Burying the Beloved traces the relationship between the law and literature in Iran to reveal the profound ambiguities at the heart of Iranian ideas of modernity regarding women's rights and social status. The book reveals how novels mediate legal reforms and examines how authors have used realism to challenge and re-imagine notions of "the real." It examines seminal works that foreground acute anxieties about female subjectivity in an Iran negotiating its modernity from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 up to and beyond the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
By focusing on marriage as the central metaphor through which both law and fiction read gender, Motlagh critically engages and highlights the difficulties that arise as gender norms and laws change over time. She examines the recurrent foregrounding of marriage at five critical periods of legal reform, documenting how texts were understood both at first publication and as their importance changed over time.
Burying the Beloved traces the relationship between the law and literature in Iran to reveal the profound ambiguities at the heart of Iranian ideas of modernity regarding women's rights and social status. The book reveals how novels mediate legal reforms and examines how authors have used realism to challenge and re-imagine notions of "the real." It examines seminal works that foreground acute anxieties about female subjectivity in an Iran negotiating its modernity from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 up to and beyond the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
By focusing on marriage as the central metaphor through which both law and fiction read gender, Motlagh critically engages and highlights the difficulties that arise as gender norms and laws change over time. She examines the recurrent foregrounding of marriage at five critical periods of legal reform, documenting how texts were understood both at first publication and as their importance changed over time.
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Burying the Beloved traces the relationship between the law and literature in Iran to reveal the profound ambiguities at the heart of Iranian ideas of modernity regarding women's rights and social status. The book reveals how novels mediate legal reforms and examines how authors have used realism to challenge and re-imagine notions of "the real." It examines seminal works that foreground acute anxieties about female subjectivity in an Iran negotiating its modernity from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 up to and beyond the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
By focusing on marriage as the central metaphor through which both law and fiction read gender, Motlagh critically engages and highlights the difficulties that arise as gender norms and laws change over time. She examines the recurrent foregrounding of marriage at five critical periods of legal reform, documenting how texts were understood both at first publication and as their importance changed over time.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804778183 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/14/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 200 |
| File size: | 351 KB |
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Burying the Beloved
MARRIAGE, REALISM, AND REFORM IN MODERN IRANBy Amy Motlagh
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7589-2
Chapter One
Dismembering and Re-membering the BelovedHOW THE CIVIL CODE REMADE MARRIAGE AND MARRIAGE REMADE LOVE
The Blind Owl ultimately is posed as a puzzle, both an intellectual puzzle for the reader to pick apart and a moral puzzle. (Think of the grotesque old man [in the novel] as Hedayat himself laughing at those of us enthralled with his story, at our struggles to define the beauty we cannot quite possess, and at how our frustrations lead us to the verge of dismissing/destroying his novella as perverse, meaningless, or destructive.) —Michael M. J. Fischer, Mute Dreams, Blind Owls, and Dispersed Knowledges
Fantastical literature points to or suggests the basis upon which cultural order rests, for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems. The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made "absent". —José Monleon, A Specter Is Haunting Europe
All these strange things that we dream about when we sleep—what influence do such things have on our hearts? Would someone fall in love with a woman he saw in his sleep? —Ahmad Kasravi, About the Novel
At the moment of its appearance (and even now, more than seventy years after its first publication), Sadeq Hedayat's novel The Blind Owl seemed idiosyncratic in Iran's prose tradition, posing, as Michael Fischer affirms, "a moral puzzle" for generations of readers, who have compared it to works ranging from Dante's Vita nuova to Kafka's Metamorphosis. Its strangeness and analytical elusiveness have made it seem literally foreign—a pastiche of story fragments from other traditions. Perhaps because of this, criticism of the novel has been primarily focused on where it comes from—for example, Western antecedents ranging from Dante to Rilke to Nerval (Katouzian 2008; Beard 1990; Johnson 1978); Buddhism (Bashiri 1974; Williams 1978) or models closer to home, such as Khayyam's Rubaiyat (Bogle 1978); the wine ritual poems of ManOchehri (Simidchieva 2003); or even Hedayat's own earlier stories (Katouzian 2008). Some have sought to place it in a more direct response to history, positing that the novel reflected Hedayat's disappointment in the Reza Pahlavi regime (Tabari 1947). Others still have taken a more sweeping attitude that seems to affirm the novel's final indeterminability, positing a critical response equivalent to "all of the above" (Al-e Ahmad 1951). If a text, as Yuri Lotman proposes, relies on a "common memory" among readers and author to make it sensible, the range of responses to The Blind Owl suggests a huge disjuncture in the memory worlds of even its most immediate audience of contemporary Iranian readers: the initial critical responses to the novel were so wildly divergent that they seem almost to refer to different novels. Yet in spite of this, The Blind Owl is perhaps the most-quoted novel in Iranian history—the novel most frequently invoked, and thought to be most representative of Iranian modernity in fiction, even as it departs from virtually every literary tradition in storytelling known to modern (or premodern) Iran.
