Search for Authenticity: Simulated Reality in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man
NEHA DUBEY
- Pages
- pp. 51-61
- Published
- July 1, 2016
NEHA DUBEY (2016). Search for Authenticity: Simulated Reality in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man. Labyrinth, 7(3), 51-61.
Abstract
The novel The Autograph Man is not much acclaimed widely as the first novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith but one cannot eschew the potentiality of Smith dealing not only with hybridity and multiculturalism but the contemporary phenomena of postmodern fiction that intensely conglomerates the plurality , self-reflexivity , discourses about popular fiction, cinematic and hyper- real aura affecting the contemporary social reality . In the age of globalization every work of art and system of cultural reproduction is highly dominated by the commercial and reified consumer capitalism. The reproduction has been ma de plausible through the mass media and technology that actualize itself in televisual identity , movies serving bourgeoisie and internet a new polyvalent form of reproducing social and cultural artifacts. Smith successfully articulates to the new forces of capitalist culture; an escape from his reality; an encounter of real and hyperreal; comprehension of the protagonist outside his real world. Withnew sincerity Smith holds an insight of dealing with ‘critical’ and ‘cultural’ aspect of postmodernism and rep resents Baudrillard’s hyperreal theory in the context of her novel’s protagonist spurious and apocryphal life, hollow referent between faith and fame. The paper analyzes here the ‘authentic’ and ‘fake’ self, the complexity in personal and professional life and an absence simply because s/he is not able to fit in either of the two and belies according to the lexicon of international gestures and we see the individuality melting in ‘symbols’
Keywords:Self-reflexivitycinematic and hyperrealityconsumer capitalismabsenceand lexicon of International Gestures


