Orientalism Versus Occidentalism: Literary and Cultural Imaging between France and Iran since the Islamic Revolution 9780755609253

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NOTES ON TR ANSLITER ATION AND TR ANSL ATION

This book uses the transliteration system used for Persian in the Iranian Studies journal. I have followed the common English spelling of proper names, and the anglicised forms of Persian terms appearing in the Oxford English Dictionary. I have provided English translation for Persian and French quotes. Unless otherwise stated, all translations into English are mine.

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 Corpus of texts Table 2 Criteria for defining trends of representation

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ACK NOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a pleasure to thank the people who have made this book possible. This starts with my supervisor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Nima Mina, and the members of my PhD supervisory committee, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam and Ayman El-Desouky, as well as with the members of my PhD examination jury, Edmund Herzig and Karima Laachir, who made enlightening comments. This research has greatly benefited from my discussions with Jean-Marc Moura and John Gurney, to whom I express my deepest gratitude. Whilst researching this book, I have been fortunate enough to exchange views and ideas with a number of enthusiastic and attentive people, who have aided me through their considerable subjects of expertise and stimulating discussions. I should especially like to thank Omid Azadibougar, Abolhassan Najafi, Iraj Afshar, Shafi`i Kadkani, Mohammad Eslami Nodushan, Shahrokh Tondrow-Saleh, Tahmuress Sajedi, Mansureh Ettehadieh, Hamid Fulladvand, Javad Tabataba’i, Christophe Balaÿ, Elmira Dadvar, Ali Dehbashi, Nasser Pakdaman, Jean-Baptiste Para, Ehsan Naraqi, Hossein Mir`abeidini, Ramin Kamran, Sepideh Farsi, Kaveh Mirabbassi, Nasser Mohajer, Gilbert Lazard and Media Kashigar. For talking about their texts and their translations with me, I thank Mariam Askari, Piruz Sayar, Mahshid Nonahali, Farideh Rava, Tinush Nazmju, Reza Qeissariyeh, Mahmud Dowlatabadi, Goli Taraqi, Ladane Azernur, Chahla Chafiq, Reza Daneshvar, Dariush Shayegan, Hossein Dowlatabadi, Ali Erfan,

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ix

M.F. Farzaneh, Jean-Yves Lacroix, Philippe de la Génardière, Sorour Kasmaï, Alain Lance, Mohammad-Ali Sepanlu, Mahasti Shahrokhi, Nahal Tajadod, Simine Varasteh, Mohsen Yalfani. I am also grateful to the booksellers Ahmad Salamatian and Bahman Amini in Paris, as well as to the staff of the French Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle in Tehran. For their illuminating comments on reading parts or the whole of the book, I am indebted to Toby Matthiesen, Denis Hermann, Omid Azadibougar, and Claire Gallien. My gratitude in particular goes to the Iran Heritage Foundation for making the publication of this book possible.

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Parts of this book have appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East: ‘French New Orientalist Narratives from the “Natives”: Reading More Than Chahdortt Djavann in Paris’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29, no. 2 (2009): 269–280. Copyright 2009, Duke University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. ‘The Persian Novel in French: A Hybrid Genre’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31, no. 2 (2011): 498–505. Copyright 2011, Duke University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

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INTRODUCTION

At the time of writing, the prevailing characterization of Iran found in French media is that of a rogue state obsessed with its nuclear ambitions, whilst France is portrayed as decadent and imperialist by the Iranian press; it is vital, therefore, to examine the ways in which these representations and stereotypes are shared, nuanced, or overcome beyond the sphere of the fourth estate. In this book, I shall explore mutual images of France and Iran in their cultural and literary dimensions. My decision to work with literary texts stems from the consideration that such works bring multiple issues to a systematic analysis of Franco-Iranian relations, relating as they do not only to literary traditions and individual writing processes but also to sociopolitical issues. I consider literature in its broad definition, including in my corpus prose texts with some narrative elements and disregarding as much as possible subjective aesthetic criteria of textuality: there is a need to have a large understanding of literary texts and not be confined to well-received and recognised ones. Such an understanding is directed at having an impact on FrancoIranian relations. The diffusion of this book will I believe raise awareness of the mechanisms of stereotyping and Othering among French and Iranian people, and might lead to lessen essentialism in our relations to the Other and to heightened acceptance of alterity. For this purpose, I shall apply my literary analysis to both France and Iran, looking at the two sides of the picture simultaneously, and to a short contemporary period, which should make my work immune from any reiteration of orientalist and occidentalist essentialism. I shall also focus on the dialectic between text and context in order to avoid the

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problems linked to textualism. In doing so, I shall argue that the issue of essentialism should shift from the question of its existence to the issue of its recognition and analysis.

Representing the other I shall analyse image, an element which sheds light on the workings of a society and its literary and non-literary imagination, combining different approaches. Based on the findings of imagology, image will be understood as instrumental to the understanding of larger cultural phenomena. Imagology, which studies the image of the foreigner, is mainly used by comparative literature practitioners in continental Europe. It is an approach combining poetics and critics: the study of the whole insists on the commonalities between texts (poetics), while the study of the details notes the points of difference (critics), or even of subversion of the whole. After originating in France, imagology has developed in other European countries. In the Netherlands and Germany, Joep Leerssen and Manfred Beller are particularly active and focus on the study of national characters in literature.1 My use of imagology will mainly be based on the French model. In the early stages of my research I considered Jean-Marc Moura’s analysis of the image of the Third World in French novels as a possible model. However, Iran cannot be said to share the space of alterity occupied by Third World countries. Moura’s findings do not include the occurrence of any novels about Iran, and this supports my view that Iran is inscribed in an orientalist imagination and thus benefits from a particular representation.2 I have added to the main imagological framework aspects of other literary theories, particularly Stephen Greenblatt’s New Historicism, and Stuart Hall’s politics of representation, which are paralleled in France by Dominique Maingueneau’s ‘Analyse du discours’. Based on imagology’s definition, the image appears as an ‘image of’ in a triple sense: it is the image of a foreigner; the image of (originating from) a nation or a society; and the image of an author’s sensibility. Image then symbolises the dialogue between two cultures, two literatures, or two texts. As such, it does not refer to the domain of vision; it is a literary term for ‘representation’, which I shall use in

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Introduction

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a more general context to refer to images, not only within texts but within society. The main hypothesis enunciated by imagology is that the question of the referent (that is, the adequacy of the image to reality) is not valid. Imagology defines the main characteristic of the image as coming from the consciousness of a difference between a Self and a foreign Other, and between Here and There. There is a dialectical relation between the represented object and its image, the expression of a discrepancy between two orders of reality and two spaces; and discrepancy is the fundamental element of comparative literature. There is a social construct of reality, but no such thing as a true image of a country – a point on which, in my view, Edward Said’s Orientalism did not elaborate enough in his criticism of the representations of the Orient by Europeans.3 This means that one cannot explain the literary image in terms of reflection of social imagery: the image is a mirage, and imagology is the study of the essentialised illusions about the Other. My perspective will thus not use image, and stereotype as its borderline case, as adequate or not to a supposed reality, nor condemn or value it, but will use it as a tool to understand the mechanisms of representation of Franco-Iranian mutual representations. If it is not possible, nor perhaps desirable, to avoid constructs in representations of the Other, I argue that analysing them in their stereotypical and clichéd forms will allow them to be put to use, rather than being swayed by them.4 In addition to image, I will understand ‘cliché’ as a figure of speech (either verbal – syntactic, stylistic, lexical – or narrative and thematic), and thus as a necessarily literary construct, and ‘stereotype’ as a social image belonging to the doxa of a society.5 Stereotype is a commonplace on a person or a group. Contrary to its everyday use, stereotype has no negative connotation in my analysis, as I look at its function and its process.6 In a literary context, I will use ‘topos’ and its Greek plural ‘topoi’ as an alternative to ‘cliché’. The hypothesis of the image as mirage leads to two consequences for reading practice. Since the discourses on the foreign Other are not unlimited, they can be organised into a typology. Thanks to its focus on typology, one of the positive achievements of imagology for the purpose of this research, is that it helps to highlight the texts in which a personal myth is presented. Some texts are put forward, not because

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they do not fit into a classification (I do not think that any text can be so far apart as to not be comparable to others), but because their nuanced discourse reveals the simplifications of other texts with which they share common formal or thematical elements. A linked consequence is that such a study has to draw on a synergy between classical literary history and cultural studies. Living in the age of mass publishing makes it impossible to deal only with the ‘great works’ of national writers studied in traditional literary history. This book rests on a dialectic between the texts of major (acclaimed, canonized) and minor (under-represented, outside the canon) authors, while their status and recognition is necessarily reassessed in the process. This perspective is original in literary studies, which often consider literature as the representation of individualities, not of types. French imagology will demonstrate that the study of types in literature brings conclusive results in terms of literary readings. This book will detail how France and Iran represent each other in the contemporary period through their narrative literature in prose, by listing and classifying all the ways in which they do so. I argue that prose narratives emphasise national elements more than poetry, which is more concerned with form and language, at least as far as contemporary Persian and French texts are concerned. I shall not examine nonnarrative texts like essays, since they are directly linked to the social issues they describe. The book’s primary contribution will be to collect data, trying to be exhaustive, analyse and compare them. It will be both a textual analysis and a cultural history of contemporary FrancoIranian relations. Its argument will be that orientalism and occidentalism, which I shall define in the following paragraph, are essential intertextual and interdiscursive references when the images of Iran and France come into play in contemporary French and Persian texts. The author is influenced by larger-scale discourses that are dominant in society and which are given credence through institutionalisation. Discourses and texts feed each other in a dialectical way. The degree to which writers resist discourses will be assessed in this book. In the case of France and Iran, the use of orientalist discourse determines the possibilities available in the endeavour to represent the Other. Each additional image of the Other adds to the discourse and restricts the

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Introduction

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range of possibilities as to taking a different stand. Edward Said argues in these terms: Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate himself vis-àvis the Orient; translated into his text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice he adopts, the type of structure he builds, the kind of images, themes, motifs that circulate in his text – all of which adds up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf.7 It should be noted here that the terms ‘West’ and ‘East’, ‘Occident’ and ‘Orient’ are not only difficult to avoid, but also familiar and useful for these first steps of definition. This is the reason why I use them at the beginning of this book without question, although they will be deconstructed later on. For now, I understand ‘the West’ as Europe and North America, and ‘the East’ as the broad Middle East. I shall restrict my use of ‘orientalism’ to the French context, and of ‘occidentalism’ to the Iranian context. It should also be stated here that I give these definitions as a consequence of my own position in the West. Said contends that orientalism is not only a Western science on the Orient and the orientals, but also a discursive construction of the oriental, formulated by Westerners so as to gain power over them. Orientalism used to be considered a Western discipline which studied the societies and civilisations of the Orient. After Said’s critique, the scope of the term expanded, and orientalism came to be considered not only as a discipline but also as a discourse, gaining the pejorative connotation that is now part of the term, according to Said.8 Orientalism was built on a series of oppositions between the West and the East, conceived as essential concepts: liberty versus despotism; individualism versus holism; historical progress versus eternity, and so on.9 Rey Chow argues in her books on China that colonisation does not necessarily mean geographical colonisation: ‘the most important aspect of Orientalism – its legacy as everyday culture and value.’10 Following Chow, I argue that orientalism is still ‘the dominant “mode of discourse” representing Europe’s views of the Orient’,11 and that this argument can

