| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
The exile—being the subject that is between landscapes—is always aware of the projection’s status as projection, construction, and aesthetic creation because of the distance created by his or her being. As such, the exile invalidates the landscape as something set in reality; it is a construction that is determined and reliant on the intervention of the subject who forms it. In both deformations, the exile takes the central role—it is the status of the exile that performs this destruction.
An excellent example of both these processes at work simultaneously is the central character of Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai. He is integrally a part of the landscape to which he is born; he is created by his coincidence with Indian history, and he projects his own version of it through his novel. Neither subjectivity nor landscape can claim primacy over the other; rather both are joined in a twin process of creation and destruction, a coming-into-being without actually finally arriving. It is also clear from Saleem’s intimate connection with Indian history that neither he, nor history (or at least his version of it) can survive the process. Throughout the novel, he constantly reminds us that he is breaking apart, that the very integrity of his body (representing here, as it does in Lacan’s notion of the Mirror Stage,12 the integrity of his subjectivity) is breaking asunder. His very being is constantly “crumbling.” What is seen here as a semitragic statement of the impossibility of finality and fulfillment is also the movement of a dialectic between subject and landscape that is constantly producing, through the text, precisely the thing that Saleem most desires: to “end up meaning-yes, meaning-something” (Midnight’s Children 3). However, the novel ends with the impossibility of completing the character’s performance of being. Saleem can never be whole.
I would like to propose that the dialectic that is demonstrated within and through the character of Saleem is precisely the dynamic that is at the center of the six novels we are to analyze and represents one of the most important questions to be addressed to the post-colonial situation. However, as Saleem’s slow breaking-apart demonstrates, this dialectic will never reach any kind of conclusion or sublation. However, this is not to say that the only thing that will be produced by the dialectic is despair.