A novel can deploy Orientalist clichés while still contesting them through unreliable narration

Evidence

Malreddy has objected to these features of the narrative. He sees The Warlord’s Son as marked throughout by “aggressive,” “frenzied,” and “knee-jerk Orientalism” that simply recycles stereotypes in the interests of lurid sensationalism. Fesperman does employ and trade on certain exoticist clichés, especially early on, but his use of them is mitigated by being part of what is actually an insistent questioning of the reliability of his protagonist as focalizer. Malreddy is too quick to conflate character and author and ignores the deliberate distance used to point up Skelly’s responses as limited and partial. Indeed, the story comes increasingly to be about the gradual development of Skelly’s perspective from Orientalism to a kind of relativism. As a result, Malreddy misses the critical awareness—not to say the irony—in statements such as “And now here was Skelly, scribe of the West, trying to make sense of these imponderable rustics for the enlightenment of the plainfolk back home” (305). In a rush to condemn Fesperman for tarring local customs and practices as diabolical, Malreddy misreads as lazy those passages that in fact register Skelly’s unsettling lack of understanding of what he sees. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 345

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Establishes the operative distinction the reader needs: contesting Islamophobia means the narrator’s clichés are distanced by focalization unreliability, not merely recycled — a usable criterion for reading Hamid and Naqvi.
• XREF: Directly equips the reader’s hinge work: this ‘focalizer distance’ test can be applied to Changez’s self-critical narration in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and to Home Boy’s first-person voice.
• QUESTION: If ‘deliberate distance’ is the criterion, how much distance is enough? When does an ironic Orientalist narrator stop being critiqued and become a vehicle? Worth testing against Naqvi and Hamid.

Related

• Stereotypes in fiction can contest Islamophobia when focalized through an unreliable narrator (similarity 0.92)
• A native focalizer’s corrective narration can historicize what baffles a Western protagonist. (similarity 0.79)