Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception

Abstract

Despite the recent growth of scholarly interest in revisiting the conception and definition of modernity in Persian literature, theoretically informed studies of Persian modernity are scarce. A basic assumption that still pervades debates in Persian literary modernity insists that modern Persian literature owes its emergence to continual, sustained influence from metropolitan European (and American) literature. Modernity’s own celebratory self-definition, self-reflection, and self-justification have reinforced such an assumption, resulting in the view that Persian literature per se is little more than a derivative, secondary project afflicted by an acute sense of interminable belatedness. By engaging critically with some of the quandaries Persian literary modernity has faced, Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception offers a theoretically sophisticated, stimulating, and penetrating intervention into these subjects. It is not often that a book provides us with such an erudite examination of literary modernity and its underpinnings in Persian.From a decidedly postcolonial and—broadly but not exclusively—Subalternist theoretical standpoint, the editors and contributors seek to challenge the exclusively Eurocentric accounts of modernity and provide fresh insights for critics and scholars alike to go beyond Eurocentric explanations of modern literary developments in Persian. The volume proposes “a new paradigm for historicizing literary modernity in Iran” and attempts to deflate the ideologically laden claim that it was the imitation and emulation of cultural and literary critical forms and discourses disseminated from the West that led to modernity’s propagation and dissemination elsewhere.The book consists of a short introduction and seven thought-provoking essays dealing with select aspects of what constitutes the project of literary modernity in the Persian context. In the introduction Rezaei Yazdi and Mozafari define the aim of the volume to be twofold: first, an attempt toward discounting and problematizing the more or less conventional views about the derivativeness of Persian literary modernity and its indebtedness to Western (European or Anglo-American) modalities of literary production; and, second, to highlight “organic literary developments” that demonstrate the role of what is regarded as “tradition” in the shaping and composition of Persian modernity. In other words, they argue rigorously and with passion that the by now largely clichéd juxtaposition of tradition versus modernity can no longer explain the intricacies involved in any serious account of literary modernity in Persian.In “Rival Texts: Modern Persian Prose Fiction and the Myth of the Founding Father,” Hamid Rezaei Yazdi, drawing from, but not limiting himself to, Bakhtin’s theory of dialogics, investigates “the polyphony of parallel discourses and shifting positions” in the works of the prominent writer Muḥammad ‘Alī Jamālzāda (1892–1997). He also makes numerous apposite references to popular novels of early to mid-twentieth-century Iran. The author’s primary aim is not simply to question, or reject, the conventional view that perpetuates the status of Jamālzāda as the “founding father” of European-style fiction in Persian but to supplant the view that regards modernity as exclusively Western (Euro-American) and sees twentieth-century Persian prose fiction as a palpable project of imitation of Western models. It is in the reappropriation of the dialogically nuanced munāẓira (debate or quarrel) from its traditional function that Persian fiction (as well as the cinematic genre known as fīlmfārsī) finds a new discursive sphere where contending ontologies can be dialectically fused. In munāẓira the author identifies the vehicle where “a pivotal moment in the history of Iranian literary modernity in which various competing aspects of Iranian identity were put to intense debate.”In his theoretically dense essay “Reactionary Interbellum Literature and the Demonic in Iran: ‘Alavī and Hidayat,” Arshavez Mozafari maintains that even though the demonic is often considered as a relic from the premodern past, it has in fact played an integral part in the formation of a modern “reactionary” literature in interbellum Iran (1921–41) that lamented “the incredibly daft and decadent stupor of late Sassanian society” and recognized “ancestral [Iranian] strength and struggle in the midst of a decaying communal presence.” This “reactionary” literature was represented not only in the works of such a pioneering modern(ist) writer as Sādiq Hidāyat but also in the short stories of his ideologically progressive literary companion, Buzurg ‘Alavī, “a towering leftist