Class origin and ideology jointly determine what a writer’s fiction excludes.

Evidence

What Rushdie seems to know – from the inside, because of his own class origin – is the history of the corruptions and criminalities of Pakistani rulers; about these he says remarkably trenchant things, and his desire to disjoin himself from that history is both productive and, for the reader, very moving. The structure of this limited knowledge, circumscribed as it is within the experience of a decadent class to which he is joined by origin but from which he himself feels wholly alienated, only confirms, however, the world-view implied in his already-existing affiliations with modernism and postmodernism. Neither the class from which the Pakistani segment of his experience is derived, nor the ideological ensemble within which he has located his own affiliations, admits, in any fundamental degree, the possibility of heroic action; between the structure of felt experience and the politico-literary affiliation, therefore, the circle is closed. What this excludes – ‘the missing bits’ to which he must ‘reconcile’ himself – is the dailiness of lives lived under oppression, and the human bonding – of resistance, of decency, of innumerable heroisms of both ordinary and extraordinary kinds – which makes it possible for large numbers of people to look each other in the eye, without guilt, with affection and solidarity and humour, and makes life, even under oppression, endurable and frequently joyous. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 239

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The closed circle — felt experience and ideological affiliation mutually reinforcing what a writer can see — is a dense, paradigm-shaping claim about the determinants of literary imagination.
• XREF: connects to: A writer’s formal method determines which social realities remain inaccessible to him — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 784; Class and gender anxieties, not colonial experience, drove Nazir Ahmed’s novels — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 458; A class-bound modernist worldview structurally excludes the daily heroisms of the oppressed.

Related

• A class-bound modernist worldview structurally excludes the daily heroisms of the oppressed. (similarity 0.89)
• Rushdie’s class-bounded experience and modernist affiliation form a closed circle excluding heroic action. (similarity 0.85)
• Reading Rushdie through ‘Nation’ and ‘Third World’ frames obscures his class moorings (similarity 0.81)
• Rushdie’s fiction excludes the everyday resistance that makes oppressed life endurable. (similarity 0.81)