A Vigil Wasted? Notes on the Ruin Sublime

Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil (2008), a novel about the internecine conflicts in Afghanistan, opens by piling on “wreckage after wreckage” to constellate Afghanistan’s many conditions of ruin.¹ It is as if the novel assumes the vexed place of “the angel of history” Walter Benjamin describes, its plot propelled by the forceful turbulence of a storm even as it is fixated on catastrophes of the past. The novel’s first relic of the past is a photographic frontispiece of a stone Buddha head now housed in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.²

This ekphrastic inclusion anticipates the later discovery and excavation of an immense Buddha statue in the story. The statue is interred deep “below ground” (16) of a derelict perfumery once run by Marcus, the aging British doctor described as “a prophet in wreckage” (6). Marcus is a remnant figure of British colonial presence in the region, and he endures the more recent ravages of war as he stays in the small village of Usha near Jalalabad. The initial image of the museum sculpture, itself a layering of mimetic forms, reflects the description of “The Great Buddha” discovered in Marcus’s garden:

And soon after the digging work began, they had encountered a large boulder. . . . As they worked away the earth, a slender ridge was found snaking around the small depression, and they saw that the whole was in fact a large human ear. Continuing downward and around the mass, they understood that they were excavating the head of a great Buddha, lying on its side. . . . A face from another time.

(16–17)

In the shadows of the Tora Bora in 2001, the Buddha emerges as a composite sign of ruin. It is at once a remnant of a picturesque antiquity and a reminder of present corrosions, most obviously of the deliberate destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas.³ A pathos-laden emblem of Afghanistan’s more tranquil Buddhist past, the narrative appearance of the artifact coalesces the violent history of cultural desecration that has gripped this nation in modern times, specifically since the Cold War. The figure of the Buddha simultaneously encapsulates the ruin’s capacity to contain a sacred, partially concealed, yet recuperative myth of origin for Afghanistan and a historicist account of its more immediate colonial struggles.⁴

The Wasted Vigil is a gripping tale of political intrigue and tragic romance that unfolds in relation to Afghanistan’s checkered political history. The sweeping historical subtext alludes to signal moments of Afghanistan’s past, implying connections between its Buddhist antiquity, Mongol and Mughal eras, and its modern twentieth- century quest for autonomy in the face of British, Soviet, and US imperial ambitions. By design, the inhabitants of the ruined house at the center of the novel are an English doctor, a Russian woman, an American gem trader, a beautiful Afghani teacher, an American spy, and a Pathan orphan turned jihadi. The careful tapestry Aslam weaves from these characters’ lives reflects the global web of conflicts and interests that have devastated this nation. The remarkable achievement of this book is that what may appear to be stock characters exceed the stereotypes of their national identities. Instead, the novel’s successful placing of characters in locations—uniquely grafting the interdependencies and betrayals of the story to Afghanistan’s ruined settings—directs readerly absorption toward the ethical questions posed by the specters of ruins.

In The Wasted Vigil, the expansive war games of colonial powers take on an intimate aspect that depends on the novel’s treatment of setting. The book showcases settings in ruin to represent how characters with different geopolitical bearings relate to each other and to their historical moment. In doing so, the work activates a variety of symbolic meanings that typically attach to English novels set in places overdetermined by colonialist history and sensibilities. “Afghanistan,” as James Buchan writes in his review of The Wasted Vigil, “is not simply the shambles of modern times. . . . It is also a peri lous literary setting for writers in English, a stylistic minefield of the oriental- exotic, the British...