Saleem as an Official Empath in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

Abstract

Literary authors sometimes use empathy as a tool to encourage border crossing between readers of different cultures or even to provide access to subjectivity of various characters. There is disagreement about the ethical aspects of narrative empathy between literary critics and affect theorists, but this article will focus more on the narrative techniques that elicit empathy. Affect theorists claim that literary characters are constructed by dominant ideologies such as race, gender, religion, and nationality (categorical identity) so the empathy that the readers feel for them propagate stereotypes. The point of literature is that it generates narrative empathy across diverse social groups which is valuable in this polarized world. Patrick Colm Hogan favors the romantic genre over the heroic genre in promoting empathy for the out-groups as the heroic plot facilitates pride for the ingroup (544). Arnab Roy also explores this concept in his article on The Book of Golden Leaves. According to Suzanne Keen, one test for the passport to enter an alien culture is the work’s capacity to invite narrative empathy (14). Keen, in her study of narrative empathy, identified a gap where there is less research on which narrative techniques lead to empathy (14). In Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the role of narrative empathy is to represent the traumatic impact of colonialism on Saleem Sinai, the central character of the novel. Rushdie employs the metaphor of Saleem’s body as a symbol for India and the emotional labor of his hybrid identity to invoke empathy for his character. By emotional labor, Rose Hackman means “putting other people’s feelings before one’s own” (29). Furthermore, Saleem’s telepathic powers give him access to the subjectivity of a thousand and one midnight’s children, adding to his emotional burden. This article also contributes to Rushdie’s notion of empathy in terms of the character gaining a new kind of truth and knowledge about the world.