Halluci-nation: Mental Illness, Modernity, and Metaphoricity in Salman Rushdie's

"Midnight's Children"
Author(s): ANDREW GAEDTKE
Source: Contemporary Literature , WINTER 2014, Vol. 55, No. 4 (WINTER 2014), pp. 701-
725
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43297984

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 ANDREW GAEDTKE

Halluci-nation: Mental Illness, Mo

and Metaphoricity in Salman R
Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children (1981),

perhaps the most puzzling is the narrator's abrupt
Among Salman perhaps the Rushdie's the many most delirious puzzling novel Midnight's elements is the narrator's that Children distinguish abrupt (1981),
Born at the precise hour of India's em
nation, Saleem Sinai finds himself en
"tune-in" to the thoughts of his fello
reception extends to the borders of th
tion that transforms his mind into a for
conversation. Critical approaches to th
have often obeyed the narrator's pro
interpretations of his experiences, and c
this transformation as a national allego
mous emergence of a modern and inde
While the novel expressly performs thi
it does so while also representing mat
conditions of disability through its prot
children of midnight. The metaphorizing
of other political and narratological en
controversy and critique within disab
critique of the reduction of illness to

1 . For example, Gillian Gane sees in the trope of th

of communication across the linguistic and cultura
dinated in this reading are the consistent signs o
condition and the condition of India within the nov

Contemporary Literature 55, 4 0010-7484; E-ISSN

© 2014 by the Board of Regents of the University

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 702 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

renewed by David Mitchell and Sharon Sn

disability is often converted into "an op
device" (47) for other social conflicts or in
against which protagonists' normativity
recently, scholars of disability have found t
cially acute within postcolonial studies, in
metaphorized in order to encode the pat
project toward nations and peoples regard
independence and self-governance. Mark
disability nor postcolonialism should be
metaphor for the other experience; nor sho
employed as a symbol of the oppression i
different experience" (10). Perhaps no one
on the interpretive difficulties that arise wh
colonialism in Midnight's Children than C
"symbolic readings of Midnight's Children
its keen interest in the material nature
analysis of diversity within the Indian bo
die's explorations of the human body and th
ities and disabilities found within a natio
proposes a much-needed corrective to th
dency that has overlooked problems of dis
and she examines many of the ways that th
cal disabilities.

However, like most critics, Barker has little to say about the ways
that mental illness is represented within the novel or how it may
fundamentally determine the form and content of the narrative.
Saleem Sinai frequently experiences paranoia, megalomania, audi-
tory hallucination, and technological thought-transmission. More
than simply metaphors, allegories of nation-building, or phantasmic
instances of a magic realism, these experiences are common among
subjects suffering from schizophrenia. Despite the conspicuous
presence of these symptoms, mental illness has been relatively
absent from discussions of the novel.2 Midnight's Children constitutes

2. Jason Howard Mezey observes the paranoia that is legible in both Saleem's narrative
and Indian politics, but he does not account for the specific delusions through which
these paranoias manifest, specifically, the technologically coded madness that I argue is
essential to understanding the novel's treatment of modern nationalism.

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 an especia
phor that
bring into
ability wh
cination, a
of nationa
What fur
boundarie
torically o
conditions
ing-nation

In contexts
disability m
disability, a
war, disaste
tute a nume
developing
categorical
normativity
(68)

More specifically, schizophrenia is a particular form of disability

that has been shown to be especially implicated in problems of
national belonging, colonization, and immigration in ways that are
not simply metaphorical. Several studies have demonstrated mark-
edly higher rates of schizophrenia among immigrants who have
relocated from former British colonies to England.3 While this data
may be understood as further evidence of the biopolitical pathol-
ogization and management of immigrant, minority, and working-
class populations, it may also underscore that cultural, national, and
historical dislocations often result in very real and specific experi-
ences of psychological duress. Although Midnight's Children may
not be principally concerned with problems of immigration (despite
Saleem Sinai's movements from India to Pakistan and back again),
it is a story in which the cultural and national ground shifts unstably
beneath the feet of its main character. A precarious cultural or sym-

