DECLARATIVE SCARCITY AND THE ILLOCUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE OF AUTHORITY IN OMAR SHAHID HAMID’S THE PRISONER

Abstract

This researchpresentsthat the near total absence of declarative speech acts in Omar Shahid Hamid’sThe Prisoner (2013) as theindex of institutional collapse in the novel’srepresentation of the Pakistani security apparatus.The study is anchored upon Vanderveken’s(1990) semantic analysis of English performative verbs. The results yield that there areonly seventeen declarative illocutionary acts, amounting to 0.14 per cent of the 12,016 illocutionary acts identified across all five categories. Out of the eighty-fiveVanderveken’s taxonomy of declarativeverbs, only eight are utilizedin the novel. The entire juridical cluster of the tableau, comprising condemning, adjudicating, acquitting, exonerating, pardoning, forgiving and absolving, is void but for a single instance of sentencing. The nullification cluster, comprising cancelling, annulling, abolishing, revoking, repealing and rescinding, is void in its entirety. The seventeen utilizeddeclaratives concentrate almost wholly in two figures, the Home Minister Pakora and the police inspector general known as Dr.Death, whose performative authority is rootednot in law but respectively in transaction and in lethal force. The article arguesthat declarative force in the novel has not diminishedso much as migrated, detaching itself from the legal institution that should authorizeit and reattaching itself to money and to violence.