Apocalyptic Narratives: The Nation in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 2000 by Teresa Heffernan

The radically performative laying down of the law by the legislator must create the very context according to which that law could be judged to be just: the founding moment, the pre-, is always already inhabited by the post-.

Geoffrey Bennington (132)

Thus the veil had to fall so that with it the strongholds of reactionaries preventing women from being educated and participating in public life would fall.

Amina Said (360)

In the Book of Revelation, John is living in forced exile on the island of Patmos.[1] Opposed to and alienated from the existing social and political order, he predicts the overthrow of a corrupt world and the everlasting reign of the New Jerusalem. In this revolutionary prophesy, John imagines himself as the consciousness of the collective; the boundary between the world and the word, between narrative and history, must dissolve, and all margins, including the one he inhabits, must be eradicated to complete this dream of a perfectly integrated community at the end of history. [2]

While the belief in the actual or imminent end of the world has receded, Frank Kermode argues that "the paradigms of apocalypse continue to lie under our ways of making sense of the world" (28). With the shift from God's plan for humanity to secular dreams about the world, nationalist narratives that both replace and echo Revelation are one of the ways we order that world. Apocalypse continues to be understood in a secular context as a revelation or unveiling (from the ancient Greek apokalupsis), and this paradigm underlies the nineteenth-century teleological narrative of modern nationalism, where the emergence of the nation is understood as the point of arrival for an "imagined community" (Anderson 6). As Benedict Anderson has suggested, as traditional religious belief wanes, national narratives come to satisfy the desire for origins, continuity, and eternity (11).

Like the biblical story, secular apocalyptic writings about the nation also express the dreams of the ostracized and the oppressed about the renewal or rebirth of a community; the call from beyond (the interference from the Other) that characterizes apocalyptic writing challenges the established order, confuses accepted rules, and ignores the prevalent codes of reason. As Jacques Derrida writes, "By its very tone, the mixing of voices, genres, and codes, and the breakdown [le detraquement of destinations, apocalyptic discourse can also dismantle the dominant contract or concordat" ("Of an Apocalyptic Tone" 89). It is not surprising then that the Romantic poets, and Blake in particular, conceived of the French and American Revolutions in millennial terms; the violence and upheaval of these events seemed to mark the dawn of a new earthly order, freeing man from the tyranny of monarchy and church.[3] And in Writing the Apocalypse, Lois Parkinson Zamora reads both the Hebrew (Ezekiel, Daniel, Zechariah) and Chri stian (Mark 13, Matthew 24, 2 Peter, and Revelation) apocalyptic texts, with their emphasis on the merging of private and public destinies, as inspiring the "communal" or national fictions of Latin American writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Julio Cortazar.

However, the events of the twentieth century have also cast doubt on apocalyptic nationalist narratives. In E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Aziz clearly joins the revolutionary chorus when he declares that "India shall be a nation! No foreigners of any sort! Hindu and Moslem and Sikh and all shall be one!" (289). But while Forster suggests that the colonial presence in India is intolerable, completing his novel in the aftermath of the First World War, he is clearly not convinced by the revolutionary promises of nationalism: Fielding taunts Aziz with the remark "India a nation! What an apotheosis! Last comer to the drab nineteenth-century sisterhood!"(289). And as a Muslim, Aziz himself is only half taken with the idea of the modern nation as he recognizes the es of teleology and origins that accompany this model. When he is asked to imagine a lineage for the modern nation, he suggests Afghans as a viable trajectory without being able to "quite fit" (289) them in the Hindu Native State of Mau. He also exp eriences, at a microcosmic level, the limits of this model, which privileges birth, when he has to refuse Mrs. Moore's invitation to join her in the English club: "Indians are not allowed into the Chandrapore Club even as guests" (41). Significantly, he is later able to extend an invitation to Adela and Mrs. Moore to "be Moslems together" on the train because membership in the Islamic nation--the umma--is not restricted by birth (130).

In Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai also draws on the revolutionary legacy of apocalyptic nationalism as an obvious frame for his account of India's struggle of liberation: "I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet" (462). Readings of Midnight's Children either insist on Rushdie's allegiance to nationalism--Josna Rege, for example, suggests that "[d]espite its conceptual freshness and vitality, Midnight's Children remains very emotionally committed to the narrative of the nation" (366) and that the novel "romanticizes the Congress Party ideal of 'unity in diversity'" (360)--or, alternatively, insist that Rushdie is disillusioned not with the nation per se but with the corruption of the postcolonial nation, because those who came to lead it were, as Timothy Brennan puts it, "sell-outs and power brokers" (27). However, in this paper, I want to argue that Midnight's Children, in recasting Aziz and drawing on Forster's skepticism, is from the outset suspicious of the very model--with its apocalyptic underpinnings--of the modern nation. Discontented with the narrative of origins and ends implicit in this model, the novel explores an alternative, though equally apocalyptic, concept of the nation, the Islamic umma. However, this paper concludes, securing these models is the figure of the (un)veiled woman, who tacitly calls into question the very apocalyptic language of "unveiling" on which they both rest.