This was really the only book of 9 for the class that I enjoyed reading. It was provocative, alluring, and seductively, like, perhaps, since in a foreign hookah bar and slowly getting stoned from the air you've been breathing for the past hour. And the story has been going on now for a while and is over before you know it.
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(1st draft)
ENG 290
December 10, 2009
Ink Blots and Answers
What is it about some novels that lead a reader to forget they are reading a novel and take what is written to be an actual accounting of events? What sort of protagonist's identity confuses someone into believing the character is the author?
I sit with a cup of Sikkim tea and ponder my own considerations of Mohsin Hamid's short novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It is a curious book, combining several aged literary techniques and devices to tell the sort of a story that is genuinely modern. The two mercenary-archetypal main characters could certainly have met at almost any place—in almost any time in history—but the complexities of national identity and extenuating circumstance bred by the modern age of terrorism, is uniquely contemporary. The two blend in Hamid's novel, and we as readers, are given a brief and wonderfully rich tapestry to assess or formulate our own opinions about national identity and to consider what circumstances could drive an individual to the actions they take.
The framing device of a dramatic monologue is no longer common in modern written literature—although in film, the benefit-from-hindsight voice-over is not uncommon—and the story-within-story technique (placing the characters in a tavern to weather a storm, even if that storm exists only symbolically within themselves) predates The Decameron. Both are used to great effect by Hamid, and, along with a curiously successful second-person narrative voice where the protagonist speaks directly to the reader through a narratively silent stranger he meets in a café in Lahore, Pakistan. We are pulled in to become intimately involved with the story this man reveals—even as he obscures his own motives. Yet in using such literary devices, Hamid never goes long without reminding us we are reading a novel.
Early on, Changez (our Pakistani story-teller), sits in a café and courteously offers assistance to a stranger. Changez quickly shares his assessment of this stranger with us—basing his assumptions on what is presented to him, "Your hair, short-cropped, and your expansive chest ... are typical of a certain type of American; but then again, sportsmen and soldiers of all nationalities tend to look alike" (Hamid 2). Even as Changez strikes directly at some particulars to this individual, we are shown that even with such astute observations, generalities still exist. The framing technique of the novel is set firmly in place a paragraph later when Changez asks this nameless stranger, "Come, tell me, what are you look for? Surely, at this time of day, only one thing could have brought you to the district of Old Anarkali ... that is the quest for the perfect cup of tea."
We are invited to civil discourse over a cup of tea, but the civility of conversation belies the depth of fervor and animosity within these stories revealed, for this is a modern tale of extremist beliefs in action and worldwide repercussions of the September 11 terrorist attacks It is these attacks that lead our protagonist—long before he sits in civil discourse with an American stranger in the Lahore café—to alter his own life and desires to become a radical terrorist himself. Which leaves us, the readers of his tale—to wonder about any sympathy we might offer him. Why do we feel for him and his situation? Or, contrarily, why don't we? Just as the story he tells us is left deliberately ambiguous, our emotional involvement with Changez is left in this vague state.
Mid-way through his tale, Changez shares with us his personal feelings about the attacks of September 11: "My thoughts were not with the victims of the attack—death on television moves me most when it is fictitious and happens to characters with whom I have built up relationships over multiple episodes—no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees. Ah, I see I am only compounding your displeasure" (73). Again, Hamid reminds us of our place as readers—as an audience to his tale. This literary self-awareness does break the theatrical "fourth-wall" in addressing us as readers, but this is a device in the story which leads some readers—if they haven't already—to mistake the real and the fictional.
In a popular review of the novel, Amazon.com user Freefall comments, "The book is a semi-autobiographical sketch of a fundamentalist who is only too willing for the cause ... There is nothing in the novel or in the realpolitik that would make a Western audience appreciate his world view. Why should a westerner feel any warmth for the protagonist being a Pakistani...?" This assessment begins with a misunderstanding and concludes with a thinly-veiled prejudice. To have a protagonist share certain traits with an author is nothing new in fiction. Just as assuming some events in a novel might stem from an author's real life is common in some readers. But to make the statement that a novel is semi-autobiographical, is, in this case, akin to hoping that belief is true so that the bigoted opinion already held can be rationalized and given some validity. It is also common in human nature to believe much of what one hears or reads, especially if it sounds like something we already believe.
In the New York Review of Books, Sarah Kerr strikes to the heart of this matter. "Maybe we the readers are the ones who jump to conclusions," she offers, "Maybe the book is intended as a Rorschach to reflect back our unconscious assumptions." This Rorschach analogy allows us to make sense of the confusion this novel breeds in readers. S. Mitra ("A reader from India/USA"), illustrates this confusion: "The authors [sic] initial reaction to September 11th was to be 'remarkably pleased' because somebody had so visibly brought America to her knees.(Pg 72)." Finding the poetic irony about a superpower Goliath struck by a tiny David is not necessarily reflective of sympathetic feelings for that David. Especially when that irony is discovered in the context of a character created for a fictional story. To confuse the creator with their work is myopic of a reader and shows—like a Rorschach ink blot—more about that reader than the novel they opine.
Another Amazon.com reviewer of Hamid, "David" Wordsworth, complains at length and summarizes numerous points which are repeatedly mistaken in popular reviews, "As a Pakistani, you have come to know the best that America has to offer. Were you not admitted to the Ivy League at Princeton ... receive a high-paying job at a prestigious New York financial firm...? Did you not fall in love with a ... woman from New York? Did you not enjoy prime business assignments and bonuses at the expense of your American counterparts...? And yet you sympathize with the 911 attackers. Isn't this odd attitude of yours quite curious? It makes me think. You then become an anti-American advocate in your native land."
Again, the mirror of art has been misunderstood to be a window. It is the prerogative of fiction to create characters who express viewpoints which might otherwise not be heard in any kind of rational forum. It is in the author's realm of creativity to present a character that may be similar in many way to themselves, but should not be taken as ciphers for their own identities. If we examine Lolita, are we to jump to the conclusion that since Humbert Humbert is a literary scholar just as Nabokov was, that the novel is auto-biographical?
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is certainly not a work of complete fabrication; it is a fictional story deliberately designed to be a complex metaphor for this very real and confusing world in which we live. This is why the soil is fertile to grow such ripened misunderstandings. Hamid himself seems to have foreseen this in the final equivocal scene: "I know you have found some of my views offensive; I hope you will not resist my attempt to shake you by the hand. But why are you reaching into your jacket, sir? I detect a glint of metal ... I trust it is from the holder of your business cards" (184).
Even as Changez gives us every reason to expect bloodshed after we turn this last page, he remains civil and courteous to both us, his audience, and to his unnamed American companion, who may well be dead a moment after the book concludes.
A literary critic once stated that good fiction should ask more questions than it answers; if an author has answers, they should write religious tracts. When we as readers close this book, having finished Changez's story, when might pour ourselves another cup of tea and consider the motives, meanings, and intentions demonstrated in this novel. What we are likely to find—from an objective viewpoint, in any case—is that Mohsin Hamid has given us more ink blots than answers.
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Works Cited
Freefall. "Willing Fundamentalist." Amazon.com.
17 Jul. 2008. Web. 1 Dec. 2009.
Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist.London: Harcourt, 2008. Print.
Kerr, Sarah. "In the Terror House of Mirrors."New York Review of Books.
11 Oct. 2007. Print.
Mitra, S. "A not (entirely) amusing piece of11 Oct. 2007. Print.
"Mohsin Hamid." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.
28 Nov 2009, 21:43 UTC. 10 Dec 2009.
Wordsworth "David" "A Reluctant Counterpoint· • ·
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