Literature functions as a pacifying force on the violent outsider

Evidence

So when the time comes, “Dover Beach” has a talismanic quality in the novel, its importance reiterated by its being printed in full at the end of the novel as a kind of appendix. Baxter stands awestruck by the poem, and Perowne speculates that he is experiencing a profound, moving nostalgia that reminds him “how much he wanted to live” (278). Although Baxter’s mind is being eaten away by Huntington’s, his mood swing here takes on a broader implication, connecting him to a cultural or civilizational consciousness in which he is immersed for all his disenfranchisement. The miraculously pacifying qualities of the poem’s slow incantation by Daisy, soothing the savage breast of a man intent on violence, gives it a privileged power in the book. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 116

Categorization

• XREF: The pacifying-power-of-literature scene is the sharpest tool for reading Bedaiwi’s and Changez’s moments of cultural exposure in Hamid and Naqvi — where a Western cultural artifact either transforms or patronizes the Muslim subject. — connects to: Modernist violence is pseudoevent imposed by the novelist — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 401; Barthes saw avant-garde literature as resistance to, not enforcer of, bourgeois hegemony — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 246