Beyond economic globalization in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia : The false promise of self-help and possibilities through reading with a creative mind

Globalization as paradox and the false promise of self-help

As a product and arguable beneficiary of globalization, Hamid sustains a complex perspective on the phenomenon, and the complexity of his relationship with it manifests itself in his approach to writing fiction. On the one hand, Hamid contextualizes economic globalization in terms of its relevance to South Asia, arguing, in “Mistrust in the West”, that his native Pakistan needs “jobs and access to the markets and knowledge and entertainment of the wider world” (2001: n.p.). He suggests that he accepts or perhaps even welcomes globalization, especially of the economic variety, much like Pakistan historically appeared to accept it at World Trade Organization negotiations. ² He apparently wholly welcomes what Steger has termed “the myriad of forms of connectivity and flows linking the local (and national) to the global” (2013: 2). On the other hand, Hamid has critiqued economic globalization in accord with scholars such as Muhammad Iqbal Anjum. He sees ways in which globalization emerges out of the colonial era in a developing nation such as Pakistan, and he might agree with Anjum that “[t]he process of globalization of Pakistan[’s] economy has been accompanied by the worst tragedies for both Pakistan herself and her masses” (2011: 75). He might agree too that “the illusive, regressive, and aggressive movement of globalization has been reduced to a predatory neo-colonialism” (Anjum, 2011: 75). As Hamid observes in an interview, Pakistan is “being ground up by the global system” (Houpt, 2000: n.p.) because, as he puts it in “My Foreign Correspondence”, globalization brings with it “mass displacement, wars, terrorism, unchecked financial capitalism, inequality, xenophobia, [and] climate change” (Hamid, 2015a: 2).

Hamid expresses the paradox of his personal experience with economic globalization and his feelings about it by way of his approach to writing How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. He resists the name-branding efforts involved with economic globalization and echoes the characteristic ambiguity of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel in which uncertainty appears as the only certainty, ³ by de-branding all aspects of his novel — by giving no character or place in the novel a name. Instead, any character could be any impoverished individual who wishes for a better life in any part of the world, and hence the characters that Hamid represents are not necessarily Pakistani ones who are subject to xenophobic perspectives that Westerners might have, especially in a post-9/11 world that stereotypes Pakistan as a backwards place where terrorists such as Osama bin Laden lurk. ⁴ Without names, the fictional world of Hamid’s novel emerges at least in part as fresh. It exists as relatively free of the drawbacks of globalization as Hamid has at times discussed them. As Hamid observes in discussing market- and non-market-based features of the contemporary world, he “found by describing things to be what they are, rather than using the shorthand of names for them, [he] could see them fresh” (Schroeder, 2013: n.p.).

Simultaneously, however, Hamid critiques globalization by overtly branding his text as a self-help book — even though it is not necessarily a self-help book, but a literary work. To reference Poon’s argument, the novel, “with its catchy, hyperbolic title”, is suggestive of “its masquerade as a self-help book” and “its satiric intent” (2015: 2). As Poon explains, “[t]he object of the novel’s satire is the capitalist, neoliberal notion of the self that is predicated on an over-weening sense of control and ultimate agency” (2015: 2). But readers might stretch beyond seeing it as simple satire. They might read the novel as a quintessentially postmodern one that addresses the subject of late capitalism as Jameson theorizes it. They might read it as a post-postmodern one in accord with Jeffrey T. Nealon’s (2013) discussion of post-postmodernism as an intensified version of postmodernism. ⁵ And, most notably, they might read it as a postmodern parody, to use a term that Linda Hutcheon theorizes in A Poetics of Postmodernism. Indeed, the novel functions, to appropriate Hutcheon’s words, not as a “ridiculing imitation”, but as a form that “enshrine[s] the past and […] question[s] it” (1988: 26, 126), especially the international literary past that produced self-help as a rhetorical genre. In other words, the novel parodies a self-help book with the goal of interrogating self-help as a genre and with the goal of interrogating the kind of world that produces self-help books for mass consumption. It at least in part ignores the fact that its own author, Hamid, perhaps inevitably hopes to make money (as any contemporary author would hope to make it). It tacitly celebrates itself as self-evidently excellent for being art — for being a sophisticated, thought-provoking, aesthetic object and not just a commodity that exists to make a profit.

