A Revolution Lost: Narrative Temporality and Postmodern Subject in Iran's Post-Revolutionary Novels

Abstract

This article studies the post-revolutionary social situation in Iran as a peripheral country, through the novels written and awarded in this historical moment. The narrative temporality and its rapport with the subjectivity that is constructed by and at the same time constructing a novel, is a pivotal formal characteristic, through which this essay engages with the analysis of Iran's post-revolutionary society after 1979 uprising. The discussion is concentrated on the awarded persian novels in three mainstream festivals, in the years between 2001 to 2011. This decade is specifically significant since post-revolutionary literary relations and institutions are established and gained power during this period. This research discusses three recurrent narrative temporalities centered around an "eternal past," which, as the essay argues, is a fundamental element in the specific actualization of post-modern subjectivity in the periphery. This specific actualization is different, but not isolated, from the case in the core countries. However, these two different actualizations of postmodern subjectivity are dialectically intertwined as the contrasting symptoms of a single phenomenon. In Iran's particular historical case, this actualization is synchronic with the construction of a post-revolutionary subjectivity that has to confront the defeat of the anti-systematic revolution, due to the structural limitations of state power in a peripheral country within the capitalist socio-economic relations. Reflecting upon this historical moment via the lens of narrative temporalities in the corpus of this research has made it possible to depict the complexities of Iran’s post-revolutionary society from an innovative perspective.