3. For a brief overview of these studies and possible explanations, see Bentall 127-28.

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 704 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

bolic order is the core crisis that confront

construct ad hoc discursive and phenomen
available cultural fragments and explanator
acts of world-building entail the forging of c
between inside and outside, foreign and fa
ancient and modern, the forging of such coh
bly fraught for psychotic subjects caught
night's Children does not simply metaphorize
tal illness and disability but ramifies them by
a divided nation through the paranoid and
ences of an especially psychologically divided
such a subject, the novel suggests, could s
location be properly represented. Thus the
interpretive choice between reading Saleem
rial experiences of disability or as metaphors
the two are mutually entangled within the
is that if Saleem struggles to manage his "bei
we must understand "world" in several sen
nomenological and historical (440).
This approach demands recognition of bot
that Saleem's self-narrative takes and the
historical materials that he incorporates. If b
long dismissed the discourse of psychotics
epiphenomena of dysfunctional neural sub
has done only slightly better by observing th
thought while reducing the particularity of e
to libido theory. Psychologists Ivan Leudar
pose an approach that would attend to the
by patients to explain their experiences, as w
pragmatic effects that such discourse might
hearers, their explanatory frameworks are
experiences and life histories. ... To challen
atory framework means demanding that the
rative using the psychologist's script, thus de
(123). Midnight's Children demands a similar
structure as well as the discursive contents and sources that consti-
tute Saleem Sinai's shifting explanatory framework must be kept in
view. Saleem's transformation into a "supernatural ham radio" ren-

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 ders an un
the moder
synthetic
his subject
product o
implies th
spiritual
Saleem' s
one compo
the novel's
niques by
conclude.

Saleem Sinai's transformation into a "supernatural ham radio" is

overdetermined by several events, making the etiology of his con-
dition as ambiguous as the condition itself. From within his adoles-
cent hiding place - a laundry hamper - Saleem witnesses his
mother undressing, recognizes evidence of her ongoing infidelity,
and, gasping from these overwhelming revelations, violently
inhales a pajama cord that has wriggled its way into his nose. Both
physical and psychological traumas are implied, and in his account
of this genetic scene, Saleem' s discourse vacillates between the mod-
ern-mythic discourses of his favorite superhero comics and psycho-
logical explanations: "Waste fluid, reaching as far, perhaps, as the
frontiers of the brain . . . there is a shock. Something electrical has
been moistened" (184). Later, it is suggested that the excessive and
overwhelming knowledge is the cause of Saleem' s psychic break: "I
tell you when a boy gets inside grown-up thoughts they can really
mess him up completely" (195). The moment of fragmentation is
followed by a cacophony of voices whose sources are initially
unidentified. Saleem finds himself confronted with the inner mono-

logues of others in a psychic communion that threatens his distinct

identity.
Saleem' s narrative is motivated by a desperate need to forge some
provisional sense of coherence against schizophrenic fragmentation,
even at the cost of error or delusion. In a compensatory effort to
reconstitute his failing psychic contours, Saleem assumes megalo-
maniacal control over the voices in his head - voices that ultimately

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 706 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

include virtually every citizen of India: "I ca

self-aggrandizement which seized me then w
instinct for self-preservation. If I had not b
of the flooding multitudes, their massed ide
hilated mine" (199). Saleem's auditory hal
vacillations between complete psycholo
megalomaniacal egoism, conforms closely
of paranoid schizophrenia, and the vacillat
dialectic that operates at several registers w
Some critics explain Saleem's psychologi
mentation as a generic effect of the standar
Kortenaar argues:

Romance stages the loss of a coherent self and t

into chaos in order to show that the hero's true
destroyed but merely submerged or hidden, to b
the fullness of time. Its concern with the prese
restoration of identity and its capacity to assuag
tions of romance for both colonial and postcolon
(769-70)

