“Terminal Crisis?”: From the Worlding of American Literature to World-System Literature

The problem is to find a central figure in whose life all the important extremes of the world of the novel converge and around whom a complete world with all its vital contradictions can be organized.

Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe”

I felt as though a world had ended.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Has the American novel become worldier since 9/11? Has the force of the World Trade Center attacks led writers toward a sustained inspection of America’s relationship to the rest of the globe? Bruce Robbins, looking at a broad range of contemporary novels, says no. The post-9/11 novel does a number of things instead: it becomes disoriented, retreats into domesticity, or (at best) treats an outside world of unmitigated suffering and absurdity that justifies immigration in a “coming to America” narrative. All in all, Robbins finds mistaken the “gently self-congratulatory” proposition that the American novel has become more global in its perspective, and in that sense more worldly (1096).

This essay considers one revealing exception, Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), which appears to have succeeded in becoming “worldly” in Robbins’s sense. Hamid’s work of fiction replies directly and cleverly to George W. Bush’s question, “why do they hate us?” even while exploring the reverse (if asymmetrical) question, “why do we fear them?” In the process, the novel layers the complex, contradictory relationships to the US that the world bears: as a means to personal upward mobility, a center of global finance capital, a dangerous imperial power, an object of romantic attachment, and finally, an object of intelligible hatred.

The point of this essay is less to show that there are exceptions to Robbins’s rule than to explore the peculiar kind of novel that offers such worldliness today, and to consider what this teaches us about the historical conjuncture of our moment. I argue that contemplating The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a worldly American novel leads to a substantive revision of both what we mean by “world” and what we mean by “American” in the context of post-9/11 literature. Making reference to Giovanni Arrighi’s illuminating world-economic analyses, I suggest that Hamid’s novel belongs to a current mode of world literature engaged by the transitional moment associated with Arrighi’s sense of the “terminal crisis” in American world-system hegemony (57). The worldliness of The Reluctant Fundamentalist thus appears anomalous if held alongside some of the conventionally national “American” novels considered by Robbins, such as Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) or Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006). But it would seem paradigmatic when read in the light of other contemporary world novels that have engaged America’s shifting global position, such as Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) or Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2006).¹

In what sense is it meaningful to call The Reluctant Fundamentalist an American novel? Does every novel written about the US by someone who has spent time there meet this description? From a biographical perspective, it is true that Hamid’s family moved to the US when he was a child and that he attended both college and law school here. Hamid’s career as a writer began with his undergraduate studies at Princeton, where he counted such luminous American authors as Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison among his teachers. A critic who classifies literature according to the author’s biographically indicated nationality would thus have some reason to consider Hamid as American. Certain textual features of The Reluctant Fundamentalist align with such a designation. The bulk of the narrative, for instance, takes place in the US and features a narrator-protagonist who struggles with the personal and social costs of immigration to America, as do characters in a certain tradition of American novels that runs from Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) to Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (2002) and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991).

Yet this...