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be equally applied to the relation of France to Iran. This does not mean that the Middle East should be conceived of as being the West’s external Other at all times. Fred Halliday warns us against the tendency to see orientalism as a historical continuity over the centuries: ‘The thesis of some enduring, trans-historical, hostility to the Orient, the Arabs, the Islamic world, is a myth.’12 Analysing texts alongside orientalism offers the possibility to see what is part of the orientalist interdiscourse and intertext, and what is specific about it, that is, how the author redeploys the motif of orientalism. The political dimension also has to be considered while analysing Franco-Iranian cultural images, precisely because one of the reasons for Iranian interest in France is political: France was neither Russia, nor Great Britain, the two powers disputing Iran, and had no direct colonial ambitions, which might be a reason why Iranians became interested in it. As argued by Bobby Sayyid, occidentalism cannot be a reverse definition of orientalism: ‘To propose occidentalism as its counterpart is to ignore the intimate relationship between power and knowledge. No doubt, the “Rest” have stereotypical representations of the West, but the source of these representations is often the West itself. A relationship of power is a relationship of unevenness.’13 Also, occidentalism was never institutionalised in Iran as a discipline, nor formalised to constitute a discipline; as such, the discourse does not have a similar systematic scientific basis.14 An important characteristic of a discipline is that it has to have a unified set of objects to study and that these objects are recognised as forming a whole by the creation of institutions devoted to their study. It is the important differentiating element between orientalism and its old and prestigious institutions, and a potential occidentalism, which is not in line with this definition, concerning neither the object of study (the West is a varying concept) nor the institutions (there is no Iranian parallel to the prestigious Oriental Institutes in the West, like those in Oxford or Chicago). Thus, although the term appears as an opposite to ‘orientalism’, it should be understood that this is not the case. I will use ‘occidentalism’ as a manageable term, but its paradox should not be forgotten. Most Iranian and Western intellectuals agree on the lack of occidentalism as a discipline. Iran has not been interested in systematically

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studying Western societies, either individually or globally, until recent times, as the recurring calls for occidentalism by various intellectuals show. In 1948, in Taskhir-e tamaddon-e farangi (The Conquest of Western Civilisation), Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman (1907–1967), a leading intellectual, called for what he termed ‘farangshenasi’ (literally, knowledge of the West).15 He also addressed the definitional problem of the West. As I write in 2011 this call is still of major importance to Iranian intellectuals: it was only in 2008 that a Faculty of World Studies, with departments in British, French, German, and North American Studies, in addition to departments in Indian, Russian and Latin American Studies, opened in Tehran University (as a parallel, there still is no will to develop the study of the history and culture of other zones of the Muslim world. For example, neither Urdu nor Ottoman are taught in the universities of the country.) ‘In short, orientalism in reverse [what I call occidentalism] neither claims the universalist and scientific mantle of orientalism proper nor is powerful enough to superimpose a totalizing identity or ideology upon its non-oriental others if it so desires.’16 This explains why, unlike orientalism, occidentalism was not and is not a discipline, although I argue it is a discourse as rich and diverse as orientalism.17 I agree with Arshin Adib-Moghaddam’s statement on this: ‘What we may establish then is an ideational pattern of representations of the west that is systemic in all but institutional structure, an unstructured Muslim archive that is informed, even constituted, from the narratives that belong to those experiences.’18 Occidentalism is given contrasting definitions, to refer to two exactly opposite viewpoints: an attitude of denial of the West coming from the non-West,19 and an exaltation of this same West.20 This dual definition can be explained by the fact that orientalism and occidentalism have always worked dialectically, and that it has been difficult to separate the progress of the two concepts. In this book, I build on Tamara Wagner’s definition of two distinct forms of occidentalism, that she respectively terms ‘revisionist’ and ‘emulative’. She argues: Occidentalism is characterized by the same duality as it refers as much to an emulation of ‘Western’ ideals as to an equally reductive rejection of them. Both are sides of the same coin. It is

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to demarcate occidentalism’s contrasting uses that I shall distinguish between its emulative (admiring, imitative, appreciative) and revisionist (despising, rejecting, retaliatory) forms.21 The emulative form can for example be seen in travelogues, following Mohammad Ghanoonparvar’s point that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, ‘Persian travel accounts changed the prevailing images of the west and western from the somewhat monolithic, vague, and exotic Other, generally regarded with hostility, to that of an Other, albeit still alien, whose advancements in social, technological, and even political arenas should be emulated by Iranians.’22 The process of defining the Self in orientalist discourse is also at work in occidentalism, according to Wagner: ‘As in orientalism, the production of occidentalist fictions says as much, if not more, about those who produce them than about what is presented, or “re-presented.”’23 This confirms that in the rejecting form of occidentalism, what is at stake is the question of origins and of authenticity, through the rejection of the modern West. Ali Mirsepassi remarks that it is more a question of inventing a tradition than returning to it.24 This is why I find Wagner’s term ‘revisionist’ inappropriate for the Iranian case. In my view, the rejecting attitude comes from a nativist preoccupation. I use nativism as ‘the doctrine that calls for the resurgence, reinstatement or continuance of native or indigenous cultural customs, beliefs, and values’.25 This is clear in the text that crystallised the issue, Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s (1923–1969) Gharbzadegi (Westoxication). This pamphlet, published in 1962 and circulating without governmental authorisation until the 1970s, is the main reference on nativist occidentalism, although not the first one. Shadman had previously criticised the impact of the West and of Westernised Iranians who helped the spread of its influence without reflecting on its basic tenets: he calls these superficially westernised Iranians the fokoli (a belittling term, literally, the bow-tied ones). Ahmad Fardid (1909–1994) is the philosopher who coined the term ‘Westoxication’ proper, later to be used by Al-e Ahmad. Interestingly, nativist occidentalism recognises orientalism as an imperialist enterprise ten years before Said:

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Introduction

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And here is something that really puzzles me: since when has orientalism become a ‘science’? If we say that some westerner is a linguist or a dialectologist or a musicologist in the oriental field, that is something else. Or if we say that he is an anthropologist or a sociologist, that is even possible? But an orientalist in the general sense? What does that mean? Does it mean that he knows all the secrets of the East? Are we living in the age of Aristotle? This is why I call orientalism a parasitic growth on the roots of imperialism.26 The link between nativism and occidentalism has often been made in the study of Iranian intellectual history.27 I thus use ‘nativist occidentalism’ in my close-readings to define this form of rejection of the West. Some scholars use other terms instead: Mehrzad Boroujerdi for instance speaks of ‘orientalism in reverse’. I must stress again that I consider it problematic to understand occidentalism as an orientalism in reverse, and that although I adhere to most of Boroujerdi’s argument, I do fear that the expression might engender some confusion. It is because of French and Iranian writers’ decision to distance themselves or not from the orientalist and occidentalist discourses that images take form. I argue that it is possible to define categories of representation of the Other according to the belonging or not to a context and a genre, and to the type of readership the work is reaching. As the genre is a model including canonical works, the choice of a genre implies a contract between the writer and the reader. This relation can be shown as follows for French and Persian contemporary literatures: Position vis-à-vis intertext and interdiscourse ↓ Images of the Other ← → Textuality This diagram works on the assumption that intertext28 and interdiscourse29 are essential referents for French and Iranian writers, who consciously or unconsciously situate themselves in relation to them when writing about Iran and France, as this book will demonstrate. The belonging to a genre partly determines this position. It is not a consequence of the writing; there is on the part of the writer a desire

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to commit to a genre and as such to be linked to other works.30 The genre is an important part of the text, as demonstrated by Dominique Maingueneau: We cannot consider the work as a representation, an arrangement of ‘contents’ that would allow us to ‘express’ ideologies or mentalities more or less deviously. Works do speak about the world, but their enunciation is involved in the world they are supposed to represent. There is not on one side a universe of mute things and activities and on the other literary representations detached from this universe that would be an image of it. Literature constitutes an activity; it not only holds a discourse about the world but also it manages its own presence in this world. Conditions of enunciation of the literary text are not an incidental armature from which it could break free. They are steadfastly linked to its meaning.31 My work on images will evaluate textuality according to the ‘conditions of enunciation’, the context, to which the texts belong. It is in the gap between cultural context and text that I shall situate this assessment. All texts have some elements of discursivity and it is not possible to make a distinction between discursive and literary texts. However, some (in this case the orientalist and occidentalist ones) adhere more closely to the interdiscourse, while others subvert it or avoid it by implementing textual strategies. The distance between the idealistic vision of Franco-Iranian cultural relations and the actual production of mostly stereotypical images underlines the difficulty of bypassing hegemonic discourses. The precise study of mutual images illustrates the predominance of clichés when the representation of the Other comes into play. In French and Persian contemporary texts, literature happens only when images are deliberately complicated, when the simple opposition between Self and Other falls.32 This conclusion overlaps with a frequent hypothesis in literary studies. The interest of my analysis lies in the fact that I come to such a conclusion after the demonstration of this process. I do not make a distinction based on aesthetic criteria at the beginning of the

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Introduction

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study, owing to the problems inherent in distinguishing texts on the basis of such criteria in the ambit of a scholarly work. However, the analysis of a wide-ranging corpus of texts will show that it is possible to define textuality and to distinguish between texts based on their creative value in the specific case of French and Persian contemporary literatures, by a process of elimination. In texts inscribed in a national frame, literary merit appears to be linked to an original representation of the Other, whereas texts that reiterate clichés on the Other are the most didactic and less creative ones.

Mapping the context of Franco-Iranian relations Franco-Iranian relationships began seriously at the end of the sixteenth century, under the rule of Henri IV and Shah Abbas. The two countries mostly stayed on good terms, especially in the nineteenth century and until the twentieth century, due to the absence of French imperialist intervention on Iran, at least politically and economically speaking. It is a recurrent argument of French scholarly tradition that the two countries have had a relationship based on cultural exchanges. At the same time, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States are conceived differently. Conspiracy theory in Iran has often focused on the English, and there is a wide and interesting imagination of Great Britain, as well as a literature drawing on the subject.33 I contend that some imperialist processes were nonetheless at stake between France and Iran throughout the cultural domain in the last two centuries, owing especially to a French monopoly on archaeological excavation34 and to the general orientalist interest for Persia.35 France was also widely present in Iran through its Catholic missionaries and their schools, where most of the elite studied until World War II.36 In Tehran alone, there were the Alliance Française, Lazarist schools St. Louis and Jeanne d’Arc, the Franco-Persane school and Lycée Razi, as well as Alliance Israélite schools.37 I do not think that humanist values are sufficient as an explanation for the culturally-centred interest of France towards Iran, but its position nonetheless helped France in the effort to project itself as a benevolent power, and tended to increase Iranian intellectual interest

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in French culture. It is partly because of this lack of visible imperialist ambitions, and of course because of the prominence of the French language in the world at the time, that French was the primary language studied by the Iranian elite until the end of World War II. French was thus the language through which Iran became acquainted with Europe, as noted by Yann Richard: Thus, although it was distant from the Mediterranean Sea, Persia accessed modernity through the language of Voltaire, just as Egypt or the Ottoman empire did. The supremacy of the Frenchspeaking world held in aristocratic and intellectual classes until the 1960s, and even until the 1979 Revolution. It was however slowly caught up by English after the fall of Mossadeq (1953) and the rise of American economical and political hegemony.38 Nicolas Bouvier, a Swiss traveller, author of the famous travelogue L’usage du monde, writes similarly on this issue: ‘in Tehran, many people who will never have the occasion nor the means to see Paris speak perfect French. [ . . . ] And when the Persians set out to read, they read neither Gyp nor Paul Bourget.’39 Another example of this culturally-centred relation is the impact of the military exchange prevalent in the FrancoIranian relations. Although its military significance is considerable, it can be seen as equally significant in cultural terms, as Mariam Habibi argues.40 A case in point is the Dar al-Fonun institution, founded with French support and modelled on the Ecole Polytechnique, where the curriculum, initially based on military science subjects, was soon extended to medicine, pharmacy and other non-military sciences.41 Teachers came primarily from Eastern European countries, and their common teaching language was French. The notion of cultural affinities thus has solid grounds. When I went to Iran for the first time in 2005, I discovered the perception of a common spirit between French and Iranians, which was partly supposed to be linked to a similar history as leading civilisations. The main revolutions in the two countries (1789 in France and 1979 in Iran) are often mentioned in this claim for world leadership. Both events were feared in neighbouring nations, and both countries

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Introduction

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insisted that they should be exported. The 1906 Constitutional Revolution was also compared to 1789. The role of their languages, as languages of culture spreading much further afield than their respective national borders, was also held to be an important factor in this leadership status: For a long time Iran has been at the crossroad of different cultures, among others Aryan and Semitic, that it then transmitted to others, so that it is by and through Persia that an important part of the Aryan heritage could penetrate into Europe. It was by Iranians that Islam was spread into Transoxiana and, in East Asia as far as China. France has played a similar role in relation to Graeco-Roman and Christian cultures, and one can see it as a bridge that united the ancient world to the modern world.42 In the literary field, France is considered a model in prose, and Iran in poetry; the perception of a deep affinity is not however confined to literature, but also expands to ideas. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, one of the most famous early travellers to Iran, expressed it succinctly: ‘Persia is in Asia what France is in Europe.’ 43 This idea has been drawn upon by most of Tavernier’s followers and is popular in Iranian politics. President Khatami is reported to have said that France was the herald of independence and liberty in Europe, just as Iran was the herald of independence and liberty in the Middle East in today’s world.44 In cultural terms, too, Iran is often supposed to be the equivalent of France in the Middle East. The writer Mahmud Dowlatabadi, for example, made a comparison between French and Iranian classical architecture during a private interview I had with him in May 2009 in Tehran, arguing that the underlying metaphysics of architecture is similar in the two cultural traditions, in which the paradise is seen as an enclosed space that is not revealed by the house front. He compared Yazd gardens, sited inside the houses, to the courtyards inside Parisian buildings, an interesting idea, although probably not one relevant to the architects. In terms of basic personality features, the Iranians I met mentioned common traits, such as tendencies to complain or to ‘laissezfaire’, though I suspect they could also have easily related to other