Certainly, the narratological structure of romance shares much with

the melodramatic trajectories of the comic books that clearly inform
Saleem's storytelling, but this formal genealogy does not fully
account for the range of particular psychological experiences that
this "hero" suffers. As I will demonstrate later, the "restoration of
identity" that romance may promise - whether personal or
national - is conspicuously promised in Midnight's Children only to
be withheld. Instead, any pretense to a purified identity will prove
to be a forgery, making the psychotic' s delusion an apposite model
for the kind of work performed by Saleem's narrative as well as the
stories nations must tell about themselves.
Personally and culturally, Saleem is therefore "condemned ... to
a life of fragments" (137), a self-description that recurs in the dis-
courses of many schizophrenics who suffer from delusions of
thought-insertion, hallucination, and depersonalization. In An Auto-
biography of a Schizophrenic Girl (1951), a psychotic patient identified
as "Renée" describes a nightmarish experience in which the human
figures around her are reduced to part-objects that fail to cohere. In
one moment of "unreality," she feels that a fellow student has dis-

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 solved int
the indivi
teeth, the
Perhaps it
fear and p
she was" (
are dissolv
psycholog
and other
In his psy
that it is o
riences th
ontological
experience
scious syst
rience are
noid syste
distinction
the fundamental difference between the inside and the outside of

the self reinscribed in ways that resemble Saleem Sinai's movement

from fragmented experience to delusional self-narration: "Because
the feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world;
that the thoughts I jumped inside were mine, that the bodies I occu-
pied acted at my command; that, as current affairs, arts, sports, the
whole rich variety of a first-class radio station poured into me, I was
somehow making them happen . . ( Midnight's Children 199).
Paranoid delusion may therefore be understood as a compen-
satory mechanism by which an ad hoc symbolic order and phe-
nomenological world are reconstructed. Such precarious orders
generally exhibit narcissistic delusions of reference. In this overcom-
pensation, the ego that is propped up through paranoid narrative
is often invested with messianic qualities. This structure is most
famously evident in the classic autobiographical account of para-

4. See in particular The Seminar of Jacques Lacan , Book III: The Psychoses , 1955-1956. In
his late, unpublished "Seminar XXIII: Le Sinthome/' Lacan found a model for the nar-
rative resolution of psychotic symptoms in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. For a lucid
treatment of this late seminar, see Harari.

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 708 - CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

noid psychosis - the memoirs of Daniel Paul S

himself to be the last living person on eart
the messianic task of restoring order to the w
with God (54-69).
Saleem assumes a similar role in relation to the fate of his nation.

During several moments of self-reflection, he recognizes the des-

perate attempts that he has made to stave off his own psychic dis-
solution and the lengths to which he will go in restoring some sense
of a meaning-rich, coherent world: "I was already beginning to take
my place at the center of the universe; and by the time I had fin-
ished, I would give meaning to it all" (143-44); "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?" (190). As is evident in the
cases of Schreber and Renée and in other memoirs and case studies

of psychosis, this "central role" manifests both as a megalomaniacal

delusion of grandeur and as a suspicion of radical persecution. Such
a fragile symbolic order is especially evident when Saleem' s mes-
sianic importance abruptly inverts into feelings of persecution and
back again: "I've been the sort of person to whom things have been
done ; but Saleem Sinai, perennial victim, persists in seeing himself
as protagonist" (272). In the zero-sum logic of such a delusion, he
must either maintain his narratological status in the world as the
subject of history or suffer a total dissolution of subjectivity.
At the same time, Saleem is not alone in generating these delu-
sions of reference, and he frequently suggests that his experiences
have both psychological and historical origins. His erratic vacilla-
tions between messianic delusion and suspicions of persecution
seem to be underwritten by the meaning that was assigned to his
birth by the highest levels of national authority. Having been born
at the precise moment of India's birth as an independent nation,
Saleem receives a letter from Prime Minister Nehru that forever
identifies his Bildungsroman with that of his nation: "You are the
newest bearer of that ancient face of India which is also eternally
young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest atten-
tion; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own" (139). While the
letter authorizes his megalomaniacal fantasies and underwrites the
metaphorization of Saleem's psychological transformation into

