Erica embodies the failure of authorship under market realities

Evidence

Hamid is, then, in some respects critiquing the globalizing of media and culture that his own novel is a part of. Yet he also attempts to mitigate the functionalist view through a renewed attention to story making. The Reluctant Fundamentalist in fact performs the manipulation of literature through globalization via its consideration of authorship and the literary. This manipulation can first be seen in the fate of the novel’s creative writer, Erica. We could say that Erica represents the unsuccessful writer, the one who fails to reconcile herself to contemporary market realities. Her excitement at acquiring a literary agent is not at first tempered by his warning that the novella—her preferred form—is “a platypus of a beast” and notoriously difficult to market (87). Yet as her psychological problems mount, she can no longer find refuge in writing and ignores her agent’s calls: “I used to turn to it, my writing, when I needed to get something out that was stuck inside. But I can’t get it out now. It pulls me in, you know? I dwell on it instead of writing it” (111–12). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 462

Categorization

Category: Craft and Method

• XREF: A close-reading move the reader can replicate on Hamid or Naqvi: reading a secondary character as an allegory of the author’s own market position.

Related

• Erica’s failed authorship mirrors literature’s subordination to market forces in Hamid’s novel (similarity 0.94)
• Hamid performs globalization’s manipulation of authorship through failed writer Erica (similarity 0.93)
• Literature embedded in global markets may be unable to contest capitalism’s Islamophobia (similarity 0.80)
• Novels contesting Islamophobia are enmeshed in the very market that trades on it (similarity 0.80)
• Authorial branding makes postcolonial writers visible only as exploitable market commodities (similarity 0.79)
• Best-selling critique novels can only mark their limits, not transcend the market. (similarity 0.79)
• A global literary market for Muslim writers shapes what can be written (similarity 0.78)
• Novels that critique Islamophobia still get co-opted by the market they critique. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• A writer can commit the very failure she diagnoses in a character #expands (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 240