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university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 NEIL TEN KORTENAAR Salman Rushdie=s Magic Realism and the Return of Inescapable Romance One knows by now one is no amnesiac king, whatever mother may say or child believe. One cannot wait any more in the back of one=s mind for that conspiracy ... the one well-timed memorable fish, so one can cut straight with the royal knife to the ring waiting in the belly, and recover at one stroke all lost memory A.K. Ramanujan, >No Amnesiac King= Salman Rushdie=s Midnight=s Children ends with a nightmare: on the eve of his wedding to Padma, the woman to whom he has been reading his memoirs aloud, Saleem Sinai imagines an apocalyptic scene that will erupt after the ceremony and prevent their departure by train on a honeymoon to Kashmir. He foresees a >crowd without boundaries= that will separate him from his new bride; his life will pass before his eyes and the >numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six= will buffet him until he explodes, his bones crack, and he collapses into >specks of voiceless dust= (551B2). This annihilation by numbers is more than the nervous jitters of a prospective groom, but contrary to what most critics assume (e.g., Syed Manzurul Islam, 133; Lopez, 203), it is not how Saleem=s life actually ends. The fact that the crowd includes everyone who has ever figured in his life is a reminder that it is but a projection. Saleem cannot report on the end, except in prophecy, because >it has not taken place= and therefore >cannot be preserved= (550). While he displays remarkable prowess and stamina as a retrospective prophet, we have no reason for trusting his forecast of the future. He may just be >cracking up= and should be taken away in a straitjacket by the likes of Doctor Baligga, who cannot see the cracks he is raving about (72). Or, having come to the end of his selfimposed task of writing his life story, a story that has seemed to himself and perhaps to his readers as large as the world, Saleem may simply feel that an 766 neil ten kortenaar university of toronto quarterly, volume 71, number 3, summer 2002 apocalypse is a more fitting note on which to conclude than a wedding. Certainly Rushdie feels that way: his previous novel had ended with the literal death of Grimus at the hands of a mob, and the final sentence of Midnight=s Children is a deliberate echo of Garcìa Màrquez=s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Readers should remember, however, that the novel offers alternative endings. Before setting down the future >with the absolute certainty of a prophet,= Saleem asks his readers how he should end his narrative: with happiness, with questions, or with dreams (550). Anything, it would seem, is possible. Alongside the final vision of postmodern apocalypse that most readers of the novel take away with them is an old-fashioned romance: even physical annihilation must wait until after the wedding. Moreover, if we consider not Saleem=s narrative but the trajectory of his life up to the moment when he starts writing, we see yet another narrative take shape. The story of his active life in the world ends with the much-battered Saleem, abject and destitute, being recognized by and restored to the substitute mother from whom he has been separated since the age of eleven. Saleem is permitted to do what is denied to most young men: he can return to the ayah who cared for him as a child and live by her side for evermore. What is this but the dream of the bourgeois child come true? Restored to his ayah=s unconditional love, he enjoys the security and the calm needed to write his memoirs. Critics have always recognized that Midnight=s Children combines incompatible narratives. The novel is labelled >magic realism= to emphasize its juxtaposition of the realist and the fantastic. A critical consensus has it that magic realism is particularly well suited to the handling of materials from the Third World, where colonialism has resulted in the...

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