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 national a
to step ou
ogous rela
gled antin

I was linke
and passive
connection
two pairs o
essary: act
cally and p
(272-73)

If the structure of Saleem's narrative bears close resemblance to

many modern delusions, so do the particular contents of his delu-

sional world. Saleem feels that his thoughts are transmitted to him,
and his technological delirium opens onto extended meditations on
questions concerning technology and modernity that trouble others
as well:

[A]t the very eye of the hurricane which was unleashed upon me . . . there
lay a single unifying force. I refer to telecommunications.
Telegrams, and after telegrams, telephones, were my undoing; gener-
ously, however, I shall accuse nobody of conspiracy; although it would
be easy to believe that the controllers of communication had resolved to
regain their monopoly of the nation's air-waves . . .
(338)

Saleem believes that his own mental transmissions may be seen as

a challenge to the state's control over information. At the same time,
this technologically coded madness is not limited to Saleem's
thought transmissions but afflicts many characters in the novel. He
observes his father becoming increasingly withdrawn from family
life after suffering a surge of anti-Muslim persecutions: "My father
. . . had taken flight into a dream-world of disturbing unreality"
(230); "[H]is one contact with the outside world . . . was his tele-
phone. He spent the day deep in conference with this instrument"
(232). Later, Saleem finds his mother lapsing into a similar break
with reality through telecommunications. Despite his insistence
upon his own persecuted /messianic singularity, Saleem suspects

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 710 - CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

that this modern, technological "unreality" h

world.

A shift toward an uncanny form of materialism is articulated by

Saleem' s double, Shiva, whose reactionary paranoia is induced by
the modernization of India. Shiva argues: "[T]here is only me-
against-the- world! The world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no
place for dreamers or their dreams; the world, little Snotnose, is
things' ' (292-93; emphasis added). Shiva's diagnosis of this ontolog-
ical transformation is consistent with the anxieties of many psy-
chotics who feel that they have been reduced to mechanical objects:
"Today what people are is just another kind of thing" (293). Saleem's
reactions to his own apparent mechanization seem both potent and
resigned: "There are moments of terror, but they go away" (36).
This anxiety over a technologically induced ontological crisis
recalls Martin Heidegger's meditation on "The Thing," in which
experiences of "unreality" and "terror" are explored in quite similar
terms. In what seems an explicit reference to Heidegger as a sym-
pathetic thinker of this technological reduction, Saleem expresses
precisely this anxiety over his flattened "being-in- the- world" (440).
Heidegger writes:

The terrifying is unsettling; it places everything outside its own nature.

What is it that unsettles and thus terrifies? It shows itself and hides itself

in the way in which everything presences, namely, in the fact that despite
all conquest of distances the nearness of things remains absent.
(164)

This sequence could well describe the ontological confusions that

Renée, Schreber, and Saleem suffer.5 Heidegger's meditation opens
with a discussion of how space and time have been conquered by
new communication and transportation technologies such that dis-
tances have been overcome, and yet the "nearness of things
remains absent": their integration within a meaningful, familiar
environment has been lost.6 The loss of the nearness of things sig-
nals an uncanny experience in which one is "not at home" ( unheim -

5. For a discussion of the ontological implications of psychosis that draws upon Hei-
deggerian ontology, see Pérez-Alvarez, Sass, and García-Montes.
6. For a different but resonant adaptation of Heideggerian thought to postcolonial
contexts, see Khanna.

