An incursion into postmodernist fiction – Graham

Swift, Waterland; Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s

Children

Erika Mihálycsa, PhD

Musée des Beaux Arts, Lille – J-M Ibos, M. Vitart (1992-97)
 Present: space-dominated age, epoch of simultaneity/
juxtaposition/ of the dispersed/ ‘palimpsest history’ (Brooke-
Rose)

• [‘lived’ space] = which ‘draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of

our lives, our time and history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at
us’; ‘[which] is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we
do not live in a kind of void, inside which we could place individuals and
other things. We do not live inside a void that could be coloured with
diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates
sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not
superimposable on one another.’ Different/oppositional spaces: non-
homogeneous; the ones that most lure us outside ourselves, since ‘they
are linked with all the others, [but] contradict all the other sites’ 
utopias (imaginary spaces devoid of reality) & heterotopias (spaces of
difference) (M. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”, 1986)
“Whereas space stretches itself from mundane reality
and forms a richly configured realm of its own, time
skims into the media experience of constructed,
repetitious packages and becomes a series of
disconnected intervals … The cutting loose of time
from sequence, and consequently from human
identity, constitutes the third wave of postmodernism,
but it no longer functions as a continuum along which
human action can meaningfully be plotted.”
(Katherine N. Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in
Contemporary Literature and Science, Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990,
279)
 “presentification of the past”
• “…what postmodernism does is to contest the very possibility of our
ever being able to know the ‘ultimate objects’ of the past. It teaches
and enacts the recognition of the fact that the social, historical and
existential ‘reality’ of the past is discursive reality when it is used as
the referent of art, and so the only ‘genuine historicity’ becomes
that which would openly acknowledge its own discursive,
contingent identity. The past is not bracketed or effaced… it is
incorporated and modified, given new and different life and
meaning. This is the lesson taught by postmodernist art today…
even the most self-conscious and parodic of contemporary works do
not try to escape, but indeed foreground, the historical, social,
ideological contexts in which they have existed and continue to
exist.” (Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, 1988)
“Postmodernism questions centralized, totalized, hierarchized, closed systems:
questions, but does not destroy …It acknowledges the human urge to make order, while
pointing out that the orders we create are just that: human constructs, not natural or
given entities … part of its questioning involves an energizing rethinking of margins and
edges, of what does not fit in the humanly constructed notion of center. Such
interrogations of the impulse to sameness (or single otherness) and homogeneity, unity
and certainty, make room for a consideration of the different and the heterogeneous, the
hybrid and the provisional …

[pm foregrounds its own contradictions] to such an extent that they become the very
defining characteristics of the entire cultural phenomenon we label with that name. The
pm is in no way absolutist; it does not say that ‘it is both impossible & useless to try &
establish some hierarchical order, some system of priorities in life’ (Fokkema). What it
does say is that there are all kinds of orders & systems in our world – and that we create
them all. That is their justification & their limitation. They do not exist ‘out there’, fixed,
given, universal, eternal; they are human constructs in history. This does not make them
any the less necessary or desirable. It does, however, condition their ‘truth’ value. The
local, the limited, the temporary, the provisional are what define pm ‘truth’ …
((Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism)
[pm characterized by] contradiction & a move toward anti-totalization … As the
very label of ‘historiographic metafiction’ is intended to suggest, pm remains
fundamentally contradictory, offering only questions, never final answers. In
fiction, it combines what Malcolm Bradbury has called ‘argument by poetics’
(metafiction) with ‘argument by historicism’ (historiographic) in such a way as to
inscribe a mutual interrogation within the texts themselves.” (A Poetics of
Postmodernism, 43, 42)

