In this time, era, this distracted age, literature’s resonance is limited. This is not news: there has been ample empirical evidence that the market for literary fiction has been unhealthy1, a diabetic if not a dialysis patient, and poetry is dead if not on the ventilator. There was a time when we exchanged verses with each other — Zamanay ke aandaaz badlay gaye, to use a pop couplet, Naya raag hai, saaz badlay gaye — but today we exchange aphorisms on social media, noses in phones: “Be eccentric now — don’t wait for old age to wear purple.” “No one is in charge of your happiness but you,” and its thoughtful corollary, “Only do what your heart tells you” (attributed correctly or mistakenly to Princess Diana). “Forgive everyone everything.” “Knowing when to walk away is wisdom.” A persuasive meaninglessness pervades. If we only do what our hearts tell us, for instance, what of rule of law? If walking away is wisdom then is engagement fatuous? And who the hell wants to wear purple, now, later, ever?

Of course, each era has its own dynamics, its own anxieties. There was a time when we reportedly sat around fires after dusk, picking meat from our teeth while reciting cosmogonic epics to each other, but oral traditions have been long subsumed by print. The hundreds, possibly thousands of versions of the Ramayana, for instance, are being standardised under our noses.2 In The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, literary sage James Wood famously asserts that the novel supplanted religion in his neck of the woods at the turn of the century as the word of man became more persuasive than the word of God. It’s an interesting claim and cogently argued though an empirically defensible aphorism suggests that “Correlation does not imply causality.” In either event, print has been under attack ever since: the advent of Marconi’s radio a century ago followed by television contributed to the marginalisation of literature much before our Age of Distraction. There is no doubt that the role of literature in our collective consciousness has changed for reasons both obvious and opaque, and will continue to change until Judgement Day.

Perhaps literature’s concerns have changed as well. Herman Melville had God on his mind when working on the greatest American novel, Moby Dick — a volume I picked up whenever I experienced a damp, drizzly November in my teenage soul — but in this era, the leading candidate for the Great American Novel seems to be Jonathan Franzen’s Purity, a novel that broadly concerns the internet — a metaphor, perhaps, for American life today. Writing in the National, Stephen Amidou writes, “It comes as no surprise that [Franzen’s] new novel … is about the internet … In the age of Julian Assange, Google, and Twitter, what more contemporary topic could there be than the internet?”[3] You would think after 9/11, the theatrically inept interventionism in Afghanistan — Operation Enduring Freedom — the calamitous invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent collapse of Libya and Syria; after indiscriminate police shootings of unarmed civilians, mass shootings in schools, malls, movie theaters, and nightclubs, the intractable War on Drugs, Detroit, Chicago; after the historic election of an African-American head of state, the possible election of a female head of state or a candy-floss-haired reality TV star, and an alarming, toxic political atmosphere; not to mention the mean, moribund economy changing the way Americans perceive themselves[4] — the American Way of Life — that the Great American Novel would be more engaged with more meaningful matters.

This past Memorial Day, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani retweeted a review of a veritable library contending with recent American warmongering[5] that includes My Life as a Foreign Country, Kaboom, Redeployment, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, The Long Walk, Thank You for Your Service, The Yellow Birds, My War, The Forever War. The list continues at a clip. Although I am mostly unfamiliar with the titles, there seems to be an entire genre devoted to the parade of American foreign policy follies in the last so many years and the associated human consequences. But where is today’s A Farewell to Arms, Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22? Where is Roth? Retired, reportedly. Updike? After penning Terrorist, an often hilarious stab at engagement (that I was compelled to purchase when attending one of his last public readings but could not complete), he checked into Protestant, Anglo Saxon Heaven.[6]

Several years ago, Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy — the organisation that bestows the Nobel Prize for Literature — averred, “The US is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.” The Americans hit back, citing the oversights of the committee since the inception of the prize — Tolstoy, Borges, Nabokov — but ultimately Philip Roth, a leading candidate in the race, was passed over. Engdahl seemed to suggest Roth’s purview, urban middle-class New Jersey does not have global resonance.

In an old essay entitled ‘Mr Difficult’,[7] Franzen distinguished between two modes of writing, the status novel and the contract novel. The former deals with the “discourse of genius and art-historical importance” — Marcel Proust’s The Remembrance of Things Past, Kafka’s Metamorphosis — while the latter, from what I can glean, is intended to be reader-friendly, novels his “mother would have liked” — Barbara Cartland’s oeuvre, perhaps, The Da Vinci Code. (There are, apparently, a couple of novels that figure between the poles including Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.) I might be reducing his insights into the involute machinery of literature but then Franzen is reducing literature to some arbitrary binary. I could posit another.

After numerous expeditions on the Pequod, I found myself reading and rereading VS Naipaul and Vladimir Nabokov whenever I had a discrete stretch of afternoon during my collegiate tenure — novelists who represent either end of literary endeavour to me. Naipaul, the grandson of possibly Brahmin cane-cutters displaced from the subcontinent to the far periphery by colonial exigencies — the swathe of the world known as the West Indies — managed to secure a scholarship at Oxford and a wife. He famously maintained that since he was denied a literary tradition by historic vicissitudes, he had to construct his own. Although known for lofty posturing, there is no doubt that Naipaul is a political writer, particularly in The Mimic Men, A Flag on the Island, In a Free State, Guerrillas, A Bend in the River, not to mention, his fascinating non-fiction, from An Area of Darkness to Beyond Belief — maps to his persona and pathology as much as the territories he sails by.