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lieh) wi
as we h
Matthew
drawing
posive c
unfamil
phrenic
bent ov
ible me
electric"
manipul
was non
tem' th
like ent
of simil
the psy
their th
or rays
physics
called a
The tech
of ontol
characte
sterility
novel's r
trol cam
mid-197
modern
poor in
is cultur
radio. Sa
radio te
"[T]he v
sistor (w
impoten
bribe, t
before
refers t

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 712 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

vasectomies and hysterectomies in exchan

cassette players, air conditioners, and other
novel's paranoid associations with mod
traced in part to the deployment of such dev
biopolitical effort to regulate body, mind
eralization of the psychoanalytic metaphor o
ization program is represented as a rite of p
to gain entrance into the modern national c
to this modern ritual enables one to "tune in" to the electrified voice

of the nation; possession of a radio becomes an emblem of modern

citizenship. Saleem's account condenses historical events with a
schizoid nightmare that closely resembles Renée' s delusion of an
electrified system connecting everyone around her while threaten-
ing the integrity and independence of her mind and body.
Radio therefore performs a nightmarish version of the nation-
building operation that Benedict Anderson attributes to the rise of
the modern novel and other print media, while implying that these
experiences of shared national consciousness may be grounded in
something akin to schizoid delusion. Anderson suggests that early
readers of novels and newspapers entered into "imagined com-
munities" grounded in a common, national readership that was
psychically unified across a geographical space and within a syn-
chronic moment in time:

The significance of this mass ceremony - Hegel observed that newspapers

serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers - is paradoxical.
It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each com-
municant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated
simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence
he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.
(35-36)

The ritualized procedure of opening the morning newspaper in uni-

son assembles a community of readers within space and time in
ways that even novels cannot. This moment of synchronized media
consumption is sharpened even further with the advent of radio, a

7. Rushdie revisits India's cultural associations between radios and sterilization pro-
grams in his short story 'The Free Radio/' in East, West (1995).

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medium w
at exactly
Saleem's c
and someh
that Hege
Still, the
only abst
Anderson
is that the
smallest n
them, or e
of their c
transmiss
nologically
one's fell
through a
predomin
ence as w
Media the
logical im
sensory m
calls "psy
processes
attention,
cesses des
With this
cally "im
Midnight
nity" tow
that he is
was a hallu
day; but t
of psycho

8. Ankhi Mu
formation to
tral nervous
of the real -
pursue other

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 714 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

of theories of nationalism. Prior to Anderson

that the nation is a result of print culture an
Tom Nairn used more polemical, psych
account for nationalist ideology:

"Nationalism" is the pathology of modern develop

capable as "neurosis" in the individual, with muc
ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capa
dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness t
world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies)
(359)

We find here the metaphorization of disability in the service of

political critique that has come under attack by disability scholars
such as Barker and Sherry. Nairn's comparison of nationalism to
"dementia," "helplessness," and "infantilism" implies a proper
developmental narrative in which "nationalism" is to be under-
stood as a deviation from some nonideological experience of
sociality.
In Midnight's Children , Saleem makes similar metaphoric links,
comparing the political partition of Pakistan to his own psychic
splitting while invoking the nosological category of schizophrenia
to describe both:

I suggest that at the deep foundations of their unease lay the fear of
schizophrenia, of splitting, that was buried like an umbilical cord in every
Pakistani heart. . . . Religion was the glue of Pakistan, holding the halves
together; just as consciousness, the awareness of oneself as a homoge-
neous entity in time, a blend of past and present, is the glue of personality,
holding together our then and our now.
(404)

In the political splitting of Pakistan, Saleem recognizes homologies

with his own imminent psychological disintegration, as well as
similar narrative strategies for repairing such disintegration.
However, the valence of pathology does not exhaust the possi-
bilities for understanding the lived experiences of hallucinated
voices and paranoid delusions in actual schizophrenics, nor is it the
final word on the links between psychic and national logics within
the novel. Leudar and Thomas ask what the voices and paranoid
delusions might do for their patients, emphasizing that the status

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 of these
each indi
sources o
them for
dar and T

The increa
her clinica
integrative
her self-es
years. The
(146)

