This presentation is about deconstructive reading of symbols in Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children'.

1. DECONSTRUCTIVE
READING
OF
SYMBOLS

2. Plato – Phaedrus
• Plato writes of a fictionalized conversation between Socrates and a student, in which Socrates tries to convince
the student that writing is inferior to speech.
• Socrates uses the Egyptian myth of Thoth's creation of writing to illustrate his point.
• As the story goes, Thoth presents his invention to the god-king of Upper Egypt for judgment. Upon its
presentation, Thoth offers script as a pharmakon for the Egyptian people.
• The Greek word pharmakon poses a quandary for translators- it is both a remedy and a poison. In the proffering
of a pharmakon, Thoth presents it as its true meaning- a harm and benefit.
• The god-king, however, refuses the invention. Through various reasonings, he determines the pharmakon of
writing to be a bad thing for the Egyptian people.
• The pharmakon, the undecidable, has been returned decided. The problem, as Derrida reasons, is this: since the
word pharmakon, in the original Greek, means both a remedy and a poison, it cannot be determined as fully
remedy or fully poison. Thus rejected writing as fully poison in Socrates' retelling of the tale, thus shutting out
the other possibilities.

3. Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy (La pharmacie de Platon,
1969)
• Derrida's interpretation of Plato's notion of pharmakon.
• Pharmakon is the Greek word which has two opposite meanings - "cure" and "poison".
• The concept of pharmakon, according to Derrida, produces a play of binary oppositions crucial to
Western logocentric tradition: remedy/poison, speech/writing, good/bad, interior/ exterior, etc.
• In Plato's Pharmacy, Derrida questions the main distinction between speech and writing. He argues
that speech was viewed as the "original" form of language by Plato and the Western tradition. Writing
is a later development - essentially bad, external to memory, productive not of truth but of
appearances.
• Derrida, in his theory of archi-writing, turns upside down the opposition by showing that speech is a
form of writing. Also, when reading Plato, Derrida reveals an interconnection between the words
pharmakon (remedy), pharmakeus (sorcerer, magi- , magician) and pharmakos (scapegoat) which
was never used by Plato but, according to Derrida, plays an important role in the character of
Socrates.
• Socrates as pharmakeus becomes the most famous pharmakos in athens after he drinks the
pharmakon.

4. The Perforated Sheet reveals # conceals
• 'Condemned by a perforated sheet to a life of fragments,'
• The narration is like perforated sheet. It does not allow us to see everything in full view – or like a cinematic ‘long
shot’. The memory of Saleem is also perforated. It sees things in bits and pieces.
• The hole of the perforated sheet represents a portal for vision but also a void that goes unfilled.
• The perforated sheet through which Aadam Aziz falls in love with his future wife performs several different
symbolic functions throughout the novel. Unable to see his future wife as a whole, Aadam falls in love with her in
pieces. As a result, their love never has a cohesive unity that holds them together. Their love is fragmented, just as
their daughter Amina’s attempts to fall in love with her husband are also fragmented. Haunted by the memory of her
previous husband, Amina embarks on a campaign to fall in love with her new husband in sections, just as her father
once fell in love with her mother. Despite her best attempts, Amina and Ahmed’s love also lacks the completion and
unity necessary for genuine love to thrive.
• The perforated sheet makes one final appearance with Jamila Singer: in an attempt to preserve her purity, she
shrouds herself completely, except for a single hole for her lips. The perforated sheet, in addition to preserving her
purity, also reduces to her to nothing more than a voice. The sheet becomes a veil that separates her from the rest of
the world and reflects her inability to accept affection.

5. The Silver Spittoon - Memory # amnesia
• The silver spittoon given to Amina as part of her dowry by the Rani of Cooch Naheen is responsible for
Saleem’s loss of memory. Even when he has amnesia, however, Saleem continues to cherish the spittoon as if
he still understands its historical value.
• Following the destruction of his family, the silver spittoon is the only tangible remnant of Saleem’s former life,
and yet it too is eventually destroyed when Saleem’s house in the ghetto is torn down.
• Spittoons, once used as part of a cherished game for both old and young, gradually fell out of use: the old men
no longer spit their betel juice into the street as they tell stories, nor do the children dart in between the streams
as they listen.
• The spittoon is the symbol of a vanishing era, which, in retrospect, seemed simpler and easier. And so,
although Saleem may not be able to recall the specific association between the spittoon and his family, the
spittoon maintains its symbolic quality as both a container of memory and source of amnesia.

6. The Silver
Spittoon
• Memory as well as amnesia
• In Midnight’s Children, spittoons initially represent Old India but grow to also symbolize Saleem’s
identity, which is intimately linked to his country given that he is one of the children of
midnight. Rani gives Mumtaz and Nadir a silver spittoon when they are married, and they frequently
play hit-the-spittoon, an old-fashioned game in which they try to spit tobacco juice into a spittoon
from various distances, similar to the old men in the town of Agra.
• After Saleem’s family is killed during the Indo-Pakistani war, he is hit in the head with the exact same
silver spittoon, and he instantly forgets his name and his entire identity.
• However, even with amnesia, Saleem knows that the spittoon is important, and he carries it with him
throughout the war. To Saleem, the spittoon represents his identity, and he carries it with him until it is
lost in Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.

7. Pickles
Preserves # destroys
• Pickles are repeatedly mentioned in Midnight’s Children, and while they are often viewed as a phallic
symbol, they are generally representative of the power of preservation within Rushdie’s
novel. Saleem is the manager of a pickle factory, and he preserves pickles and chutneys each day.
• He also attempts to preserve his own life story like the pickles in his factory. Saleem largely manages
to preserve his life through storytelling, offering a bit of immortality to a dying man, and he also labels
and stores each chapter he writes in a pickle jar, so that they may be read later, by his son for
example.
• This connection between pickles and the preservation of stories endures until the very end of the
book, when Saleem ceremoniously labels his very last pickle jar as a way of closing out his story and
his life as a whole.

8. Knees and Nose Strength # Weakness : Destructor # Creator
• The seer, Ramram, predicts the birth of “knees and nose,” which represent Shiva and Saleem, respectively.
• In addition to symbolizing each boy’s special power, knees and nose also play another role.
• When Aadam Aziz first kneels down to pray, his knees touch the floor and his nose hits the ground. Knees and
nose, in this instance, represent an act of prayer, as well as the submission and humility necessary for faith.
After hitting his nose on the ground, however, Aadam rejects that submission, and a hole opens up inside of
him.
• Knees and nose also become significant with Farooq’s death via a sniper bullet. Shot, Farooq first drops to his
knees, then hits his nose on the ground. Just as Aadam bowed before god, Farooq bows before death.
• Shiva is suspected of killing a string of prostitutes with his powerful knees, while Saleem uses his nose to
discover the most decrepit prostitute in the city.
• Knees and nose—just like Shiva and Saleem, destruction and creation, faith and humility—are inextricably
related.

9. Saleem and Shiva
• Saleem is Shiva and Shiva is Saleem . . . SwappedChildren
• Binary opposition . . .
• Complementary to each other likeYin andYang . . .
• If Saleem is allegorical India, the history of India is incomplete without the story of Shiva . . .
• Shiva is unaware about him being ‘magical child’ of the Midnight . . . Saleem, suffers from amnesia.
• Saleem’s amnesia is the result of the burden of memory . . . And Amnesiac nations like India with long history
and heritage sufferes from the burden of memory. . .
• Shiva’s forgetfulness is more menacing and threatening to the nation . . . Likes of him are easy ploy to ‘The
Widow’s political ambitions to control the nation…