Essay: Non-Identity in Rushdie and Woolf

In her 1923 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Virginia Woolf places characterization at the center of the novelist’s concerns. For Woolf, the novelist is defined primarily by his or her obsession with capturing character, a task she deems nearly impossible. “Few catch the phantom [of character]; most have to be content with a scrap of her dress or a wisp of her hair” (21). Despite this ostensible focus on characterization, Woolf has been criticized for creating shallow, incomplete characters in her works. Indeed, in her novel, Jacob’s Room, published in 1922, remarkably little attention is given to the title character. Only a vague outline is provided of the progression of Jacob Flanders from early childhood to his death, and key transitional moments in Jacob’s life are elided from the narrative. Whereas the title character is often absent from the action and narration of Jacob’s Room, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children protagonist Saleem Sinai is omnipresent throughout that narrative. The 1980 work serves as an obsessive study of the identity of the novel’s protagonist, who is also its narrator. Saleem explores his identity through the emotions, ideologies, and physical traits of his many ancestors, neighbors, and friends; he scrutinizes his relationship with India and the role that he plays in its journey toward independence. However, whether they explore character through elision and multiple focalization or through a rigorous, insistent study of the main character, both Woolf’s and Rushdie’s protagonists remain mysterious. Despite the differences in their approach to character, Jacob’s Room and Midnight’s Children both remain a testament to the ultimate unknowability of others and of the self.

Woolf has long been at the center of a critical debate regarding characterization in her novels. Her friend E.M Forster “agreed that she was not much good at characterization” (Hynes 37). Contemporary writer Arnold Bennett, toward whom Woolf’s response article “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” is directed, said about Jacob’s Room that “it is packed and bursting with originality, and it is exquisitely written … [but] the characters do not vitally survive in the mind, because the author has been obsessed by details of originality and cleverness” (qtd. in Hynes 37). Other critics are of the opposite opinion, praising Woolf for producing writing that is both experimental and realistic. Gerald Bullett writes of Jacob’s Room: “She has created a world; not a world of men and women, but a world of luminous twilight; queer, vivid, remote yet real; beautiful and elusive as a floating bubble” (794). Recent scholarship cites this vagueness of characterization as a general attribute of modernist works, in which personhood is explored in an unconventional, but not inferior, manner. Traditional character in modernist novels is fragmented and dissolved; “the watchwords in this appraisal of the modernist representation of personhood have been fluidity, porousness, borderlessness, rupture” (Abbott 394). 

 “Fluidity, porousness, borderlessness, rupture” – these words certainly fit Jacob’s character profile. The novel tracks his life, from childhood, through adulthood to death. Although the novel is roughly structured after the progression of his life, important events in his life are undertreated in the narrative. When Mrs. Flanders, Jacob, and his brother Archer return to the beach-house in Chapter One, after Jacob is lost at the beach, Mrs. Flanders is described as fussing over both Archer and Rebecca’s baby. Instead of tending to her own child who has recently experienced a small trauma “Mrs. Flanders bent over and looked anxiously at the baby, asleep, but frowning” (9). Similarly, at the very end of the novel, Jacob’s death is not explicitly treated. Instead, it is only alluded to through the helplessness of his mother and of his friend Bonamy as they survey what remains of Jacob: a rocking chair, unanswered letters, a pair of shoes. “’He left everything just as it was,’ Bonamy marvelled. ‘Nothing arranged. All his letters strewn about for any one to read. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back?’” (139) Bonamy calls out “Jacob! Jacob!” (139), echoing Archer, who, seeking the lost protagonist, cries for his brother in Chapter One. Jacob has lived, and died, but still remains unfound, a mystery.

This marginalization of Jacob is created not only through the choice of events, but through the choice of focalizers at key moments in the narrative. When Jacob leaves his home and his mother for the first time to go to Cambridge, this monumental event in the young man’s life is focalized through the eyes of a stranger. Mrs. Norman, a middle-aged passenger on the train to Cambridge, nervously observes Jacob as he enters her train car. She fears being “shut up alone, in a railway carriage, with a young man … it is a fact that men are dangerous” (23). Instead of relating Jacob’s own thoughts and emotions, Woolf chooses to relate this event through a person who is not only of no importance to Jacob, but who initially antagonizes him to a considerable extent. 