The meanings and pragmatic effects of such experiences must be

evaluated in each instance. Rather than a psychiatrist imposing
inflexible, nosological criteria, the subject in question must be heard
in order for these pragmatic effects to be understood. The sugges-
tion is that rather than being meaningless, pathological symptoms,
hallucinations and perhaps even paranoid delusions can be essen-
tial for a patient's coordination of self and world - a suggestion that,
as we have seen, recurs in psychoanalytic and phenomenological
approaches to psychosis.
Saleem's paranoid narrative clearly engages in sorting and struc-
turing operations in order to restore a coherent sense of both psy-
chological and national identity, and in this he is perhaps not so
unique. Jonathan Culler identifies this paranoid sorting as a narra-
tive operation for which novels may be especially well suited: "If
politics depends upon the distinction between friend and enemy,
deciding who is which or ranging oneself on one side or the other,
the novel provides a space within which the distinction can arise,
prior to those decisions'7 (49). Such a sorting operation is both a
work of paranoia and an act of fiction: it may assert internal homo-
geneity where none exists in order to establish a fundamental if
fragile order. At the scales of both personhood and nation, identity
is produced through paranoid fictions. All of this suggests that an
ambivalence may be observed in the ways that the novel evaluates
the status of Saleem Sinai's experiences. Perhaps even more so than
the nation-building novels that Anderson invokes, Midnight's Chil-
dren is a novel that critically and sympathetically reflects upon those
nation-building narrative functions and the psychological opera-

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 716 - CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

tions - at once pathological and pragmati

operate. In support of this distinction, Ti
"[Rushdie's] novels, in short, are metafict
interest neo-colonial. That is, they are no
novels" (85). If Midnight's Children operat
gizing remove from Saleem's narrative, it al
a narrator who struggles to manage person
Like the paranoid strategies that psychot
scribe their failing ego boundaries, the India
exhibits a radical suspicion of foreign influe
fabulation in order to elide its own irredu
neity. Teresa Heffernan points to an especial
nationalist mythology papering over this lac
"Nehru, in an article written long before
entitled 'The Psychology of Indian Nat
attempt to counter British imperialism)
shared a common and continuous history:
there has always been a fundamental uni
common faith and culture'" (473). Contra
Saleem's ability to hear the thoughts of his
to suspect that the notion of a single, mo
"There are as many versions of India as I
these internal divisions refuse to be subordi
ocal identity.9 In this instance, Saleem's
awareness that the national unity projected
India is a precarious one that fails to conta
ities and local divisions within or repel th
outside of its porous psychic and material
observes that the allegorization of the body
ure of the fragmented body is a recurring t
fiction. Citing J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986), Am
of Reason (1986), and Ben Okri's The Famishe
gests that "[t]heir representations of the
mented or ill undermine not only the col
silent, atemporal, and natural primitive, but

9. Eric Santner traces a similar logic of state paranoia

nationalism and the rise of the Nazi movement to the delusions of Schreber.

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 ception of
ingly, any
modern vi
gressive m
nist - is re
At times
"mature"
thetic for
sented as
"progressiv
style. Sale
realist scr
industry w

"Sonny Jim
for five th
fond of rai
fact, the en
he had beco
ulous natur
despised) m
(279

Hanif's cal
India wake
of delirium
ist mode as a more mature aesthetic vision; his work is motivated
by a desire to force an immature India finally to face "reality." Some
critics have taken Hanif's aesthetic critique to be Rushdie's. As Neil
ten Kortenaar writes, "The common reading of Midnight's Children ,
which regards the magic in magic realism as indigenous and the
realism as Western, finds ready corroboration in the novel itself,
where Roger Clark finds a 'stereotypical polarity' between Indian
spirituality and European worldliness" (766). In my view, these easy
equivalences unravel, and with them the possibility of clearly
demarcating a distinctly "Indian" aesthetic from foreign or Western
counterparts. If Hanif's fellow citizens prefer mythic tropes, heroic

10. For a discussion of the long history of such nonlinear temporal deformations of
the postcolonial Bildungsroman, see Esty.

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 718 » CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

leaders, and mystic fetishes, these "atavist

be more than compatible with simultaneo
zation and are often derived from purpor
sources.

