The first novel RHUL students encounter in ‘Inventing the Novel’ (EN1107) is Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. While the module primarily examines the birth and early development of the novel in English, from Aphra Behn in the seventeenth century to Charles Dickens in the nineteenth, we argue that Hamid could not have written his book without the technical and generic innovations pioneered by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. Knowing how these pioneers invented a new genre is essential knowledge in the course, but Hamid is also there to show that their innovations live on in today’s world too.
Studying English at university is not only about acquiring knowledge: it is also about developing skills, of which critical thinking is perhaps the most important. Critical thinking is essential to writing a decent essay on a novel, play, or poem, and it is a ‘life skill’ too. By life skill I don’t just mean something useful in a job, though lawyers and journalists and civil servants need to use critical thinking skills every day. We have to think critically every time we read a newspaper, or hear a politician appeal for our votes – otherwise we’re just swallowing what someone else wants us to believe. At a time when the value to society of university education is increasingly cast in narrowly economic terms, those of us who work in the arts and humanities must continue to press the case for the wider value of an education for citizenship as well as productivity or competitiveness.
Hamid’s is a particularly good novel to begin with because in one sense it is about critical thinking. Its narrator and main protagonist, Changez, is a Pakistani who excels in Princeton and becomes an analyst in an elite New York valuation agency, Underwood Samson. (One thing we want students to learn is how to read on different levels: The Reluctant Fundamentalist works allegorically as well as literally, and Underwood Samson – US – is partly an allegorical code for the United States.) 9/11 changes Changez: he (re)discovers his Pakistani and Muslim identity, grows a beard, endures racist hostility, and becomes an anti-western lecturer (and, perhaps, a terrorist – though the novel is carefully ambiguous about this).
When Changez tells his story in Lahore to an unnamed American whose voice we never hear, he makes clear that he is telling another side to the story of 9/11. Shortly before the attacks, on assignment in Manila, he recognizes that he shares with a Filipino taxi driver a “Third World sensibility” (77); when, later, he sees the twin towers collapse on television, he smiles. Changez sees America from the inside and the outside; he is part of it, and then he is not, and this gives him not just a different perspective but multiple perspectives. He therefore knows that how we see the world depends on our position, and shifting position gives a different picture: as he tells the American, “a different way of observing is required” in Pakistan (140). Hamid’s novel silences the American for a reason: the implication is that the voices of the “Third World” have been silenced by the roar of the West, and unless we hear them we will condemn ourselves to misunderstanding.
Hamid thus foregrounds a fundamental aspect of the novel. Novels cannot work without character, time, and place; even a badly written novel should put the reader in the position of a character experiencing something which may be familiar or unfamiliar. A novel therefore makes us change places, and see things differently. Novels should be enjoyable but they are more than entertainment. They may help us to learn in a peculiarly experiential way.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel about seeing things differently, empathizing with those we may consider to be ‘others’, and thinking critically. We use it as raw material for critical analysis but it is itself also a guide to what we are trying to teach. It is, then, not just raw material for study, but an invitation to think about how we think – and that applies to the teacher as much as it does to the student. The novel helps us to understand not only how to teach literature, but why we are doing so in the first place.
The first novel RHUL students encounter in ‘Inventing the Novel’ (EN1107) is Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. While the module primarily examines the birth and early development of the novel in English, from Aphra Behn in the seventeenth century to Charles Dickens in the nineteenth, we argue that Hamid could not have written his book without the technical and generic innovations pioneered by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. Knowing how these pioneers invented a new genre is essential knowledge in the course, but Hamid is also there to show that their innovations live on in today’s world too.
Studying English at university is not only about acquiring knowledge: it is also about developing skills, of which critical thinking is perhaps the most important. Critical thinking is essential to writing a decent essay on a novel, play, or poem, and it is a ‘life skill’ too. By life skill I don’t just mean something useful in a job, though lawyers and journalists and civil servants need to use critical thinking skills every day. We have to think critically every time we read a newspaper, or hear a politician appeal for our votes – otherwise we’re just swallowing what someone else wants us to believe. At a time when the value to society of university education is increasingly cast in narrowly economic terms, those of us who work in the arts and humanities must continue to press the case for the wider value of an education for citizenship as well as productivity or competitiveness.
Hamid’s is a particularly good novel to begin with because in one sense it is about critical thinking. Its narrator and main protagonist, Changez, is a Pakistani who excels in Princeton and becomes an analyst in an elite New York valuation agency, Underwood Samson. (One thing we want students to learn is how to read on different levels: The Reluctant Fundamentalist works allegorically as well as literally, and Underwood Samson – US – is partly an allegorical code for the United States.) 9/11 changes Changez: he (re)discovers his Pakistani and Muslim identity, grows a beard, endures racist hostility, and becomes an anti-western lecturer (and, perhaps, a terrorist – though the novel is carefully ambiguous about this).
When Changez tells his story in Lahore to an unnamed American whose voice we never hear, he makes clear that he is telling another side to the story of 9/11. Shortly before the attacks, on assignment in Manila, he recognizes that he shares with a Filipino taxi driver a “Third World sensibility” (77); when, later, he sees the twin towers collapse on television, he smiles. Changez sees America from the inside and the outside; he is part of it, and then he is not, and this gives him not just a different perspective but multiple perspectives. He therefore knows that how we see the world depends on our position, and shifting position gives a different picture: as he tells the American, “a different way of observing is required” in Pakistan (140). Hamid’s novel silences the American for a reason: the implication is that the voices of the “Third World” have been silenced by the roar of the West, and unless we hear them we will condemn ourselves to misunderstanding.
Hamid thus foregrounds a fundamental aspect of the novel. Novels cannot work without character, time, and place; even a badly written novel should put the reader in the position of a character experiencing something which may be familiar or unfamiliar. A novel therefore makes us change places, and see things differently. Novels should be enjoyable but they are more than entertainment. They may help us to learn in a peculiarly experiential way.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a novel about seeing things differently, empathizing with those we may consider to be ‘others’, and thinking critically. We use it as raw material for critical analysis but it is itself also a guide to what we are trying to teach. It is, then, not just raw material for study, but an invitation to think about how we think – and that applies to the teacher as much as it does to the student. The novel helps us to understand not only how to teach literature, but why we are doing so in the first place.