Serious fiction turned inward in the twentieth century, and Le Carré reversed that turn

Evidence

A century or more ago politics on the international scale was one of the great themes of fiction, as War and Peace, The Charterhouse of Parma and dozens of other major novels attest. But with the twentieth century serious fiction shifted towards the psychological, the novel of inner rather than outer development. Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence and Faulkner turned toward the individual mind as the great subject of fiction, and even writers intensely conscious of political forces, such as Camus, tended to treat them primarily as aspects of the self.… Not only are political forces created by the minds that perceive them, but the true focus of fiction is on the perception itself. The mind shapes the political world. … Le Carré reverses the equation, maintaining that individual human minds and lives are shaped by the political forces that act upon them. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 323

Categorization

• XREF: This is a tool for the reader’s hinge argument: the Le Carré reversal (minds shaped by politics, not politics shaped by minds) is a usable counterpoint frame for analyzing whether Hamid and Naqvi portray characters as political products or as shapers.
• DEFINE: Defines the twentieth-century turn inward as a literary-historical benchmark against which Le Carré’s reversal becomes legible.