Cultura inglese - modulo 1

CULTURA INGLESE

Salman Rushdie's biography is reflected in Midnight's Children. He was born at the beginning of Indian independence, in Bombay. His father was a Muslim lawyer, and his mother was a teacher.

His maternal great father was a doctor and officially a Muslim, but he allowed his daughter to be educated and didn't demand that she lived in the traditional female seclusion.

He grew up in a family formally Muslim, but open-minded, and with social ambition. He was bilingual (English and Urdu). His father was a master storyteller, he made up ongoing narratives (in the fashion of the Arabian Nights, from night to night). Since his family didn't observe Muslim rights, they didn't consider leaving India after partition.

Salman apparently wanted to become a writer from an early age, he listed the Wizard of Oz as his earliest literary influence. As far as popular culture, Elvis Presley's songs were influential.

The culture in Bombay at the time was cosmopolitan, a mixture of high and

lowculture is typical also of the very nature of the postmodern novel. In the postmodern novel is not elitist, but is a mix of high art and low.

After attending school in Bombay he was sent to England in 1961 to continue his education. He attended prominent public school “…”, which had conservative values, there he was rather unhappy, his reason “ I was foreign, cleaver and bad at games”, he was also a target of racial attacks.

1962 his family sold their possessions in India and followed him to England. Two years later they moved to Pakistan. And in 1965, when he finished school, he followed them. But he didn’t feel at home, it was the time of one of the may military confrontation between India and Pakistan, and the family felt caught in the middle. They felt sympathy for Pakistan but also he felt that his personal history was connected to India. What saved him was his return to England, to attend Cambridge, where he had a good time, he didn’t spent much.

Salman Rushdie is a renowned author who was born in Bombay, India in 1947. He grew up in a middle-class Muslim family and attended a prestigious school in Bombay. After completing his education, he moved to England to pursue higher studies. His first novel, "Rymus," was a fantasy-science fiction book that caught the attention of publishers. He received an advance for continuing writing and decided to travel to India for five months. During this trip, he wrote his most famous novel, "Midnight's Children," which was published in 1975.

The year 1975 held significant political events for Rushdie, including Margaret Thatcher's election in the UK and Indira Gandhi's declaration of a state of emergency in India. Around the same time, Rushdie also published another novel titled "Shame," which was a fictionalized story of Pakistan.

In addition to his career as a novelist, Rushdie became a well-known critic and political activist. His main targets were Thatcher and Indira Gandhi, and he was part of a group of leading writers, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who shared similar views. Rushdie wrote a number of important essays during this period, including "A Period of Mild Dictatorship," "Imaginary Homelands," and "Outside the Whale." These essays were later collected and published in a book titled "Imaginary Homelands" in 1992.

Rushdie also found inspiration in the works of Charles Dickens. He admired Dickens' ability to create fantastic and larger-than-life characters, which he incorporated into his own writing.

The real word more visible.- Comic“Life and opinion of Tristan Shandy. A Gentlemen”:- A very experimental narrative, that takes the usual plot of the biographyof a character up to his or her marriage. So, he takes a classic genre andgives it a twist, like Salman.

Both novels use a convoluted and digressive form. All these elements point tothe importance of reflectivity. Therefore Tristan Shandy is considered thefourgrounder of his genre. Midniht children is overwhelming (it covers morethan 60 years, and in the history of 3 countries in India, and it’s overcrowded ystrange characters, whose names sometimes change like India).

Many novels of this period try to embrace two or three generations, to connectthe history.

Another element of this novel is that the narrator is unreliable, by his ownadmission. Unreliability is not a new technique: the remains of the day,attornment?

It is an important element connected to the linguistic turn, the idea that thereis no straight

Forward access to reality and no possibility to achieve an objective and shared knowledge of the word.

Midnight Children is paradigmatic of the post-modern taste, for example for its exuberance and excessiveness. This is visible in the fact that the novel is very hard to categorize in terms of genre: part history, part autobiography, part social theory, part magic, part poetry, part realism, part allegory (the body allegorizes the nation), part fable, part myth, part Bollywood show bits, part lyrical epic. Also, high and low are mixed. It marks the beginning of a pluricultural narration, it is also multivocal (different narratives and povs). It engages seriously with contemporary history, the author witnessed Independence and Partition, a moment of contrast (great hopes and idealism coexist with brutal violence, immediately after the declaration conflict started). It's a novel about the possibility of redemption, it is a postcolonial novel, it foregrounds the sense of dislocation, migration.

and fracturing between different legacy. The sense of fracturing is metaphorized in different ways: at the beginning there is a long sequence which concerns the grandfather visiting a daughter (that can be seen by the doctor in different fragments). He uses "Autobiography" as a device to express all these different fragments.

The protagonist, at the beginning, is working in a pickle factory and tells the story, 30 or more years before his birth, so before Partition, and ends the story 30 years after Partition (the structure is symmetrical). He is one of the 101 children born at midnight, within one hour of the Declaration, so when he takes the first breath, the president is giving the speech "... destiny".

The story starts in 1950 (return to India of Gandhi, who starts to organize movements against British colonization), when the grandfather returns from Europe to India. These years were violent: ban of political meetings, killing of 350 people in 1980 (it's a historical event).

Moment in the novel, used to point out how different cultures interpret in different ways history). It's a book that mingles tragedy and humour: deep issues and a light-hearted sense of the word. The fracturing of the book also stands for the fracturing of a country after partition, there was no geographical need of separation between Muslims (Pakistan) and Hindus (India), the third largest religion Sikhism (less than 2% of India) was concentrated in the Punjio region, that after partition was divided between India and Pakistan, so that they became an even smaller minority in both nations. Under British rule there were small autonomous states, the main was Kashmere, where there was an Indu "king" leading a predominantly Muslim population, after partition ended up divided between Pakistan, India and China (and it is still today disputed territory), it is so fractured that it embodies the many conflicts of India, for this reason the author sets the beginning and end of the novel in

This region. The partition was accompanied by the British vice rulers, at the time of partition there was one related to Charles III, who later died in a terrorist attack. Partition was so violent that in a few weeks over a million lives were lost, this great new word, was fought immediately and began to crack and fall apart.

Other important historical event is Emergency (1975-1977), when Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, declared State of emergency with the protest of imminent external threat to India. During this period elections were cancelled, and civil liberties suspended. There was the sterilization of many Indians (partly voluntaries). Now the protagonist returns and here he dies.

The greatest writer in this form was Borges, whose novels integrate magical events in otherwise realistic contexts. In this novel the most magical is the conceived of 1001 children born between midnight and 1am, the numbers refer to the Arabian nights. On his 10 birthday he finds out, after an accident, he can

Il protagonista del romanzo comunica con gli altri sopravvissuti bambini nati a mezzanotte e scopre che ognuno di loro ha dei poteri magici. In modo allegorico, ogni bambino nato a mezzanotte ha un potere e una visione particolare del futuro del paese (rappresentano la speranza): uno vede un'India futura in cui il genere non conta più, uno in cui l'industrializzazione è presente ma sotto controllo (senza sfruttamento), uno in cui la natura e gli esseri umani convivono pacificamente, uno in cui i trasporti non sono un problema (sono moderni ed efficienti). Alla fine, loro sono morti o...