Changez in his own admission confidently admits to being a modern day janissary but this definition given by Juan-Bautista gives me less confidence in labeling Changez with this term. The main point of doubt I would raise is that Changez was not captured but went to America originally of his own free will. He wanted to be part of a bigger and powerful empire than the dwindling ones of his own nation. The second point of doubt is that does Changez really help erase his own culture? If this was not true then Juan-Bautista’s accusation could really be seen as a bitter attack on Changez’s character. Maybe a more accurate term to use would be ‘rebel’. In view of Moshin Hamid’s model for his book, The Fall by Albert Camus, this term takes on a more loaded definition; rebellion becomes an important part of being human. Maybe another description could be more accurate such as a traitor because of his initial voluntary education and employment in America and his subsequent leaving.
JANISSARY
“There really could be no doubt: I was a modern day Janissary, a servant of the American empire when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war.”1
Nowhere in the book does anybody ever tell Changez what to do regarding important choices. He studies at Princeton because it is one of the best universities in the world, which he is good enough to be in and his poor boy’s sense of ‘longing’ motivates him to succeed. No one demands him to study in America, he even has to go through rigorous tests to get in, and so this really should be seen as his own choice. By process of logic his choices must become narrower. The choices left are his and no one decides for him. When he explains his poor background of a culture of declining wealth he says that he both ignores the fact and tries to ‘restores things to what they were’. What attracts him to America is envy of another empire of power and influence that he wishes to be a part of.
When he arrives at Princeton he says; ‘“I have access to this beautiful campus…to professors who are titans in their field and fellow students who are philosopher-kings in the making”’ 1 Changez makes Princeton sound like a paradise, a utopia. It is interesting Hamid uses the term philosopher-kings, a term originating in Plato’s Republic, which is a book about creating a perfect state, or a Utopia. The word utopia technically means a place ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, customs and conditions. It is also the word for an impossibly ideal scheme. Changez’s first impressions of this perfect place are suitably set in America where one of the biggest impossibly ideal schemes thrives, attracting the attention of many international students: The American Dream. As Changez says being at Princeton ‘Is a dream come true.’
The philosopher-kings were supposed to be rulers of a state who were also lovers of wisdom and had perfect reason in able to judge justly. This idea though has been criticized for its uncompromising elitism and possible power abuse. In this sense it is true to say that he is being reared to rule the world, but he has been seduced by the dream of American success. He has been converted, but not captured.
The offices of Underwood & Sampson are regularly described as ‘the empire’ and Changez does manage to become enlisted into its corps. What this empire does is the valuation of other businesses, normally ones that are about to be sold. If this is considered as erasing his culture than it is one of the more indirect ways of doing so. Consider how the American business stays mainly within America, with brief excursions to other places, and has very few links and interest with other countries and cultures overseas. It is difficult to see how one erases the other. If it does than it would only be collateral, not intentional, damage. One could argue that Changez moral defense of his job does have fascistic echoes of the reply ‘just following orders’, but his reply is more credible considering that he is not fighting a literal war. In fact the accusation of janissary only highlights the fact of how single and narrow-minded Changez has been on his work to the compromise of the other areas of his life. It can only really be taken on as a metaphor of his over individualisation to the expense of his society but not literal. Not to say that there are no negative consequences to his actions, the link between Erica as a writer and Juan-Bautista as a publisher should not be missed, but it should be clear that his consequences remain in America. It also has to be remembered that Juan-Bautista is annoyed by Changez’s presence, and anxious about his job, and might want to put him off in any way. Juan-Bautista is really a disgruntled victim and critic of what is in fact the natural process of growth and decline in a system of capitalism. What is not in doubt is that Changez’s loyalties are indeed confused, but there are better names to call him than janissary.
REBEL
“Do you have any possessions? Some? Good. Have you shared them with the poor? No? Then you are what I call a Saducee”2
Juan-Bautista calls Changez a janissary but Jean-Baptiste Clamence, the narrator in Albert Camus’ The Fall, he calls the unnamed listener a Sadducee. A Sadducee is a member of a religious sect that followed only the first five books of the Torah. The point of this name is to highlight the hypercriticism of people who follow the law but who are not charitable.
