ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Arjun Appadurai’s concept of ‘mediascapes’ and ‘ideoscapes’ (Appadurai 2004: 100–108) to deconstruct N. Katherine Hayles’ seminal notion of the cybernetic ‘hopeful monster’ that is considered by her a digital literary medium for opening new horizons (Hayles 2008). The chapter also discusses prospects for digitalising Pakistani literary forms that may offer spatiotemporal platform to a new type of experience and experiment. Mohsin Hamid’s story ‘The (Former) General in His Labyrinth’ sets such an example of mediascaping the fantastic to appear as realistic. Though focusing on the story as such, the chapter simultaneously exposes South Asian readers-community to some representation of the convergent and cross-genre complexities within our postcolonial digital landscape. Once put against the Pakistani political history where the country has simply been ruled by its military for more than two-thirds of its national life, the character of the [Former] General in the story stays a secretive symbol of control concealed amid a mazy medium of search for the culprit. The search-research mode of the story lends its textual transaction a hypertextual mosaic-like magnitude. With diversity and hybridity as its hyper-link, the story also offers an e-merging (or electronically merging) South Asian digital poetics for our times to question the reductionist hegemonic geographies and their delimiting ideologies of cross-continental constraints. Such a multimodal and multicursal electronic literariness of the story places a transcultural challenge to the Pakistani literary writers writing in English by bringing aesthetic strategies closer to new interpretative traditions of media and its mediascaping. While its 3D hypertextual space helps us expand the representative means for artistic and aesthetic ‘real’, the story engages with the e-merging phenomenon of reconfiguring playfully the dynamics of readership-authorship, proving ‘digitality’ to become what Hayles pronounces the future generative web-word and ‘textual condition of the twenty-first-century’ (Hayles 2008:186), and what Appadurai imagines to be an ‘Enlightenment worldview’ (Appadurai 2004:104).
