Fissured Skin, Inner-Ear Radio, and a Telepathic Nose: Senses as Media in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (original) (raw)

This essay brings the postcolonial novel in relation with an often-overlooked but rich resource: the embedded, materialist figurations of psychoanalysis. It examines Salman Rushdie’s use of the alternative register of sensory percep- tion in Midnight’s Children to piece together an extant self that corresponds both actively and passively to the new historical and political realities of the subcontinent. In doing so, however, the essay moves beyond critical common- places about Rushdie’s magical realism and revisionary historiography to align his æsthetic instead to the media conditions under which Freud worked, the emergent ideas of transference and telepathy, and the resultant impera- tives of Freudian psychoanalysis. The capaciousness and indeterminate logic of Midnight’s Children can be read as those of an analytic medium which indiscrim- inately receives psychic material, both individual and collective. The narrator, like Freud’s analyst, is idealized as a media technology who/which (imperfectly) reconstructs a story from the derivatives of the national unconscious.

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