An aspect of the novel that has proved to be one of the most puzzling is its deployment of the feminine. It is hard to reconcile, for example, the narrator's enjoyment in describing in minute and repetitive detail the features of his elusive beloved in part 1 with his grim glee in loathing and desiring what is seemingly the very same woman in part 2. Most of all, critics have shied away from looking too closely at the literal dismemberment of this beloved in part 1, or her inadvertent (if we take the narrator's word for it) murder in part 2:
But what was I to do with the corpse? A corpse whose flesh was already beginning to rot! At first I thought of burying it in my room, then of taking it away and throwing it down some well surrounded by morning glories—but these all seemed like they would take so much thinking, so much trouble to ensure that I not be seen! At the same time, I didn't want any stranger to look at her.... Finally a thought came to me: what if I were to cut her up into pieces, place them in my old case, and take them away, far, very far, from the eyes of men, and bury her?
This time, I did not hesitate; I took a bone-handled knife I had in the closet of my room and very carefully began to cut away the thin black dress that had covered her like a spider's web.... Then I cut off her head, and drops of cold blood poured out of her neck, and then I cut off her hands and feet and arranged them in my suitcase. (BK, 24-25)
Given critics' willingness to consider the novel from almost every available vantage point—from approaches that emphasize the novel's intertextuality to its Freudian overtones—why ignore this rich vein? Why look away from this act of violence, which exemplifies the complex figuration of the feminine in The Blind Owl? No scene in the novel more clearly presents the impulse to protect and destroy that the narrator evinces for his beloved, yet it is perhaps this very conflation of two different kinds of impulse that makes this act so hard to critically engage.
If we adopt Michael Beard's approach in Hedayat's "Blind Owl" as a Western Novel (1990), we might argue that the adventures of the beloved's corpse are part of the novel's extensive system of borrowing from Western sources—from Edgar Allen Poe to Oscar Wilde. Alternatively, if we agree with Marta Simidchieva's contextualization of the novel (2003), we can see it more comfortably as a reworking of the topos of the "daughter of the vine" found in classical Persian poetry. But what if we read it instead in the linguistic-historical context of 1930s Iran, where the civil code created at the behest of Reza Pahlavi was just being enacted? While the civil code sought to regulate everything, from last names to taxation, some of its most controversial laws were those that addressed public gender behaviors. In 1936, the Mandatory Unveiling Act forced urban women to remove their veils in public; in 1937, the controversial Marriage Act of 1931 was revised. In 1940, a section of the Penal Law passed by the Assembly sanctioned the murder of wife, mother, or sister caught in circumstances of adultery or leading up to adultery (Paidar, 111).
Historians have endeavored to understand these reforms in different ways, focusing primarily on whether or not they may be seen as genuine efforts to "liberate" women and/or to respond to feminists' demands for greater rights for women. The arguments in this vein revolve mostly around whether or not the women's rights movement was fully co-opted by Reza Pahlavi, and if so, what the outcome of that co-optation was. Recent scholarship has harshly criticized this move, seeing it as a derailing of the nascent women's rights movement. In this vein, Hamideh Sedghi proposes that under the Pahlavis "women's emancipation meant state exploitation of gender as a measure to combat and contain religious forces and their bazaar supporters" (67). Minoo Moallem goes further, suggesting that not only did the legalization of forcible unveiling by the state enable the regime's suppression of the clergy via the instrument of female bodies, but it also interpellated all males as citizens of the nation-state by enabling their authority over women (69-73).
