Midnight, S Children

Midnight’s Children   as a Postmodern novel
No matter how hard one searches, there is no single , unifying   definition of postmodernism . As an aesthetic   practice, a cultural epoch or philosophy it is plural, fluid and open. Indeed any attempt to define postmodernism immediately undermines and betrays its values , principles and practices. Postmodernism is loose, flexible and contingent. It is   possible to declare, with any degree of confidence, only that Postmodernism is a site of conflict, negotiation, and debate. Regarding literature one might say that Postmodernist fiction is an international phenomenon with immense diversity and it is not easy to map Postmodern fictions. Raymond Federman argues in the same vein when he says,   in Self- Reflexive Fiction, “it can not be said that these writers ……formed a unified movement for which a coherent theory could be formulated.” Still there had been attempts to chart the Postmodern qualities of literature as has been done by   Barry Lewis, in The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, “ Some of the dominant features of their postmodernist fictions include: temporal disorder; the erosion of the sense of the time; a pervasive and pointless use of pastiche; a foregrounding of words as fragmenting material signs; the loose association of ideas ; paranoia; and vicious circles   or a loss of distinction between logically separate levels of discourse.” John W. Aldridge posits the same idea in The American Novel and the Way We Live Now   with a little more vehemence, “ In the fiction of Postmodern writers …….virtually everything and everyone exists in such a radical state of disorder an aberration that there is no way of determining   from which conditions in the real world they have been derived or from what standard of sanity they may be said to depart.” Salman Rushdie   is undoubtedly one of the major authors of Postmodern fiction as well as an important   theoretician whose   Haroun and the Sea of Stories , according to Chris-...