Singing Modernity with the Language of Tradition

Abstract

The nineteenth-century founders of Persian literary criticism toted its radical momentum and moved to bash long-standing, even dogmatic, structures and prescribed social norms. In Bahār’s essays, after the experience of the revolution and the political chaos that ensued, literary criticism becomes conservative, didactic and hierarchical. Although the discourse of the ‘new intellectuals’ was mostly negative, Bahār was the voice for the affirmative, seeking to establish a high culture with a particular focus on human ethical values and patriotic sentiments. Bahār’s literary discourse relies more on trans-literary suppositions, emerging from his nationalist historical narrative in which the literary past is glorified and reconciled with the ideas of Iranian modernity. From this perspective, it can be said that Bahār is the founder of literary nativism in Iran. In his poetry, Bahār tries to exemplify such nativist literary discourse by applying the rhetoric and narrative strategies of Persian classical poetry and using traditional literary genres such as panegyric, prison poetry (habsiyyeh) and spring-poetry (bahāriyyeh) to praise modern ideas such as liberty, equality and progress. This allowed Bahār to form a dialogue between traditional epistemology and modern ideas. He re-articulates the pre-modern moral and political concepts within the context of the prevalent discourses of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. However, the contradiction between traditional form and modern content in Bahār’s poems, on some occasions, has resulted in the ideological representation of modern ideas, where we observe an identity relation between the modern sociopolitical concepts and pre-modern literature and world view.