A writer can commit the very failure she diagnoses in a character

Evidence

As elsewhere, we are primed to interpret this observation as a comment on the proprietorial relationship of the Islamic Republic to its citizens, especially its women. Yet it also serves accurately to describe Nafisi’s own relationship to all the characters that frequent the pages of her memoir, including those whom she calls “my girls” (51). We are told that true novelistic villains, as exemplified by Mrs. Newsome, the tyrannical matriarch in James’s novel The Ambassadors, have “dictatorial minds” (249). Nabokov’s skill and his “beautiful language” (41) unnervingly lead us into complicity with this monster, who is “a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives … Humbert, like most dictators was interested only in his own version of other people” (48). Here for once, in a text that constantly strives to keep all its elements firmly within its rigid grip, is an irony that manages to be entirely unself-conscious. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 240

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The ‘solipsization’ concept — seeing characters only through the author’s eyes — is a precise tool the reader can test against how Hamid and Naqvi render Muslim subjectivity.

Related

• Beautiful narration can recruit readers into complicity with dictatorship-figures. (similarity 0.80)
• Characters can be destroyed precisely by the very narratives meant to defend them (similarity 0.80)
• Ambivalence that never risks making a Muslim character bad is just liberal evasion. (similarity 0.79)
• The liberal novel reaches a boundary in accommodating Islamic political identity claims. (similarity 0.79)
• A novel can rescue liberal humanism while denying voice to the Muslim other (similarity 0.78)
• Islamophobia-resisting fiction can work head-on or by unsettling readerly expectations (similarity 0.78)
• The liberal novel can only gesture obliquely at tensions it cannot resolve. (similarity 0.78)
• A novel’s humane intention can be undercut by the stereotypes it dramatizes. (similarity 0.78)
• Novel-empathy rhetoric can flatter Western readers while denigrating another culture (similarity 0.78)