Doctor Narlikar, known for his advocacy of steriliz

and modern techniques of population control,
father to invest in the construction of tetrapods
architectural structures that would reclaim under
terrain for real estate development. During a walk t
this self-fashioned man of science and modernit
thing that made him lose his reason" (201). He dis
of his tetrapods, which had been set up in a publi
of icon pointing the way to the future," has been ad
tility icon by a group of beggar women:

They had lighted oil-lamps at the base of the object; one

painted the OM-symbol on its upraised tip; they were chan
they gave the tetrapod a thorough and worshipful wash
miracle had been transformed into Shiva-lingam; Doctor
opponent of fertility, was driven wild at this vision, in w
to him that all the old dark priapic forces of ancient, p
had been unleashed upon the beauty of sterile twentieth-c

(201)

Narlikar confronts the women, which leads to a riot

ultimately "crushed into death by the weight of h
sion" (202). For all of his resistance to the ritu
"ancient, procreative India," Narlikar clearly perf
of his own icon of modernity, a "beloved obsession
his dismissal of ancient fertility rites, is meant t
perform a modern rebirth of Bombay. In the end
women, blessing the tetrapod as an icon of fertility
who recognize the meaning of the object and its plac
erogeneous symbolic system that cannot be called
or secular. The implication is that Narlikar's proje
has its own sacred fetishes that prove to be powerful
and ritual even if Narlikar disavows - in properly
ion - all "atavistic longings." In such densely iron
novel scrambles any fantasized distinction between t

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the prem
immanent
zation, d
reduction
A similar
premoder
hallucinat
mitter an
divine me
figures an
"I saw th
butterfly,
Even his
primary
valence: in
vani, a Sa
"Sky Voic
interpreta
sianic role
ple in the
natural h
and the se
This supe
Saleem Si
cultural r
ciations o
atavistic m
tieth cent
included
ducted exp
obscure ta
ing séanc
basis of e
wise deve
be read as
able to att
collapse
although t

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 720 » CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

but becomes a more widespread cultural ph

suitable medium in radio technology. Kuni no
association of radio with brain waves lent mea
nology in Europe and America well before
household presence: "In the nineteen-twenti
in Great Britain and in Germany several 'radi
even conducted in public broadcasting serv
reports in the press also brought them to the
were not yet equipped with a radio" (243). 11
While radio became a useful medium for s
of thought-insertion, the technology has also
history of magical thinking that blurs an
demarcating psychopathology from the nor
tural history erodes facile geographical associa
modernity with the West and atavistic spiritu
ther, the narrative template for Saleem's
divine inspiration may have rather unlike
evident in a minor subplot that serves as a co
narrative self-fashioning. Saleem recalls ho
Cyrus was transformed by his mother into
vand," a religious guru and cult leader wit
story. His promotional materials claim that Lo
earth via an energy beam from another pl
member of a race of spiritually superior bein
shrewd management, Lord Khusro becomes
India, with throngs of followers, "accounta
luxury liner called the Khusrovand Starship ,
Khusro s Astral Plane " (308). Saleem recogn
mythic backstory created by Cyrus's mother:
no person understand that what Mrs. Du
rework and reinvent the most potent of all m
end of the coming of the superman?" (309)
sented as an instance of India's return to its a
to be a turn toward an uncannily modern and
ogy. This satirical sequence, like Narlikar's t

11. For more on these tests, including one conducted by

263-74.

