NEOCOLONIAL NARCISSISM AND POSTCOLONIAL PARANOIA

Abstract

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children represents an attempt to provide a therapeutic understanding of history and its traumas in a manner that places individualized psychoanalytic constructions in juxtaposition to those of larger collectives. Following Rushdie's lead, I recuperate the problematic Freudian concepts of paranoia, narcissism and fetishism and offer them as models for the functioning of state power. I postulate interdependent senses of nation and state that incorporate both desire and narrative, and thus allow for the application of psychoanalytic terms: the nation is the way in which the state desires to be known, and the state is the way in which the nation desires not to be known. A psychoanalysis of the state thus reads on the institutional level for the same dynamics of repression, projection and displacement that Freud applied to the individual psyche. In Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai represents a fictionalized engagement with Indian history that mirrors the narcissism, fetishism and paranoia of the state; his eventual destruction as Rushdie's final closural manoeuvre suggests the elimination, albeit temporary, of the impediments to a therapeutic relationship with Indian history. Through this reading of Rushdie's novel, I explore the intersections of historical, literary and psychological narratives that operate to provide readers with more tools for working through the traumas of colonialism and postcoloniality as they overwhelm individuals, communities and nations alike – especially in light of current trends towards the diminishment of the role of the nation in an era of globalization. In doing so, I explore how the individual postcolonial subject is constituted in relation to history, but also how the corporate, interpellating subject of the postcolonial nation-state constitutes itself in relation to that same history.

Keywords:

• India
• Midnight's Children
• narrative
• nation-state
• psychoanalysis
• state narcissism

Notes

¹What is most useful for my purposes in Brooks is his use of Freudian transference as a metaphor for narrative: ‘[W]e we may conceive of the text as an as-if medium, fictional (as any set of signs must be) yet speaking of the investments of desire on the part of both addresser and addressee, author and reader, a place of rhetorical exchange or transaction’ (1984: 234).

²For two potential pitfalls to the application of psychoanalytic models to the nation-state, see Lloyd (2000) and Zizek (2000). Lloyd (2000: 218) argues that, when the trauma of individuals becomes a metaphor for cultural histories, the result is a positivistic, state-centred narrative in which losses of the past are (melancholic) historical ballast to be jettisoned in order to continue a march of progress. At the other end of the spectrum: ‘The melancholic link to the lost ethnic Object allows us to claim that we remain faithful to our ethnic roots while fully participating in the global capitalist game’ (Zizek 2000: 659).

³I see productive links between psychoanalytic and Marxist readings of the nation-state via the process of interpellation, a confluence described recently by Khanna: ‘Psychoanalysis helps us understand how the state's reliance on the nation is about different forms of representation, whether in terms of textualization, print capitalism, or representational politics. Psychoanalysis describes the processing of subjects into the larger groups that constitute nation-states’ (2003: 8).

⁴See Kabir (2002).

⁵I will hereafter refer to quotations from this edition of Midnight's Children (1991a [1981]) parenthetically as MC. Quotations from Imaginary Homelands (1991b) will be referenced parenthetically as IH.

⁶For a treatment of the gender politics of Rushdie's fixation on Indira Gandhi's widowhood and his reliance on ‘culturally conditioned misogyny’ (Sunder Rajan 1993: 114), see Sunder Rajan (1993) and Frank (1996).

⁷Guha (1976: 43) points out that the preventive detention employed during the Emergency was a longstanding part of India's Constitution of 1950; the suspension of civil rights in the form of imprisonment without trial traces its roots back to a 1947 measure to control communal violence between Hindu and Muslim. Gandhi herself emphatically defends the Emergency by stating that it is ‘totally within our Constitutional framework’ (India 1975b: cols 51–2). The insistence on the normalcy of the Emergency coincides with a key facet of paranoia: it may be based upon the irrational projection of an external threat, but it does not in other ways affect the ‘normal’ behavior of the paranoiac (Robins and Post 1997: 4).

⁸Itty Abraham (1998) provides another example of state narcissism through fetishism, in this case in the form of India's first nuclear reactor, Apsara. He characterizes the metonymic link between nuclear power and technological advancement as fetishistic: ‘Inscribed with all the accoutrements of the postcolonial state's desire – science, modernity, indigeneity – the technological artefact was meant to stand out from the landscape of Indian history and tradition, bearing no trace of its origins, embodying the future, situated only in relation to other fetishized objects like dams, railways, steel mills and jet aircraft, aesthetically and practically the new face of India’ (1998: 156).

⁹In narrating his birth, Saleem articulates what for Rushdie is a straw-man version of nationalistic history – the myopia of focusing on the magical moment of Independence to the detriment of other histories: ‘I shall not describe the mass blood-letting in progress on the frontiers of the divided Punjab … I shall avert my eyes form the violence in Bengal and the long pacifying walk of Mahatma Gandhi. Selfish? Narrow-minded? Well, perhaps; but excusably so, in my opinion. After all, one is not born every day’ (MC 125).

¹⁰My sense of mainstream Indian history's allergic reaction to Partition derives from Pandey (1992), as well as from Majumdar (1969), in which the author discusses Partition by comparing it to events in 1398 before stating: ‘It is unnecessary to recount that story of shame and barbarity as it falls beyond the period under review’ (1969: 791–2). Of course, a different sort of nationalism is much more at home with the rhetoric of Partition as fuel for stoking communal tensions, as examined in Lal (2002).

¹¹In Midnight's Children, Pakistan is denied the potential of India's magical birth; Saleem's midnight-conferred powers will not work in Pakistan, and his role in the Pakistani army forces him to participate in the 1971 massacres in Dacca. Saleem sums up his unfeeling state as being the buddha, claiming: ‘emptied of history, the buddha learned the arts of submission, and did only what was required of him. To sum up: I became a citizen of Pakistan’ (MC 403).

¹²In her 1982 Falkland Island's victory speech in Cheltenham, Margaret Thatcher cheered the winners of the Falklands War, chided the ‘waverers’ and ‘faint-hearts’ and chastised striking railway unions for undermining British progress and ignoring the ‘Falklands factor’; in doing so, her correspondence to at least the first three of Freud's stages of narcissism is nearly textbook perfect (Thatcher 1989: 160–4). For discussion of official secrecy in England, see Porter (1989) and Vincent (1998).

¹³For a detailed account of the stand-off that led to the hunger strike and the lives and deaths of the hunger strikers, see Beresford (1989); a recounting of Operation Bluestar and its aftermath can be found in Wolpert (1993: 416–21).

¹⁴Rushdie reiterates these sentiments in his essay ‘India's fiftieth anniversary’, when he writes: ‘India has taken the modern view of the self and enlarged it to encompass almost one billion souls. The selfhood of India is so capacious, so elastic, that it manages to accommodate one billion kinds of difference. It agrees with its billion selves to call all of them “Indian”’ (2002: 163–4).

¹⁵To critique Rushdie's construction of the Indian nation-state, one may turn to Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, which ‘must ground itself in a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism (that is, of the bureaucratic constructions of citizenship, the modern state, and bourgeois privacy that classical political philosophy has produced)’ (2000: 42); the notion of the Indian nation as based on incompleteness or lack, one articulated in the inaugural volume of Subaltern Studies as the ‘historic failure of the nation to come into its own (Guha 1988: 43), is implicit in Rushdie's approach to Midnight's Children.