Abstract
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a narrative known for its irreverent treatment of national identity, its story resting as it does on the comic superimposition of Saleem Sinai’s story onto the (hi)story of his nation. By playing with metaphors and simulacra, Rushdie’s text explodes this superimposition, thus transforming the sacred status of the nation state into utter profanity. Midnight’s Children deploys the resources of fiction to stretch the principle of superimposition/ correspondence to its limits in order to underscore its tendency to fall apart. Representation in the novel becomes a form of aesthetic resistance made possible through remetaphorization, a notion akin to reterritorialization. This resistance strains the classical national narrative, which relies on the mirroring effect of the metaphor, and shows the metaphor disintegrating under the weight of the simulacrum. Midnight’s Children plots Saleem’s story as he discovers that his drive for reaching the very centre of meaning is not his only mistake. His ultimate mistake lies in the metaphorical postulation of the centre itself - a centre which turns out to be empty, hollow, and purely hypothetical.