“What pm aesthetic practice shares with much contemporary theory

(psychoanalytic, linguistic, analytic philosophical, hermeneutic, poststructuralist,
historiographical, discourse analytic, semiotic, + Marxist, neo-pragmatist, feminist)
is an interest in interpretative strategies & in the situating of verbal utterances in
social action … What most of these theoretical points of view [Lacan, Lyotard,
Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, + Judith Butler, Kristeva, Deleuze, Eco, Rorty, Cixous,
Spivak, Said, Homi Bhabha etc.] share today is a desire to question what
Christopher Norris calls ‘the kinds of wholesale explanatory theory which would
seek to transcend their own special context or localized conditions of cultural
production.’ They also tend not to become paralyzed by their very pm realization
that their own discourses have no absolute claim to any ultimate foundation in
‘truth.’ If we accept that all is provisional & historically conditioned, we will
not stop thinking, as some fear; in fact, that acceptance will guarantee that we
never stop thinking – and rethinking.” (A Poetics of Postmodernism, 53)
language as a medium / narrative as a vehicle are the only
means of accessing & knowing the past in a historical text:
“Historiography is but textualization of the past … and
historiography as a text is shaped by the same creative
process involved in the writing of fiction.” (Hayden White,
Metahistory, 1973)

“‘Historia’ or ‘Inquiry’… To know that what we are is what

we are because our past has determined it.” (G. Swift,
Waterland)
Kleiues+Kleiues, Hamburg Museum of
Contemporary Art (former Hamburger
Hauptbahnhof), 1990-1995

Jean Nouvel, Institut du Monde Arabe,

Paris, 1987
“Man is the story-telling animal” (Graham Swift, Waterland, 1983, 62)

“Reality’s not strange, not unexpected. Reality doesn’t reside in the sudden
hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality
is that nothing happens. How many of the events of history have occurred,
ask yourselves, for this and for that reason, but for no other reason,
fundamentally, than the desire to make things happen? I present to you
History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama. History,
and its near relative, Histrionics…” (Waterland, 40)

“Yet the Here & Now, which brings both joy & terror, comes but rarely –
does not come even when we call it. That’s the way it is: life includes a lot of
empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-
tenth Here & Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the
Here & Now is neither now nor here./ What do you do when reality is an
empty space? … you can tell stories.” (Waterland, 61)
 “History” vs. histories (natural, local, socio-
economic, family)
Nor does this four-year intermission [WW1] inhibit the
determination, if it tries the patience, of Johannes
Schmidt. For soon after its cessation, glad that history
has got its business over, he once more takes to the
seas. Once more he is scooping up eel larvae – this
time in the Western Atlantic. And by the early
twenties - so tirelessly has he worked – he is able to
declare his findings; to affirm that, taking the area
where the largest number of smallest larvae have
been collected to correspond to the breeding territory
of the eel, then this same, long unimagined, let alone
undiscovered spawning ground is to be found
between latitudes 20° & 30° North & longitudes 50° &
65° West – that is to say, in that mysterious region of
floating weed known as the Sargasso Sea. (Waterland
203)
“Explaining is a way of avoiding the facts while you pretend to get near to
them.”

• When you work with water, you have to know & respect it.
When you labour to subdue it, you have to understand that one
day it may rise up & turn all your labours to nothing. For what
is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no
taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And
what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the
natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all
landscapes, most approximates to Nothing? Every Fenman
secretly concedes this; every Fenman suffers now & then the
illusion that the land he walks over is not there, is floating…
And every Fen-child, who is given picture-books to read in
which the sun bounces over mountain tops & the road of life
winds through heaps of green cushions, & is taught nursery
rhymes in which persons go up & down hills, is apt to demand
of its elders: Why are the Fens flat? (Waterland 13)
 “I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history”
(Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children)

• ‘So gradually Doctor Aziz came to have a picture of Naseem in his mind, a badly-fitting
collage of her severally-inspected parts. This phantasm of a partitioned woman began
to haunt him, and not only in his dreams. Glued together by his imagination, she
accompanied him on all his rounds, she moved into the front room of his mind, so that
waking and sleeping he could feel in his fingertips the softness of her ticklish skin or
the perfect tiny wrists or the beauty of the ankles; he could smell her scent of
lavender and chambeli; he could hear her voice and her helpless laughter of a little
girl; but she was headless, because he hd never seen her face.”