Certainly, the literary past of self-help as a rhetorical genre that Hamid critiques involves the historical moment to which Poon traces the genre: it involves Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct, which Poon identifies as “the original book which gave the genre of self-improvement literature its name” (2015: 2). However, Hamid himself seems to trace the genre to different key points. As he suggests in an interview in the Wall Street Journal, “[t]he oldest self-help book forms […] are religious self-help book forms [that] often employ [the second person]” just as Hamid does in his novel (Schroeder, 2013: n.p.). Moreover, they are forms that appeared in the early American literary tradition — an often religiously-infused tradition that speaks to American history as key to the development of global capitalism. Indeed, in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid tacitly references Benjamin Franklin’s ethos as arguably the most famous self-made man in history via the narrator’s eventual characterization of the nameless protagonist as “self-made, on the rise” (Hamid, 2013a: 141). ⁶ Thus Hamid seems to trace more modern incarnations of the self-help genre to Franklin’s Autobiography (1793/2004), which showcases the means by which Franklin fashioned himself as a self-made man, among the progenitors of the self-made-man myth, ⁷ and among the first purveyors of the American Dream as a religious Protestant ethic shaped it (Effing, 2009: 128) — a dream for success through hard work that functions as a foundation for widespread belief in the promises of global capitalism.

For early generations of Americans who read Franklin, the Autobiography spoke to the quintessentially American right to pursue happiness as per the Declaration of Independence, ⁸ but amid the rise of late capitalism in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the kind of self-help that Franklin offers takes on new meaning in new manifestations of the genre. As Micki McGee describes, the self-help genre’s boom in the late-twentieth century was a response to “declining real wages and increased uncertainty about employment stability and opportunities” (2005: 12), both clear byproducts of capitalism and globalization as Hamid sees them. And texts associated with this boom, as Maureen Ebben explains, essentially “reproduce[d] the conventions of apolitical religious discourses” by advocating for “spiritual reform” and by way of “authors enjoining readers to ‘seek a higher power’” (1995: 112). Hence the self-help genre developed into one that promised, via a quasi-religious rhetoric that reflects its heritage, to resuscitate the imagined prospect of social and personal mobility, even if such social mobility is implausible or impossible. It thereby developed into an untrustworthy genre arguably associated with the stuff of fiction, much as it appears in the world of Hamid’s fiction, because it promises, but perhaps cannot deliver, real help to anyone except an author making money from sales. The genre developed as a sort of accidental or purposeful tool of capitalist forces: for instance, publishing companies that seek to keep in place a population of have-nots who will buy self-help books because this population seeks perpetually to become a population of haves.

The globalized, capital-driven world of Hamid’s novel does afford possibilities for some degree of social mobility as self-help books that Hamid parodies promise it, and possible mobility keeps characters believing in global capitalism and the promise of self-help. For example, essentially following the narrator’s 12 steps, the nameless protagonist at least temporarily improves his economic circumstances and climbs in social class status to emerge as self-made. At the novel’s opening, set “generations” following “the end of colonization” ⁹ and at the onset of a modern moment at which globalization thrives — a moment that scholars see as distinct from the postcolonial one ¹⁰ — “you”, the unnamed protagonist that the apparently omniscient narrator of the self-help book addresses, live in a country village home with no privacy, and you suffer from hepatitis E, a virus that infects the human system via faecal–oral transmission — essentially a sewage system gone wrong and one that arguably parodies globalization as a toxic economic system gone wrong (20; 3). But by way of leaving the village, the nameless protagonist climbs the social ladder for a time. He works initially as a DVD delivery boy, using his knowledge of movies as what Pierre Bourdieu terms cultural capital in his conversations with rich customers as well as with the pretty girl, who comes from the same lower class as the nameless protagonist. Later, he becomes a peddler of imported canned tuna, soy sauce, and ketchup. Later still, he becomes a bottled water mogul who provides fraudulently clean and then actually clean water to city residents who seek to avoid diseases such as hepatitis E.

