Reading as Resistance: Practicing Literacy and Interconnection in Nadeem Aslam's The Golden Legend

Abstract

Reading as ResistancePracticing Literacy and Interconnection in Nadeem Aslam's The Golden Legend Beth Miller "Literature means no one is forgotten." Nadeem Aslam1 Though often read in the context of post-9/11 literature, Nadeem Aslam's novels also occupy their own unique territory in contemporary fiction.2 His texts consistently carve out nuanced, compassionate spaces for both readers and characters where multiple perspectives find a voice, what Madeline Clements terms "conscience-heavy fiction" (53). The narratives' multiplicity of voices takes root across the global landscape, guaranteeing a wide array of characters a place in which to speak but leaving it up to his readers whether or not these disparate perspectives will be heard.3 Aslam's 2017 novel The Golden Legend further enhances the significance of the interlocking narratives that characterize his lyrical, gripping oeuvre. These narratives invite readers to form connections between them, just as the characters seek to locate their individual story's place in relation to others'. Aslam's novels tell the stories of ordinary people making sense of love, life, and loss in larger communal, cultural, national, and global circumstances, described by Peter Childs and James Green as "private individuals caught up in public history" (8). The writer says that, for his characters, he is "more interested in people" than in them serving "as representatives of a religion, or nation, or ideology" (Hong). The Golden Legend shifts the focus of Aslam's explorations of interconnection with an increased emphasis on physical and spatial reality in a globalized and ever-globalizing world. As a result, the theme of connectivity foregrounds the resistant power of individuals and human relationships to uphold love and beauty in spite of opposing structures of power and violence.4 Early in the text, Aslam demonstrates this networked global experience when he writes: Nargis [, the protagonist,] looked towards the window, the country outside it and the world beyond. The hidden lines of force moving through the room, through her body. Everything this land and others like it were going through was about power and influence. All of it. All these struggles of Pakistanis were [End Page 341] not just about Pakistan, they were about the survival of the human race. They were about the whole planet. (34–35) This passage indicates the global scale across which the novel operates. The process of reading, then, mirrors the orders of magnitude suggested by the passage's logic: moving from an individual, to a city, a nation, a continent, and to the world. The Golden Legend's narratives stand in for a global network of people and their stories. By networks, in this sense, I refer both to the human networks of family, friends, and co-workers, the people they know, and so on, rippling outward, and the more common usage of the phrase in daily life, the digital and technological networks that, metaphorically and literally, join individuals to the rest of the world. To make these zones of connection more readily apparent, Aslam employs digital networks to help readers cognitively construct a human network imaginary.5 The regular appearances of cell phones, cellular towers, and the internet remind readers of connectivity and separation not only in the digital space, but also in the relational. However, the writer resists permitting physical and emotional human networks to entirely dominate representations of connection in his novel; instead, the reader begins to find that intra- and extra-diegetic stories play a crucial role in linking humanity to one another. In fact, the theme of storytelling, particularly stories that demonstrate sharing and collaboration among individuals and cultures, forms the other half of the essential structure of human experience and connection in the novel. The Golden Legend directs readers' awareness and attention to less apparent but equally necessary and immediate networks: physical communities, personal and cultural memory, as well as books and stories themselves. One book retains particular significance in The Golden Legend—its inter-diegetic namesake, That They Might Know Each Other. The text-within-the-text is violently attacked and dismembered, leaving the main characters the task of stitching it back together with gold thread. This physical act of remaking takes place textually alongside readers' reconceptualization of...