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European citizens on this, like the Italians or the Spanish.45 Another trait supposedly common to both French and Iranians frequently mentioned to me in interviews was their pride in what was termed ‘cultural exceptionality’. In a more systematic way, scholars have worked on the influence of French literature on Persian literature. Analyses focus for example on the influence of French poetry on the development of she’r now (literally, new poetry), in Persian blank verses.46 However, considerations of the reception of Persian literature in France stop at Aragon with Le fou d’Elsa (1963).47 Cultural influence is often seen as a one-way process, especially in the contemporary period, with France exercising literary influence and Iran receiving it; as such, it is also a mark of post-colonial relations.48 I will show in the first chapter that French scholars have construed an Iran to which they can feel close,49 as exemplified by this quote from Richard which argues for the links between France and Iran: ‘Between Persian and French, are we not dealing with the dialogue of ambitions superseded by history, of universal cultures crushed by globalization?’50 It is worth noting, however, that apart from conversations within a scholarly milieu, such similarities were touched upon only by Iranians. There is no such sense of a cultural proximity between France and Iran in the French non-scholarly imagination. France does not have a special place for Iran, which is seen as being on a par with other Middle-Eastern countries. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has held an ambivalent place among French intellectuals;51 there is a deep dichotomy in their discourse on Iran today, owing to the contrast between the negative fanatical image of Iran with the positive orientalist picture. The positive picture is focused on some Persian characters: the kings of ancient Persia, Cyrus and Darius, as well as Alexander’s Bactrian wife Roxana, and Omar Khayyam. The Persians are seen through the Greek prism of Herodotus as the Other of Greco-Roman culture. The other prism is the Bible, in which Persians are described in positive terms, especially on the basis of the episode in which Xerxes (Assuerus) gives help to the Jewish people, in the Book of Esther.52 This attraction for Persian figures goes as far back as Madeleine de Scudéry

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Introduction

15

and her Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus (1649–53), in which the Persian king represents the perfect lover and is shown as a model for other princes.53 From the end of the nineteenth century onwards French writers became particularly attracted to the mathematician-poet-philosopher Omar Khayyam, probably the best-known of Persian poets nowadays, although Saadi was translated first, and one can only wonder what would have happened to this figure if Marguerite Yourcenar had written ‘Mémoires de Khayyam’. As she states in the introduction of Mémoires d’Hadrien: Only one other figure in history has tempted me with nearly the same insistence: Omar Khayyam, the poet-astronomer. But the life of Khayyam is that of the pure contemplator, and of the somber skeptic, too: the world of action meant little to him. Furthermore, I do not know Persia, nor do I know its language.54 Among the great Persian figures who fascinated the French intellectual imagination, we also find the sect of the Assassins and its master Hassan Sabbah.55 The Assassins are given different images, either as freedom fighters against the Seljuk oppression or as religious fanatics. Samarcande, the novel by Amin Maalouf, a Franco-Lebanese writer, for example plays on this double image.56 Interestingly, Scheherazade is not seen as an entirely Persian character, and thus has not been the heroine of contemporary French texts, belonging rather in the French imagination to a global Orient. On the other side, the main French figures that fascinate Iranians are Napoleon (who also fought the English and the Russians, Iran’s perceived main enemies in the last two centuries) and Charles de Gaulle, as well as committed writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. This double preference for literary and political figures will be apparent in the texts by Iranian writers within Iran: France is conceived in the Iranian imagination as a nation of both writers and artists, as well as of political figures. These general images are not specific to Franco-Iranian relations: a fascination for Khayyam is also found in England, just as a special interest for de Gaulle can be observed in Cuba, for example. My aim

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is to focus closely on these representations in order to show the precise point where they are shared only by France and Iran, as well as to demonstrate how they are shaped and constructed. An imbalance to deal with is the lack of a centre experienced by Iranian people, because of the diaspora, an experience by and large not shared by French people. This Iranian diaspora is a complicating, and hence enriching, factor in the study of mutual perceptions and image.

Using typological analysis In my definition of the image and of imagology, I have stressed that it is essential to approach the voluminous corpus on mutual images of France and Iran through a classification, to distinguish between forms of representing the Other. The discourses on the Other, even in fiction, are limited, and can thus be put together and compared. The typological method is based on exhaustiveness, if at all possible in a post-modern age, and diachrony. It is indeed necessary to consider literary texts written by French writers on Iran and by Iranian writers on France between 1979 and 2009 in their totality, as some modes of representation may otherwise be left unexamined. The last two pages of this introduction consist of tables containing the different typologies of representation of the Other in French and Iranian texts, and the criteria I have used to distinguish between them. There are twenty French texts on Iran, and fifty-seven Iranian texts on France, only six of which were written by Iranians within Iran. Typological thought is not new in literary studies. There were recurrent calls in the twentieth century for the organising of literary genres and styles into categories. Northrop Frye was influential in this perspective, through his argument that type was a mode of thought. I do not use ‘typology’ in the specific sense of Bible reading conceptualised by Northrop Frye and others, but simply as another word for categorisation. My stance as regards classification is somewhat similar, although where Frye speaks of criticism, I speak of comparative literature: There is a place for classification in criticism, as in any other discipline which is more important than an elegant accomplishment

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Introduction

17

of some mandarin caste. The strong emotional repugnance felt by many critics toward any form of schematization in poetics is again the result of a failure to distinguish criticism as a body of knowledge from the direct experience of literature, where every act is unique and classification has no place. Whenever schematization appears in the following pages, no importance is attached to the schematic form itself, which may be only the result of my own lack of ingenuity. Much of it, I expect, and in fact hope, may be mere scaffolding, to be knocked away when the building is in better shape.57 My own method is based on similar scaffolding. Classification into trends of representation is not an end in itself; it is a means to understand French and Iranian respective images. I have proceeded in a methodical way to find literary texts, starting with bibliographies and encyclopaedias.58 I also searched for terms referring to France and Iran in the catalogues of French and Iranian main libraries,59 on the websites of publishing houses and bookshops, as well as books recommended by the many Iranians and French I interviewed. It appeared that the texts found in bookshops overlapped with those found in libraries, apart from the very recent ones. For texts dated from around 2007 to 2009 that were less likely to be found in national libraries, I used online bookshops such as www.amazon.com. There is no global bookshop in Iran, so I researched www.ketab.ir, the online catalogue that provides references for books published after the 1979 Revolution, and their more complete CD, Katibeh. Because this was not entirely exhaustive, I also researched recent publications in the main publishing houses in Tehran during my fieldwork there, at Cheshmeh, Nashr-e Markaz, Nilufar, Nashr-e Tarikh-e Iran, Qoqnus, Sales, Amir Kabir, Nashr-e Qatreh, Nashr-e Ney, and at the Tehran Book Fair in May 2009. As the Iranian book industry is smaller than that of France and many interesting trends can be detected by searching journals instead,60 I had several meetings with Ali Dehbashi, either alone or with other intellectuals or researchers. Dehbashi is the editor of Bokhara magazine, which surveys recent publications in literature, philosophy, art and Iranian studies in the West. The publishing house,

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Orientalism versus Occidentalism

which also organises weekly events, is an important forum for intellectuals and writers and it was a helpful source in the work of tracing an outline of Iranian relations with France. I also had interviews with various intellectuals whom I questioned on their specific knowledge of France and Iran, and who helped me to get a broad picture on FrancoIranian relations. The first table on pages 22–23 presents the corpus of texts according to trends of representation. The second table (page 24) shows the criteria used to define these trends. I distinguish the texts according to the current location of the writer, thus highlighting the difference between writers in Iran and those working in exile. I define exile broadly to encompass writers living abroad, not only those who left Iran out of political or economical necessity. The location of the writer is often correlated with a choice between the French or the Persian language, with the belonging to a genre and with the targeted readership. I also distinguish texts according to the time and space of narration, as well as to their prevailing theme. I find essential the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators, following Gérard Genette’s categories on the narrator’s relation to the story.61 In the homodiegetic narrative, the story is told by a character who acts in it. A special case of this narration is the autodiegetic one, in which the narrator is the protagonist of the story. In the heterodiegetic narrative, the narrator tells a story of which he is not a part. The final criteria are the images of the Self and the Other. These are necessarily multifaceted, even in the discursive texts condensing image to a stereotype. Hence I have defined them according to their function in the text, and not according to their content. Whilst I shall examine their content in detail during close-reading, it is preferable in this table to concentrate on their functions. As regards images of the Other, there are three functions: the Other as alius, the Other as alter, and the Other as described in passing. Here, a distinction between the Other as alius and as alter is necessary, along the lines drawn by Moura.62 Alter is the other Self, the Other in a pair of two, as in alter ego; whereas alius is the alienated Other. Alius evolved in French toward ‘aliéné’ (insane person); it became a degraded Other, not necessarily negative but always alienated. The possibility of representing the Other as an alter permits us to

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Introduction

19

leave aside fear about him and to consider him as a necessary parallel to the construction of the Self. This book will show that, apart from those analysed in the final chapter and parts of the fourth chapter, all trends represent the Other as alius. It will also show that these representations are not mutually exclusive, but complement each other and work in dialectic within French and Iranian society. My choice to categorise Persian literature according to whether it was written in France or Iran stems from the consideration that, where the image of the French is concerned, the living situation of the writer is a distinguishing element, as the situation of exile or immigration leads to a reappraisal of the foreign Other. What constitutes the nationality of a text is a difficult question. I have decided to consider mutual images of nations within a centralizing perspective. I work from the assumption that French writers write in French and are representative of a French discourse, each as a sort of national allegory, while Iranians within Iran write in Persian (I do not consider writings in Gilaki, Arabic, Kurdish and other minority languages which I cannot read), even though the issue acquires further complexity owing to the texts of writers in exile. It has been argued that the novel is linked to the emergence of nation-states,63 and my hypothesis is that there is still an essential link between novels and nations despite current celebrations of globalisation. Benedict Anderson has well described how state and literature reinforced each other during the phase of nation-state building.64 This is a position particularly suited to the imagologist approach, since the method focuses on literary issues of nationality, and on literature as national practice. The choice has stemmed from the character of the texts themselves, in that they do not employ the potential of internal Others, for instance, Afghans or Arabs for Iranians, and North-African Muslims for the French. Their discourse is always directed at an external Other. I define Iranian writers as Iranian even when they have French nationality and publish in French, because Iran is still their main frame of reference. They all recognise themselves as Iranian because of their unforgettable loss and longing for their country. As such, the paratext is important to define their belonging, as their texts could also be categorized in the French literary system. I have found no cases when the polarity between homeland

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and hostland had to be revised, either because there might be several hostlands (Iranian writers writing about their experiences in different European countries), or several homelands (writers belonging to Iranian minorities). I shall address the link between nation and text throughout this book, and provide answers to the issue of nation as I examine single texts. The use of the post-colonial paradigm will help me to answer my need to look at both sides and to draw conclusions after a parallel and tentatively exhaustive study of both literatures. Moreover, the link between nation and culture, and especially literature, is essential in post-colonial theories, and I will use them as tools in some aspects of my readings. Post-colonial readings are the study of the impact of European imperialism on world societies and on cultural phenomena after the era of colonialism, as well as of the mechanisms of hegemony;65 as such, they also affect the countries that, like Iran and France, did not share a colonial relation. I use post-colonialism in a restricted sense, with the hyphen, to highlight such dynamics. Postcolonialism reflects primarily on identities and belonging in political terms, and thus appears as a necessary frame from the perspective of mutual images between countries, especially when a significant number of the texts studied were written in exile. In order to choose one representative text for each trend, I have selected a text that contains all the characteristics of the others, but exaggerates their tendency, or puts forward what is less evident in the other texts of the trend, so as to make its function clearer. This does not mean that all texts of the trend are homogeneous; it means that in their representation of the Other, their function is similar. My analysis will focus on accessible texts written in the period between 1979 and 2009. The 1979 Revolution in Iran marks a categorical change in Franco-Iranian relations, and consequently in mutual images of the countries. I extend the study until 2009 to include an analysis of recent publications. This makes the periodisation through the thirty years of the Islamic Republic quite a ‘natural’ one, even though I will refer from time to time to previous periods in order to make brief comparisons. If some narratives on the identities of Self and Other were already at work before the Revolution, the event acted as an accelerator

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Introduction

21

in literary evolutions. Moreover, a crucial image, the Islamic component of Iranian identity, was added to perceptions of Iran with the advent of the Islamic regime, and this has resulted in new definitions and counter-definitions of Iran. During these thirty years, mutual images between the two countries did not evolve a lot; this makes it possible to consider the period as an entity and to study them in a nonchronological perspective. The table on pages 22–23 shows the corpus of texts organised by trends of representation and the one on page 24 the criteria chosen to define the trends.