Like the nameless protagonist but to a greater degree, the pretty girl buys into the capitalist system and the dream of upward mobility as globalization propagates it, and she successfully helps herself by transcending her social class to become a self-made woman — at least for a while. She does so by leaving the city, which is likely Lahore, after a sexual encounter with the nameless protagonist and effectively becoming a part of the mass media that disseminates globalization’s products in “great city by the sea” (112), which is likely Karachi. The nameless protagonist first sees the pretty girl “on a billboard […] modeling jeans”, and eventually she becomes “a person of some substance in her industry”, not “a model of the first rank”, but one who “is well known to photographers and designers and other models, and to readers of picture-laden weekend supplements of local newspapers” (61; 84). She appears to earn “as much as a retail banker her age, and perhaps twice as much as [the nameless protagonist]”, rendering a sexual encounter with him as “transgressive” because they occupy different spheres of existence in terms of class (84; 110).

Yet just as paradox characterizes Hamid’s experience with globalization as it informs his book’s apparent genre and purpose, it characterizes globalization as a subject that Hamid represents in his self-help book parody. It characterizes his effort to question and contest the increasingly corporatized literary history of self-help as a genre that in actuality cannot really help those who seek to move up the social ladder. Globalization exists, paradoxically, as a phenomenon that promises economic richness to all, especially non-Western victims of globalization who most need help or self-help of some variety, but it produces dramatic social class inequities and toxic effects. It eventually, and perhaps inevitably, comes to work against the promise of social mobility through hard work, and like self-help books that fail to actually help their readers to help themselves, it fails to bring its adherents the fruits of their capitalist desires. Indeed, the nameless protagonist never finds the degree of success that comes to define Franklin, who makes his way onto the American one-hundred dollar bill, and similarly, the pretty girl, who cycles through the mass media system in search of economic wealth and status, loses social status as she ages out of her profession. Once her modelling career ends, she appears on “[a] popular cooking show on TV” that the nameless protagonist, at this point married, sees his wife watching (126). When the show gets cancelled, the pretty girl turns to selling furniture at a furniture store with no mass media presence other than a website that the nameless protagonist visits at about the time he senses his marriage is failing. By the novel’s conclusion, the pretty girl, no longer a girl by any means but still referred to as such by the narrator, altogether retires from her work and thus relinquishes her now minimal presence in the mass media. A byproduct that the capitalist system spits out, she ends up essentially where she began: she becomes a landlady in “the city of her birth” and lives in the condo that she rents, her only connection to her former life being her view of “a telecommunications center” (197; 207). As the narrator observes, “[s]he bought her place for its view” — perhaps because she is nostalgic about her youth and more financially successful days; perhaps because she is nostalgic for the sense of connectivity her career had enabled; or perhaps just because she is happy for a reminder of the comfortable distance she now has from an excessively competitive, capital-driven life (207).

More notable than capitalism’s unfulfilled promises as Hamid showcases them, by way of the nameless protagonist’s and the pretty girl’s professional trajectories, brute violence emerges as endemic to economic globalization as a process. It manifests as evidence that although capitalism may allow for some degree of social mobility, economic globalization results in more harm than good. Violence appears as the result of a stratified society in which individual citizens engage in an often futile rat race for money — one of the sort that Hamid’s self-help book encourages. As the narrator says, “[c]ontact between extremes of wealth and poverty fuels” burglaries, robberies, and the like (172). From his early days in school, the nameless protagonist encounters violence, as evidenced by his experience with a teacher who makes “raw and slightly bloody” the nameless protagonist’s ear (23). Notably, the teacher enacts violence in large part because he feels dissatisfied with his life: he would rather have had a career as a corrupt, wealthier, and more highly regarded “meter reader at the electric utility”, but instead he is left to occupy a lower social class (23). Similarly, a desire for wealth motivates violence that the nameless protagonist encounters as a bottled-water mogul. Upon attempting to expand his business onto the “turf” of “a wealthy businessman”, who runs a rival operation, the nameless protagonist receives a threat from a “boyish motorcyclist” with a gun (124; 123). And violent acts such as the boyish motorcyclist’s are common in Hamid’s novel. At one point, a bombing occurs near a hotel at which the pretty girl opts to stay. At another, a bombing destroys the nameless protagonist’s truck. Indeed, violence serves as clear evidence of the problem with the toxic system that produces a minority of haves and a majority of have-nots and perhaps constitutes the very problem itself. As suggested by the title of Hamid’s seventh chapter, “BE PREPARED TO USE VIOLENCE”, getting filthy rich in rising Asia necessitates violence (117). And as the narrator elucidates,

