight’s Children is a novel about the enabling power of hybridity”. Saleem’s birth mother is a Hindu woman who had an affair with his father, a British Christian named Methwold, an allusion to William Methwold, a British coloniser. However, Mary Pereira, a nurse, puts “on the ankle of a ten-chip whopper with eyes… as blue as Methwold’s… this name: Sinai”. Therein, Saleem is given by fate to Muslim parents and raised as their son, the nurse being the only person aware of these events. Rushdie utilises this literary cliché of a ‘changeling’ to present Saleem as the unification of India’s main religious sects, continuing the theme of Saleem as a symbol for the whole of the nation. In addition to the views of the Prime Minister referred to above, further on in the novel, Saleem’s half-mad geography teacher, Mr. Zagallo, embarrasses Saleem in front of the class by criticising his facial features, comparing them to a map of India: “‘Thees stains’ he cries, ‘are Pakistan! Thees birthmark on the right ear is the East Wing; these horrible stained cheek, the West!’”. Through this imagery, Rushdie successfully uses the character of Saleem to unite not only the religious elements of India, but the geographically disparate cultures too, including that of India and Pakistan. It is true that “we can regard the body allegory as the ‘official’ allegory of the nation” and Rushdie’s sophisticated use of symbolism serves to portray the vast multiplicity of Indian society, but also to reveal that despite cultural variegation, India’s unique identity as a nation lies in its hybridity.

Rushdie further develops his use of symbols to explore the unique national identity of India that defies restrictive and singular definitions, through his introduction of the Midnight’s Children Conference and use of magic realism. Saleem recounts that “Midnight has many children; the offspring of Independence” and these 1001 children who were born at midnight were all gifted with unique and supernatural powers. Rushdie uses this magic realism and the allusion to the 1001 Arabian Nights, to link the midnight’s children with the ancient and superstitious Indian culture, but the time of their birth makes them children of the new India. Rushdie once again cleverly uses symbolism to unite the ‘old’ and ‘new’ India in the midnight’s children. Furthermore, the midnight’s children also “represented the variegated religions and culture prevalent in India.” Saleem describes them as a “many headed monster, speaking in myriad tongues of Babel”, but his gift of telepathy brings all these children together in a ‘conference’ of his mind, furthering the symbol of Saleem as the uniting force of India. However, this metaphor also has a dark side, as the disintegration of the so called “Midnight’s Children Conference”, represents the decline of India and the struggles it faced as a fledgling nation. This is most obvious when, after one year of existence, Saleem’s ‘imagined community’ “finally fell apart on the day the Chinese armies came down over the Himalayas to humiliate the Indian fauj”. Rushdie also again links fantasy with reality, when Saleem recounts the events of the mass sterilisation of the 581 Midnight’s Children who had survived up until that moment. This is a direct link to the 1975 ‘Emergency’ of India, initiated by Indira Ghandi, in which ‘sterilisation camps’ were present. Rushdie uses the Midnight’s Children to explore history in a very postmodern way, that is fragmented and plural, but completely unrepressed. Saleem describes the nation of India as a “miracle” and Rushdie certainly supports this statement, representing the nation symbolically as a “transcendental entity”, constantly adding multiple layers of meaning throughout the novel, to express the idea that whilst India is the very essence of multiplicity, it is a unique and wondrous formation, which is precisely what defines it as a nation.

Rushdie’s extensive use of magic realism can also be seen as a method of exploring the “sweep and chaos of contemporary reality and its resemblance to a dream or nightmare”. Rushdie uses this magic realism as a way of writing against traditional Western singular realities and instead writes “beyond the confines of the established and political social structures”. It is the magic realist form of the narrative, specifically regarding the gifts of the midnight’s children, that allows Rushdie to smuggle Saleem into every important political event of India’s first 30 years of independence, including the language riots in 1952, where Saleem claims he gave the “language marchers their battle-cry”. Rushdie’s extensive use of magic realism allows the characters to be transformed into symbols and metaphors and for their stories to be interpreted on many different levels. For example, an independence movement leader before Saleem’s birth, Mian Abdullah, is assassinated, although the novel recounts that “His body was hard and the long curved blades had trouble killing him”. Abdullah’s physical toughness defies reality and this allows it to be interpreted on a symbolic level, representing the difficulty of the British in suppressing the culture of an entire nation. Another example of Rushdie’s magic realism is the “fountains of confusion” released by a supposed “supernatural invasion” where “the past of India rose up to confound her present; the newborn secular state was being given an awesome reminder of it’s fabulous antiquity”. This example also serves to illustrate the confusion surrounding national identity and the conflict between the religions of Hinduism and Islam that dominated the society. Through magic realism, Rushdie expresses a “genuinely ‘third-world’ consciousness” to contrast the dominant Western discourse and to provide possible alternative hermeneutics of history, challenging the hegemonic power structures of British Imperialism.

Rushdie’s post-colonial exploration of national identity can be further seen in his use of language to repair power imbalances between the colonisers and the colonised. Language becomes one of the central issues in post-colonial studies, because colonisers use repression of traditional language and the imposition of their own language, to perpetuate and assert their own definitions of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’. Ever since the 17th century in India, “it has been impossible to deny that there was one language for the powerful and another for the powerless”. However, Rushdie approaches English in a new way, reforming the colonisers’ language as an act of resistance against the hegemonic discourse of British imperialism, redesigning a colonial language to reflect India’s post-colonial experience. Rushdie’s unique use of language “helps to establish a wider ethnocentric base for the English language creating an Indian blend of English”. Rushdie himself does not believe however, that English is, or should become, an alien language in India, instead pointing out that English has become an ‘Indian’ language and that the Indian-English is not the same as western English. Rushdie claims that “language, like much else in the newly independent societies, needs to be decolonized”, and his own unique language “can only be described as ‘Rushdiesque’”.

Rushdie believes that the multiplicity and mixed traditions of India are what give it its unique identity as a nation and instead of completely rejecting the Western influences brought to India by centuries of colonial occupation, he believes that these influences have in many cases, been reimagined and have become uniquely Indian. Rushdie’s unique language, his use of magic realism and the allegorical characters of Saleem and the midnight’s children, reveal that in post-colonial India, it is precisely the multiplicity and fragmentation of Indian society and culture that defines the unique national identity of this fledgling nation.