In the course of the train ride, Mrs. Norman’s initial impression of Jacob shifts, as it becomes apparent that he intends her no harm. “When the train drew into the station, Mr. Flanders burst open the door, and put the lady's dressing-case out for her, saying, or rather mumbling: ‘Let me’ very shyly; indeed he was rather clumsy about it”. Mrs. Norman changes her mind about Jacob: “She noted his indifference, presumably he was in some way or other--to her at least--nice, handsome, interesting, distinguished, well built, like her own boy?” (24) 

Mrs. Norman is unreliable: at first, she appraises Jacob one way, and then another. Her focus is clearly turned inward, toward her peculiar, subjective fears, and her personal life. Her profile of Jacob’s character is therefore rendered of no use to the reader, in terms of its relevance to his actual personality. Instead, what we do get is a vividly convincing momentary insight into the mind of Mrs. Norman. The woman’s pathetic fear of a young man who clearly has no interest in her is highly believable; the shift in her perception of him too is realistic, as his indifference allays her anxiety.

In this scene, Woolf deftly engages the sympathy of the readers toward Mrs. Norman; just as quickly, however, the reader must release her. After a single train ride together, the two strangers part way forever.

‘Who...’ said the lady, meeting her son; but as there was a great crowd on the platform and Jacob had already gone, she did not finish her sentence … this sight of her fellow-traveller was completely lost in her mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing-well twirls in the water and disappears for ever (24).

In Jacob’s Room, Woolf does not endeavor to encompass the entirety of her protagonist’s inner world. Our knowledge of his hopes, desires, and fears is very limited; the factual information we have about his age or his physical appearance is almost nonexistent. Instead, Woolf creates a heartbreakingly realistic portrait of the modern everyman as he is perceived by the world. Every day of urban modern life we encounter hundreds of strangers whom we are likely to never see again, and whom we never give a second thought to. Jacob’s life is the sum of the people he encounters: mother and friends and lovers, but mostly, and overwhelmingly, strangers, for whom Jacob’s entire life is no more than a pin dropped into a wishing well. And so the narrative techniques of multiple focalizations, and massive elision, suit Jacob’s Room perfectly. Like all the strangers in our lives, Jacob remains indistinct, insignificant, unknown.

Whereas Woolf takes a subdued, subtle approach to the characterization of Jacob, Rushdie tackles the identity of his protagonist Saleem head-on. As we saw, for much of Jacob’s Room the title character was absent; in Midnight’s Children Saleem is overwhelmingly ubiquitous. Saleem narrates not only the events of his own life, but those of his country and his ancestors, events that occurred decades before his own birth, in a narrative mode some scholars term the “telepathic first person” (Jacob and Sussman 106) or “omniscient first person” (Alber et al. 120). But Saleem is not content with merely relating the events of the past. Instead, he obsessively forges bonds between himself and every person and occurrence in his. He inherits his baldness from his biological father William Methwold. He describes his grandfather’s nose with great detail and then establishes its relation to himself. “There it was, reflected in the water, undulating like a mad plantain in the centre of his face … this colossal apparatus which was to be my birthright” (8). Saleem’s desire for connectedness is so profound that he seeks similarity in people to whom he is not related, and even in objects. “My inheritance grows, because now I have the mythical golden teeth of the boatman Tai … I have Ilse Lubin for suicide and pickled snakes for virility” (119). 

Saleem doesn’t associate his identity only with other individuals, however. He establishes intricate links between himself and his native land, India. In the very first paragraph of Midnight’s Children, Saleem describes how he “had been mysteriously handcuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained to those of my country” (3). Throughout his life, important dates in his life coincide with important events in the history of India. Saleem is born on August 15, 1947, the day India declares independence; at nine years old he acquires his power of telepathy as “elections were approaching and language marchers were fighting over Bombay” (196); he has dreams involving Kashmir, the birthplace of his grandfather, and shortly thereafter India and Pakistan begin a war over that stretch of land. Obsessed with the link between India and himself, Saleem sees connections everywhere. “I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively … Actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically, and passively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world” (273). 

