The aesthetic of elephantiasis: Rushdie's Midnight's Children as an encyclopaedic novel

Abstract

Drawing on Northrop Frye, Edward Mendelson and Franco Moretti, this article discusses encyclopaedic features in Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children and argues that the novelist's ambition to incorporate the whole of life is simultaneously a serious and ironic enterprise carried out on the level of discourse. The former attitude stands revealed in metaphorical modes of connection, analogy and fusion, whereby the manifold variations of life are made to resonate in meaningful patterns, whereas irony pertains primarily to metonymical modes of dispersion, fragmentation and fission, in which the processes of life are allowed to proliferate randomly. The encyclopaedic impulse of the novel takes the form of two complementary strategies, that of completeness and that of eternal continuation.

Keywords:

• Rushdie
• encyclopaedic novel
• elephantiasis
• metaphor
• metonymy