[b]ecoming filthy rich requires a degree of unsqueamishness, whether in rising Asia or anywhere else. For wealth comes from capital, and capital comes from labor, and labor comes from equilibrium, from calories in chasing calories out, an inherent, in-built leanness, the leanness of biological machines that must be bent to your will with some force if you are to loosen your own financial belt and, sighingly, expand. (119)

Put another way, becoming filthy rich requires the exploitation of others. It requires treating others as less than human or altogether inhuman — as existing for the sole purpose of serving an inevitably self-serving boss and a system of global capitalism that aims only to perpetuate itself to the benefit of the elite who run the system.

Violence, too, emerges in Hamid’s novel in more systematic and organized ways, for instance through the actions of fanatical Islamic believers who seek to remake the world order by countering modernity, capitalism, and capitalist drives toward social mobility that self-help books bolster. Al-Qaeda terrorists who in their networks “operate globally like transnational corporations” (Kurzman, 2012: 394) aim to “unify the whole Islamic community and perhaps even transform the world of the unbelievers, the more radical among them advocating violence as a proper means of struggle” (Lechner and Boli, 2012: 389). And much as in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel in which the reader never knows for certain whether the novel’s protagonist is actually a religiously-motivated terrorist or a market fundamentalist who terrorizes those who seek social mobility via capitalist forces, ¹¹ fanatical fundamentalism appears as a hazy yet seemingly pervasive absent presence in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Readers know that “religious activists” and “religiously-minded activists” lurk in the narrative (49; 149). They know, as the narrator instructs in one of his twelve steps, to “AVOID IDEALISTS” who apparently “congregate around universities” (55; 57). They even know that, for a time, the nameless protagonist “grow[s] a beard and join[s] an organization” that offers him some semblance of direction, “belonging”, and “protection” (60; 73). What Hamid never makes wholly clear is the nature of the organization and whether it and organizations like it enact any of the violent acts readers see. What Hamid masks in a divergence from the apparently straightforward rhetoric of the self-help genre that he parodies is whether fundamentalist terrorists are to blame for the array of bombings mentioned in the novel.

Finally, much like Hamid represents terrorist violence that opposes the state as endemic to economic globalization as a process, he represents state violence by the police and the military as an inherent part of the interconnected and toxic global-capitalist system as well. Police and military forces use surveillance mechanisms to monitor and transmit the workings of remote corners of the world and to potentially act on what they see with violence of a sanctioned sort that mirrors terrorist violence, and in doing so they parody globalization’s methodology much like terrorists do. From the novel’s opening pages, Hamid’s reader senses the existence of threatening surveying activities and even sees the action of the novel from secret, surveying perspectives. The narrator invites the reader to perceive the nameless protagonist and his sister playing a childhood game of river “from the lenses of an orbiting reconnaissance satellite” (27) or, as Claire Chambers suggests, from the perspective of a drone (2013: n.p.), and the nameless protagonist remains in the eye of surveillance through much of his life. His first sexual encounter — with the pretty girl — occurs on her rooftop under the “the lights of circling aircraft, a pair of stars able to burn through the city’s pollution”, and “lines of electrical wires” that, too, foster surveillance streak across the night sky (53). As the narrator describes the nameless protagonist “PATRONIZ[ing] THE ARTISTS OF WAR” in accord with the ninth step to becoming filthy rich, “[a] series of [closed circuit television] cameras observes various stages of [his] progress through the cantonment” (162). Even in acts as innocent as checking email, someone else always and inevitably watches, creating an apparently interconnected network akin to the one that economic globalization aims to create. Just as the laptop on which the pretty girl watches movies is transformed, “in effect, into a covert surveillance device” that surveys her wholly innocent movements, so too is the nameless protagonist observed by unidentified observers via his computer (169). According to the narrator, he is “tracked, as are we all, as [he] proceed[s] through [his] e-mails, catch[es] up on news, perform[s] a search” (168). Thus, the war general, the “emerging-market equity trader”, the “rapid-fire TV remote user”, and the “multiple-computer-window opener” all share a common experience as cogs in a global system despite the apparently distinct lives they lead (160). As the narrator explains, we’re all information, all of us, whether “readers or writers, you or I” (159). We are all assimilated into a threatening system from which there is seemingly no escape, and self-help books such as the one that Hamid parodies can never solve the wide range of the lower class’s problems that manifest in this threatening system.

