Un lenzuolo bucato e una sputacchiera d'argento. Eredità privata e memoria storica in Midnight’s Children

The object plays an important role within the figural logic of postcolonial literature. As traces of original culture, residues of a tradition to be preserved, things recover thecharacter of substitute and symbolic replacement that according toFreud was typicalof the fetish. Thus,we are witnessing a reinterpretation of the fetishistic phenomenon, no longer the solipsistic experience of a single individual trapped in his own desire,but a need shared by a collective identity that tries to maintain itself through a crystallization of its historical memories. The protagonists of postcolonial literature intertwine their experiences with the fate of the objects that accompany them; consequently, a careful examination of the works cannot ignore a material perspectivethat takes into account the thematic and formal kitentrusted to things. This contribution intends to investigate the narrative function assumed by objects in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children(1981). In particular, the textual activities of a holedsheet and a silver spittoon will be closely examined: the first as a vehicle of a private inheritance and the second of a collective one, both to be preserved among the historical vicissitudes of India in balance between the previous European identity and the urge of a new postcolonial reality.