translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

only way of existing in the present, to facilitate the search of a coherent
identity. Saleem is the promoter of the radically personal narration as
opposed to the hegemonic, domineering and official conception of history.
His narration proves uncertainty, is unreliable and does not claim to offer
absolute, totalizing explanations. Saleem contradicts himself, makes
mistakes, lies, still he pretends that he is India, that he plays an important
role in its history; thus, by Saleem’s allegorizing of his own history,
Rushdie parodies allegory, showing its dangers. Reality cannot be read
allegorically, but it must be created individually and, in the case of Saleem,
the creation of history happens in the very act of narration.
4. The relation of the individual with history (Saleem Sinai).
From Rushdie’s perspective, the individual is always an interested
part when one speaks about the narrated events. This accounts for the
subjective approach to the historical fact or to the present moment; the
artist cannot evade history, confronting himself with it in the self-defining
process and in the process of understanding temporality. “Being conscious
of one’s own person as a homogeneous entity in time, a blend of past and
present, is the thing which unifies personality, keeping together our past
and our present.” (Rushdie, 1991: 35) Saleem Sinai represents, from this
perspective, an example of ‘reading’ the world. Being a participant in the
events around him, situating himself temporarily in their immediate
vicinity, Saleem is an unreliable narrator, demonstrating a partial and
fragmentary perspective upon facts. Saleem confers significance to the
historical events in relation to himself as an individual, creating, in this
way, a personal sense against history; making history personal, Saleem
fragments the official history. Situating himself in the center of his own
universe, Saleem embodies a radically humanist perspective on history, the
process of narration and identity. Like Oskar in The Tin Drum, Saleem is
‘chained in history’, forced to be the witness of his own epoch, a time that
determines his identity and becomes the material of his stories. The two
protagonists’ impulse to search for their identity is a phenomenon similar
to that of the birth of history in the time and space in which they live.
Saleem and Oskar’s identities are established through the stories they
narrate and to narrate, in their case, does not mean to inscribe themselves
in the self-sufficient sterile space of discourse, but to answer as thoroughly
as possible to the circumstances of the world in which they live. This means
to be realistic.
In the same way in which Rushdie’s hero in Midnight’s Children
suggests his version of history by refusing to adhere to the official history,
Julian Barnes’s novel A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters offers the
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