Other kinds of richness: Countering globalization via creative ways of reading

Hamid’s novel aims to interrogate the self-help genre’s promise of personal economic prosperity by way of its suggestion that economic prosperity of any sort perhaps results in ends that are not always or inherently positive: it results in some individual or corporation certainly capitalizing, but with a palpable and detrimental backlash for some other individual or population. Hence, in accord with parody as Hutcheon theorizes it, Hamid builds on his questioning of self-help by offering possibilities for a kind of richness that a mass-marketed self-help book of the sort that he parodies would tend not to present. And, notably, he does so with keen attention to the literary traditions in which he engages. In other words, Hamid suggests that non-capital-based riches and books written for purposes that transcend capitalist ones might provide those in need of help in the era of economic globalization with results that capital-based riches and texts such as self-help books written for predominantly capital-oriented purposes cannot provide. Indeed, he intimates that his text, as a quintessentially literary one that stimulates a reader’s imagination, serves as a prime example of a book that can provide this kind of counter-capitalist richness and move readers beyond the confines of a globalized and apparently ever-globalizing system.

In particular, Hamid posits that reading creatively with a capacity for imagination — reading with a mind that welcomes the literary and not just the literal — provides a richness that capitalism fails to afford. Even though writers such as Hamid must contend with markets such as those that mass produce and market actual self-help books, in the narrator’s words, “[r]eaders don’t work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you’ll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness in reading” (98; emphasis added). As Peter Morey argues, Hamid celebrates creative readings elsewhere in his oeuvre. He celebrates them in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by “[d]efamiliariz[ing] our relation to literary projects of national identification, forcing us to be the kind of deterritorialized reader demanded by the emerging category of world literature” (2011: 136). Along the same lines, the narrator of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia indicates the rich function of reading in creative ways in an ever-globalizing world that mass produces and mass markets self-help books. In the novel’s first and only outright mention of globalization as a contemporary phenomenon, he suggests that readers not turn to mass-marketed self-help books per se, but instead “persist in reading […] breathtakingly boring foreign novel[s]” (19). He suggests that they continue “slogging through page after page after please-make-it-stop page of tar-slow prose and blush-inducing formal conceit […] out of an impulse to understand distant lands that because of globalization are increasingly affecting life in [their] own” (19). Thus he suggests that readers in need of help find it in that which thrives as literary in the face of that which is mass-produced and mass-marketed. And he proposes that all novels, especially novels from different lands such as his own, function to provide self-help of a sort — even if their authors opt against making the kind of money that they would make if they explicitly shaped their books as mass-marketed, easily commodifiable, and easily consumed self-help books by genre.

For Hamid, reading literature creates room for creative human interpretation, and it thereby creates space beyond global capitalism’s reach and beyond the narrow, counter-creative logic that global capitalism arguably necessitates. It functions in distinct ways from reading mass media images that appear near-ubiquitously on screens and from reading mass-produced self-help books that boomed long after Franklin wrote his original. As the narrator makes clear, “[w]hen you watch a TV show or a movie, what you see looks like what it physically represents” (97). Certainly, a self-help book that a publisher mass produces and aims to sell for a profit provides a consumer with a product that in essence invites itself to face-value interpretation. By contrast, as the narrator continues, “when you read a book” with a creative mind, “what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create” (97). Notably, according to the narrator, reading with a creative imagination that appreciates and itself engages in creative work allows a book to become “one of a million different books” because all readers interpret and imagine books in different ways (97). And this notion of a book becoming any of a million books illuminates the rhetorical possibilities afforded by Hamid’s de-branding of individuals, cities, and nations in his text. It suggests that Hamid quite purposely aims to create space for readerly creativity — if readers opt to take him up on the opportunity he provides by way of his de-branding.

