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Literature, Catastrophe, and Numbers: Saadat Hasan Manto and Tahar Ben Jelloun

Literature, Catastrophe, and Numbers: Saadat Hasan Manto and Tahar Ben Jelloun Dominic Rainsford Saadat Hasan Manto and Tahar Ben Jelloun We are confronted every day with events that call for an ethically motivated response. To some extent this could be said of all events that affect human beings (and perhaps other species) for good or ill. But the events that strike most of us most insistently as calling for such a response are those that are painful, horrifying, and catastrophic. There is a broad assumption, tacitly underpinning most nations’ support (however half-­ earted or hypocritical it may be in practice) of institutions such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, encoded in religions, and implicit in cultural products that play on a thoughtful interest in the predicaments of real or imagined strangers, that people want to know about other people’s suffering, and would, in principle, like to alleviate it. In public information-­ xchange and debate, notably in political discourse and the news media, the first recourse, in conveying suffering, is frequently to numbers. We are told that a given event has affected, or may affect, one person, nine, two hundred and seven, three thousand . . . a million. . . . We try to respond http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Comparatist University of North Carolina Press

Literature, Catastrophe, and Numbers: Saadat Hasan Manto and Tahar Ben Jelloun

Rainsford, Dominic
The Comparatist , Volume 41 – Nov 1, 2017
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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Southern Comparative Literature Association.
ISSN
1559-0887
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Abstract

Dominic Rainsford Saadat Hasan Manto and Tahar Ben Jelloun We are confronted every day with events that call for an ethically motivated response. To some extent this could be said of all events that affect human beings (and perhaps other species) for good or ill. But the events that strike most of us most insistently as calling for such a response are those that are painful, horrifying, and catastrophic. There is a broad assumption, tacitly underpinning most nations’ support (however half-­ earted or hypocritical it may be in practice) of institutions such as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, encoded in religions, and implicit in cultural products that play on a thoughtful interest in the predicaments of real or imagined strangers, that people want to know about other people’s suffering, and would, in principle, like to alleviate it. In public information-­ xchange and debate, notably in political discourse and the news media, the first recourse, in conveying suffering, is frequently to numbers. We are told that a given event has affected, or may affect, one person, nine, two hundred and seven, three thousand . . . a million. . . . We try to respond

Journal

The Comparatist – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Nov 1, 2017

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