NEOCOLONIAL NARCISSISM AND POSTCOLONIAL PARANOIA

Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children represents an attempt to provide a therapeutic understanding of history and its traumas in a manner that places individualized psychoanalytic constructions in juxtaposition to those of larger collectives. Following Rushdie's lead, I recuperate the problematic Freudian concepts of paranoia, narcissism and fetishism and offer them as models for the functioning of state power. I postulate interdependent senses of nation and state that incorporate both desire and narrative, and thus allow for the application of psychoanalytic terms: the nation is the way in which the state desires to be known, and the state is the way in which the nation desires not to be known. A psychoanalysis of the state thus reads on the institutional level for the same dynamics of repression, projection and displacement that Freud applied to the individual psyche. In Midnight's Children, Saleem Sinai represents a fictionalized engagement with Indian history that mirrors the narcissism, fetishism and paranoia of the state; his eventual destruction as Rushdie's final closural manoeuvre suggests the elimination, albeit temporary, of the impediments to a therapeutic relationship with Indian history. Through this reading of Rushdie's novel, I explore the intersections of historical, literary and psychological narratives that operate to provide readers with more tools for working through the traumas of colonialism and postcoloniality as they overwhelm individuals, communities and nations alike – especially in light of current trends towards the diminishment of the role of the nation in an era of globalization. In doing so, I explore how the individual postcolonial subject is constituted in relation to history, but also how the corporate, interpellating subject of the postcolonial nation-state constitutes itself in relation to that same history.