T(r)opology of memory: Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Abstract

In the body of cultural memory, traumas, scars and traces gradually develop into places and figures (topoi and tropes) of discourse. The blueprint of Midnight’s Children is the staging of individual and social memory as a means to redeem the past of the oppressed through the manipulation of official history. Allegory is the informing trope of this reworking of memory within the stream of history. It is a preposterous, humorous allegory, issuing in a broadly human comic epic, which is primarily about Rushdie’s native India but also contains an ironic picture of the West. The remaking of cultural memory here appears as a synaesthetic as well as a hyper-medial intercultural affair.