魯西迪「午夜之子」之「魔幻寫實」及「自我」與「他者」

Magic Realism, Self, and Other in Rushdie's Midnight's Children

This study aims to explore the features of magical realism and the issues of the self and the other in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981). Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Gunter Grass's Tin Drum, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude are often associated with magical realism, constituting the most important trend in international contemporary fiction. Magic realism is a world-wide phenomenon and, because of this very fact, the geographical, historical and cultural contexts in which it has evolved are extremely diverse. This has given rise to an abundance in discourse strategies. Therefore, the purpose of this study is twofold: one is to explore the following six features associated with magic realism in Rushdie's Midnight's Children: (1) the perspective is that of 'the other'; (2) the duties of he readers, in decoding the texts, have 'evolved'; (3) the setting has a relatively specific historical, geographical and cultural context; (4) reality is presented as the human experience of the universe, and elements such as dream and imagination are consequently present; (5) a free, post-structuralist style of writing; and, finally, (6) the use of the fantastical and inexplicable, in its many shapes and forms, plays a major role in all magical-realist texts. The other is to discuss the issues of the self and the other in Midnight's Children. Midnight's Children centers on the author's native India and is acclaimed as a major milestone in magical realist and postcolonial literature. Midnight's Children is a loose allegory for events in India both before and, primarily, after the independence and partition of India, which took place at midnight on 15 August 1947. The protagonist and narrator of the story is Saleem Sinai, a telepath with an extraordinary nose. Born at the dawn of Indian independence and destined, upon his death, to break into as many pieces as there are citizens of India, Saleem Sinai manages to represent the entirety of India within his individual self. The notion that a single person could possibly embody a teeming, diverse, multitudinous nation like India encapsulates one of the novel's fundamental concerns: the tension between the single/self and the many/other. The dynamic relationship between Saleem's individual life and the collective life of the nation suggests that public and private will always influence one another, but it remains unclear whether they can be completely equated with one another. Throughout the novel, Saleem struggles to contain all of India within himself—to cram his personal story with the themes and stories of his country-only to disintegrate and collapse at the end of his attempt. Also, the battle between Saleem and Shiva reflects the ancient, mythological battle between the creative and destructive forces in the world. The enmity and tension between the two begin at the moment of their simultaneous births.本文旨在探討印裔英國作家薩爾曼‧魯西迪（Salman Rushdie）的《午夜之子》（Midnight’s Children）之魔幻寫實（magical realism）技巧及自我（self）與他者（other）的議題。魯西迪的《午夜之子》與葛拉斯（Gunter Grass）的《錫鼓》（Tin Drum）及馬奎斯（Gabriel Garcia Marquez）的《百年孤寂》（One Hundred Years of Solitude）並列為當代魔幻現實主義的代表作。英國文學評論家－大衛．洛吉（David Lodge）曾說過：「魔幻寫實能讓不可能發生的不可思議事件出現在寫實的故事中，是一種文學技巧，與當代拉丁美洲小說淵源頗深，魔幻寫實作家都經歷過巨大的歷史文化動盪與個人的磨折苦難，感到平靜的寫實主義沒辦法將那件事情表達出來。」魔幻寫實主義通常是興起於一些壓迫、獨裁或集權社會裡，可能表現了對於這樣一個高度危險的政治現實的一種調適。另一方面，魔幻寫實也超越了這些社會限制。不同於科幻和奇幻文學的是，魔幻寫實主義會將它的世界描寫得荒誕古怪、反覆無常。因此，本文以魯西迪的魔幻現實主義代表作《午夜之子》為文本，探討常出現的魔幻寫實主義技巧，並探討魯西迪如何將重要的歷史事件和主角的經歷巧妙地結合在一起，對印度次大陸從英國殖民地變成獨立國家轉化過程中的種種問題進行了探索。《午夜之子》以魔幻寫實的手法處理家族史，