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Table 1: Corpus of texts, organised by trends of representation and category of writers

• Ayene-ha ye dar dar, Hushang Golshiri • Sorraya dar eghma, Esmail Fassih • Kafeh-ye Naderi, Reza Gheissarieh

• • • • • • • •

Narratives on Iran as an alter ego (V)

• ‘Arus-e faransavi, ‘arus-e kuhestan, Hassan Purmansuri

Occidentalist narratives (III)

Nouvelles Lettres persanes, Serge Ginger Chahrouz le voyant, René-Jean Clot L’année de l’éclipse, Philippe de la Génardière Battue, Philippe de la Genardière Le tailleur de Téhéran, Guillemette Resplandy Darius, Jean Grosjean Livrets Cartes Postales ‘Omar Khayyam’ Le cure-dent, Jean-Yves Lacroix

• Per Lashez/ ‘Adat mikonim, Zoya Pirzad

Idealistic narratives on France (III)

• Voyage en Iran, Chantal Vervaet • Trente oiseaux face au soleil, Gilles Lanneau • Les Nouvelles Lettres persanes, Michel Drancourt • Petits tableaux persans, Nicolas Rousseau • Voyage au pays des baloutches, Stéphane Dudoignon • Longue marche, Bernard Ollivier

Travel writings to the Islamic Republic of Iran (I)

Definitions of the Iranian nation (III)

• Le soleil de la Perse, Guy Rachet • Sauver Ispahan, Jean-Christophe Rufin • Avicenne, Gilbert Sinoué • Roxane l’éblouissante, Joséphine Dedet • Louison ou l’heure exquise, Fanny Deschamps • Marie d’Ispahan, Ghislaine Schoeller

Orientalist historical novels (I)

The texts in bold are the ones I close-read in the book. The roman numeral refers to the chapter in which the trend is discussed.

By French writers

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By Iranian writers in Iran

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By Iranian writers in exile

• Terre de mirages, Dariush Shayegan • Adieu Ménilmontant, Ali Erfan • Fantasmes, Hossein Amir Rouhi • Le soupir de l’ange, Javad Javaheri • J’ai épousé Johnny à Notre-Dame-de-Sion, Fariba Hachtroudi • Kobolierrot, Amir Parsa • Le testament amoureux, Serge Rezvani • Le cimetière de verre, Sorour Kasmaï

The Persian novel in French (V)

Table 1 (continued)

• Ruz-ha dar rah/ Partir, rester, revenir, Shahrokh Meskub • Zendegi-e man, Tahereh Alavi • Bibi kukumeh/ Shab-e zendedari/ Ashna’i, M.F Farzaneh • Hamnava’i-ye shabane, Reza Ghassemi • Nameh, Hamid Sadr • Le dernier poète du monde/ La 602e nuit/ La route des infidèles, Ali Erfan • ‘Arefi dar Paris, Kamran Behnia • Dar safar/ Madaran va dokhtaran, Mahshid Amirshahi • Jadeh, meh, va…/ Sug, Chahla Chafiq

New orientalist narratives (II)

• Aqa-ye ‘Alef/ Madam • Les larmes de l’exil, Gorgeh/ Anar banu, Ladane Azernour Goli Taraqi • Comment peut-on • Istgah-e Bastil, Hossein être français? Dowlatabadi Chahdortt • Rakh/Kucheh-ha-ye Djavann mavazi, Javad Javaheri • Passagers des trois mondes, Mehdi Dadsetan • Tous mes jours sont des adieux, Maria Adle • La pierre philosophale, Homa Sayar • L’espèce errante, Afsaneh Eghbal • Six nouvelles cruelles, Ali Reza Sadri Alai • Sans te dire adieu, Mariam Sachs • The Hourglass, Mahasti Shahrokhi • A Girl in Paris, Shusha Guppy

Persian literature of exile (IV) • Les jumeaux de la révolution, Ali Reza Sadry Alai • Qui a tué l’ayatollah Kanuni?, Naïri Nahapétian • Regard persan, Sara Yalda • Passeport à l’iranienne, Nahal Tajadod • Persépolis, Marjane Satrapi

Counter-narratives on Iran (II)

• L’enfant du blé, Raphaël Djavanni • Téhéran-Paris, Tabib Hibat • Nocturne iranien, Claudine MoninKrijan • La vie d’une iranienne au 20è siècle, Mahindokht • Pour l’amour d’une langue, Azadée Nichapour • La vallée des aigles, Sorour Kasmaï

Autobiographies of suffering (II)

Introduction 23

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Occidentalist narratives Idealistic narratives on France

Orientalist historical novels Travel writing on Iran Narratives on Iran as an alter ego Persian novels in French The Persian literature of exile New orientalist narratives Counternarratives on Iran Autobiographies of suffering Definitions of the Iranian nation

French

Persian

France

France

Iran

Persian

French

France

Iran

Persian both and French French homodiegetic

France

Persian

French

France

Iran

French

France

French and Iranian French mainstream French mainstream French mainstream Iranian

French

French mainstream French mainstream French

Primary audience

heterodiegetic? Iranian mainstream? heterodiegetic Iranian

heterodiegetic

homodiegetic

homodiegetic

both

both

homodiegetic

French

France

heterodiegetic

Narrator

French

Language

France

Writer’s location

Table 2: Criteria for defining trends of representation

Exile

Varied

Adventures in Iran Adventures in Iran Varied

Prevailing theme

novel

novel

Travel writing

Novel

Prevailing genre

short story/ novel Condemning autobiography Iran Supporting autobiography Iran Giving autobiography testimony Condemning novel Iranian exiles Contemporary Condemning novel Iran France ? Contemporary varied short story/ France and Iran novel

Pre-modern Iran Contemporary Iran Iran, various times Contemporary France and Iran Contemporary France Contemporary France and Iran Contemporary Iran Contemporary France and Iran Contemporary France and Iran

Time and space of the narration

positive ? complex

alius ? alius

in-passing positive

in-passing positive

in-passing positive

negative

complex

alter

alius

complex

alter

complex

positive

alius

mixed

in-passing

Image of the Self

alius

Image of the Other

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CHAPTER 1 HOW CAN ANYBODY BE PER SIAN? FR ENCH TEXTS ON IR AN

Defining contemporary French orientalism I would like to start with an example of French orientalism’s inscription within a discourse system through an article on the history of Iranian studies in France by Bernard Hourcade.1 Interestingly, the author himself is not concerned with the issue of orientalism, although the debate was fierce in the academy at the time of writing. Hourcade’s article underlines two facts. Firstly, French orientalists saw the Iranian world as a distinct entity, different from the Turkish and Semitic civilisations, and thus their relation to Iran was often based on the idea of a shared Aryan identity.2 This can be explained by the insistence on philological and archaeological works, which had been orientated towards this Aryan framework since the finding of similarities between Sanskrit and European languages by Sir William Jones.3 Indeed, the French Ministry of Public Education was given the monopoly of archaeological excavations in Persia from 1894 to 1931.4 Thus the French created an object of study that was the Persian world and, thanks to this Aryan narrative, Persia could be understood as not entirely alien.5 Secondly, French orientalism has always been more interested in ancient Persia than in contemporary Iran, even if this tendency changed around the middle of the twentieth century, to be

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replaced by a flood of researches on contemporary Iranian society and politics; medieval, pre-modern and modern periods were not of high interest either, and are still poorly represented in Iranian studies. This interest in ancient Persia has some historical background, explained partly by the fact that Persia was primarily known by proxy, that is, through books and manuscripts, until late in the history of French orientalism, as opposed, for instance, to the Ottoman empire, where orientalists travelled with reasonable ease.6 This insistence on the ancient is a characteristic described at length by Edward Said. According to Said, the object of study is analysed in its artificially fixed past. Thus, the two notions of French orientalism delineated by Hourcade (creating an Aryan identity for the Persian empire and studying mostly ancient Persia), are testimonies to Said’s demonstration that scientific analysis cannot be excluded from general power discourse, and up to a point, from the French imperialist discourse. But what is the specificity of French orientalism today in the wider non-academic discourse? Might it be, for example, Islamophobic? William Beeman, who has worked on American-Iranian relations, argues that the weight of orientalism is traced into today’s discourse towards the Other: ‘The West has a ready-made code of invective that could be invoked. The code itself is not descriptive; it is evocative of emotional and prejudicial overtones that go back centuries.’7 According to him, the old orientalist discourse just needs to be reinvigorated, and Islamophobia, as the prejudice against Islam and Muslims, represents this reinvigoration.8 The term Islamophobia is increasingly used to refer to religiously motivated hostility directed at Muslims, especially at North Africans in France. In general, it has become more prominent in public discourse since the Islamic scarf controversy in France (and the interdiction of wearing the hijab in public schools) and afterwards, with 9/11.9 It is interesting to note that Islamophobia in France can be traced back to the Iranian Revolution and the idea of Islam conveyed at the time, especially by the media.10 The Algerian war of independence laid the ground for this negative view of Muslims, as has the settlement of populations of Muslim origin, who had for many years been termed ‘immigrant travellers’ and not specifically defined in religious terms. Thomas Deltombe insists on the fact that until 1979, Islam was

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How can anybody be Persian?

27

unknown to most people, and was certainly not considered a problem. However, with the Iranian Revolution, widely reported and broadcast, Islam became a subject of talk in French dining rooms and Islamic symbols became common references.11 Despite this genealogy, there is no particular French Islamophobia toward Iran in contemporary times, since the fear of Islam in France is focused mainly on the fear of North Africans, whose practice of this religion is seen as interfering with French ‘laïcité ’. The elements of Islamophobia I could trace in the French context referred only to a few ‘new orientalist narratives’ by writers of Iranian origin. I shall expand in the following chapter on these orientalist discourses, which exaggerate the status of Muslims or Islam as a ‘threat’ to the West.12 Thus it appears that Islamophobia is not a good framework within which to think of the French image of Iranians, as it is mainly found in some of the writings produced by Iranian exiles rather than by the French themselves. My argument is that the French doxa on Iranians today is not characterised by Islamophobia but by an inability to distance itself from the heavy interdiscursive presence of an orientalist image of Persians, originating with Montesquieu and perpetuated by orientalist scholars. The horizon of expectation of a French reader has not moved drastically since the first images of Persians appeared in French literature; the fixed images on Iran and Iranians found in contemporary French literature are due to a fetishistic view of Montesquieu’s characters and images and to the inability of writers to overcome this textual reference.13 My use of ‘fetish’ is based on Homi Bhabha’s concept in The Location of Culture, where he argues that stereotype is a form of fetish: it both desires and rejects the Other. It is ‘a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’.14 This tension can be found precisely in French contemporary texts and their orientalist referent. The link that I make is between the fetishisation of the image of Persians and its stereotyping in French letters. I prefer to use ‘cliché’, as a literary term focused on the imagination, rather than ‘stereotype’; but by replacing stereotype with cliché, I subscribe to the above definition by Bhabha. In Montesquieu’s famous epistolary novel, a French character exclaims: ‘Oh! ah! A Persian, is he? Most amazing! How can anybody

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be a Persian?’15 The Persian Letters features two Persian characters arriving in Paris and describing the city and its people through letters to their relatives. The characters represent at the same time figures of Others looking at the French Self (what in imagology is called the ‘meta-image’), and pretexts for the French Self to analyse and criticise itself through an allegorical novel. This allegorical role is important: Usbek and Rica’s exotic belonging is idealistic; it is a detour taken in order to better see oneself and warn against possible governmental errors. But there is also a realistic reference to Persia: the letters written by the Persians to their relatives in Iran, and the relatives’ replies, are pretext for describing Persia, in orientalist terms, based on interdiscursive references to the harem and to the despotic power of men over women. Joep Leerssen interestingly notes that the Persian nationality of Usbek and Rica’s correspondents is more important than their own nationality, which he sees as simply exotic. Readers take the place of the Persian correspondent, Roxane, Ibben, or Mirza, and as such, penetrate the actual Persia, which they were not able to do through the encounter with the Persians in Paris.16 This represents the mise en scène of the appropriation of Iran through narration, albeit a multivocal appropriation. The Persian Letters was often re-edited, both during Montesquieu’s lifetime and after his death. Olivier Bonnerot has counted fifty re-editions, including twelve in the year of publication, 1721.17 When analysing the recurring aspect of the query ‘How can anybody be Persian?’ in the French imagination, it is essential to remember that Montesquieu’s epistolary novel comes after the fashionable travelogues by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Jean Chardin. The Persian is by then a known figure of the exotic and a privileged figure of the oriental Other.18 Olivier Bonnerot discusses the ways in which Persia is seen as both fascinating and frightening because of its supposed violence and cruelty, and this in several milieus: the religious, scientific, poetic and ideological. Bonnerot argues that the tension between the fantasy of its pleasures and the horror of its atrocities has given the myth of Persia its greatness.19 It is striking, when browsing French prose texts concerned with Iran in different periods, to see how often French intellectuals and

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How can anybody be Persian?

