Midnight's Structure

How can we understand Midnight’s Children in light of Foucault’s understanding of the archive? Let’s start with Foucault.

Foucault considers the construction of the archive from the bottom – the base of structure that organizes and creates order. In the introduction to The Order of Things, Foucault states:

[...]I am concerned here with observing how a culture experiences the propinquity of things, how it establishes the tabula of their relationships and the order by which they must be considered. (xxiv)

He writes here of understanding the archaeology of culture, that which is used to create order and thus understanding within a culture. The tabula is the ground from which items can be compared/contrasted/discriminated, thus establishing order and meaning. In this exploration of archaeologies, Foucault turns to two works of fiction as exemplars of both the arbitrary construction of this order and the way in which it is transmitted. In Order, he begins by considering Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia with its seemingly odd categorization of creatures, emphasizing the archive as arbitrary and constructed. In Language, counter-memory, practice, he explicates Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, paying particular attention to the construction of the fantastic and the positioning of Temptation among, within, and encompassing other books/works. Here, he considers the construction of the library through repetition:

Only the assiduous clamor created by repetition can transmit to us what only happened once. The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is a phenomenon of the library. (91)

Thus repetition also works as establishing a ground for order, reasserting events or concepts to create new meaning in the spaces between.

Foucault is concerned throughout with the places where things touch, the intervals that exist between theses spaces, and how these delineations then create order and meaning for a culture. Juxtaposing this structure with Rushdie’s novel both establishes and validates Saleem Sinai’s assertions, offering clarity – a map or path – through the winding narrative.

Determining the archeology of culture is precisely the task of Saleem Sinai as narrator of Midnight's Children. His story is quite literally that of India, both in his telling (allowing ownership and shaping of the story) and in the intertwining of his life (and the lives of his family members) with the political developments of his country. This order is established in the first lines of the novel when Sinai outlines several important incidents in the story of his life - his birth at the stroke of midnight; the synchronicity of this with the rebirth of India as an independent nation; the importance of his nose, nicknames, and snot. This moment passes almost immediately into the past, with the retelling of his grandfather's history, again, with special emphasis on the nose.

In and of itself, this is not a terribly unusual beginning for any story; in Foucauldian terms, though, this lays the first table, establishing some categories for understanding the novel. Autobiographical stories are also often begun with the very beginning - the moment of birth, perhaps even the circumstances of that moment, which later serve to reveal something of someone's life. But this structure is repeated throughout the novel, both through the recurring themes (of noses, progeny, snot) and in the literal structure of preview (and later repetition of these important points).

Thus the winding narrative which constantly folds back upon itself is, in a Borges-ish way, very much an ordered archive.