6 - Institutions of Fiction

Summary

In 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote memorably of the birth pangs of a new literary era: ‘we hear all round us, in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction. It is the prevailing sound of the Georgian age.’ Debates have raged on whether the period around 1980 should be seen as a comparable moment of epochal transition for the novel. In his introduction to the third issue of the newly (re-)launched Granta magazine in 1980, the issue in which the first extract of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children appeared, Bill Buford famously announced that we were seeing ‘at last, the end of the English novel and the beginning of the British one’. The narrative of a moribund English novel, transformed in the 1980s as the empire ‘wrote back’ (in Rushdie’s phrase), has shaped the teaching of modern and contemporary fiction. For Robert Eaglestone, the publication of Midnight’s Children is a ‘literary event’ that marks the ‘beginning [of] the contemporary’ for two reasons: it represents the flourishing of postmodernism, while opening up a wholly new thematic landscape for the novel, and it achieved huge international publishing success as the first truly ‘global’ novel. It is the second of Eaglestone’s reasons for considering Midnight’s Children to be a transitional literary event that is central to this chapter: the unprecedented international publishing success of a groundbreaking literary novel, the context for that success and its effects. Rushdie’s novel was published in spring 1981 with very modest advance orders of 639 copies. Its Booker Prize success, in the first year that the prize announcement was televised, boosted hardback sales by 17,000 copies in three months. Since then, Midnight’s Children has been garlanded with the accolade of ‘Booker of Bookers’ not once, but twice: for the best book in twenty-five years in 1993 and for the best book in forty years in 2008. It was chosen for the BBC’s Big Read in 2003, and it has now sold over a million copies.