• ‘Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,’ I wrote and read aloud, ‘I

have nevertheless done better than my grandfather; because while Aadam Aziz
remained the sheet’s victim, I have become its master – and Padma is the one who is
now under its spell. Sitting in my enchanted shadows, I vouchsafe daily glimpses of
myself – while she, my squatting glimpser, is captivated, helpless as a mongoose
frozen into immobility by the swaying, blinkless eyes of a hooded snake, paralysed –
yes! – by love.’
“As a young man he had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown
larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art. ‘Look at me,’ he
said before he killed himself, ‘I wanted to be a miniaturist and I’ve got
elephantiasis instead!’ The swollen events of the night of the crescent knives
reminded Nadir Khan of his roommate, because life had once again, perversely,
refused to remain life-sized. It had turned melodramatic: and that embarrassed
him.”

“But this was Delhi, and Lifafa Das had altered his cry accordingly. ‘See the
whole world, come see everything!’ The hyperbolic formula began, after a time, to
prey upon his mind; more and more picture postcards went into his peepshow as
he tried, desperately, to deliver what he promised, to put everything into his box. (I
am suddenly reminded of Nadir Khan’s friend the painter: is this an Indian
disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected, too?)”
“‘It was only a matter of time,’ my father said, with every appearance of
pleasure; but time had been an unsteady affair, in my experience, not a
thing to be relied upon. It could even be partitioned: the clocks in Pakistan
would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts… Mr Kemal,
who wanted nothing to do with Partition, was fond of saying, ‘Here’s proof
of the folly of the scheme! Those Leaguers plan to abscond with a whole
thirty minutes! Time Without Partitions,’ Mr Kemal cried, ‘That’s the
ticket!’ And S.P. Butt said, ‘If they can change the time just like that, what’s
real any more? I ask you? What’s true?’

“…who would know, for instance, that although baby-weight and

monsoons have silenced the clock on the Estate clocktower, the steady beat
of Mountbatten’s ticktock is still there, soft but inexorable, and that it’s
only a matter of time before it fills our ears with its metronomic, drumming
music…”
By the time the rains came at the end of June, the foetus was fully
formed inside her womb. Knees and nose were present; and as many
heads as would grow were already in position. What had been (at the
beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a
word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more
complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book – perhaps an
encyclopaedia – even a whole language… which is to say that the lump
in the middle of my mother grew so large, and became so heavy, that
while Warden Road at the foot of our two-storey hillock became flooded
with dirty yellow rainwater and stranded buses began to rust and
children swam in the liquid road and newspapers sank soggily beneath
the surface, Amina found herself in a circular first-floor tower room,
scarcely able to move beneath the weight of her leaden balloon. (MC)
• “…and this year – fourteen hours to go, thirteen, twelve – there was
an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a
nation which has never previously existed was about to win its
freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had invented
the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was
nevertheless quite imaginary; into the mythical land, a country which
would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective
will – except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy
shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat,
and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can
only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth – a
collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only
by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.” (MC)
“He didn’t feel intruded upon amid these multitudes; on the contrary. There was a satisfying
anonymity in the crowds, an absence of intrusion. Nobody here was interested in his mysteries.
Everyone was here to lose themselves. Such was the unarticulated magic of the masses, and in
those days losing himself was just about Professor Solanka’s only purpose in life.” (S. Rushdie,
Fury, 2001)

“…I am alone in the vastness of the numbers, the numbers marching one two three, I am being
buffeted right and left while rip tear crunch reaches its climax, and my body is screaming, it
cannot take this treatment any more, but now I see familiar faces in the crowd, they are all here,
my grandfather Aadam and his wife Naseem, and Alia and Mustapha and Hanif and Emerald …
there is a countdown ticktocking to midnight, fireworks and stars, the cardboard cut-outs of
wrestlers, and I see that I shall never reach Kashmir, like Jehangir the Mughal Emperor and I
shall die with Kashmir on my lips… I hear lies being spoken in the night, anything you want
you kin be, the greatest lie of all, cracking now, fission of Saleem, I am the bomb in Bombay,
watch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful pressure of the crowd, bag of
bones falling down down down, just as once at Jallianwala, but Dyer seems not to be present
today, no Mercurochrome, only a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street, because
I have been so-many too-many persons, life unlike syntax allows one more than three, and at
last somewhere the striking of a clock, twelve chimes, release.” (Midnight’s Children)