In any case, I've been thinking especially about an author's self-consciousness when writing a novel, and I'm not talking exactly (I don't think) about the kind of self-consciousness that happens when you accidently wear a mismatching pair of shoes or forget your pants or anything like that, but more about the kind that...well, in Twilight in Delhi, I see the abortive masculinities and their subsequent lack of agency (in the characters), and it's all too easy to extrapolate a conclusion that the writing of such masculinities may betray some certain amount of masculine anxiety within Ahmed Ali?
So...going back to my last post...I guess all I'm really doing is clarifying what I couldn't clarify in the last post (but please count this as two blog posts. This wasn't at all what I set out to do)...(god, can you tell how incoherent I am?)...anyways...what kind of authorial self-consciousnesses or anxieties can we extrapolate from the lack of character in contemporary writing?
So... Ahmed Ali is experiencing masculine anxiety as evinced by the lack of male agency in his writing? I guess I'm wanting some examples.
ReplyDeleteAsghar's western dress is a rejection of traditional masculine forms. Mir Nihal is reduced to killing small animals and scaring small children as he gets older and more frail... is there anything else? What about the characters in these examples did you find to be particularly autobiographical on Ali's part?