Rushdie’s class-bounded experience and modernist affiliation form a closed circle excluding heroic action.

Evidence

What Rushdie seems to knowfrom 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 bur from which he himself feels wholly alienated, only confirms, however, rhe world-view implied in his already-existing affiliations with modernism and posrmodernism. 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. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 548

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s strategic-essentialism research: this is a materialist diagnosis of why Rushdie’s ironic/affiliation stance cannot escape its own class limits — the bind without a loosening mechanism. — connects to: Rushdie’s narrative form cannot sustain a claim to quintessential Indianness. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 491; Rushdie’s fiction excludes the everyday resistance that makes oppressed life endurable. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 550; Myth and epic enact being as closed filiation, excluding the other. (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Rushdie’s fiction excludes the everyday resistance that makes oppressed life endurable. #expands (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 550
• Myth and epic enact being as closed filiation, excluding the other. #corroborates (0.80)