The Novel Consciousness in Midnight’s Children Anonymous College

In Atlas of the European Novel, Franco Moretti argues that “The novel functions as the symbolic form of the nation-state ...and it’s a form that not only does not conceal the nation’s internal divisions, but manages to turn them into a story.” He characterises the ‘nation-state’ as a single geographical territory in which a nation’s pluralistic ideological and cultural landscape coincides with the monolithic notion of a political state, resulting in irreconcilable “internal divisions”. Moretti thus posits the novel as, in the words of Ian Watt in Rise of the Novel, the only “logical literary vehicle of culture” (Watt 13), a discursive site through which an inconclusive dialogue between the multiple fragments that constitute the national discourse can be narrated. It challenges the “literary traditionalism” (Watt 13) of “previous literary forms [that] had reflected the general tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major test of truth”(Watt 13). Hence, this essay aims to explicate how the novel Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie subverts the binary between nation and narrative, asserting that it is only through “individualist and innovating reorientation” (Watt 13) that a literary work can...