The fictional construction of Iran for a western readership: from Montesquieu to Nafisi

Abstract

The studies of the literary representations of Iran in the West often fall under two categories: one discusses the seventeenth to the nineteenth century when the region was still Persia and the literature was tinged with fantasy and hedonism. The other is twentieth century Iran, which in the Western imagination usually signifies oil, Shahs, and mullahs. The link between the two is often missing, as though these two bodies of scholarship engage two different countries. My study is an effort to address this gap, based on the premise that literary texts, thanks to their capacity for containing complexities and contradictions, can serve as devices for challenging simplified distinctions. I bring together four texts from the last three centuries deeply engaged with Iran in their own ways: Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), James Morier’s Adventures of Hajji Baba of Isfahan (1824), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (1999), and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003). The four chosen texts all became bestsellers when published and were discussed widely. They are written in English and French for non-Iranian readers. They are geographically set in Iran or Persia, and their protagonists are Persians or Iranians. Therefore, they make great examples for a study of literary representations of Iran at various points in history. The theoretical framework of this project is founded on ‘geocriticism’ and ‘literary cartography’, two recently developed modes of literary theory articulated by, among others, Bernard Westphal and Robert Tally, in turn inspired by the rise of radical geography and spatial theory in the 1970s and 80s. As a whole, Oriental studies leans towards Foucauldian historicism and periodization, which tends to lock texts within their historical contexts, thereby hampering the possibility of intertextual dialogue across time. The dominance of such a method is partially responsible for the disparity between studies of ‘Persia’ and ‘Iran’. Theories related to the spatial capacities of narrative can break the sway of historicism. In my opening chapter on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, I begin by taking a quantitative angle to challenge assumptions that this is primarily a scathing criticism of French society at the time. I focus on the Persian aspects and show how they coalesce around the metaphorical site of the harem. The harem is constructed as a complex microcosm of Persia, one with its particular power relations, and show how the self-empowering of women through negotiating with their husband-master topples the dominant structure. The second chapter discusses James Morier’s nineteenth century picaresque, Adventures of Hajji Baba. I focus on episodes that take place on the borders of Persia to show how the instability of the land is used by Morier to represent Hajji Baba’s behavior as picaro. Taking the spatiality of the land into account, Iran is constructed as a vast unstable patchwork with no central authority. Hajji Baba then appears as a restless character doing his best to survive. The third chapter on Persepolis, a graphic novel published in 1999, takes a more visual approach. I interpret Persepolis as an act of mapping that moves through various sections of Iranian society in order to create an alternative geography. Marji, the protagonist, is driven by a strong sense of curiosity and defiance, which takes the reader frame by frame into various parts of Iranian society and leads to a unique spatial construction of Iran as a flexible set of territories. In my fourth chapter on Reading Lolita in Tehran, I begin by discussing how post-9/11 politics plays itself out in the reception of this memoir. This chapter cuts through the politics of the time to explore the internal dynamics of the book and show why it became a polarizing phenomenon. Iran here is portrayed as a mutilated land with insurmountable gaps, a construction that leads to polarized characterizations of the country and its inhabitants, and depicts Iran as a place in which all the links among people and possibilities of resistance are removed. In terms of historical context, these four works have little in common. Consequently, rather than aspiring to articulate an evolutionary narrative, I study four literary snapshots of Iran across three centuries. By moving beyond periodization and deploying literary cartography, I have these texts talk to each other across seemingly independent timeframes, which, for the first time, reveals interesting overlaps among seemingly disparate books, such as the way Montesqueieu’s harem is reconstructed in Reading Lolita, or how Persepolis’s restless character finds an antecedent in Hajji Baba. Exploring the mapmaking capacities of those texts, I show that the similarities and contrasts between them go beyond historical confinements. In doing so, this project will be an attempt to undermine a widespread stereotype about Iran as the nation that deserves castigation, since it failed to live up to its glorious past.