Moreover, the kind of imagination and creativity that reading with a literary mind affords sustains the capacity to transcend the limits of the reading experience by enabling creative action. Reading with a creative imagination counters fundamentalist forces such as those that may well enact violence within the bounds of Hamid’s novel: forces made up of individuals who aim to read all religious texts — and really all texts — literally as opposed to figuratively or creatively and then enact in life the words of these texts as though they are enacting what Malise Ruthven calls “blueprints for practical action” (2007: 52). ¹² Reading with a creative imagination likewise enables readers to approach aspects of their lives in imaginative and creative ways — in ways that counter the monotony of the age of mechanical reproduction that gave birth to and helps to propagate globalization. It enables readers as creative agents in the world to imagine ways of living that transcend the terms that capitalist thinking aims to set for the masses and to see globalization not as an oppressive force that hems global citizens in, but as an oppressive force that global citizens can overcome with actions. As Hamid puts it in “My Foreign Correspondence”, globalization is no doubt a “brutal phenomenon”, but if it “is capable of holding out any fundamental promise to us, any temptation to go along with its havoc, then surely that promise ought to be this: we will be more free to invent ourselves” (2015a: 2) — especially if, I would add, we can imagine and enact the possibilities that invention affords.

Furthermore, in its ability to foster imagination and a sense of agency, reading promotes human feeling of a sort that an economically oriented mind that aims only to globalize with the wholly logical goal of obtaining increased capital cannot inherently sustain. For Hamid and for many twenty-first century writers of fiction like him, economic globalization sustains an emotionless logic, operating in sleek corporate terms such as those that Hamid fleshes out via his depictions of the Underwood Samson corporation in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Yet according to the narrator of How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, “when [one] imagine[s], [one] feel[s]” and thereby attains “[t]he capacity for empathy” (220). And as a result of providing an opportunity for readers to develop empathy, Hamid invites readers to bridge the distance between themselves and their apparent Others in the same way in which Hamid as author bridges the distance between the protagonist of his novel — the unnamed you — and the novel’s reader. By bridging divides via empathy, Hamid’s readers emerge as better equipped to create a more socially just world of the sort that Hamid intimates that he desires when, for instance, he observes in “My Foreign Correspondence” that he finds “religious tolerance for all, including for targets of persecution such as Christians, Hindus, Ahmadis, secularists, and those of no religion”, as desirable (2015a: 5). As Hamid observes later in the same essay, further intertwining his conceptions of imagination, action, and empathy, “I want to bring my imagined world back into our world, to share it, to have a reader enter it and shape it, to open a space for experimentation and imagination that crosses the boundaries of the self, of the real, of time” (2015a: 10). As he continues, it is only by “people coming together to invent a world that is post-civilization” that an “infinitely more civilized world” (2015a: 10) — and thus more socially just world, at least according to Hamid’s conceptions of what counts as civilized — can emerge.

The astute literary imagination that can see and reveal complexity and in turn make creative meaning — the kind of mind that Hamid celebrates and hopes to foster by way of his parodic fiction — might see ways in which Hamid links his work to the writings of Sufi mysticism. It might see ways in which Hamid’s novel as a parody of a self-help book arguably comes to function rhetorically as a sort of twenty-first century prose incarnation of the mystical genre of the Sufi love poem — a genre that Hamid does not seek to challenge in the same way that he seeks to challenge the genre and ideological underpinnings of self-help via postmodern parody. For Hamid, the genre of Sufi poetry, like Sufism as the mystical dimension of Islam, might function as a reminder to Westerners in particular that Islam is not a monolith, to appropriate the title and argument of Hamid’s Guardian article (2013b). ¹³ It might remind Westerners that thinking as globalizers of the corporate world do, and seeking monolithic global systems as globalizers seek them, creates more harm than good. He likely understands Sufism and Sufi poetry as a genre as existing outside of the tradition/modernity dichotomy just as Katherine Pratt Ewing (1997) understands Sufism. ¹⁴ And, notably, Sufism is not an altogether new subject for Hamid: he sees it as relevant to modernity and hence he fashions it as part of the fiction about modern times that he writes. He initially references poetry associated with Sufism in Moth Smoke: in its title and in an inset metaphor involving protagonist Darashikoh “Daru” Shezad’s servant, Manucci, who describes a “moth in love” as circling a flame (Hamid, 2013: 137), the novel references the Sufi metaphor of moth and flame. This metaphor portrays the Sufi mystic’s annihilation upon experiencing divine love, ¹⁵ and in the context of Hamid’s oeuvre, it draws attention to the creative way in which Sufi mystics think and read — creative ways that Hamid celebrates.

