Wednesday, April 13, 2016
Passing On Your Story
I was listening to a song in the car yesterday and the lyrics were "I'm well acquainted with villains that live in my bed / They beg me write them so they'll never die when I'm dead". It reminded me of the whole point of the story of Midnight's Children. He is writing the story in order to pass it on to the readers and share his story. That way when he finally "falls apart" his story will still live on. This song lyrics by Halsey is saying that these "villains" want her to write about them so that when she dies their beings will live on. This has been the main purpose of the past few stories that we've read so it immediately clicked in my mind as extremely relevant.
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4 comments:
When you mentioned the "past few stories," it clicked with me too. In "Things Fall Apart" and "Beloved" (sorry Ms. King but there's no option to italicize here), there's the idea of collective immortality - people and events live on as long as the story is being passed from generation to generation.
Speaking of Beloved, do you think that Toni Morrison included the concept of Obganje in her story as a reference to traditional Ibo religions, or was she simply symbolizing memory and the past with the ghost of Beloved?
I have actually wondered that myself, Antonio. I think that it is possibly that she created Beloved simply to symbolize memory and the past, but honestly, if she had done research on African culture before she wrote the novel, or had prior knowledge (which I think is likely) she probably would have come across the idea of Obanje at one point. I think it could definitely go either way, and I think you can get a lot out of both interpretations.
I've also noticed that this idea of writing everything down in order to immortalize it and pass it on has been a very frequent occurrence in our readings this year. However something that I think is interesting is 1) that Rushdie is using his character Saleem Sinai as the one who wishes to pass on the story instead of the author himself and 2) that Saleem says he is writing for his son, and really the only people he's actually writing the story for and the ones he wants to pass it on to are his son and Padma. However the way that Rushdie writes it seems that he is speaking to a larger audience.
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