novelist.” These authors explored, in part as vitriols and diatribes, the concept of demonic (Ahrīmanic) love in conjunction with the potential racial “contamination” of Iranians in the wake of Islamic (“Semitic”) conquest.Henry M. Bowles premises his essay, “Linguistic Realism and Modernity: The Ontology of the Poetic Form; Suhrawardī to Sā’ib,” on the assumption that “the traditional account of ‘Modernism’ as an import . . . is due for reconsideration, as is the ‘stadial’ and ‘historicist’ notion that Modernism is a function of (inevitably Eurocentric) time.” Bowles states succinctly that “the sine qua non of any Modernity of the verbal arts is the eclipse of the language of nature . . . by the language of the mind” and that “secular psychocentrism is the very heart of any conception of language worthy of the designation ‘Modern.’” Therefore, as part of the overall objective of the volume, it would not be anachronistic at all if one speaks of “Modernity” in the context of post-Enlightenment European letters as well as in the context of post-Timurid Persian poetics. Going beyond the strictures of poetics and into the realm of history of ideas, the author examines two significant post-Peripatetic schools of thought, namely, the ishrāqi project of Suhrawardī (d. 1191) and the philosophy of Mullā S.adrā (d. ca. 1640) followed by a brief discussion of the poetry of S.ā’ib, one of the chief practitioners of the so-called sabk-i tāza, the hallmark of the Safavid and Mughal (Indian) Persian poetry. Bowles’s conclusion is revealing: “Secular psychocentrism opens the gate for poetic language as latter-day ‘revelation.’ . . . Pace many observers, this is no reconciliation of philosophy or poetry with mysticism—or, if it is, then the ‘Modern’ philosopher and poet, the shaykh al-ishrāq and the Safavid-Mughal lyricist, are making use of a mysticism of a decidedly humanistic, crypto-secular sort.” Such notions as the eclipse of the language of nature by the language of the mind as well as the concept of secular psychocentrism that figure prominently in this essay can have significant implications for redrawing, spatially and temporally, the designation of what constitutes modernity (or Modernity, in Bowles’s rendering) in Persian literary-historical and critical discourse.Fateme Montazeri’s contribution, “A Predestined Break from the Past: Sh’ir-i Naw, History, and Hermeneutics,” addresses the enduring presence of the classical dilemma of freewill versus predestination—a seminal point of contention in the history of Islamic thought, going back to the Muʿtazilite-Ashʿarite controversies—in select works of modern Persian poetry. The author perceptively examines the reductionist argument made by some overtly ideologically motivated critics that only modern, Nimaic (and post-Nimaic, for that matter) poetry derived from a belief in free human agency represented a true commitment (taʿahhud) to social and political issues as opposed to classical (i.e., traditional) poetry where human agency was subsumed within the overarching idea of predestination. Through assigning intentionality and free will solely to modern poets, she contends, these critics insisted on a rather formulaic, one-dimensional—“socio-political”—reading of many works of poetry. According to Montazeri, “The logic of sociopolitical commitment has created an artificial [emphasis added] conflict between the new and old. It has normalized the presumption, embedded (even if tacitly) in the scholarly literature, that the bulk of Shi’r-i Naw is ‘revolutionary’ in nature, and that the ‘social aspect’ of stock classical poems is either missing or ‘weak and ill.’” This perspective derives from “the association of ‘originality of human will and agency’ to the former and, in contrast, a form of ‘dark predestinationism’ to much of the latter.” Through close reading of the select works of such poets as Akhavān-Sālis (“Ākhar-i Shāhnāma,” “Katība,” “Chāvūshī”), Shāmlū (“Dar Astāna,” “Lawh”), and Wāsif Bākhtarī (“Va Ṣidā Ṣidā-yi Ṣhikastan Būd,” “Az Faṣl-i Dīgar,” “Dar Sukūt-i Shammātahā”), the author concludes that “neither is the human in Shi’r-i Naw absolutely capable of pure transformative striving, nor is he in classical poems utterly restrained by predestination.”In “Intimating Tehran: The Figure of the Prostitute in Iranian Popular Literature, 1920s–1970s,” Jairan Gahan engages the proliferation and propagation of the figure of the female prostitute as “diseased,” “disgusting,” “pitiful,” yet “spectacular” in popular (often serialized) novels, short stories, and semiethnographic journalistic accounts between the 1920s and 1970s, the socioculturally transformative era associated with Iranian modernity. As the author maintains, “The literary display of prostitutes’ suffering constructed their bodies as vulnerable and in need of rescue; imagined the public readership as morally progressive and socially committed; while at the same time proved to be a popular and profitable spectacle that ensured the market success of ‘social novels.’” “The fallen woman,” Gahan contends, “was not merely invented as a literary instrument to serve political ends. Rather, the genre of the ‘social novel’ [emerged as a] popular commercialized fiction ordained by strong moral sentiments.” The genealogy of popular literature was intimately connected with the prospects of larger social-moral reforms and liberal humanitarianism as well as the major transformation of urban life in Tehran since 1920s. The author concludes that “modern Iranian literature, both popular and avant-garde, at once reflected and produced an affective economy, which relied on vivid expositions of diseased women, and the compassionate attachment of the public readership to vulnerable, repulsive female bodies.” As such, Gahan emphasizes the overall interconnectedness of an emergent Iranian modern literary movement to the everyday quotidian experiences of modernity in Iran.Samuel Hodgkin’s “Classical Persian Canons of the Revolutionary Press: Abū al-Qāsim Lāhūtī’s Circles in Istanbul and Moscow” explores a seminal, though hitherto neglected, aspect of Persian literary modernity, namely, the process of canonization of Persian literary classics within a decidedly ideological milieu in the (former) Soviet Union. Hodgkin carefully points to the work of the revolutionary poet Lāhūtī, whom he considers an accomplished contributor to literary modernity in Persian. “[Lāhūtī’s] sense of poetry’s functions,” Hodgkin writes, “emerged from an ideological commitment to the modern, but not to an aesthetic program resembling any historically specific contemporary ‘modernism,’ ‘futurism,’ or ‘avant-garde.’ To the contrary, from the mid-1930s on, Lāhūtī was a leading exemplar of social realism, which was promulgated as an explicit critique of an alternative to artistic modernism.” As Hodgkin further maintains, “The moderns deployed the most suitable canonical figures to indigenize [emphasis added] projects of modernization. But what were they to make of the canonical corpus as a whole?” he asks. While some literary modernists regarded the majority of classical Persian poetry as an impediment to modernization, Lāhūtī’s position on the Persian canon was different, as can be illustrated in his qaṣīda, “Kremlin,” a poetic response (istiqbāl or naẓīra) to the poignant Madā’in qaṣīda by Khāqānī (d. 1199).The final chapter of the book, titled “Pneumatics of Blackness: Nāsir Taqvā’ī’s Bād-i Jin and Modernity’s Anthropological Drive,” by Parisa Vaziri, expands on the ethnography of Iranian modernity as part of the movement meant to represent “the co-constitution of Iranian literary and filmic modernity and the development of Iranian anthropology.” Through a close, in-depth analysis of Nāṣir Taqvā’ī’s 1969 mawj-i naw ethnographic documentary Bād-i Jin—featuring the voice-over by the poet Ahmad Shamlu—the author looks at the interconnectedness of ethnographic film and ethnographic literature up to the 1970s. The author is cognizant of the political context of modern Iranian ethnographic filmmaking, both in the context of the global politics of Cold War at the time, and in relation to the efforts of the Iranian (Pahlavi) state to “homogenize all ethnic tribes and instances of socio-geographical fragmentation and antagonism onto a unified Persian identity that would surrender to administrative hold.” The essay is as much addressing the experimentalism, surrealism, and avant-gardism of the filmic ethnography as it addresses the visual and audiovisual description of zar ritual culture practiced among descendants of African labor forces that had settled in the Persian Gulf region over a long period of time. In addition to Bād-i Jin, Vaziri also considers Taqvā’ī’s other works—namely, Ārāmish dar Huzūr-i Dīgarān (1970) and Musīqī-i Junūb. Vaziri is keen to point out that, in the modern ethnographic genre in Iranian cinema, the experimental exploration of abstraction (as in Bād-i Jin, for instance) has had a more successful and enduring imprint than more “prosaic” and “factic” works such as Musīqī-i Junūb. The implications of this privileging of aestheticization and valorization of abstraction in the conceptualization—and self-definition—of Persian modernism, whether filmic or literary, can be significant. One may suggest that, through an anthropological critique of the documentary films, Vaziri highlights modernity’s own rhetoric of self-privilegization, self-legitimation, and self-promulgation.The theoretically engaging essays vigorously and