A novel can build generic trespass into its form, not just its plot

Evidence

In fact, just as its characters draw closer to one another as they cross and recross borders, so, too, the novel itself enacts its own transgressions in generic terms with the aim of exploring what unites cultures as well as what divides them. As Skelly and Najeeb travel deeper into Afghanistan, the textual elements come more and more to resemble those of that preeminent narrative form of the forging of America at its frontiers, the Western. Skelly experiences an unexpected familiarity not only through those unbidden intrusions of memory but also because his experiences have the quality of the already read—even to him. So, for example, our protagonists are forced to witness the summary justice meted out to those judged traitors when the captured leader of a raiding party and his deputies are lynched (352–53). By this point, we have come to realize that what we are reading is in fact an archetypal frontier narrative—a sort of transcultural Western (an Eastern Western, if you will)—complete with raiding parties, nights spent around campfires under the stars, ambushes in rocky ravines, banditry, warring tribes, and makeshift gallows. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 350

Categorization

• DEFINE: Transcultural Western as a generic transgression lending formal structure to the border-transgressing theme.
• XREF: Generic frontier/Western scaffolding as a mode of perceiving the Other — relevant to framing the rhetorical work any novel does. — connects to: Puzzling fictions work by violating self-imposed rules, not by ignoring them. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 517