A holed sheet and a silver spittoon

Private inheritance and historical memory in Midnight's Children

Abstract

The object plays an important role within the figural logic of postcolonial literature. As traces of original culture, residues of a tradition to be preserved, things recover the character of substitute and symbolic replacement that according to Freud was typical of the fetish. Thus we are witnessing a reinterpretation of the fetishistic phenomenon, no longer the solipsistic experience of a single individual trapped in his own desire but a need shared by a collective identity that tries to maintain itself through a crystallization of its historical memories. The protagonists of postcolonial literature intertwine their experiences with the fate of the objects that accompany them; consequently, a careful examination of the works cannot ignore a material perspective that takes into account the thematic and formal kit entrusted to things. This contribution intends to investigate the narrative function assumed by objects in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981). In particular, the textual activities of a holed sheet and a silver spittoon will be closely examined: the first as a vehicle of a private inheritance and the second of a collective inheritance, both to be preserved among the historical vicissitudes of India in balance between the previous European identity and the urge of a new postcolonial reality.