Contrived liberal endings encode postimperial white paternal fantasies.

Evidence

The fact that, as critics have frequently remarked, both novels have to resort to quite contrived and implausible denouements is indicative of a certain strain in the task of standing up for liberal humanist values. In fact, both McEwan and Updike—like Amis—manifest a marked postimperial melancholia of the kind identified by Paul Gilroy. In Britain the loss of empire and in the United States the loss of a particular white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant consensus have led to compensatory fantasies about the reassertion of white male power in the face of competing claims by others. In keeping with the two novels’ domestication of cultural struggles, the decline of white male power is figured as a failure of parental (and especially paternal) protection. This failure then calls for a reassertion of masculinities of a particularly assertive kind, corresponding to ideals of a national “best self” that has been lost and must be retrieved. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 84

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to Gilroy’s postcolonial melancholia and gives a diagnostic for testing whether Hamid and Naqvi also defer to paternal/rescuer arcs.
• SEED: Angle: using ‘postimperial melancholia’ as the test to distinguish contesting from quietly reinforcing novels — does the ending rescue a white/Western subject?

Related

• Contrived endings in anti-jihad novels reveal a postimperial melancholia about lost white male authority (similarity 0.93)
• Post-imperial melancholia shapes the novel’s exculpatory white male viewpoint. (similarity 0.84)
• Contrived novel endings expose strain in defending liberal humanist values (similarity 0.80)
• A fictional happy ending can quietly reinforce the very Islamophobia it critiques (similarity 0.79)
• Liberal-humanist endings depend on converting the threatening Other. (similarity 0.79)
• Novels can expose imperialism through their endings rather than endorse it (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Post-imperial melancholia shapes the novel’s exculpatory white male viewpoint. #corroborates (0.70) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 119