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Nov. 28th, 2007 06:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
commotiocordisFor safety. Plz to be ignoring, is only public so I don't have to fool around with logging in if I need it in some kind of rapidy haste.
“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” –Faulkner
Memory is visceral, not cognitive but sense based—power being nose, when both scent and memory processed through same portion of brain
connect
Passage begins with yet another tacit declaration of S’s superiority in the realm of history, likens self to prophet which gives authority to make up what he cannot remember—future, like history, through his gut or nose, because as memory, history is his power, he has the authorization to do that
S goes over this role as reverse-prophet, as quasi-supernatural thing put on earth to record history throughout entire novel
--Drainage and the Desert: “Those who follow in my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work, this source-book, this Hadith or Purana or Grundrisse, for guidance and inspiration.”
Right there alone, puts himself, his life story and that of his ancestors on the same level as that of Mohammed or the post-Vedic Hindu scriptures or a great philosopher like Karl Marx
Narcissism, justified or not, comes across woven through entire recap-turned-future. Is this importance, his sense of these intangible yet irrefutable ties to history that keep his dictation of the future moving back to the past—as talk about plans for wedding, Reverend Mother’s watching ghost, the boy who dreamed at the Pioneer Café, the dog his father killed
As he continues this future narrative, he’s pulled away from Padma into the milling throng of what seems to be all of India, and when Saleem reveals that “now [he] sees familiar faces in the crowd, they are all here,” the crowd becomes not faceless people to the tune of India’s 650 million, but India itself, the India that Saleem has been destined since birth to carry the history of.
Padma forgotten after they are pulled apart because Padma present and future, past is where his burden lies
Just like when lost memory became translucent, just like when father falling apart, this morass of people, the burden of memory overtaking Saleem’ identity -> falling apart.
There’s a line about a paragraph past this passage, “. . . it is both the privilege and the curse of MC to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace,”
Perfect summation of Saleem’s attitude towards being honored MC--
He is the one more than three,
in the crumbling tower where time seems to stop and speed up simultaneously and he is immune from the war,
he’s the bomb in Bombay, separate immune above the natural rules of English of time he is one more than three, not the past present or future, but commenting, detailing them all from his perch in this time-ignoring bubble imposed upon him by the weight of history he feels has come upon him by his status as a surviving midnight’s child
Seems to me there's a lot you can talk about here. Saleem's referencing just about everything in the book thus far, ("perhaps Naseem in honor of Reverend Mother", "taxi-cab driven by a country boy who once dreamed, at the Pioneer Cafe", "along Hornby Vellard, where a dog was left to die"), and I'm sure you can successfully BS about why he's mentioning the dog his dad killed or whatever (my explanation: he's nuts and rambling). Padma isn't mentioned at all--his first wife, left out of this little reunion? Padma is present and future, and past is where his burden lies. Something deeply significant in that, I'm sure. If you like, you can ramble on a little about the line near the end of the uberlong paragraph where he says "I have been so-many too-many persons, life unlike syntax allows one more than three", and attach some deep (or shallow, I'm not picky) meaning to it. Go on at length about why he's ending the novel this way (my bet: he wants it to stick in the minds of readers, and maybe life will leave him alone if everyone thinks he dies like this). If you're really stuck, just go on about the significance of the whole "thousand and one" thing in the final paragraph, you can probably get a whole presentation out of that alone.
O eternal opposition of inside and outside! Because a human being,
inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all
kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one
person one minute and another the next, The body, on the other hand,
is homogeneous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness… Uncork
the body, and God knows what you permit to come tumbling out.
Suddenly you are forever other than you were; and the world becomes
such that parents can cease to be parents, and love can turn to hate.”
