Unnatural Narrative in Postcolonial Contexts: Re-reading Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

In a recent edition of Narrative (2010), Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brain Richardson observe that “the analysis of unnatural texts” is becoming a subject of increasing interest within narratology (113). Contrary to models that privilege narrative as mimetic, these scholars argue that all narrative should not be treated as such and criticize the tendencies to force what they term “unnatural storyworlds” into traditional mimetic molds in order to be read and understood. Consequently, they offer an alternative methodology which highlights “the ways in which strange and innovative narratives challenge mimetic understandings of narrative” and “ the consequences that the existence of such narratives may have for the general conception of what narrative is and what is can do” (115). Jan Alber and Monika Fludernik also observe how this new focus of unnatural narratology emerges out of a “combination” of previous postmodern narratology, such as the work of Brian McHale, and the current narratological “cognitive turn” as exemplified by such theorists as David Herman and Liza Zunshine (14).

Because “unnatural narrative” is generally treated in broad terms, using a collection of predominantly postmodern texts, and falls under the wider heading of “postclassical narratology” the authors of the Narrative article do not comment on any specific potential historical or political usages of unnatural narrative. However, postcolonial literature often engages in positing what the narrative scholars above describe as “unnatural story-worlds,” “unnatural minds,” and “unnatural forms of narration” through many vehicles, including achronicity, magical realism, and meta-narrative strategies. Consequently, this essay examines how and to what extent the theoretical lens of unnatural narrative potentially alters or enriches our understanding of narrative in postcolonial contexts.

More specifically, I bring the notion of unnatural narrative into dialogue with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The novel follows Saleem Sinai as he writes about his life and explains his intimate connection with the evolution of Indian as a nation from the very moment of his birth at the precise moment of Indian independence. Saleem struggles to tell his story on his own terms. His narrative includes the history of his grandparents and parents, a supernatural connection to other children born between the hours of midnight and one that morning, and a rivalry with another midnight’s child who rightfully should have lived Saleem’s life. All the while, the events of his life and the life of his family are intricately meshed with those of India’s history, from the Amritsar massacre of 1919, to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, and the ensuing administration of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her controversial decision to exercise unilateral power in the mid 1970’s by calling an Indian state of emergency. Throughout his exposition, Saleem possesses the growing feeling that he is disintegrating, and thus concludes his narrative by prophesying his own impending death, “reducing me to specks of voiceless dust” (533).

While critics such as Aruna Srivastava have established that the novel is a historical meta-fiction that comments on how history is both constructed and used for political ends, and that Rushdie’s use of “magical realism” is intimately tied to the concept of conflicting tensions between colonizing and colonized subjects, it is not clear to what degree these interpretations rely on the type of mimetic privileging Abler et al. describe. Nor is it clear to what extent viewing Midnight’s Children as an “unnatural narrative” would change our reading of Rushdie’s use of magical realism and contradictory possible histories. By reading the novel in this way, in essence scrutinizing traditional readings with this broader notion of unnaturalness, I address how such a methodology revises and enhances previous readings of Rushdie’s novel, while also suggesting that this new unnatural aspect of postclassical narrative theory might hold greater ramifications for wider postcolonial critical uses.

In doing so, this analysis must first address often debated questions concerning what constitutes postcolonial narrative, postcolonial narrative analysis and postcolonial narratology. As Gerald Prince explains, “the very domain and boundaries of the postcolonial are at least as problematic as those of narratology...