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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2015 2b. Short Essay: 2b. Choose a previously-read literary text . . . |
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Hanna Mak
2b. Short Essay: The Postmodern
Byronic Hero in Mohsin Hamid’s
Moth Smoke
As Salman Rushdie once said, “Vertigo
is the conflict between the fear of falling and the desire to fall.” The
enduring appeal of the gothic and the Byronic hero archetype is the product of
this almost inexplicable conflict within ourselves; a primal attraction to
elements within a story that are dark, enigmatic and oftentimes profoundly
disturbing. Through the tragic figure of the Byronic hero, the reader is able to
safely indulge this predilection. While the character is often brilliant or
resourceful, he or she is also frequently a self-destructive, disillusioned
iconoclast, and often guards some terrible secret or forbidden love. Daru, the
protagonist of Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke,
encapsulates all of these traits perfectly—despite their tincture through the
updated lens of a Postmodernist Pakistani-American author, who aims not to
simply reuse old tropes, but to evoke and play with them deliberately.
The author prepares the reader to
anticipate the arc of the Byronic hero almost immediately. Beginning the story
with a trial, Daru is implicated in the killing of a child, and our first
introduction to the character is as follows: “A hard man with shadowed eyes,
manacled, cuffed, disheveled, proud, erect. A man capable of anything and afraid
of nothing. Two guards accompany him, and yes, they are brutes, but they would
offer scant assurance if this man were not chained. He is the terrible
almost-hero of a great story. Tragic, powerful, and dangerous. He alone meets
your eyes.” This description occurs in the only section of the book that comes
from the perspective of an omniscient narrator; every other chapter is from the
perspective of a handful of different characters, including Daru himself.
Ultimately, it represents the perspective of the
public eye, and differs greatly from
the inner knowledge we gain of the main character through the eyes of his
friends, his lover, and of himself. In its description, it encapsulates the
Byronic hero’s dark, haunted appearance and capable nature, but it fails to
represent Daru as he actually is—only
with elements of truth. It is an imperfect projection of a criminal that could
easily be gleaned from a news outlet or the word-of-mouth condemnation of a
stranger that vastly exaggerates his physical strength and savagery. Therefore,
while this aspect of the narrative serves to evoke the powerful, culturally
recognizable image of the Byronic hero, it also becomes a critique of its
accuracy and real-world application.
The novel does not only offer a
critique, however. It also deliberately acknowledges the inexorable force of
cultural imagery, and subsequently the place that the Byronic hero trope has
within the reader’s collective consciousness. For example, somewhat ironically,
through the act of emphasizing the discrepancy between public opinion of the
hero and the “reality” of the hero that the reader gradually constructs
throughout the novel, the Byronic hero archetype is still ultimately reinforced,
because it emphasizes Daru’s status as a deeply misunderstood pariah. While the
context is changed because the reader knows substantially more about the
character’s motivations and his back story than his Romantic predecessor of
Magua in the Last of the Mohicans,
and must also contend with the Postmodernist dilemma of the chronically
unreliable narrator, the characterization still remains intact. Daru further
fulfils the archetype because he can readily be characterized as highly
intelligent, but self-destructive. Julius Superb, his former economics
professor, relates his opinion in an interview: “Daru? Brilliant. Though a bit
of a seat-of-the-pants economist. Liked to assert rather than prove. And not the
best at handling criticism. …From my experience, Daru is completely crazy.
Quick-tempered, oversensitive, inconsistent. But so am I, and I haven’t killed
anyone yet.”
Lastly, as further evidence of the
Byronic hero archetype, the element of forbidden love is strongly present in the
novel—Daru’s affair with his best friend’s wife, the articulate and brutally
honest Mumtaz, ultimately plays a major role in his undoing. After being fired
from his job at the bank, Daru never manages to find a new job, and gradually
loses everything that he has—all while watching his childhood friend, the
arrogant yet extremely charismatic Ozi, enjoy every trapping of success due to
his powerful family connections. He finds himself connecting with Mumtaz,
becoming increasingly obsessed with her in direct proportion to his gradual loss
of status. After Ozi discovers them through an open window, however, he frames
Daru for the hit-and-run killing of a young boy—a crime for which Ozi was
responsible, with an abundance of witnesses—and the trial from the scene at the
beginning of the novel concludes at the end with Daru’s conviction and
imprisonment.
Where the example of Daru possibly
stands apart from his Romantic predecessors is the fact that he has no exemplary
foil with whom to contrast his darkness, as did Magua in
Last of the Mohicans. Ozi is Daru’s
foil only in terms of success and fortune, which he only has access to because
of his connections. In fact, true to the novel’s Postmodernist classification,
all of the characters are seriously flawed and duplicitous. Ultimately, the
novel does portray Daru as a Byronic hero, but does so to the effect of
highlighting the structural injustices in Lahore society. The effectiveness of
this symbol as a conduit for the message of the author, however, demonstrates
the enduring power that it continues to wield within the modern imagination and
across multiple cultures.