(Rushdie 1995: 236-37.)
syntax -- from Greek, from syntassein to arrange together
Just like Saleem tries to organize scents his now unplugged nose can take in in “Jamila Singer” -- by color and weight and shape
Just like organizing people around him by their role in his life – Mary Pereira=mother, Schaapsteker = father
Mughal emperor -- "Gar firdaus, ruhe zamin ast, hamin asto, hamin asto, hamin asto"
If there’s a heaven on earth, it’s here [Kashmir]
Also autobiographist noted for wild and adventurous stories, the validity of which often questioned
“Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.” –Faulkner
Memory is visceral, not cognitive but sense based—power being nose, when both scent and memory processed through same portion of brain
connect
Passage begins with yet another tacit declaration of S’s superiority in the realm of history, likens self to prophet which gives authority to make up what he cannot remember—future, like history, through his gut or nose, because as memory, history is his power, he has the authorization to do that
S goes over this role as reverse-prophet, as quasi-supernatural thing put on earth to record history throughout entire novel
--Drainage and the Desert: “Those who follow in my footsteps will, however, inevitably come to this present work, this source-book, this Hadith or Purana or Grundrisse, for guidance and inspiration.”
Right there alone, puts himself, his life story and that of his ancestors on the same level as that of Mohammed or the post-Vedic Hindu scriptures or a great philosopher like Karl Marx
Narcissism, justified or not, comes across woven through entire recap-turned-future. Is this importance, his sense of these intangible yet irrefutable ties to history that keep his dictation of the future moving back to the past—as talk about plans for wedding, Reverend Mother’s watching ghost, the boy who dreamed at the Pioneer Café, the dog his father killed
As he continues this future narrative, he’s pulled away from Padma into the milling throng of what seems to be all of India, and when Saleem reveals that “now [he] sees familiar faces in the crowd, they are all here,” the crowd becomes not faceless people to the tune of India’s 650 million, but India itself, the India that Saleem has been destined since birth to carry the history of.
Padma forgotten after they are pulled apart because Padma present and future, past is where his burden lies
Just like when lost memory became translucent, just like when father falling apart, this morass of people, the burden of memory overtaking Saleem’ identity -> falling apart.
There’s a line about a paragraph past this passage, “. . . it is both the privilege and the curse of MC to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace,”
Perfect summation of Saleem’s attitude towards being honored MC--
He is the one more than three,
in the crumbling tower where time seems to stop and speed up simultaneously and he is immune from the war,
he’s the bomb in Bombay, separate immune above the natural rules of English of time he is one more than three, not the past present or future, but commenting, detailing them all from his perch in this time-ignoring bubble imposed upon him by the weight of history he feels has come upon him by his status as a surviving midnight’s child
Seems to me there's a lot you can talk about here. Saleem's referencing just about everything in the book thus far, ("perhaps Naseem in honor of Reverend Mother", "taxi-cab driven by a country boy who once dreamed, at the Pioneer Cafe", "along Hornby Vellard, where a dog was left to die"), and I'm sure you can successfully BS about why he's mentioning the dog his dad killed or whatever (my explanation: he's nuts and rambling). Padma isn't mentioned at all--his first wife, left out of this little reunion? Padma is present and future, and past is where his burden lies. Something deeply significant in that, I'm sure. If you like, you can ramble on a little about the line near the end of the uberlong paragraph where he says "I have been so-many too-many persons, life unlike syntax allows one more than three", and attach some deep (or shallow, I'm not picky) meaning to it. Go on at length about why he's ending the novel this way (my bet: he wants it to stick in the minds of readers, and maybe life will leave him alone if everyone thinks he dies like this). If you're really stuck, just go on about the significance of the whole "thousand and one" thing in the final paragraph, you can probably get a whole presentation out of that alone.
O eternal opposition of inside and outside! Because a human being,
inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all
kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one
person one minute and another the next, The body, on the other hand,
is homogeneous as anything. Indivisible, a one-piece suit, if you will. It is important to preserve this wholeness… Uncork
the body, and God knows what you permit to come tumbling out.
Suddenly you are forever other than you were; and the world becomes
such that parents can cease to be parents, and love can turn to hate.”
(Rushdie 1995: 236-37.)
syntax -- from Greek, from syntassein to arrange together
Just like Saleem tries to organize scents his now unplugged nose can take in in “Jamila Singer” -- by color and weight and shape
Just like organizing people around him by their role in his life – Mary Pereira=mother, Schaapsteker = father
Mughal emperor -- "Gar firdaus, ruhe zamin ast, hamin asto, hamin asto, hamin asto"
If there’s a heaven on earth, it’s here [Kashmir]
Also autobiographist noted for wild and adventurous stories, the validity of which often questioned
