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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
We used to feel we knew what it meant to say "Iran." We could imagine that cat-shaped territory and visualize a single culture more or less contained by its boundaries. Whatever its fabled diversity, we could imagine a national character shaped by its geography and see its literature as a reasonably direct, unmediated transcription of the national character, a spiritual secretion emerging spontaneously, organically from the national soil. But what do we do with the culture that has been refracted through the events of 1979? Now we are faced with a subject which refuses to be defined by the map—a country whose writers are in large numbers (even more than in the shah's time) living overseas, whose patterns of life at home are molded by a peculiarly distorted version of a popular culture which we have never really had to study as a serious political phenomenon.
1. In The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 16-23.
2. It may be relevant that mirrors are still common recurring images in modernist literature, but now as sources of duplicity and deception. Think of the function of mirroring in Nabokov, or Hedayat.
3. See the chapter on the increasing demands placed on Iranian writers in Ghanoonparvar's, Mohammad book Prophets of Doom: Literature as a Socio-political Phenomenon in Modern Iran (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), pp. 35-67Google Scholar and passim.
4. The term is used organizationally in Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harvest, 1956), passim.
5. That linkage opens a whole set of possible approaches to literature: can we see the famous emphasis on violent confrontation and pain in modern Persian writing as a reaction to the polite screen which cushions and complicates intersubjectivity in Iranian society? Was that polite screen, so clearly today an "artificial" construct, seen as less artificial before confrontation with Western modes of intersubjectivity introduced a more self-conscious distinction between artificial and natural?
6. Explanations of this phenomenon are not confined to sociology of literary criticism. There has been a commentary on the mystique of the Ten Nights in a satire being serialized in the London-based comic magazine Asghar Aqa. We see an uninformed audience carrying obligatory copies of Ferdowsi, trying vainly to identify the writers. See the third installment of "Nashod Keh Besheh," Asghar Aqa. Nos. 225 & 226 (March 10, 1985): 7.