29

writers use Montesquieu’s query to qualify the relations between Iran and France. It is also the sign of the influence of Persian literature on French literature, starting from around the seventeenth century with Racine’s use of Persian themes, down to Aragon’s Le fou d’Elsa. Even though Persian themes became less current in the second half of the twentieth century, one can still find several ‘New Persian Letters’ by French writers, as well as numerous references to Montesquieu. Indeed, I have found it difficult to locate French texts that do not at some point make use of this reference. Even though the Persian Other may no longer be a privileged Other after colonisation and its focus on North-African or African Others, the question ‘How can anybody be Iranian?’ is a recurring way of reflecting on difference.20 What is at stake in this query is the French reflection on Otherness, the exact Otherness being embodied by Persians/Iranians. Here it might be necessary to remind the reader that ‘Iranian’ is a large category including different groups of languages and of peoples; although ‘Persian’ refers to only one of these languages and to one group of Iranians, it has been a general term to designate Iranians in the West. Be that as it may, the famous question is so predominant that it has become an insurmountable introduction to or conclusion on Iran – that is, a cliché. Most writers feel the need to situate themselves relatively to it, and are caught in the rhetoric of the question. This is the burden of orientalist interdiscourse. The cliché works as a way of inscribing oneself into a literary tradition, more than as an attempt to find an original answer to the question. It is thus an object of both literary desire and rejection. French contemporary texts allude to the same old French references on Iran as well as to one another, using neither Persian texts nor Iranian references as ways to vary the image. This closed intertextuality is in my view partly explained by an important factor, the scarcity of translations from Persian into French. Such translations as have been made include Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, over fifteen years after its publication in Persian.21 Although Hedayat can be considered as the only internationally recognised Iranian writer, José Corti announced in 2008 that The Blind Owl had sold 50,000 copies – hardly exceptional for the masterpiece of the best-known Iranian writer in France, over a period of more than fifty

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years.22 Many important twentieth-century Persian authors have not been translated: from Simin Daneshvar to Sadeq Chubak to Mahmud Dowlatabadi, from poets Simin Behbahani to Ahmad Shamlu, and it is only with Christophe Balaÿ in the last two decades that there has been a systematic revival of translation of modern and contemporary texts.23 Classical poetry, too, suffers from this lack of interest: CharlesHenri de Fouchécour’s French translation of the whole Divan of Hafez was only published in 2006. Even Rumi, a best-seller in the United States, has hardly benefited from an interest in mystical love poetry in France. Since so few Persian texts have been translated, there are almost no images to oppose that of Montesquieu and we find ourselves in a closed circuit where images refer endlessly to one another. This makes it difficult for writers to go beyond the cliché. In the next two sections I shall analyse French contemporary texts on Iran to show their difficulty in overcoming the orientalist tradition. I have classified these texts into two categories: orientalist historical novels, and travel writing on Iran (summaries of the texts can be found in the Appendix). Although different in their formal characteristics (historical novel versus travel writing, pre-modern setting versus contemporary setting), they share a similar discourse of orientalism and their aim is to register in the orientalist referential tradition. Both trends have imitation at their core – but as no writer simply wants to imitate, some originality must come from the intertext, a point that I shall illustrate in the close-reading. Both genres are thus based on this paradoxical desire to say new things within a similar frame, to expose new mysteries of Iran while relying on previous discoveries. Images thus appear as variations on the same theme, as in music. They are repeated under different forms. This does not disqualify the inscription of their discourse in the orientalist tradition. On the contrary, Ali Behdad has demonstrated that the irregularities found in some texts and the dissatisfaction they show with the official orientalist discourse reinforce orientalism as an institution: in highlighting its shortcomings, they facilitate its adaptation to new strategies; as such, these irregularities can be understood as explanations for the long history of orientalism and its survival.24 I thus argue that these French texts, enclosed in their interdiscursive referent, construe the Iranian Other as

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an object both of desire (primarily in orientalist historical novels), and of rejection (primarily in travel writing). The point is not to show that these orientalist representations are misrepresentations, but to detail how they work and constitute a system of fetishisation, where a dialectic between the Self and the Other is at work.

Orientalist historical novels I want to begin by drawing an enlightening parallel between orientalist historical novels and French spy novels on Iran produced in the same period. Indeed, orientalism comes as much from genre fiction than from the classics, if not more; the most quantitatively productive orientalism may be pulp orientalism. This is why this book wants to look exhaustively at contemporary French texts, including pulp orientalist ones, as there have already been numerous analysis of orientalism in classical French texts. Converging images of Iran in genre fiction and orientalist historical novels By ‘genre fiction’, I mean all fiction that is considered as ‘not quite literary’ by the centres that define literature: academia, critics and teachers. Genre fiction welcomes all the fiction that high culture rejects from its sanctuary. It is based on the requirements of the entertainment industry.25 Its defining characteristic is that it is heavily based on a contract between the reader and the writer. It remains within the bounds of already-established norms, whereas other forms of literature usually try to transgress them. The writer is expected to use variations on the same theme, and the reader to be familiar with the genre as a whole and to read the text according to previous schemes – hence the term ‘genre fiction’. In this form, single examples are not so much considered in their singularity as in their relation to other similar works and sets of stereotypes; the idea of the masterpiece thus does not make sense in genre fiction.26 I shall therefore focus on a series and not on an individual text. My reason for studying genre fiction –or pulp orientalism– in this section is that its images represent a heightening of the stereotypes of

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one society about the Other found in traditional literature. Differences with the Other are underlined and caricatured. The doxa can express itself more freely in these texts, precisely because it is the expectation of the reader that it should do so.27 Genre fiction has a clear horizon of expectation, and is thus an interesting first step to apprehend literary stereotypes. I have chosen the spy novel as an example of genre fiction, because it is the most prolific trend for genre texts representing Iran. Only political fiction novels set in Iran could compete with this production, for example, Les mangeurs de feu28 or L’imam caché,29 as there are few romances and no science fiction stories linked to Iran. I do not list all the French spy novels set in Iran, as I study the genre as an example of the use of the doxa, and not in its exhaustive aspect. One of the main series belonging to the genre is S.A.S. by Gérard de Villiers. S.A.S. stands for ‘Son Altesse Sérénissime’, as the hero is an Austrian prince. The series has been tremendously successful with the French public, even though the hero is not French but Austrian, and France is only an ally and the United States is the main political power.30 In de Villiers’ spy novels, pre-Revolutionary Iran is described as a country following orders from other powers, mainly the USA or England. It is exotic, corrupt and poor, and is described in a condescending manner which is both infantilising and neo-imperialistic. This is not surprising, considering that spy novels reproduce right-wing ideologies of the West as a centre of law and order, as Erik Neveu demonstrates in his study.31 Neveu shows how, in contemporary French spy fictions, an opposition between Us and the Other is designed to portray the superiority of the Western political system and the primacy of the civilising West, and this can be clearly observed in the case of the novels on Iran. Here, the ‘Us’ is put forward, whereas in non-genre literature, the insistence is more on the Self versus the Other. This is another testimony that the spy novel is part of a national discourse aimed at reinforcing the unity of the nation through the framing of a dangerous outsider who is supposed to threaten it. Spy novels written after the Islamic Revolution add to the existing picture of exotic Iran the terrorism and cruelty of Iranians. One novel, La veuve de l’Ayatollah,32 which was adapted for the cinema by Andrew V. McLaglen, draws especially heavily on the tortures inflicted on prisoners in Iran, and on the cruel

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madness of a regime willing to send its martyrs on desperate missions; it signals the beginning of the ‘terrorist factor’ in this genre, a theme which reoccurs in later works with the additional threat of a nuclearcapable Iran driven by fanatic mullahs.33 It is essential to note that realism is the main ambition in these novels. Everything must be supposed to be true: the writer claims to be providing readers with clues on how to better understand the world they live in. All texts contain numerous realistic elements, which have the function of underlining the veracity of the fiction and of making readers believe the unbelievable. For example, character names sound real; phone numbers and place names are similarly plausible. The principle underlying this realism is that spy novels are other versions of reality, and especially of reality as seen in the news. The best scenarios for spy novels are to be found on TV, and news stories can quickly become spy novel scenarios (for example, de Villiers’ last novel on Iran, which uses the most up-to-date news about the Iranian nuclear issue to make a thriller about nuclear weapons, or his earlier use of ‘Operation Eagle Claw’ in which American helicopters failed to rescue the American hostages).34 A number of narrative aspects contribute to the creation of the Iranian Other as an alius.35 Firstly, Iran’s time seems to be fixed in an exotic premodernity, as distant from Western time as possible. A radical dichotomy is built between the two: Oriental time and ‘our’ time are different, so that the orientals are said to be unhurried and to have their own rhythm. Secondly, genre conventions do not include descriptive writing, and the scene is thus mostly set in some vague oriental desert. When Tehran is the place of the narrative, there is an insistence on its chaos and disharmony, as opposed to the order and tidiness of Western cities. Thirdly, Iranian characters are stock types. As in any novel of the genre, indigenous women are prey to the hero, and are described as particularly sensual and erotic, and at the same time necessarily hypocritical, on account of the taboos they are meant to live with (for example, virginity until marriage), in the view of the Western character, who uses this hypocrisy to his advantage. Iranian men are regularly described as having all the deficiencies attributed by the genre to Middle-Easterners: they are lazy and hypocritical, fanatics and liars, but also very proud. Western characters only show them some respect because they have a vague idea of the continuity between

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the glorious Persian empire and contemporary Iran.36 Finally, the lexicon used by the hero includes a few Persian words, providing an exotic element to break the monotony of the narrative. S.A.S. speaks a dozen languages and readily masters Persian, whereas his enemies only speak their own languages. This is ideologically significant, supposedly showing the mastering by the Westerner of the codes of the indigenous, while most of the time, the indigenous does not speak any European languages. These narrative elements all contribute to a depiction of Iranian people based on their most exotic, distant, and mainly negative characteristics. Here, I would like to make a brief excursus on the link between the reading of these novels and the taint of prejudice in the attitude of many French people toward Iranians. Prejudice is an attitude; it is the tendency to judge people negatively or positively because of their belonging to a group. It is interesting to recall how in his chapter ‘La Java des polars’, Pierre Labrousse reassesses the idea that reading S.A.S. is only a relaxing distraction, devoid of consequence on the readers’ view of the Other. Labrousse’s argument is applicable to Iran, seen as a far-away imaginary land: ‘the spy novel is always Manichean, but the Evil moves back geographically’.37 With its heroes saving the West, the spy novel ‘translates the political helplessness, and the helplessness to confront the other otherwise than with a feeling of superiority.’38 Spy novels in Iran thus contribute to the constitution of an interdiscursive corpus on Iran and add to the stereotypical images of the country. In spy novels and orientalist historical novels, we find different examples of attitudes towards the Other, that may be described, along imagologist lines, as phobia and mania:39 the former extremely negative, the latter extremely positive, but in both of them, the Other is essentialised and set up as a symbol; he is definitely different, alius. When we turn to orientalist historical novels, we find that the alius is represented in positive terms, but nonetheless as irreparably alien. Interdiscursivity in the orientalist historical novel Among the books belonging to this trend, two use French characters as main heroes: Marie d’Ispahan40 and Sauver Ispahan.41 Others focus

