The paper reveals a striking relationship between Salman Rushdie's Midnight's
Children and art theories and it further attempts to carefully examine this relationship by
contrasting with the visual art technique of collage or bricolage. Similar to the discourse of
Postrnodernism, the paper seeks to stress the possibility that there is not one world, but rather
many worlds which have been lived according to different speeds and rhythms, producing
contradictory histories.
The relations between present and past, tradition and newness are exemplified in
most Postmodem literature, such as Midnight's Children. The readers are challenged by an
art of local and broadened meaning by Rushdie's use of the technique of collage or bricolage.
Doctor Aziz's arrangement of fragments in his mind is similar to some painters' arrangement
of objects. The world of the imagination--the entire realm of fantasy--actually lies beyond
the realm of the real.
In Midnight's Children the complex play of imagery, spliced like a series of film
clips, constructs the history brought into the present. The world of some painters' collages,
like that of Rushdie's constructions, is reality turned into fantasy. The meanings produced in
Midnight's Children are derived neither from the past nor the present alone, but from the
new uses to which old ingredients are put. Collage is a particular frank expression of this
process.
While Modernist aesthetics proposes a "closed" notion of the work of art as a finished
and complete object, Postrnodernist aesthetics privileges an art in process, which opens
on to the unexpected, as in late collage works or bricolage ones. The paper also tends to present
a renewed, Postrnodernist way of interpreting or teaching Rushdie's fiction.
Relation:
The Proceedings of the Seventh International Symposium on English Teaching, v.1=第七屆中華民國英語文教學國際研討會論文集第一冊, pp.331-338