compellingly challenge dominant, Eurocentric accounts of modernity. It would have been preferred, nevertheless, if the volume’s own geographical expanse was not restricted by an adherence to a quintessentially Eurocentric politico-strategic model, namely the nation-state form and national(ist) literary culture. Except for Montazeri’s select references to the poetry of contemporary Afghan poet Wāsef Bākhtarī and Hodgson’s analysis of the Central Asian and Soviet contexts of the poetry of Lāhūtī, the rest of the contributions deal exclusively with Iran, thus indirectly reinforcing the view that Persian literature—whether modern or classical—is exclusively Iranian.Although the editors attempted to carefully edit a range of essays representing a diverse array of disciplines within Persian studies, some errors have uncannily crept in the process of copyediting the text. Take, for instance, the transcription of certain Persian names into English. Names of individuals composed of two components are, in my view correctly, rendered as Kāzimzādah or Jamālzadah. However, for some odd reason, the name Taqīzādah is rendered as TaqīZādah. Similarly, Murtaḍā Mushfiq Kāẓimī’s novel Tihrān-i Makhūf is translated into English as Ghastly Tehran in Rezaei Yazdi’s article (63), as The Horrific Tehran in Gahan’s essay (164), and again in the same essay as The Horrifying Tehran (170). Furthermore, it seems that the editors tended to make the endnotes, references, and bibliographies (both Persian and non-Persian sources) of each article exhaustively comprehensive and inclusive. This is fine, as far as it goes, but, in one case (Mozafari), it appears as if the gist of the article’s argument can be found essentially in its extensive endnotes. In fact, in this particular article, the main body of the essay is only a little over six pages long; its meticulous notes and extensive bibliography, however, run into sixteen pages. Similarly, of the total of twenty-one pages of the editors’ introduction, only a little over four pages compose the main text, while nine pages are devoted to the notes and eight pages to the bibliography.In better accounting the development of literary modernity in Persian, one would have to acknowledge its historical (and sociological) and spatial (and geopolitical) co-constitutive and interconnected nature. Critical evaluation of modernity should aim at problematizing, but also acknowledging, the subject of modernity on a global scale. No doubt the widespread promulgation of modernism as a set of tendencies across literary and artistic works was intrinsically related to the prestige colonial and imperial cultural and educational designs accorded to Euro-American modernist literary texts. However, in the making of the aesthetic tendencies of the project of literary modernity on a global scale, crucial context-based practices proved formative. As this collection succinctly illustrates, such practices were far from mere imitation or emulation; they were engaged essentially in a creative, constant dialogue with their own residual cultural traditions as well as with the emergent practices, thus leading to a complex, interconnected, and vastly cosmopolitan project of modernism and contributing actively and powerfully to the expansion of modernity as a global literary and aesthetic practice. As Rezaei Yazdi eloquently puts it, such a view of globalization that insists on “cross-cultural pollination,” however, should not be confused with “liberal fantasies of mutual tolerance, concessions, and compromises [that] obfuscate tensions, betrayal, injustice, and domination.” In the meantime, “history-as-conflict, likewise, obscures connections, associations, alliances, and interdependence.” No literary modernity can be regarded simply as a derivative project imported and transplanted from the outside; similarly, no such modernity can be identified as entirely native and self-sufficient. The articles collected in this book adhere to the ontological view that modernity in Persian literature follows its own logic, but in no way do they regard substantive interaction between Persian and various other literary modernisms and modernities as superfluous or inconsequential.Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception is far from the first critical study of Persian literary modernity, but the range and depth of its content and expert treatment of the subjects and issues it engages with make it by far one of the best collections of essays in English dealing with the history, theory, and politics of Persian literary modernity and modernism. This is certainly an invaluable contribution to Persian literary and cultural studies and a welcome testimony to the emergence of a new generation of Persianists in academia.