At the same time, these reforms were accompanied by messages in the press and state propaganda endorsing and valorizing companionate marriage, which was seen as the "modernizing" type of marriage. As recent studies by C. Amin (2002), Najmabadi (2005), and Afary (2009) have observed, the ideology of marriage was part of what had to be remade in order for the institution to serve as an engine of the state's modernization project. Though the romanticization of marriage as an institution that could promote women's rights and lead to the improvement of children-citizens is by now an old story, the ambivalent role that literature played in this process has not been adequately examined. The dismemberment in The Blind Owl (and the critical aversion to addressing it) is a clue—possibly the first, but certainly not the last—that there were problems with the assumption (or perhaps the hope) that romantic love would culminate in marriage and that such marriages would be the cornerstone of a modern society.
To an extent, we may see The Blind Owl, which is divided into two major parts, as the before-and-after of these reforms. In part 1, the narrator, a reclusive artisan who paints pen boxes, becomes obsessed with the "ethereal," otherworldly woman he first perceives when his uncle visits. He has never before seen this uncle (and notes that it is odd that he must accept the man's word that he is who he says he is), but feels he must offer him a special kind of hospitality in the form of a special wine he keeps in his closet. As he reaches for the bottle, he spies, from an aperture in the wall, the scene that will recur repeatedly throughout the novel—the scene that is, in fact, the subject of the narrator's signature painting on his pen boxes (which are sold in India by this same uncle). The eyes of the woman he sees in this scene haunt him: "It was then that I first beheld those frightening, magic eyes, those eyes which seemed to express a bitter reproach to mankind, with their look of anxiety and wonder, of menace and promise—and the current of my existence was drawn toward those shining eyes charged with manifold significance" (TBO, 9). But when the narrator turns away, the aperture and its scene disappear. Some unspecified time later, the woman suddenly reappears at his door, enters his room, and promptly lies down on his bed and dies. However, the narrator only realizes that she is dead after he has recorded his observations and placed his hand on her hair: "For some reason unknown to me I raised my trembling hand.... Then I thrust (foru bordam) my fingers into her hair. It was cold and damp ... It was as though she had been dead for days" (TBO, 20). He undertakes to sketch her portrait—a kind of death mask to preserve her forever:
I don't know how many times I drew and redrew her face before dawn, but none of the sketches satisfied me; I tore them up as soon as I drew them—but I neither tired nor was I aware of the passage of time.
Near dawn ... I was busy with a version that seemed better than all the rest, but the eyes? Those eyes, with their expression of reproach as though they had seen me commit some unpardonable sin—I was incapable of depicting them on paper. The image of those eyes seemed suddenly to have been effaced from my memory. (BK, 23)
His effort to produce a drawing that suits him is frustrated by his inability to see her eyes. But the corpse is briefly revivified (in a moment that echoes Poe's "Ligeia") so that she can open her eyes and allow the narrator to draw them. Now he can complete the portrait. Having done so, he exclaims triumphantly: "Now I had her eyes, I had the spirit of her eyes down on paper and now her body was of no use to me" (BK, 24). The remainder of part 1 is devoted to the disposal of the body, but the portrait the narrator produces haunts him. It can be recognized as a central image in the novella, re-created repetitively in the description of the pen cases that the narrator produces, in the portrait on the jar that the narrator finds while burying the woman, and in part 2, on the curtain hanging in the narrator's childhood home.