Saleem’s strange wordplay is certainly inspired by a passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In that play, after a troupe of actors has arrived at the palace, Polonius praises their ability to perform a play in any of the generic types – “tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral” (2.2.397-99). Shakespeare, in that passage, pokes fun at our tendency to obsessively classify: he implies that the categories we apply to art and life alike are merely impositions we use to better understand it (Hubler 60). Saleem Sinai’s obsessive, compulsive quest for meaning in his life is as fruitful as Polonius’s. He sees metaphor and literalism everywhere; he has analyzed his life as though it were a carefully constructed work of literature, in which every person and occurrence has a meaning that is crucial to a plot. 

As filled as Saleem’s life story is with the certainty of dates and locations, however, it is riddled with hesitation and gloom. In addition to the physical traits he has inherited from his ancestors, he acquires a lot of ambiguity. He receives, for instance, “the hole in the centre of me which was my inheritance from my grandfather Aadam Aziz” (266). From his father Ahmed Sinai he receives the “inability to follow his own nose … making me, for year after year, incapable of sniffing out true road” (94). The physical and nationalistic identity Saleem has struggled to forge for himself gradually crumbled throughout the novel. For a sizeable chunk of the narrative, Saleem presents himself as the sole unique Midnight’s Child, whose destiny is intertwined with that of India. “I had been mysteriously handcuffed to history”, he says, “Soothsayers had prophesied me, newspapers celebrated my arrival, politicos ratified my authenticity” (3). As he grows up, however, his uniqueness is challenged by others. First, he is switched at birth with Shiva, the neighbor’s boy, whose renown eventually eclipses Saleem’s own as Shiva becomes a famous, decorated war-hero. In addition to sharing the journalistic spotlight, Saleem must now share with Shiva the heritage that he has struggled so hard to piece together for himself; he must consider the possibility that Shiva, as his parent’s true child, has a bigger claim to his grandfather’s nose and Tai’s teeth than he has. Indeed, Saleem fears Shiva so much that he flees from the magician’s ghetto back to his family, which he is no longer certain he can rightfully call his own. “Did Saleem, fearing a reunion with his alter ego … flee back into the bosom of that family whose comforts had been denied the war-hero?” (544). 

Within his family too his importance diminishes when Jamila discovers her singing prowess: “I knew … that, from now on, Jamila was the child who mattered, and that I must take second place to her talent for ever” (408). But the centrality of Saleem in his nation’s history, and with it, Saleem’s identity diminishes a thousandfold as he discovers that his legacy as a midnight’s child is in fact shared by one thousand other children. These children too were born on India’s first birthday, and they too possess magical powers; Saleem is no longer unique. Saleem’s selfhood continues to dilute as he acquires telepathic powers. Soon, he becomes little more than a broadcast tool for the other midnight’s children, and acts “as a sort of national network, so that by opening my transformed mind to all the children I could turn it into a kind of forum in which they could talk to one another, through me” (314). 

Saleem’s doubts become overwhelming, and he attempts to overcome a lifetime of assumptions about himself. His sense of self-fragmentation becomes manifested in his perception of his physical self. He feels that his body is cracking. “As cracks widen within – I can hear and feel the rip tear crunch – I begin to grow thinner, translucent almost; there isn't much of me left, and soon there will be nothing at all. Six hundred million specks of dust, and all transparent, invisible as glass” (535). His last hopes for some meaning reside in the book that he is writing. “I must work fast [at telling the tale], faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning - yes, meaning -something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity” (4). His life has no purpose unless he immortalizes it in writing; on its own, Saleem has come to realize, his life is meaningless.

There is the same sort of vacant hollowness about the characters of both Jacob and Saleem. Jacob is never comprehensively characterized; Saleem creates a detailed, all-encompassing identity for himself, only to have it crumble as he grows up. For Saleem, the impossibility of a unified identity is insurmountable. In the end, he is “only a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street” (664). Saleem’s pain is that of a powerful illusion born and shattered. Jacob’s death, on the other hand, is much more peaceful and resigned. His death does not come as a shock; he was never singled out as unique and extraordinary as Saleem believed he was. And so, Saleem is ushered out of the world with the violence of a body smashing, exploding, trampled; Jacob exits with the helpless acquiescence that life is merely something that once occupied a messy room and an empty pair of shoes.

Image by Tyo Taku

Works Cited

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Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. MIT. Web. 15 June 2012.

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Woolf, Virginia. "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 21-34.Google Books. Web. 15 June 2012.