Salman Rushdie: The Oral Narrative

In an interview in 1985, Rushdie talks about the techniques he used in Midnight's Children as his attempt to reproduce the traditional techniques of the Indian oral narrative tradition:

"Listening to this man (a famous story teller in Baroda) reminded me of the shape of the oral narrative. It's not linear. An oral narrative does not go from the beginning to the middle to the end of the story. It goes in great swoops, it goes in spirals or in loops, it every so often reiterates something that happened earlier to remind you, and then takes you off again, sometimes summarises itself, it frequently digresses off into something that the story teller appears just to have thought of, then it comes back to the main thrust of the narrative...

"So that's what Midnight's Children was, I think, and I think everything about Laurence Sterne, Garcia Marquez, and all that, comes a long way behind that, and that was the thing that I felt when writing it that I was trying to do."

Enlightenment

Everything I know
about Buddhism
I know
because of you.

I was only a child
then--I believed in you
I believed, I believed
in every word
you said.

One night I sat, cross-legged
and prayed, in front of
the altar because
you
told me to.

That night
instead of going to bed
that night because
you
told me to

I chanted
I chanted
a thousand
and one prayers:

Quan The Am Bo Tat...
Quan The Am Bo Tat...
Quan The Am Bo Tat...

I was too young
to understand
the journey.

I have lost my way since
the night you left me
the night
Quan Am passed me by.

Why I am cheating on you, notebook...

That's right, notebook. I am having an affair...with my new blog. I can't help it. I'm only human. This blog is so pretty, so public, so new. You, on the other hand, have always been so private, so primitive, so likely to expire. The idea of a writer traversing fields and ponds with her leather bound notebook in tow is so passe, so a romantic impossibility belonging only to the realm of writerly images. I was never able to bound you in cow skin. You abhorred it; I could barely afford it. And where are these fields and ponds that supposedly generate great characters for the next-great-Canadian-novels? I am still looking for that one tree you once promised me, that little moss covered nook at the base of a trunk, that deep contemplative shade away from the hazy summer sun. Hhmph. More writerly images.

I'm sorry, notebook. But I do think it's time we try other connections. I'll come back to you every once in a while. Will you be there for me in moments of crisis? moments of severe self-doubt? moments of unbearable loneliness? I'm sure my new blog is not equipped for containing such abysses. But you are. You have always been my most faithful crevasse.