In How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, Hamid discusses Sufi ideas much like he does in Moth Smoke: as fostering creative and counter-monolithic literary thinking. And perhaps more significantly, they manifest as running counter to ideologies that drive global capitalism and responses to it. As a result, they reinforce Carl W. Ernst’s portrayal of Sufism as a threat to certain modernists — I would say especially those who seek to globalize or those who support economic globalization without seeing its problems — and to terrorists who emerge in opposition to economic globalization. As Ernst puts it and as Hamid would certainly well know, “Muslim modernists have been highly critical of Sufism, not on the grounds that it is foreign to Islam but because they see it as a medieval superstition and a barrier to modernity” (2011: 199). Similarly, Muslim fundamentalists reject Sufism, though for altogether different reasons. Predominantly because they seek to present interpretations that are “literal and hence unchallengeably true, any kind of psychological or mystical interpretation of the sacred text [such as those that Sufis present] is a basic threat to the monopoly that [Islamic fundamentalists] wish to claim over tradition” (Ernst, 2011: 212). Indeed, Islamic fundamentalists “see Sufism as an enemy of Islam only slightly less threatening than Western secularism” (Ernst, 2011: 200), as do terrorists who take fundamentalist ways of thinking to a violent extreme via their actions. They arguably fear Sufism because they would prefer for Islam to emerge as monolithic and hence as akin to global capitalism — or at least what proponents of global capitalism strive to make of it.

As Hamid observes in a Los Angeles Times interview, “[t]he Sufi poem, sort of Sufism in a nutshell, is Islamic mysticism where love is used as the prism for relating to the universe” (Johnson, 2013: n.p.). And love as Sufis might understand it — love that initially manifests itself toward other humans and eventually manifests itself as love for the divine — functions in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia to replace capitalism as a globalizing force and to foster the kind of creative imagination that Hamid aims to cultivate, as evidenced by the development of the relationship between the nameless protagonist and the pretty girl as Hamid represents it. Although the nameless protagonist and the pretty girl go their separate ways after their sexual encounter in their youth, reconnecting only briefly in their adult lives, the pretty girl seems always to remain, for the nameless protagonist, the stuff of imagination and empathy — the stuff of the experience of reading a Sufi love poem as a great work of literature. As the narrator portrays the nameless protagonist encountering the pretty girl in his post-adolescent life, he observes that the nameless protagonist’s “image of [the pretty girl] is not entirely determined by her physical reality” (107) just as the squiggles that form the words of a book or poem fail to define the multifaceted, imagination-inducing nature of text as a creative mind seeks to see it. For the nameless protagonist and for Hamid, the pretty girl makes of love a possible solution to the violence that global capitalism creates. The relationship between the nameless protagonist and the girl shows that love can connect the masses in the twenty-first century in a more meaningful way than economic globalization connects or possibly can connect them.

Much as it takes Hamid’s creative reader attention and time to discover the significance of love in the context of the late-capitalist times that his novel as parody of a self-help book strategically represents, it takes time — nearly a lifetime — for the protagonist and the pretty girl to discover and act on the love between them, and love only emerges between them when they open themselves to allowing it to supplant their capitalist impulses as Hamid hopes love will supplant capitalist impulses for his readers. Indeed, only when the nameless protagonist and the pretty girl abandon impulses for monetary riches do they find one another in old age and in the unnamed city that is likely Lahore — the city to which the pretty girl returns because she “feel[s] a tug, of what she cannot say” (197). That tug, whether it is God, chance, “fate, or narrative trajectory” (183), the basic possibilities for occurrences within the text as the narrator represents them, places the pretty girl into a Sufi-like “life removed” in which she encounters the nameless protagonist in a pharmacy (Jamal, 2009: xix). Apparently no longer following any trite steps to monetary wealth, the nameless protagonist opts against sustaining a “FOCUS ON THE FUNDAMENTALS” (199), as step 11 of 12 of the book requires. The phrase, evocative of religious fundamentalism and used in Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist to denote a quasi-fundamentalist faith in capitalism, evidently deters him, perhaps because it alludes to the stuff of fundamentalism’s literalism as opposed to the stuff of literature and creativity. Instead, he opts to fulfil his “lingering desires to connect” (204) much like a creative reader of literature aims to connect ideas that authors present in their literary texts. He opts for love, “that oddest of desires an I can have for a you” (213).