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 lessly diss
modernity
Western c
confirmed
cross-cultu
alter ego L

Cyrus-the-g
religious fa
many years
Dubash; and
mother had
the task of
remaking C
(308

As in Wal
the story
materialism
allegorical
ity and de
Khusro m
elations" o
has compo
Even moder
to conceal fr
true existan
World Over
reds, jews,
khusro comes with Irrefutable Proofs. Read and believe!
(306)

Despite the fully legible paranoid suspicion of an "anti-religious

conspiracy" orchestrated by Western scientists, the text invokes
those same scientists and the cultural authority of their discourse
in order to provide "Irrefutable Proofs" of Lord Khusro' s authen-
ticity. The laser beam that delivered Lord Khusro to Earth may be
read as a vestige not only of the Superman comics but also of the
work that Cyrus's father performed as a physicist. Cyrus's mother
takes revenge on his father by adapting his scientific discourse into

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 722 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

her mythic system, and as is clear from

sumption, that hybrid system proves to be
tural commodity.
These moments of confrontation between a secular, scientific
modernity and a mythic, premodern past consistently fail to reach
any final resolution but instead persist in schizoid combinations.
Every attempt by Cyrus's mother to reinstall her religious rhetoric
is shot through with discursive traces of scientistic rhetoric, while
Doctor Narlikar and Hanif Aziz fail to achieve the sterile, modern,
realist vision that they promote. Their efforts to purify Indian cul-
ture by purging its premodern past result only in further prolifer-
ation of the hybridity that they cannot acknowledge.
Despite the heterogeneous cultural materials that are placed in
uneasy confrontation, the schizoid condition that overruns the pro-
jected difference between inside and outside is hardly unique to
India's experience of modernity. In his polemical essay We Have
Never Been Modern , Bruno Latour argues that the story that moder-
nity has told of itself is - not unlike the Lord Khusro myth - a work
of paranoid fiction. Against the familiar narrative that modernity
performs a "work of purification" (11) by which distinctions are
securely drawn between the social and the natural, the rational and
the irrational, the mythic and the scientific, Latour argues that
modernity is marked by a proliferation of "hybrids" and "quasi-
objects" (51) which occupy the purportedly excluded middle. Nar-
likar' s tetrapod may be understood as precisely such a hybrid or
schizoid object that belies the supposed work of purification that he
hopes to accomplish for India.
The borders between the secular and the religious, the modern
and the premodern, are consistently overrun despite these attempts
at purification. As is legible in the promotional materials of Lord
Khusro, the demand for purification is a paranoid demand: it is
marked by a fear of contamination from a pernicious outside and
motivated by an effort to reinscribe some defensible border. Mid-
night's Children represents this paranoid construction of precarious
boundaries between inside and outside as not merely the symptom
of a single paranoiac; it is also the project of a newly independent
nation attempting and failing, like other nations before and after it,

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 to disting
be regard
a figure f
with a scr
tal illness
phorical co
230).
The impossibility of securely establishing paranoid boundaries is
perhaps most evident in the irony that Saleem Sinai - the figure who
is said to embody the state of India - is born of foreign ancestry. As
Kane notes, "The protagonist's birth thus starkly dramatizes the
illusion of coherence upon which postcolonial nationality rests,
even as this genesis debunks conceptions of blood and race as the
unifying constituents of national identity" (96). Foreignness lies at
the hallucinating and hallucinated center of India, and the experi-
ence of this heterogeneity is made phenomenologically vivid in
Saleem' s persistent schizophrenic symptoms:

O eternal opposition of inside and outside! Because a human being, inside

himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all kinds of
everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one
minute and another the next.
(270)

"All kinds of everywhichthing" describes well the hybrid quasi-

objects that, as Latour argues, are not purified but rather prolifer-
ated through the course of history (51).
If we insist upon understanding the modern as the purification
of any premodern elements, then the India of Midnight's Children
never achieves proper modernity. However, the same would hold
true for any nation struggling to somehow awake from its own
nightmare of history, only to replace it with a delusionally con-
structed past. Like the psychotic who must fashion some unity from
a vertiginous multiplicity of psychic fragments, the nation is forged
through a delusional narrative about its own purity in space and
time. In Midnight's Children , these narrative solutions are cast in the
valences of both pathology and pathos. Perceived foreign threats
prove to be manifestations of internal divisions that cannot be

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 724 • CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE

resolved but only negated and projected o

the nation, like the contours of psychotic su
the substance of hallucination.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

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