First-person narration can exclude contending perspectives and flatten a novel’s politics

Evidence

This limitation is also reflected in the short shrift given to those other explanatory narratives—such as female self-determination or Marxism—embodied by other characters. The first-person narrative focalization through Najwa avoids or rejects them out of hand. Her narrow point of view is deemed not to require any mimetic backup through the usual literary devices such as irony or gradations of authority among the texts’ voices. Hassan argues that “in Aboulela’s episteme of faith, there is neither room nor use for irony. In matters of faith, the faithful lack a sense of irony, because irony identifies a discrepancy or a lack that diminishes the status of its object. By contrast, faith elevates and exalts.” This line is tempting but does not stand close scrutiny. Aboulela’s novels are, in fact, always worrying away at the fact that the faithful are constantly being frustrated—in personal ways or in terms of their proselytizing mission—by the resistance of the unfaithful in refusing to yield to their viewpoint. As such, lack and imperfection are at the heart of her books: the lack engendered in living in a world that is less than perfect and that has not been brought into conformity with God’s law. In view of this, irony’s absence is a stylistic choice, not—as Hassan implies—an organic expression of a spiritual outlook. Irony could be employed at the expense of a number of targets in Minaret (Marxists, hypocrites, secularists). The fact that it is not appears to be a sign of Aboulela’s discomfort with a meaningful polyphony—one that would necessarily give more of a voice and historical rationale to such alternative perspectives. If no persuasive dissenting views are articulated, it is then unnecessary to differentiate between them. The same first-person narrative voice that guarantees the novel’s authentic feel also excludes any contending discourses. This exclusion contributes to the rather flat, “take it or leave it” nature of Aboulela’s account of God’s reappearance in Najwa’s life. Prosaic realism thus arguably hampers readerly identification, enforcing a distinction between those for whom the necessary willing suspension of disbelief required by all literature extends only to the limits of the empirically credible, and those willing to go along with an internally imposed schema wherein God is effectively both authority and author of the outcome. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 498

Categorization

• XREF: Core methodological tool for the reader’s hinge work: how narrative focalization and ironic distance determine whether a novel contests or quietly reinforces its framework. Directly transferable to analyzing Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. — connects to: Narrative form itself, not author intent, generates ideological content. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 1879
• SEED: The distinction between sign of an organic worldview vs. a stylistic choice about polyphony is an essay-ready criterion for evaluating religious or any worldview-centered fiction.
• ADDENDUM: Relates to ‘On Sacrifice’ in that faith-based accounts operating without irony or internal dissent mirror how sacrifice narratives often exclude contending voices. Also relevant to how worldview fiction handles dissent generally.