translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

(Gasiorek, 1995: 116) While postmodernism does not recognize any
objective cause and negates referentiality, metaphysical realism proclaims a
causal description of the truth: “language is constitutive to knowledge,
which is always mediated, but which, still, establishes a link with an
independent reality which constrains what can be asserted plausibly about
it.” (Gasiorek, 1995: 199)
Realism is a presence within postmodernism, a direction of the
contemporary British novel, the realist writers being aware of the
epistemological and aesthetic difficulties involved in the literary
representation, of the fact that any interpretation of reality is, partially,
constituted from discourses. Situated within the inescapable context of
postmodernism, novelists like Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Salman
Rushdie try to undermine and contest its limits and, being aware that
absolute, complete knowledge cannot be achieved, they attempt to labor
history into meaningful accounts of it, considering the moral implications
of their interpretations as well.
Salman Rushdie labels as problematic the connection between the
real past and the personal imagination past. In Midnight’s Children, the
difference between reality and fantasy should be established, as verifiable
historical instances are constantly referred to and constitute the reference
against which the fictitious experience works, establishing its limits.
History is envisaged as collective fiction in which individuals choose to
participate; if history can be made up of fiction, then fiction, in its turn, can
be composed of history. (Batty, 1994: 212) The relationship between the
historical and the fictitious dimensions is not necessarily a dialectic one:
fabulation and history could be identical.
1. What is history?
For Rushdie, history is made up of those elements that are meaningful
to the story-teller/narrator, the singular and apparently insignificant
incident being often valorized. The survival in one’s memory of the ordinary
and the trivial transforms it into a symbol, a signifying element, into the
extra-ordinary; the remembered past element is given value against the
official variant. The final meaning of history is built from the memories
related to certain fragments of the past. In Midnight’s Children we witness the
interpenetration of historical events and personal activities, the trivial and
the important moments amalgamating and thus undermining the
pretensions of history to neutrality and objectivity. Reality is a carnivalesque
space; in fact, multiple realities, the space being open to various voices;
history becomes the space for dialogue, not being controlled by any ultimate
authority, the purpose being the dialogue in itself.
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