It is worth looking a little more into The Fall as it often gives good descriptions of the situations that occur in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and adds some insight to Changez’s character and to the novel as a whole. Changez does own some possessions and though not uncharitable he is more or less working for his own advantage. For that advantage he is required to compromise; ‘We were expected to contribute our talents to your society, the society we were joining.’1 In Camus’ novel the protagonist explains this compromise as a ‘process of attrition’:
‘Haven’t you noticed that our society is organized to this kind of liquidation?... “Do you want a good clean life? Like everybody else?” You say of course. How can one say no? “O.K. You’ll be cleaned up. Here’s a job, a family, and organized leisure.” And the little teeth attack the flesh, right down to the bone. But I am unjust. I shouldn’t say their organization. It is ours, after all: it’s a question of which will clean up the other.’2
In relation to the organization Underwood & Sampson this is a good description of what happens to Changez. He works for and gets all the things he wants but finds that all the things he wants kill his idea of himself. He cannot be called a rebel against society because it is his, after all. He is a rebel against himself because he finds himself to be a hypocrite of a kind. This idea of rebellion comes closer to the Camus’ definition and would suit better than janissary. His image becomes a mask and in hating the mask he makes a decision to betray the country that has expected him to contribute and potentially make him a traitor of himself.
I do think that Juan-Bautista is supposed to allude to John the Baptist but also to the similarly named Jean-Baptiste Clamence because he tries to make strangers aware of their own hypocritical, or contradictory, existences like Changez tries to do; ‘the portrait I hold out to my contemporaries becomes a mirror.’2
This notion of being a traitor against yourself comes up in The Fall as Jean-Baptiste Clamence compares Amsterdam concentric canals to Dante’s conception of hell. He notices that they have arrived ‘in the last circle’, which, usefully in this study, in Dante’s Inferno is the third Nether Hell known as The Sins of the Wolf where the sinners of fraud complex, namely traitors, are punished.
TRAITOR
“Indeed, I would soon be gone, leaving my family and my home behind, and this made me a kind of coward in my own eyes, a traitor.”1
Looking to the classic Italian epic poem may seem like a deviation from the main question but it is useful to investigate the Inferno’s last circle in relation to ideas of betrayal. This will be used to help define Changez status to see if he is a traitor and what kind of traitor he is.
The image of treason is shown in the Inferno as Satan devouring Judas, Brutus and Cassius. Judas represents treason against God, but the novel as a whole being irreligious; it’s unlikely that he is this sort of traitor. He is more like Brutus and Cassius who were traitors to Julius Caesar, the empire and world order, which consequently in The Inferno represents treason against Man-in-Soceity.4 The key scene for this part of the argument is Changez’s smile at the twin towers attack. In public he pretends to feel the same shock and anguish as his co-workers but really feels pleased about the symbolism of America being ‘brought to its knees’. This alone does not make him a traitor because he did not know why he felt pleased and so he is simply confused.
After the attack the society changes. New York society proclaims itself to be American, a big difference for Changez regarding how he tells us that he was ‘never an American’1 and its sudden suspicions makes him aware of his well hidden difference that produces an uncomfortable guilt in him. The point is that the society Changez pledged to has changed, or has revealed a darker side, that puts pressure on his position. Despite his business cards and Princeton degree society’s judgment of him becomes to be about his race. He still loves America and is sympathetic towards Jim but society has made it difficult for him to be himself, which is a breach of ideals that constitutes America and, like a broken contract, he is not obliged to keep his alliance.
Having gone through this definition of traitor it seems that the rebel is a better description of who Changez is and makes clearer sense of what he does. There is another term that I’ve briefly touched that I would like to return to because it illuminates exactly how one can be both rebel and authority.
PHILOSOPHER-KING
‘Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne…it’s a chore, on the contrary, quite solitary and very exhausting’2
One of main overlooked issues of this book is the concern of freedom and of its responsibilities. Camus was also interested in freedom stating that man is condemned to be free and thought that the only free man was the rebel. Hamid here more concerned with living with others and ones duty. Changez, having rebelled, ends up as a lecturer of a university. Teaching others is the way he believes he should use the responsibilities of his freedom, skills and knowledge.
Bizarrely it is at this point Changez really does become more of a janissary as he opposes the country he was once allied to, but even here he is not one, he is a philosopher-king; or not so much a philosopher-king but more like a philosopher-servant, organizing protests, meeting and advising students in every aspect of life. Using the skills he gained from America in a way he feels benefits the greater good of a wider society.
Much as this novel is about terrorism it is also about globalisation and Changez’s dilemma of his torn identity has been made a problem because he tries to define himself to narrowly by country when what he is a citizen, not of America or Pakistan, but of the world.
Moshin Hamid did not write a polemic of American foreign policy, or a propagandist piece for Pakistan, but he wrote an ambiguous fable to provoke critical thinking in the reader. He does this because this is what he believes to be of responsible good use of his writing skills. Maybe it is really this that is important for individuals, like Changez, and countries, like America: to be free and just.
BIBLOGRAPHY
1 Hamid, Moshin, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
2 Camus, Albert, The Fall
3 Dante, Inferno
No comments:
Post a Comment