Ethical Responsibility in Midnight’s Children. Clinical Storytelling as a Form of Biological and Cultural Survival

The present essay discusses the bioethical concern in the narration of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). The multiple Booker Prize winner has been acknowledged as one of the prominent literary works of the past century, and a major source of critical inquiry, especially for Postmodern and Postcolonial criticism. Yet, not much has been said about the interpretative strategies on which narration relies to convey its meanings, especially with regard to the novel’s ethical and moral concern for the transmission of knowledge, be it biological or cultural. The present paper tackles this aspect of Rushdie’s masterful work by discussing how the literary connection between Saleem’s fictional world and the history of India represents a strategic confounding of different narrative and historical planes. Among the effects of this literary operation is the overlapping of Saleem’s family with his siblings of the midnight, which results in Saleem’s progressive disillusionment with the idea of familial belonging based on blood ties to embrace, in its place, an elective affiliation as theorized by Edward Said. This comes from the awareness that emotional bonding is the only true source of ethical responsibility towards one’s own community and its future generations. Following Judith Butler, his biographical recount can thus be seen as metanarratively concerned with establishing a bond with the reader through what will be defined here as ‘clinical storytelling’, a very peculiar style based on a medical epistemology embedded in the magical realist tone of the novel, whose unreliability appears to be especially effective in raising and exploring ethical questions about literary authorship, storytelling and cultural transmission.