Midnight's Children key quotes Flashcards
‘in a pool of Anglepoised…’
‘In a pool of Anglepoised light, I no longer want to be anything except what who I am…the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done…everyone everything whose being-in-the-world was affected by mine’
‘each contains a similar multitude’
‘I must interrupt myself…’
‘I must interrupt myself…Padma has started getting irritated whenever my narration becomes self-conscious, whenever I reveal the hands holding the strings…but I must register a protest’
Of MCC
‘The illusion of the artist’ - that he could know all and control creation
‘I measure truth against…’
‘I measure truth against these early things….Mary…the fisherman’ [tellers of tales]
‘Guilty of trickery…’
‘Nor have I been guilty of trickery. I provided clues.’
Reality can…
‘Reality can have metaphorical content’
of his childhood world
‘Full of labels….bore the legend: Made As England’
‘the temptation…’
‘I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer…’
‘In words and pickles…’
‘In words and pickles, I have immortalised my memories…distortions are inevitable in both. We must live with imperfections’
‘I should revise…’
‘I should revise and revise, improve and improve, but there is neither the time nor the energy’
Miniaturist
Miniaturist with elephantitis
‘Collective failure of imagination…’
‘In a collective failure of imagination, we learned we could not think our way out of our pasts’
[importance of plural]
‘Morality, judgement…’
‘Morality, judgement, character…it all starts with memory’
‘Memory’s truth…’
‘Memory’s truth…it selects, alters…in the end it creates its own reality, its hetereogeneous but usually coherent version’
‘no sane human…’
‘No sane human trusts someone else’s version more than their own’
‘A little uncertainity…’
‘Padma…a little uncertainty is no bad thing’
Linked in ‘adverbs and hyphens…’
Linked in ‘adverbs and hyphens…in what our (admirably modern) scientists might call ‘modes of connection; composed of…pairs of opposed’
‘We all…’
‘We all lived happily…this last-sentence fiction’
‘Everything must be told in sequence…’
‘Everything must be told in sequence; I have Padma…’
‘Only fragments…’
‘Only fragments remain, none of it makes sense any more! - but I musn’t presume to judge…sense-and-nonsense is no longer (perhaps never was) for me to evaluate’
[‘evaluate’ - scientific language?]
‘The climax…’
‘The climax, in black and white…a time beyond illusions…scraps of memory, this is not how a climax should be written’
‘I am left with shreds, and must jerk towards my crisis like a puppet with broken strings’
Time distortion
‘as I wrote centuries ago…’
‘Too close…’
‘we’re too close to the cinema-screen; only subjective judgements are possible’
‘the art is…’
‘The art is to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind; above all, to give it shape and form …meaning (I have mentioned my fear of absurdity’
Nose attempting to pray
‘he hit his nose while attempting to pray. Three drops of blood…transformed with rubies…the tears had solidified too…as he brushed diamonds form his lashes, he resolved never again to kiss earth for any god or man’
‘this decision left a hole in him…leaving him vulnerable to women and history’
‘my grandfather’s altered vision…’
‘my grandfather’s altered vision: he had spent five years away from home’
Prayer ritual
‘only a charade’; ‘strange middle ground’
Whatitsname
‘whatisname…an unconscious cry for help…a seriously meant question’
Tai
‘illiteracy, dismissed with a flourish; literature crumbled beneath his hand’
‘the bag represents Abroad; it is the alien thing, the invader, progress’
Aadam’s face
‘face of many colours’
has a ‘hole’
‘phantasm of…’
Sheet - ‘phantasm of a partitioned woman’
Nazi swastika
‘not the Nazi swastika….but the Hindu symbol of power’
‘I have been…’
‘I have been the living proof of the fabulous nature of this collective dream’
‘the monster…’
‘the monster in the streets…the new myth’
Padma, name
“You are an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?”
Boundaries of states
‘the boundaries of these states were walls of words. Language divides us.’
Correspondences
‘as a people, we are obsessed with correspondences…a national longing for form’
‘Saleem was forever…’
‘Saleem was forever tainted with Bombayness’
Padma
‘useful because…a critic’
‘“what do you know, city boy?”…I insert a brief paen to Dung’
‘in her absence…’
‘In her absence, my certainties are falling apart….sending these words into the darkness and am scared of being disbelieved’
Edward Said
[Critical]
Consciously mixed national discourses - “make it acknowledge marginalized, supressed or forgotten histories”
Lacoubi
[Critical]
‘internal and external’ impacts of colonialisation
Rushdie tries to ‘locate what is oppressive’
Morey
[Critical]
‘incompletions and inconsistencies’ allow reader ‘interaction’
Pardey
[Critical]
Fragmentation ‘resists shallow homogenization’
Cronin
[Critical]
‘images…knowledge and power are forever opposed’
Mukerjee
[Critical]
‘three levels of narration: fairy tale, autobiography, and history’
Kortenaar
[Critical]
‘distinguishes between lies and ficiton…fictions give order and meaing’
Batty
[Critical]
‘narration…political act…implied listener controls the fate of the narrator’
‘Implicit contract’ in narration
Syed
[Critical]
‘Saleem, by creating his own universe, articulates his right to articulate his own version of history’
Rushdie
[Critical]
“Saleem has a thesis, and the book tests it…”
“I wanted to restore the past to myself….whole, in Technicolour”
“The broken mirror may actually be as valuable…human beings do not perceive things whole”
“the past is a country from which we have all emigrated”
“something can be gained” in translation
