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Narration, Description and Repetition in Rohinton Mistry’s Family Matters

  • 인문논총
  • 2015, 38(), pp.31-51
  • Publisher : Institute for Human studies, Kyungnam University
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Published : October 31, 2015

Sorensen, Eli Park 1

1서울대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article discusses Rohinton Mistry s third novel, Family Matters (2002), and the form of the novel. In the reception of Rohinton Mistry s novels, it has often been pointed out that his novels share a lot —formally as well as thematically—with the classic European novel form. In order to explore this connection, I return to Georg Lukács s theory on novelistic class consciousness. To Lukács, the genre of the novel is essentially an expression of the formation of a new class, the revolutionary bourgeoisie. After this revolutionary bourgeoisie has assumed a position of power and conservatism during the second half of the 19th century, the novel begins to change radically from a form that emphasizes narration to a form that emphasizes description. In Lukács’s view, description reifies and de historicizes the revolutionary potential of bourgeois subjectivity. Albeit in a different context, one similarly finds the notion of a bourgeois fall in The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which Frantz Fanon develops a critique of the post-independent national middle class as a stagnant, powerless class. In my article I want to explore these ideas about a fallen bourgeoisie, postcolonial history and literary form in a reading of the class subjectivity Mistry articulates in Family Matters—a novel that, as the title indicates, engages with some of the classic bourgeois values within a specific historical context, the Parsi community in India during the 1990s. I argue that the novel revives—and thus repeats—the mode of narration characteristic of the revolutionary bourgeoisie during the first half of the 19th Century in an attempt to overcome the problem of fragmentation and the lack of historical sense.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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