Salman Rushdie’s Interviews: On Autonomous Characters, Theme of the Double, Multiple Personality, and Divided Self in Midnight's Children and Satanic Verses

“Padma is one of my favorite characters in [Midnight’s Children], because she was completely unplanned. In the first version, she appeared as a very minor character in the last fifteen or so pages; then, when the narrator began to ‘tell’ the book, she arrived and sat there, she simply demanded to be told the story and kept interrupting it, telling Saleem to get on with it. She became very important because she literally demanded to be important” (1, p. 14).

“What I meant was that Saleem's whole persona is a childlike one, because children believe themselves to be the centre of the universe, and they stop as they grow up; but he never stops, he believes—at the point where he begins the novel—that he is the prime mover of these great events. It seemed to me that it was quite possible to read the entire book as his distortion of history, written to prove that he was at the middle of it. But the moment at which reality starts to face him it destroys him; he can’t cope with it, and he retreats into a kind of catatonic state or he becomes acquiescent and complacent” (1, p. 41).

“I do find it difficult to start writing until I can hear the people speak” (1, p. 98).

“Many of the characters in [The Satanic Verses] are for a long time not really unitary selves, they’re just collections of selves…And I think that’s also true about people, that we are not unitary selves, we are a kind of bag of selves, which we draw out from; we become this or that self in different circumstances” (1, p. 103).

“I think, like most writers, that I am most completely myself when I write, and not the rest of the time. I have a social self, and my full self can’t be released except in writing” (1, p. 46).

“Then I suppose what I finally understood, which actually let me start writing, was that [The Satanic Verses] is about, unsurprisingly I suppose for me, about divided selves…And I discovered, only now, really, only in the last few weeks when I’ve been obliged to start talking about the book, that I keep doing this, it seems. That it seems to me I’ve done it, if you look at every novel…Doubles, yes…obviously Saleem in Midnight’s Children…And here I am doing it again. I feel ashamed of this…Maybe becoming conscious of it is a way of stopping” (1, p. 90-91).

1. Michael Reder (Editor). Conversations with Salman Rushdie. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2000.