When considering the spectrality of Midnight’s Children, a multitude of questions are conjured. And the text ends with the disintegration of Saleem as the singular body of India into the whirling mass which symbolises India in all its pluralities. The twenty-six chutney jars at the end of the text provide Rushdie with his grand metaphor of the ‘chutnification of history’, in which the truth claims of history are subverted by the distortions, intensifications, and amalgamations of memory. Memory, history, and nation inform, antagonise, haunt each other. The text delves into the recesses of primordial memory, cuts up and rearranges history and figures nation as dream. Midnight’s Children is a novel about memory, history, and nation, but not an extrication of these terms from one another, nor a clarification of what each of these terms mean singularly within the post-independence Indian context. Hauntology has the potential to resolve, or at least better understand, these questions. The figure of the ghost is so prominent in the text because the questions of India’s past, present and future, even of India’s being, conjure spectres. Midnight’s Children contains a spectral panoply, littered with spectres, djinns, spirits, and the leprous ghost of Joseph D’Costa, a communist during his life and a literalised ‘spectre of Communism’ after his death. The question ‘whither India?’ offers a lens through which to read the text, for its capaciousness creates a constellation of further questions: not only ‘ whither India’ but also ‘ whence/ what/ who India’and the mordant evocations of ‘ wither India ’. Salman Rushdie, in his novel Midnight’s Children (1981), also turns to spectres when writing a novel about memory, origin, and nation. To respond to the question ‘whither Marx?’ Derrida turned to spectres. The ghost has presence but not a body it is neither alive nor dead and it does not belong to only past, present, or future, but all of them. Hauntology thus allows for the ‘disjointedness’ of time, origin and being to be understood through the figure of the ghost (or spectre). It would comprehend them, but incomprehensibly. It would harbour within itself, but like circumscribed places or particular events, eschatology and teleology themselves. This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being (of the ‘to be,’ assuming that it is a matter of Being in the ‘to be or not to be,’ but nothing is less certain). Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time. Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time, makes of it also a last time. The figure of the ghost, which features so prominently in the text, prompts Derrida to ask: ‘ What is a ghost?’ In attempting to resolve this question, Derrida proposes a new theoretical framework, that of hauntology: This leads to an exploration of the spirit/spectres of Marx and the relationship between Marxism and deconstruction. In Specters of Marx, Derrida performs an extended close reading of the (re)appearance of the ghost in Hamlet and unpacks the complexities of line, ‘The time is out of joint’. This was the question posed to Jacques Derrida, resulting in his lecture and subsequent ‘extended and clarified’ book, both entitled ‘Specters of Marx’.
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