Neither sword nor pen: phallacious impotence

Abstract

This essay explores narrative crises in Salman Rushdie’s postcolonial novel Midnight’s Children by displaying the dynamics of its (re)solutionist mechanisms. The main argument is that neither narratives of textual closure nor of open-endedness can be reduced to a mimetic politics (of determinism or relativism, to give just two examples), once solipsistic control over the text has been demystified. This irreducibility is demonstrated as the narrator’s discourse of authorial impotence seeks to deflect attention from the constructedness of his competing narrative of phallocentric resolution in order to upgrade the reliability of both his identitarian and his nonidentitarian politics. Among the questions the essay seeks to address are: How do the narrator’s contradictory discourses suppress class and gender conflicts in the novel? How can this suppression be understood as a ‘complicitous critique’ (Hutcheon) of authoritarian narrativization? What are the narrative strategies used by Rushdie’s narrator(s) and his characters to simulate change and dissimulate unchange, forestalling dialogic relationality with the other as self, and with the self as other? Keywords: historiographic metafiction; authorial control; narrative impotence; irresolution; ethics.