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on the Persian figures dear to French imagination: Roxanna, Cyrus or Avicenna.42 However, these figures are painted not so much as Persians but as extraordinary characters. For this purpose, the oriental setting appears as the most appropriate one. In fact, since the characters are marvellous and dream-like, they need a fabulous setting. A principal point of the orientalist historical novel is thus to describe the adventures of heroes, especially their travel adventures, and not to depict their country of origin, Persia. However, they are not adventure novels as such, nor can they be categorised as genre fiction, because they have some literary ambition and go beyond the thread of genre fictions. The hero, French or Persian, belongs to the past. No author has chosen to depict a character of his or her own time in the setting of Iran. There is thus a necessary distance between the time of the narration and the time of the writing. This is a further link between the historical and the oriental marvellous. The exoticism of the Orient belongs to the past and the East, in its modern form, can no longer be associated with dreams and fancies. Orientalist historical novels are based on true events and/or characters: none of them create entirely fictitious characters or story lines. As such, the genre is based on the same imagination as scientific orientalism. The historical basis appears as a justification for improbable events happening during the novel, and for all the attendant ‘embroideries’, especially love stories, which are not recorded in the archives, thus allowing the writer to expand on them. Orientalism, even in its novelistic form, needs to be based on serious sources, with a scholarly background justifying its fancies. The issue of reception is especially important here: such novels are wellreceived and well read, precisely because of this scholarly historical touch. The light tone is compensated by the seriousness of the subject and of the sources. Another element that makes the Persian an alius is to be found in the focalisation. Most orientalist historical novels use heterodiegetic narrators, apart from Roxane l’éblouissante.43 Homodiegetic narrators make us feel close to the heroes, whereas the purpose of these novels is to represent them as models, because of their famous historical status, so a distance from their inner feelings becomes necessary to make of them figures of authority. Finally, the convergence of the trend with

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travel narratives reinforces the distancing effect. Travel narratives are an important genre in the orientalist tradition (see all the Journeys to the Orient of the nineteenth century), and in many of these novels we find stories of travel. Persia is set as a far-away country where adventures happen. This element is more obvious in the travel writing genre that I analyse in the last section of this chapter, although the shared element of travel reinforces the link between the two trends. These formal distancing elements are appropriate to genre conventions for both historical and oriental novels, which are constructed on the idea of a far Other, in time and in space, and I want now to show that the content aspects of exoticism work in the same direction. Charles Forsdick makes a clear distinction between two kinds of exoticisms, one exemplified by Victor Segalen’s works, and the other by Pierre Loti’s.44 The latter translates Otherness into known terms; the former, represented by the ‘exote’, truly experiences the ‘Diverse’. One can reiterate the comparison by remembering the opposition between the Other as alter (Segalen) or as alius (Loti). For the French reader, and especially the reader who has chosen an entertaining book, the Orient is necessarily associated with exoticism. Persia is constructed as an exotic Other for the pleasure and the consumption of the reader. Exoticism in ancient and pre-modern Persia is associated with positive values, because the French Self of the time of the narration is not particularly respected: it should be remembered that in many regards Persia was more advanced than France in the periods chosen in these texts, and that the writers have this in mind when setting the context and indulging their narrative mania towards the Persian Other. This mania is linked to the idea that the Orient would represent the pure origin, while the Occident would be backward at the time of the narration and decadent at the time of the writing. This reading of the Orient as ‘more pure’ fixes it in its marvellous past, denying it the possibility to evolve towards the modern. Indeed, where would Westerners thirsty for purity go if the Orient disappeared? This is what happens in the novels, where Persia becomes the symbol of marvellous life and grand characters. Persian figures are great thinkers, symbolising the best intellectual achievements of the country, like Avicenna in Gilbert Sinoué’s Avicenne, or great kings like

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Cyrus in Guy Rachet’s Le soleil de la Perse. However, this mania does not apply to modern Iran; the marvellous only belongs to pre-modern times. The historical novel thus reinforces the rupture between Persia and Iran, which is seen as a country that has gone wrong and wasted its great potential. As is the case with spy novels, these literary effects are not neutral, but rather act to distance the reader from contemporary Iran, which appears to have no link with Persia. In the next section, I shall assess the validity of these arguments by focusing on an example representative of the trend. I have chosen to close-read Marie d’Ispahan because of the collusion of the orientalist discourse with the feminist one.45 With its feminist overtones, it may have a distance from the canon of the orientalist historical novel, and I shall investigate whether feminist discontent challenges orientalist statements. In her article on Freya Stark, Syrine Hout argues, for example, that articulations of gender and nationalist identities make fissures in the edifice of orientalism by destabilising the Self and the Other.46 Is Marie d’Ispahan achieving such a breaking of the monolithic aspect of orientalism through its feminist tone? Exoticism, eroticism and orientalism: is feminist orientalism changing the equation? Ghislaine Schoeller is an art historian who has written three novels and a dictionary of famous women. Her Marie d’Ispahan recounts the extraordinary life of Marie Petit, a washerwoman in the French provinces, who comes to Paris and, thanks to her wit and beauty, becomes the famous owner of a successful gambling house. Marie is eventually accepted at the court of the King Louis XIV of France, and chosen for an embassy mission to represent the court and the princesses of France in Persia, where she will accompany her lover, Jean-Baptiste Fabre, a French diplomat. Various adventures happen to them on the way from Aleppo to Erivan, and it is alone that she arrives in Isfahan after Jean-Baptiste’s death. She is introduced to the Shah and allowed into the harem, where she meets the women and exchanges views on life in France and in Persia. After she has achieved her mission, she leaves Isfahan to go back to France, where she is imprisoned for her

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lack of morals during the journey (not only was she Fabre’s lover, but she seduced several princes and princesses during her long stay in the Orient), to finally be freed by Fabre’s wife. The most important intertextual reference is to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, recognised as the first Western woman to write about the Muslim Orient, as wife of the British ambassador to the Ottoman empire, and who inspired many female travellers.47 She travelled around the same time as Marie Petit, in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Marie d’Ispahan is a historical novel: a historical bibliography and notes on the sources for each character can be found at the end of the book. It should be remembered that an important consequence of the visit of Marie Petit to Persia was the visit of ambassador Reza Beg to France in 1715, as Fabre and Marie’s embassy, the first to be sent by Louis XIV, had caught the interest of the Shah. One character, Louis Robin, a doctor, is said in the notes to have been the father-in-law of Charles Poncet, the character on whom Sauver Ispahan is based. It is interesting to see that the novel is connected with others of its type, confirming the idea that the French imagination is fixed on only a few figures. Marie Petit fascinated several writers, both because of her gambling house (several books centred on this heroine are entitled La Brelandière, based on the card play, three of a kind) and because of the ambassadorial role she played for Louis XIV of France. However, Schoeller’s novel is the only one where her travels to the Orient are depicted at length. Most of the attention had been focused on her gambling house, and those texts which deal with her travels to Persia do not expand on them. In Marie d’Ispahan, Persia has a special place, whereas Turkey, for example, is depicted negatively. The Persia described in Marie d’Ispahan is a clichéd one: ‘She thought about the princesses already lying down on their sofas and she imagined them enjoying their Turkish delights’ (p.345). The cover plays entirely on such orientalist images in order to attract the reader. The collusion of the historical and the oriental is interesting: the Orient was fashionable and widely talked about during Louis XIV’s reign, and the construction of the narration demonstrates this proliferation of discourse on the Orient. In fact, even though the Orient is introduced as a goal in roughly the second third of the novel, it is only

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described ‘in the field’ later, in the second half. Earlier in the novel, the Orient is the subject of much talk and fantasy and Marie decides to follow her lover Fabre there because he has spoken so highly of it, describing it in the most marvellous terms: Marie’s desire for the Orient stems from his. This exemplifies the process of triangular desire analysed by René Girard: desire happens when the object is desired by another.48 This is an important process in orientalism, when the Orient is the object of so much desire. In Fabre’s mouth, Isfahan appears as a city from the One Thousand and One Nights. It is because of his oriental tales, ‘his dreams, his legends brought from Persia, country of voluptuousness and mystery’ (p.188), that Marie leaves with Jean-Baptiste, who assures her that: ‘There, gold and gems pile up, as well as spices. [ . . . ] The sky is more beautiful there and the stars shine more brightly at night than anywhere else’ (p.184). Orientalism happens when the Orient is uttered. Narrative elements of time, space and lexicon participate in the orientalist effect of the novel to produce a narration that appears oriental. It is the historical perspective of the novel that provides the oriental and exotic tone, since Persia is seen as having been at its most glorious in pre-modern times. The story in Marie d’Ispahan could not possibly be set in the nineteenth or twentieth century. The gap in space, through the geographical displacement between France and Persia, is thus reinforced by the gap in time, backwards to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The space is made more exotic by the different countries Marie traverses to reach her destination; as soon as her journey begins, exotic characteristics are read as picturesque embodiments of the different countries encountered. Even though half of the novel is concerned with going to Persia and with the adventures that happen on the way, only one quarter of the novel’s story is actually set there. This reinforces the inaccessibility status of the space, as the narrator insists on the fact that no European woman had ever before reached Persia, the end of the world, and that Marie is the only one to have accomplished such a challenge. In the orientalist tradition, Persia is more talked about than seen and experienced. In terms of lexicon, Persian words are used in both a historical and an orientalist perspective. Following the rules of the historical genre,

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most Persian words are in italics and followed by footnotes, such as, ‘meimandar bachi’ (the head of the Mehmandars, p.340) or ‘Esfahane, nesf-e djahane’ (Isfahan, half the world, p.334). This breaks the rhythm of the narration and serves to remind readers that they are dealing with a serious historical novel. Interestingly, the nouns describing some characteristic Persian figures are not italicized; this inclusion of foreign words within the flow of the narration is an exoticising and orientalising device; thus one finds ‘calender’ (wandering dervish, p.338), or ‘attamadoulet’ (minister, p.342), as if these words were understandable for a general French reader. As the characters make their way to Persia, a few untranslated Islamic expressions (‘Il hamdou lillah’, Praise to God, ‘Masch’Allah’, God willed it) are also used, their functions being precisely to sound ‘Islamic’. In the same lexical perspective, it is interesting to note that Persian cultural elements are perfectly integrated into the narration. The subtleties of ta’arof (politeness codes) are well rendered; also, the letters of the French court to the Shah’s court are plausible if we compare them to existing letters, with several sentences devoted to praise of the Shah. This participates in the lexical reality effect. These elements construct a specific mania towards Persia and the Persians. The discourse of Marie d’Ispahan shows Persia as grander than France. However, it may also be argued that ‘orientalism looks at a supposed inferior culture and views it in stereotypical terms, even if these terms may result in the Orient and Orientals appearing to be positive, at least superficially.’ 49 Marie describes Persian manners favourably, and incessantly compares them to their French counterparts. Her reaction on entering the harem, where she is well received and soon accepted as a friend, is entirely positive, and she finds her acquaintance with the Persian ladies more satisfying than her relationship with the French princesses at the court of Louis XIV of France (p.344). On daily issues, Marie insists that she finds the custom of taking baths (considered unadvisable in France at the time) very healthy; she also thinks that Persian clothes are better suited to a woman’s body, and that the corset, which caused constant fainting spells in French ladies, should be replaced by veils. In general, the comparisons she makes favour Persia over France,

