The Reluctant Fundamentalist proves vitally engaged in the concerns of the mind and its passages reveal a struggle with difficulties of a sort that make anxiety seem an innocuous euphemism or outdated scholarly endeavor, which inevitably veers the reader's attention away from their importance in understanding the text and its world. This essay is concerned with the psychological, artistic, historical and geographical contingencies Mohsin Hamid faces in putting together his novel/la1 through the travail of production and publication. The Reluctant Fundamentalist has cemented Hamid's reputation and taken on the guise of a relatively autonomous sphere in its own fashion. Hamid resorts to powerful actions of a “begetting” kind, and specifying points of departure for his novel/la grows increasingly problematic. The novel/la is in fact intricate, and its resemblance with many productions is striking nevertheless. Going against the grain of fundamental and dominant traditions through a reluctant ethos, Hamid engages in beginnings and beginnings again to find alternatives, a Saidian reasoning read in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Taking its cue from Hamid's reflection on the manufacturing of his own “fiction” and Said's Beginnings, this essay examines how Hamid builds on Albert Camus's La chute as a point of reference to inaugurate The Reluctant Fundamentalist which owes its genesis to miscellaneous acts of beginning based, among many others, on McEwan's Atonement and Ali's Brick Lane. Hamid also engages world events such as America's beginning as a nation and 9/11, which both have inspired the novel/la's impulse to begin and begin again in the process of production. These influences with the alternatives given make up the texture of his novel/la, which is not only creative in nature, but also theoretical and philosophical in trajectories.
While critics take a particular interest in discussing Mohsin Hamid as a novelist of globalization, migration, war, politics, economics, and capitalism, I contend that Hamid manifests a strong interest in, even obsession with, art in his fiction and non-fiction, which also makes him a novelist of art. Relying on his own words in his non-fiction, I argue that Hamid expresses a direct, often indirect concern about his artistic life, which includes his artistic experiences, ways, pursuits, and struggles in the globalized world of art. This article aims to ground my obstinate claim that Hamid symbolically exposes his own artistic life in his fiction in reality; it does this by focusing on Hamid’s non-fiction where his personal confessions can be said to be the most pronounced in contrast to his fiction where these are symbolic and, therefore, less definite. It establishes the basis on which my subsequent claim that Hamid speaks about his artistic experiences in his fiction can stand and, by extension, the claim that his fiction, besides being metafictional, can also be considered autobiographical.
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