Separated by a generation and sensibility, Nabokov was also a product of historic churn: his aristocratic, White Russian family was forced to flee Saint Petersburg during the Bolshevik Revolution, never to return again. Although they managed to seek refuge in Berlin, their patriarch was gun-downed on the street soon after. Then, at the eve of World War II, Nabokov, married to a Jew, was forced to flee again, this time for America, as the Nazis swept in. His brother, Sergei, was not so lucky: he was killed in a concentration camp. One would think that Nabokov would have been a deeply political writer but he is most known for a ‘love story’ about an old man preying on a pubescent girl, a novel in verse featuring academic pyrotechnics, and a comic sketch of an émigré professor of Russian language. It is almost as if he was so traumatised by history, the world, that he created one for himself.

In the ‘End of Innocence’,[8] the ever engaged, ever engaging Pankaj Mishra writes, “On September 11, terrorists from the Middle East who destroyed American immunity to large-scale violence and chaos also forced many American and British novelists to reconsider the value of their work and its relation to the history of the present.” He cites, amongst others, Jay McInerney who declaimed, “Most novelists I know ... went through intense self-examination and self-loathing,” and Martin Amis who maintained, “The so-called work in progress … had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of pitiable babble.” Mishra then makes an emphatic case for engagement with the “history of the present.”

Dulcet, Anglophone prose stylist Amit Chaudhuri might differ. Not long ago, for instance, he asked, “What is Pakistani writing? Whatever it might be, it seems to have taken up newsprint lately. Things have been changing quickly and irrevocably over the last [so many] years: a great symbol of American capitalism was destroyed by two aeroplanes; this was followed … by a crash in the market no less resounding … In no obvious way connected to all this, a handful of Anglophone writers has recently been emerging from that country.”[9]

Chaudhuri persists in this tenor for several long pages, connecting the dots for us all, offering cosmogonic theories concerning the appearance of Pakistan on the global literary map by performing impressive hermeneutic acrobatics. He neglects to acknowledge that the subcontinent shares a history, sociocultural ecosystem, and a literary imagination[10] but he must have his own concerns, his own anxieties, and the more interesting question to me is whether Pakistani literature is engaged with the world in a meaningful way.

From the recently fashionable Saadat Hassan Manto to the recently deceased social novelist Abdullah Hussein, our greatest writers have contended with the calamities unleashed by the sudden inception of India and Pakistan. And there is no doubt that Allama Muhammed Iqbal’s often misunderstood metred philosophies and Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s charged anthems still resonate across the subcontinent — his verses were invoked on the floor of the Indian parliament the other day — not to mention, the diasporas, and the New York City subway:

You ask me about that country whose details escape me/[11]

I don’t remember its geography, nothing of its history.

… Should I visit it in memory, it would be like a past lover…

I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy ...

But Chadhuri’s broadside is more concerned about a selection from our English language fiction: a novel set amongst expatriates in Afghanistan, a novella invoking a changed post-9/11 sociocultural dispensation, a satire featuring the fiery demise of a retrograde dictator, a child’s take on a civil war, a commentary on the gentry of rural Punjab, and a tale set between calamities across continents. I don’t think anybody can accuse us of being unengaged. Chaudhuri seems to be complaining that we are too engaged, representing, as it were, the other end of the spectrum. Perhaps he should take a page out of our book?

We have yet to produce a Naipaul or Nabokov (or the Great Pakistani Novel for that matter), but Pakistani literature only seems more Naipaulian than Nabokovian in facile surveys. Closer scrutiny suggests otherwise. Faiz’s poems occupy a special shelf in our consciousness but poets such as Josh Malihabadi, Nasir Kazmi, and Jaun Elia had other concerns. Fiction is also dramatically varied, from Mustansar Hussain Tarar’s novels to Shakeel Adilzada’s 4,000 page Bazigar, to Muhammad Asim Butt’s Daira. And in English? Zulfikar Ghose’s Incredible Brazilian is narrated by the fabulist Gregório Peixoto da Silva Xavier, Azhar Abidi’s Passarola Rising is set in 18th-century Europe, Imad Rahman’s hilarious I Dream of Microwaves involves an actor playing Hispanics on “America’s Most Wanted,” and Saad Shafqat’s Breath of Death is our first medical thriller. The list continues at a clip.

But merely being engaged with the world, with the “history of the present,” is not a prerequisite for great literature. Although Nabokov acquitted himself rather well, who reads his compatriot, Nobel winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn anymore, the writers comprising the Neg­ritude Movement,[12] or our Prog­ressives? Does anybody even recall John Dos Passos, once anointed as “the best writer of our time?”[13] Manifestly, engagement can be a fraught endeavour. I suppose

one can “Forgive everybody everything,” but I find myself wondering from time to time whether we, readers, writers, Americans, South Asians, South Americans, South Koreans, anybody, everybody, can afford to be unengaged in this day and age, noses in phones?

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 31st, 2016