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especially where luxury and splendour are concerned. In this description of Isfahan, she concludes on the equal splendour of Isfahan and Versailles: ‘Poor Louis the Great, the palaces of the Sophi compete in magnificence with his’ (p.336). This magnificence and the kindness of the princesses in the harem are testimonies that orientalism does not necessarily equate with negative representation. On the contrary, the Other is shown as grander than the Self, but I consider that this contributes to the effect of alienating the Persian. It is interesting that the text contains no detailed description of any Persian characters. The description of the Persian princesses is a clichéd one, inspired by looking at miniatures. Marie’s gaze never dwells on a specific person, nor does she describe her relationship or conversation with any individual. The Persian woman to which the female character has access is a fantasy of the imagination. This is the point of contact between the orientalist historical novel and genre fiction: the reading pleasure comes from the interdiscursive reference to traditional orientalism and to the continuity within the trend. The writer indeed deliberately insists on the construction of her work as representative of the genre, for example defining the narrative as ‘a veritable oriental tale’ (p.340). Schoeller plays on her own writing of a novel by stating that the life of a given character is worthy of being told in a novel, and by insisting on the fact that Marie is a real ‘novel heroine’. The continuity of the tradition in this novel, with no portrait of Persian individuals and no dwelling on any specific scenes and situations, makes for easy reading: to some extent, one already knows what one will read. The presence of an innovative feminist discourse does not in any way disrupt this pleasure, and probably even accentuates it for the readers, who may reasonably be expected to be mostly female. Sexualising the Orient and dominating it sexually is a characteristic of orientalism, as numerous critics have shown, including Said in Orientalism. The sexual domination of the Orient by the West in orientalist texts can be understood as an analogy for other power relations, as argued by Behdad: ‘I would like to suggest the possibility of a parallel development and a circulatory relation between the harem as a fundamental part of the aesthetic representation of oriental sexuality and the social practices of expansionism and the discourses that

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represented it.’50 In Marie d’Ispahan, as in earlier orientalism, the Orient is represented as a sensual place, where women are extremely feminine; however, that does not stop the narrator from telling stories about homosexual loves within the harem. Sex remains a characteristic of the Orient: for example, upon arrival in Erivan, the French ambassador Jean-Baptiste Fabre is offered a few virgins as a present. However, a new feature appears in this novel. In early orientalism towards Persia, Persian men were often feminised, as their space was seen as a space of conquest for French desires. In the contemporary version, women are still lascivious and sensuous, but men are described as virile, precisely because of the extraordinary status described above, that makes them models of heroes. This characterization of oriental men thus deconstructs the topos of the Occident overcoming a feminised Orient. This is quite an innovation in the Persian case: while travel writing in previous centuries did depict some Middle-Easterners, especially the Arab nomad and the rebellious Afghan, as particularly manly, Persian men were not really seen as nomads and, unlike the Afghans, never had a reputation as warriors.51 Another important aspect in this perspective is that, although women were not the main object of interest in earlier orientalism towards Persia, several contemporary historical novels purposely use women as heroines while the narrator offers a discourse on this use. There is thus a collusion between sexual discourse and feminist discourse. Orientalism converges with feminism in several instances, when women of/in the Orient are shown as amazing characters, on a par with their male counterparts. A tendency in this orientalist historical novel that was rarely found in traditional orientalism is to shed light on important historical female figures, sometimes forgotten by the orientalist tradition. Roxana, Alexander’s Bactrian wife, is a case in point. If the tradition of the orientalist historical novel is homogeneous, texts necessarily stray away at certain moments, because the purpose of novels is not exclusively to describe the Orient, which is, as I have shown, a pretext for other adventures. Other discourses necessarily interfere. In addition to the feminist discourse, the orientalist historical novel often portrays love stories. Sometimes, orientalism and

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romanticism converge in the description of oriental women. Lisa Lowe demonstrates how orientalism often merges with other discourses, especially with romanticism, where the woman and the oriental are construed as inaccessible and different, and thus create similar situations of desire.52 Marie d’Ispahan is a case in point: the novel insists on how great the heroine’s achievements are, despite the fact that she is a woman, and on her position as a woman in France, in Persia, and in the course of her journey. This is all the more interesting since travel adventures are usually reserved to men. The appearance of the feminist discourse in these novels serves as a striking reminder of how women have been omitted from the interdiscursivity of the genre, regardless the fact that they did travel as wives and sisters or alone. However, the tendency is too quantitatively insignificant to lead to a deconstruction of the orientalist discourse, and least of all, to a rewriting or recreating of the genre. Also, in this novel the alienation of the Iranian Other sits alongside the emancipation of the French woman, which possibly amounts to a reinforcement of orientalism in its powerrelation, the woman being this time the beneficiary of the struggle. The merging of feminist and orientalist discourses thus does not alter the balance between power, representation and discourse. I would like to quote Behdad again on this issue, who argues that deviations from the official orientalist discourse do not erase orientalism from the text: ‘In a dominant discursive practice such as Orientalism there is no radical rupture or pure ideological resistance, indeed, writing about the Orient unavoidably implies entering the strategic field of its power relations.’53 He further argues that the integration of other discourses help ‘to transform Orientalism’s strategies of domination, for they expose the system’s shortcomings’.54 Orientalism remains a productive force in post-colonial power relations because it is able to incorporate differing discourses from different epistemological domains, including feminism.55 Another trend by French writers is based on a similar relation to the Iranian alius: travel writing on Iran. I shall analyse it in the next section, but wish first to look at those non-literary productions on which travel writings are based: travel guides. These appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century, following the fashion of travelogues.56

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The respective discourses of travel guides and contemporary travel writing are not exclusive, but overlapping, and I shall define the space where they overlap.

Travel writing on Iran Converging images of Iran in travel guides and travel writing Travel guides on Iran written in French are scarce, although the traveller has the option of using the more numerous guides in English, like Lonely Planet or the Bradt guide. In the last three decades, several guides in French were published: Petit Futé Iran, reprinted in 2002, 2005 and 2010; the Olizane guide, a Swiss equivalent of the Bradt guide, focusing on the cultural aspect and the historical explanation of sites more than on travel practicalities, with a 6th edition in 2006; the Guide culturel de l’Iran by Patrick Ringgenberg, published in 2006; and the Guide bleu évasion Iran, printed in 2001 and 2006. The Islamic Revolution and the Iran–Iraq war stopped the writing and publishing of guides on Iran in the 1980s, hence the scarcity of such tourist guides until the 2000s, when the country became more open to tourism. The tourist guide is a heterogeneous genre. It belongs to different epistemological domains: history, ethnography, architecture, economics and literature. Like most others, tourist guides on Iran contain sections on all these domains, supposedly necessary to the understanding of a country.57 These sections are generally placed at the beginning of the books, because discovery of cultural norms appears essential before discovery of actual sites. There is also practical information about how best to visit the country (with much insistence on national customs), as well as a glossary of daily-life terms and a bibliography. The main part of the guide is devoted to things to do and see in each region and city, accommodation, information on transport and restaurants, maps and pictures, and except for the more ‘cultural’ guide Olizane, advice on what to buy. These features help us to understand that tourist guides place themselves as exhaustive modes of representing Others, in their completeness. This abundance of information makes it clear that the journey can be the simple re-enactment of the reading:

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travellers admire what is meant to be admired, buy what is meant to be worthwhile, look at the sites reproduced on the pictures with their own eyes, and may never stray away from the printed text. In addition, their cameras burden them and keep them away from being present.58 The discourse of the tourist guide is to present the Other as an object of desire, mapping everything for tourists and defining their desire.59 One final element to note is the absence of a speaker in the guide. A note at the back always requests tourists returning from Iran to help complement the information, thus imparting a sense of truthfulness. The product appears as the most comprehensive effort to provide all the information available on Iran. On the other hand, the tourist guide is supposed to consist only of factual information, and is thus spared the effort to state its own position and voice. The tourist-reader of the guide is also potentially its writer, and the speaker is dispersed. Tourism studies have produced interesting research on tourist guides, which by and large are based on a similar format whatever the country described, even if there exist different positions on the market, eco-friendly, ecotourism and so on.60 What I want to stress is that the tourist guide plays the same function of interdiscursive burden to the writer-traveller as genre fiction on Iran plays for the orientalist historical novel. The reference is to a non-literary and practical text, which has a paradoxical function: it is supposed to be based on a humanistic approach to the other country, but insists on individual self-fulfilment. I argue that after the age of colonial empires, some travellers find it difficult to think of their journey as having an effect on the Other. This would bring guilt. Therefore, individual tourists, especially the ones who travel to the Islamic Republic of Iran, are the only beneficiary of their journeys and individually fulfil their own aim. In this perspective, I argue that it is possible to apply some of Barthes’s analysis of the Guide Bleu to tourist guides on Iran, especially to the more cultural ones; that is, all the guides mentioned above apart from Petit Futé and its alter-globalist advice.61 The Guide Bleu is what is called a cultural guide. It has the peculiarity of insisting on the descriptions of landscapes and monuments, which, according to Barthes, is a process that masks a country more than it shows it. Indeed, human life disappears from the guide: ‘the human

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life of a country disappears to the exclusive benefit of its monuments. For the Guide Bleu, men exist only as ‘“types”. [ . . . ] We find again here this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man.’62 It is interesting to note that the tourist guide fixes the Other in its past: the Other is represented only by monuments and heritage, never in the present familiar and common characteristics, in keeping with the orientalist tradition. In travel guides on Iran, there are nuances to this general point: Petit futé, for example, tends to describe people and customs as much as monuments and insists on a humanistic approach to the country. It gives advice on how to do a humanitarian project in Iran, how to find a job there, and so on. In other guides, there is a paradox in the opposition between the humanistic premise (the interest in other cultures, the will to break from one’s habits and modes of thought) and the assumption that the traveller will be solitarily rewarded. Effort appears as a solitary process. Moreover, the guide assumes that the traveller will never be in contact with Iranian natives for long, and thus never delves into the humanistic encounter; the tourist is not supposed to stay. I shall demonstrate in the next section that these elements are additional interdiscursive referents for a form close to the tourist guide: travel writing.63 Interdiscursivity in the accounts of travels to Iran: open physical circuit versus closed discursive circuit Literary scholars often disregard travel writing because of the generic doubt it carries. However, I contend that a proper reflection on the genre helps to dissolve this doubt, which is often linked to journalism. As Guillaume Thouroude says convincingly: ‘travel narratives conform to Jolles’s idea of the “derived form”: that is, just as the Epic is the “derived form” of the Geste, so the travel narrative could be said to “derive” from Memorabilia’.64 Thouroude demonstrates that travel writing has not evolved as a subgenre of fiction, but derives directly from an elementary narrative structure and thus has a generic status independent of fiction. Accordingly, I define travel writing as the account of a journey experienced by the narrator, who is necessarily also the author. The fact of the narrator having seen what he writes

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appears as a guarantee of authenticity.65 The genre thus rests both on a referential pact and on an autobiographical pact.66 The Orient is defined by its being desired by Others, what René Girard has called ‘mimetic desire’.67 Interestingly, travellers to contemporary Iran desire the country not so much because of their readings of early travels to Persia, as because of the desire of modern travellers who preceded them in what is conceived as a dangerous country; their reference is a modern one. It is important to remember that there is a conflict at the basis of the genre that exists in the particular form of travel to Iran: travel writing describes the Other, as well as it refers to other narratives. It is based on a double function: to represent novelty under the traits of the unknown Other, and to continue a tradition. It is because the descriptive aspects of travel writing are referential not only to the world but also to other texts that the intricacies of the literary cannot be separated from the representations of the world – in short, that interdiscourse cannot be separated from intertext. These texts are concerned with rewriting (there is no such thing as the exact transcription of the lived experience), and with interdiscursivity (no travel writer is the first to narrate the country in question): if there is more history to be observed in the making of these texts, there is also, as an inevitable corollary perhaps, more textuality. Indeed, we should not forget that, despite the unique element of each journey, the telling of it reaches us only by means of a range of available discourses. News reporting, anthropology, sociology, ecological science, the writings of previous travellers – these all contribute to the making of that apparently singular voice that acts as our interpreter and our guide.68 Moreover, the journey is often textualised from the start. For example, Bernard Ollivier’s text, which I shall be close-reading in this chapter, was devised before the journey, and Ollivier approached publishing houses before his departure. Travel writing on Iran differs from earlier travel writing about Persia. Because Iran had been on the route to Afghanistan, India

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and Kathmandu in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of travelling to Iran changed after the Islamic Revolution, and consequently so did the content of travel writing. In this section, I study travel writing published after the Islamic Revolution, generally dating from the 2000s, as the country was rarely visited between the Revolution and the war with Iraq, and took some time to re-open to tourism (many of its neighbouring countries, especially Iraq and Afghanistan, are still very much closed to tourism, which does not facilitate travels in the region). This was also a period during which no tourist guides were published. In terms of content, little travel writing is devoted to Iran alone: the country is often not the sole purpose of travel, but is placed in the context of a broader Central Asia or Middle East. Numerous accounts of travel to Iran are devoted to the whole of the Silk Road and its mythical route. Most travellers, however, do not take the Iranian route, making the availability of travel writing for the purposes of this study somewhat scarce, compared to the proliferation of writings on other paths of the Silk Road. The Iranian route is mostly avoided because Iran appears to be a relatively inaccessible country for French travellers: visas are difficult to obtain; women have to take dress code restrictions into account; and most importantly, there is prejudice against a country depicted as fanatical and dangerous in the French doxa. All these texts on Iran purport to lift the veil, by offering to a general French readership an image of the country which is more complex than the one encountered in the French doxa, thanks to both the direct encounter and the aspect of self-discovery. The two aspects are linked and, because self-discovery comes from the encounter with the Other, the other country and sometimes the individual Other have special status as initiators. However, some negative images carried by the media are difficult to bypass: the veiling of women, and religion in general are especially sensitive subjects. Apart from the religious aspect, difficult to apprehend for French persons used to secularism, representations of Iran in travel writing are often positive. Some texts even show a tendency to be ‘Iranzadeh’, as a counterpart to Gharbzadeh.69 Iranzadeh means ‘Iran-struck’, that is, admiring all things Iranian.

