In the most recent issue of Boulevard, poet and fiction writer Anis Shivani published an ideological critique of Dave Eggers’s 2012 novel A Hologram for the King. I haven’t read the novel, and so was going to skip the essay, but the author made a few bold statements about the novel right at the top, and I was intrigued. The essay, it turns out, is a smart and accessible critique of the book from a postcolonial perspective. Shivani points out that “In the last few years in America we’ve had white novelists representing Muslims and Arabs more prominently that Muslims or Arabs have in their own writing.”
What we’re seeing is perhaps a particular form of Orientalism, only pitched at a higher, more refined, more politically correct level. The other can’t be demonized, of course–that’s the business of bureaucrats propagating the endless campaign against terror, or unreconstructed neoconservative types–but whereas Eggers may be offering something of a critique of neoliberlism in economic terms, his overall venture in Hologram accords quite well with neoliberlism’s position with respect to countries on the periphery.
For neoliberalism, countries like Saudi Arabia are the subject of particular discourse formations, and I don’t think Eggers deviates too far from this discourse because he too, after all, breathes the same intellectual air.
…I don’t want to suggest that Eggers doesn’t depict Saudis sympathetically–he does–but the kind of sympathy he represents is precisely the problem.
The essay goes on to argue this point, effectively illuminating the ideology behind the novel. “Eggers is to be given credit for taking on big subjects, when the predominant bulk of American literary fiction insists on living in a world of nostalgia and psychosis,” Shivani notes toward the end. But Shivani’s not about to give Eggers a pass on the way he approaches his big subject. Fun, fun, fun.
In the same issue, the essay that did attract my attention from the top, but that I actually couldn’t finish, was Robert Zaller’s Toward the Post-Modern Novel: The Polyphonic Consciousness of György Sebestyén.
The piece’s aim is to re-introduce this Hungarian author to the English-language audience. Sebestyén died in 1990, and though some of his work was translated to English before his death in the few years that followed, it seems he’s largely been forgotten by the English-language public. Zaller contextualizes his novel as post-modern in relationship to modernists Proust, Joyce, and Musil. Other names that appear in the first two pages of the piece are Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Robbe-Grillet, Le Clezio, Gaddis, Pynchon, Wallace, Beckett, Roth, Kundera, Kadare, Nabokov, W.G. Sebald, Celan. That’s a lot of name-dropping. Courtesy of NYRB Press, I’ve actually been very interested in mid-century Hungarian authors. By far, the most interesting of the novelists I’ve read lately was Magda Szabo. Not that I was really expecting to find her name in Zaller’s essay, but her name was fresh enough in my mind to make me aware that Zaller’s list didn’t include a single female author, modern, post-modern, or what. Not even Virginia Woolf. I got so distracted by my own track of thought, I never got to part two of his long-ish essay.
otagonist, arrives here as a boy of four. A farmer adopts him and treats him cruelly. Egger, nevertheless, builds a life, marries, goes to war, returns, watches the world change around him as he becomes a stalwart of his valley and earns his living by leading groups of tourists through the mountains. I’m reading this novel as a meditation about stewardship of the land, an exercise of imagination about how to live lightly. It takes a certain set of experiences, good and bad luck, to get there. Here’s a sign that Egger paints to advertise his business:
Olga Zilberbourg 