Part 2 concerns a story that strikes the reader as uncanny in light of part 1; many of the characters are subtly different but seem to have been transposed from part 1 into a different setting set of circumstances in part 2. Moreover, in part 2, the seemingly same "ethereal girl" has become a woman, and his wife: roles which seem to deform her. These differences transform her from silence to speech, from chastity to promiscuity, from fidelity to conjugal treachery. She will not allow the narrator to consummate their marriage, and he finally contrives to do so in the guise of one of her lovers, the old odd-and-ends peddler—another recasting of a character from part 1: the uncle, the shaykh of the portrait, and the hearse driver. In part 2, the narrator's ongoing uncanny sense of his relationship to this old man figure is finally realized after he murders his wife. The sense of his likeness to this old man foreshadows their collapse into one figure: "I went over and stood before the mirror. Overcome with horror, I covered my face with my hands. What I had seen in the mirror was the likeness, no, the exact image of the old odds-and-ends man. My hair and beard were completely white, like those of a man who had come out alive from a room in which he has been shut up with a cobra" (TBO, 127). The narrator is (we presume) the same, and the same code is used to describe the woman, but she is transformed: now his cousin and wife, this woman is figured as cruel and the detachment that spurred his desire when she was his beloved is portrayed as malicious indifference. Additionally, she is promiscuous: the anxiety in part 1 that she was the lover of the old man is realized here. The narrator knows for certain that she is the lover not only of the old man but of many other undesirable rivals. Where their marriage might be expected, within the conventional logic of narrative (both social and literary) that views marriage as the logical conclusion to romance, to stabilize the narrator's attitudes toward the woman, the opposite transpires. Desperate to consummate their marriage, the narrator disguises himself as the old man and is accepted as his wife's lover. In the ecstasy—or rage—of the moment, the narrator murders her, plunging the knife (a recurring object and image) into her in a replication of the act of penetration.
Here again, critics have been loath to address this murder, tending to skirt the subject—like that of the dismemberment—altogether; its linking of ecstasy and violence against the female object of that violent desire is perhaps too uncomfortable to confront. To the extent that he addresses them, Beard proposes that the key to understanding these strange moments of signification in The Blind Owl is to identify its complex relationship with the Western tradition of the novel, which Beard sees as developing separately from Eastern and Islamic literary forms. Seeing the novel as fundamentally a "love story," Beard views its drama of violence in terms of the personal and individual libidinal impulse rather than social ones:
The situation of the domestic triangle [between narrator, wife, and lover] and the speaker's consequent rage at his wife are two delusions he cannot break through. Once he has translated his disgust towards his own sexuality into personal rage at his wife, the dilemma remains which side of the imagined triangle to remove. He could kill the lover, but the wife's lover is secretly himself. The other answer, killing the wife, achieves only the retranslation of the problem into its original terms, because once she is gone his jealous rage is left without an object and turns back into guilt. (Beard, 90)
Beard perceptively identifies the "triangle" that exists between the narrator, his wife, and her lover, and points out that the old man lover is the narrator's double, into whom he transforms after he consummates his marriage and murders his wife.
As he endeavors to move the novel away from purely historical and/ or personal-biographical readings, Beard seeks to restore it to what he feels is its full aesthetic value—not merely as an Iranian novel but as a novel. Yet in doing so, he implicitly seems to take sides in an argument he criticizes—namely, whether or not the novel has indigenous roots in Iran. Nonetheless, Beard devotes his study to elaborating Hedayat's relationship to the European tradition of romance vis-à-vis Dante's Vita nuova; the Gothic and its inheritors, including Poe; as well as Hedayat's demonstrated interests in psychoanalysis and the writings of Freud.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Burying the Beloved by Amy Motlagh Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixA Note on Transliteration and Translation....................xi
Introduction: Burying the Past: Iranian Modernity's Marriage to Realism....................1
1 Dismembering and 7?e-membering the Beloved: How the Civil Code Remade Marriage and Marriage Remade Love....................21
2 Wedding or Funeral? The Family Protection Law and the Bride's Consent....................41
3 Ain't I a Woman? Domesticity's Other....................59
4 Exhuming the Beloved, Revising the Past: Lawlessness, Postmodernism, and Heterotopia....................94
5 A Metaphor for Civil Society? Marriage and "Rights Talk" in the Khatami Period....................112
Conclusion: A Severed Head? Iranian Literary Modernity in Transnational Context....................129
Notes....................137
Bibliography....................157
Index....................175