Yet within the bounds of Hamid’s novel, there appears to be no way to exist entirely beyond what Hamid presents as the near-ethereal globalizing systems and networks that define the times — systems and networks that Hamid represents as functioning essentially as mystics might imagine that divine forces function. The pair certainly escapes an existence rooted in the globalized “era of cities”, the “airport and fiber-optic cables” that bind cities to one another and that “collectively [form], even if tenuously, a change-scented urban archipelago spanning not just rising Asia but the entire planet” (224). But evidence of economic globalization remains as the backdrop to their relationship, interweaving with a counter-capitalist life to form a hybrid reality much like Hamid’s own reality and like the reality of the genre he writes: one in which self-help and that which is literary and not mass-produced predominantly for profit intertwine. After their encounter in the pharmacy, the nameless protagonist and the pretty girl, now more of a “wizened woman”, go to “a movie in a theater that astonishes [the nameless protagonist] with the size of its screen and the quality of its sound and the costliness of its popcorn” (209; 213). As they make love in the pretty girl’s condo, rendering the pretty girl the nameless protagonist’s first and last lover as per his idealistic adolescent vision of love, and as they eventually live together in the condo unconventionally but very much in love through the rest of their days, they inevitably do so with the telecommunications tower looming over them as an idol of the globalized times. When the nameless protagonist’s son from his failed marriage visits from North America and allows the couple to become a family, they spend time watching movies. Likewise, “[t]elevision and radio” continue to “bring in some news of” the “city beyond”, a place that although “increasingly mythological” sustains a presence because of mass media (223). When the pretty girl suffers from cancer that by the novel’s end takes her life, the nameless protagonist, too, turns to mass media: he “hunt[s] down her favorite movies for her to watch an ultimate time” (226).

Nonetheless, even attempting to live beyond the corporate terms of a capital-driven life in an increasingly globalized world affords an opportunity for self-help of a sort that works better than that which a mass-marketed book might provide — self-help that results in what Hamid suggests might be transcendence as Sufis understand it. In the novel’s final scene, the nameless protagonist, presumably the victim of a second heart attack, faces his own life’s end “in a hospital bed” and is once again “attached to interfaces electrical, gaseous, and liquid” (227). Following a brief “moment of panic” at the notion that “the last half decade of [his] life [was] merely a fantasy” and that he has lived a life devoid of love, “the pretty girl enters” — in the nameless narrator’s deathbed dream or perhaps in some authentically spiritual form (228). Hamid opts not to specify how. Yet what Hamid does make clear is the pervasive and utterly transcendent sense of love that the nameless protagonist experiences at his life’s end — love that a multinational corporation that propagates economic globalization could never foster. Like a Sufi mystic who “find[s God] through his creation and through human love” — like a Sufi mystic who “[i]n loving another human being” finds a means by which to understand and experience “the all-consuming power of love” (Jamal, 2009: xx) — the nameless protagonist feels “calmness in the face of terror” because “despite all else [he has] loved” (228).

By default, as Hamid presents it in the second person narration, the nameless protagonist’s experience of love becomes one in which “you” the reader can share to run counter to globalization’s totalizing endgame (228), even if the result is a mere hybrid alternative in which globalization and that which counters it interweave. Echoing the nameless protagonist’s “EXIT STRATEGY”, you the reader might opt to see outside of the post-postmodern, twenty-first century machinery of globalization (217) — the wires, advertisements, and digital media that pervade the twenty-first century global consciousness. With some metaphorical as opposed to economic buy-in from humanity at large, you the reader, too, might begin the process of realizing love as the finest, most ethical, and most enriching possible globalism and form of self-help in the inescapable context of a globalized world. Moreover, you might see that acting on love in life can begin the process of remaking the world into something more: it might begin the process of creating a more socially just world in which love as opposed to money sets the terms for existence and provides a framework for living a fulfilling and perhaps spiritual life.