Rushdie’s fiction excludes the everyday resistance that makes oppressed life endurable.

Evidence

What this excludes- ‘the missing bits’ to which he must ‘reconcile’ himselfis the dailiness of lives lived under oppression, and the human bonding - of resistance, of decency, of innumerable heroisms of both ordinary and extraordinary kindswhich makes it possible for large numbers of people to look each other in the eye, without guilt, with affection and solidarity and humour, and makes life, even under oppression, endurable and frequently joyous. Of that other kind of life his fictions, right up to The Satanic Verses, seem to be largely ignorant; what his imagination makes of the subsequent experiences we shall find our only from later work. The infinite bleakness of Shame, its cage-like quality, is rooted, in other words, in what it excludes as much as what it actually comprises. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 550

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Rushdie’s class-bounded experience and modernist affiliation form a closed circle excluding heroic action. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 548; A class-bound modernist worldview structurally excludes the daily heroisms of the oppressed. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 548