I was a little dismayed last week when Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children won another big prize. I have always thought it to be a rather overated work of literature, although I accept that many Booker lovers like it. My main objection, when I think about it, is that it is effectively a derivative work of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum. I mean this in terms of style, structure, charactisation and plot.
I believe that Rushdie is indebted to Grass for the following reasons:
1/. Magic Realism: Both novels are said to be examples of Magic Realism. Previous to Grass, critics used the term ‘magic realism’ to describe paintings of the Neue Sachlichkeit. Grass’s novel invented a whole new genre of literary Magic Realism and so obviously Rushdie owes a debt to him for that.
2/. Structure: Rushdie is further indebted to Grass in the way that he ‘borrow’s the main structural device: using the private lives of both protagonists to reflect public events. To be fair, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude also owes something to Grass in this respect.
3/. Oskar is born the day the Nazis come to power. Saleem is born on the moment of Indian independence.
4/. Both are unreliable narrators.
5/. Both are demonic children: Oskar claims he can break glass with his voice. Saleem uses telepathy. Oskar is a dwarf (or little person) – Saleem has nasal difficulties.
6/. Both believe that the man their mother is having an affair with is
really his father. Oskar believes that Jan Bronski (a Pole) is his father. Saleem believes that Nadir Khan (muslim) is his father. Significant because Oskar is German and Saleem is Hindu.
7/. In many ways The Tin Drum retells the days of Grass’s childhood in Danzig. In many ways Midnight’s Children retells the days of Rushdie’s childhood growing up in Mumbai.
Tags: books, culture, danzig, gabriel garcia marquez, gdansk, gunter grass, literature, magic realism, mumbai, salman rushdie
June 5, 2009 at 11:42 am
I don’t recall (6) in the text of Midnight’s Children. The child swapping would fit, though, as both children have the blood of two political universes, and both are raised by a parent who isn’t necessarily his birth parent. I would say the clarity of the child swapping is analogous to the ambiguity in the Grass work.
June 9, 2009 at 1:16 am
Saleem is not Hindu in Midnight’s Children.
June 9, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Really? Are you sure If not Hindu what was he then?
June 29, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Muslim
August 27, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Well, the problem with the british and colonial writing is that it tends to borrow, and then forget. Yes, midnight’s children owesa lot to tin drum, and rushdie, to be fair, has himself said that he learnt from tin drum. But remember, the granda of all is not Grass, but Borges, who, in a far better, meticulous, and artisitc way, produced the first actually magical realitic texts.
The broblem with magical realism of rushdie is, that it it too easy to costruct. It need nothing, not even a lyrical prose – it is a torrent gush, untamed, and stupid at most times.
September 18, 2009 at 12:15 pm
Your take on this is interesting, although I don’t necessarily see the usefulness in finding out who invented magic realism and then assign to that writer the most supreme value. As mj has pointed out, Grass himself wasn’t free from the legacies of previous authors, and his fiction displays affinities with previous magic realist texts.
I find Midnight’s Children (and Rushdie’s writing overall) to be nothing but a joyous and generous admission of the important role played by the literary legacies of previous authors. And he makes this quite blatant. Trying to ascertain the value of his work in terms of originality is in a way undermining what he is trying to do: he’s reassessing Indian colonial and postcolonial history in a way nobody had done before. The elements borrowed from previous writers (Grass, Kafka, Forster, Kipling, Marquez) are all there, but despite his willing engagement with previous texts, he’s ultimately doing his own thing.
Perhaps the key to appreciating Rushdie is to recognise that, beyond his sources, he has many things to say about his chosen topics. In Midnight’s Children, Saleem is a Muslim, although his constantly debated parenthood links him to Hinduism and Christianity. (This is in itself a deliberate attempt at portraying the religious complexities of the country.) But Saleem self-identifies as Muslim, and is therefore part of a cultural minority in India, which is key to his character. The fact that you find the Hindu and Muslim faiths interchangeable possibly means (and I apologise in advance for making a strong point here) that you haven’t engaged that much with the content of Rushdie’s novel and have remained in the surface of form.
September 19, 2009 at 10:42 am
No, it was just a long time since i read the novel. I don’t think the faiths are interchangeable. I still think he borrowed the architecture of Grass’s book.
October 23, 2009 at 1:51 am
god!!!! whats with the religion thing with the above commenters……
get a life people….
i think they did both a good job!!!! and thats that….
November 15, 2009 at 4:35 am
When i first read midnight’s children back in the early 80’s I was most impressed by the structure of the novel. Later, when I read the Tin Drum, I was stunned by how much Rushdie had “borrowed” from it. The magical child, the change in the child’s power midway through the book, even details like the lover hiding under a woman’skirt, and also the seemingly brilliant black and green passage, all appear in the Gunter Grass novel. Yes, he transformed the context to the subcontinent, but that was a grafting of new flesh onto old bones. Creative, yes, (and I still love the book); but he should have been more explicit in acknowledging his debt to Grass. I’m surprised more has not been made of this. Everyone these days screams about “plagarism”at the drop of a hat, but this hat has had a pretty long ride.