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The issue of narrator is essential when considering this genre: the narrator assumes the role of being the translator of one culture into another. Said rightly remarks that: ‘To be a European in the Orient always implies being a consciousness set apart from and unequal with its surroundings.’70 The writer-traveller is supposed to describe what he or she has seen in terms understandable by a specific audience; yet the narrative of the voyage cannot be a direct transcription of the reality seen: it is both a rewriting of the precursors’ text and a re-enactment of the journey. A travel writing text is not a personal diary: it is directed at a reader who has not been to Iran. The narrator is the only omnipresent voice, and travel writing is a form of autobiography. The use of the third person marks the Iranian as an Other outside the dialogue. He is not spoken to; he is only spoken about. Summaries of French travel writing on Iran can be found at the end of this book. I shall only mention here that I distinguish between three categories of travel writing: journals, initiatory accounts, and guides. Guides make up for the paucity of tourist guides about the country. Journals narrate the details of the journey and of many encounters, sometimes in the form of logbooks. The initiatory aspect is often an important aspect of journals, and in some, it takes the lead over the representation of the Other: the description of the country and of its people is then bypassed in order to narrate the self-discovery. I have found very little travel writing by women (only one in Iran, and another one by a woman accompanied by her husband on her way to Mongolia). Critics working on travel writing note that women have been erased from the genre, their writings relegated to the non-literary sphere.71 I do not think I have overlooked any woman narrating her travels to the Islamic Republic of Iran: the trend certainly appears very masculine. Finally, let me conclude by mentioning the fact that, with the exception of François Nicoullaud72 (whose journal is not an instance of travel writing but an essay, and therefore not listed in this book), diplomats, who for a long time were the primary travellers to Iran, no longer seem to publish general writings on their experience. Adventurers have appropriated the genre. If the link between writing and politics is thus less apparent at first, this does not mean that orientalism in its political dimension has disappeared. I will see what forms this link has taken in the close-reading.

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Iran as a pretext for the French traveller to discover himself: Bernard Ollivier’s Longue marche Bernard Ollivier’s Longue marche. Vers Samarcande is a journal and an initiatory account, which has been an important library success.73 Ollivier walked from Istanbul to China through Iran, and his travel writing is representative of the desire to describe mysterious Iran for people who do not know much about it. As with most French travel writing on Iran, it is also the account of a journey of self-discovery, aimed at answering the question: why am I walking? Indeed, the selfdiscovery and physical challenge aspects are revealed as the centre of the writing as one reads along. Longue marche is a three-volume narrative: the first one has the subtitle Traverser l’Anatolie, the second one, in which Iran has the leading part, Vers Samarcande, and the last one is called Le vent des steppes. Ollivier is a Norman journalist who, having retired, decided to walk from Istanbul to Xi’an, four months a year for three years, writing an account of his journey and donating the royalties for the published book to a charity working to help disadvantaged young people by encouraging them to walk. Ollivier’s narrative rarely describes Iranians: the narrator is mostly concerned with his own discovery, and his encounters with the Other are either superficial or superficially described. He describes them as alius. In the French doxa, Iran has the characteristic of being seen as a fanatical country, but also as the repository of an ancient and brilliant culture. However, the fanatical aspect is often underlined first. Ollivier’s encounter with Iran is always assessed against what was expected of the country along this paradoxical image. Concerning Iran as a place of refined culture, one finds frequent references to the ‘eternal Orient’, its poetry and its artistic achievements. But these are only general qualifications, not images expanded upon. The more developed, non-mythical images of Iran as positive have to be read in relation to the preconceived image formed by the writer. Because Iran has been apprehended in negative terms before the departure, the effect of discovering it as a hospitable country is accentuated. For example, Ollivier states that he was truly astonished by the kindness of Iranians, compared to ‘these hideous fanatics I was so often forewarned of in Paris’

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(p.25). He emphasises how easily he made friends and the sacred aspect of the foreigner as a guest: ‘Is it possible to be more welcoming than an Iranian?’ (p.101) Moreover, Iranians are described as never boasting about this hospitality: ‘I am always dumbfounded by the discretion of oriental generosity. Can you imagine an Occidental making you a gift without waiting for thanks, at least?’ (p.43) In mundane terms, the country is described as clean (compared to Turkey and Central Asia) and as having good infrastructures. At the end of his journey through the country, Ollivier exclaims: ‘But goodness knows why, I love Iran through thick and thin, and first of all I love Iranians. They excel in the art of lying, of missing the point, but their hand is always held out to the traveller when he needs it, and nobody knows like them how to enjoy the simple pleasure of rubbing shoulders with the passing traveller’ (p.145). His concluding remark on leaving Iran is positive: ‘This long crossing of the country made me discover, behind the brutality of powers, a welcoming people, marvellously open and who, despite the chaos of the Islamic Revolution, have retained their ancestral qualities. I could measure the unfairness done by the Occidental media to these cultured and refined Persians, who fade into the background, behind obscurantist, old-fashioned and violent mullahs. Obviously, this is due to the tyrants and the monsters who monopolise the spirit of the country and are the focus of information about it’ (p.222). This statement insists on a recurrent distinction between the people and their regimes, especially for countries with a bad reputation. Many travellers reproduce this differentiating element. Ollivier describes at length what is often called the Iranian paradox, the schizophrenia inhabiting the Iranian people. He ponders on the paradox between the violent and the artistic characters of Iranians: ‘It seems that in this country where one cannot do without the arts and the poets – which so fascinated Occidental writers (I am thinking of Gobineau, Jane Dieulafoy, Graham Greene, Peter Fleming and I could list so many others) – things can only change through bloodbaths. [ . . . ] All the ambiguity and the duplicity of this people are there. They spend most of their time smelling and comparing the scent of roses, and then they kill half of their family at sunrise’ (p.137). On some issues, the negative side of the paradox becomes dominant,

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and Ollivier condemns Iran, especially where religion is concerned. I would suggest, along Lisa Lowe’s lines, that the representation of Iran under its Islamic form is directed at the general French readership as a warning against the dangers of Islamism in France.74 The negative images presented by Ollivier enter the topos of the ‘wonders’ in travel writing,75 thus rendering them entirely alien. This can be seen in the Iranian mourning traditions: ‘In this country regularly shaken by death wishes, sadness and asceticism are cast as virtues’ (p.174). Some traditions, especially the Ashura, are similarly described: ‘What strikes me here is the fanatical furore about assassins dead thirteen centuries ago’ (p.60). In these descriptions, the interdiscursive topos of the barbarous is reactualised in the contemporary topos of the Muslim as fanatic. My purpose is not to say that there is more to see in the Ashura than the ‘fanatical’ aspect, but that these statements come both from a literary interdiscourse of the Other as a negative (the reverse of the Self) and from an Islamophobic discourse. At these points, the traveller is no longer able to judge for himself; nor does he try to look at things through the different angle he could gain thanks to his being on the spot, but merely reproduces discourses directed at an internal French reader. Ollivier is conscious of his status as a foreigner, and of what he has to present to the Iranians he meets. The images of Iran are thus intimately linked to the image he offers of himself, both as an individual and as a representative of France. It is indeed with the discovery of himself that his travel writing is concerned, more than with the depiction of Iran. By assessing the Other, Ollivier finds self-definitions. Ollivier is conscious of being seen as a ‘roumi’ first, and as a wanderer second: ‘I have to be what I seem to be here for others: a poor dervish’ (p.69). Because he is conscious that he will inevitably be categorized by people, he chooses to play on the image of the dervish, a rather positive one for Iranians. Presenting himself as a walker would not have been understood, he argues, while the dervish has some resonance in Iran. He takes an ironic, humorous approach to the image he projects to Iranians: walking in the desert, for instance, he wears a kaffiyeh, and represents himself as Tintin in the Land of Black Gold (p.177). On another occasion, he compares himself to the astonished

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Persian in Paris in The Persian Letters: ‘For the second time since I met him, I must have looked like the Persian in Paris, since he bursts out laughing’ (p.60), another example of the interdiscursive burden of Montesquieu. In his encounters, Ollivier often finds himself questioned as a religious being. For example, he mentions several instances of announcing that he is a Catholic, and of being asked by Iranians what he thinks of Roger Garaudy.76 His religious identity is reinforced against its Muslim counterpart, and he finds himself further defined by it than he had expected. The self-image of the character Ollivier also merges with the one of France, since by repeatedly saying ‘I am French’, he appears as a representative of the country. His self-discovery is thus also enriched by the discovery of the image that France has abroad. He generally quotes sympathetic mentions of France, alongside a sense of betrayal enduring from the Iran–Iraq war. For example, a young man he meets in Sabzevar tells him: ‘We like you very much, you French, since you have welcomed Khomeini, but those were your planes which bombarded us during the war’ (p.193). In Nishapur, an innkeeper tells him that Iran and France are friends, and that he will give him a big room, which he would not have done for an American. Another important French figure for Iranians, on a par with Roger Garaudy, is Zinedine Zidane, at the time of Ollivier’s travel. Because the footballer is a Muslim, Iranians feel proud of him and often mention him as a Muslim brother. France is understood as being a friend to Muslims, and Ollivier repeatedly reminds to his Iranian guests that it has four million inhabitants of Muslim origin (it actually has more than five million). The title, Longue marche, reminds the reader that the purpose of the book is the walk, and that the walk is a means in itself. This focus is also a reminder of the presence of the traveller-writer, who is the real hero of the text. I have insisted on the initiatory aspect of the book, as Ollivier walks not only to discover countries but also to try to find the answer to the simple question: why am I walking? It is necessary to put this personal question into the broader context of the travel writing genre. The reflection on the Self is inscribed in this discovery, as travel writing is a form of autobiographical quest. It is interesting that

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Ollivier always appears on his own, as a solitary hero, confirming the point previously noted on the exemplary status of the traveller. When Ollivier equates his inner development with his physical journey, there is a false consciousness on the part of the writer, as the writing happens after the travel has taken place. The travel writing cannot be a personal diary, as a rewriting of the experience takes place, and is intended for an audience.77 The only connection Ollivier claims to recognise is towards previous European travellers in the Orient, through literary references. He inscribes his text into a broader literary context with references to the great travellers Gobineau, Jane Dieulafoy, Graham Greene and Peter Fleming, whom he cites because of their fascination with Persian arts (p.137). Just like them, Ollivier dwells on the poetical mind of the Iranians and on the attractions of Persian poetry, although he does not mention specific Iranian poets nor quote any poems. Rather, the reference to poetry is a cliché of the traveller to Iran; it is a superficial and incidental inscription into a literary tradition. Indeed, more than by this tradition, Ollivier was inspired to make his walk and write about it by his contemporary predecessor on the Silk Road, Philippe Valéry.78 Just three years after Valéry, Ollivier departs to repeat the journey and write about it. An important part of his text is the reflection on the physical exploit and on the philosophy of travelling on foot, tinged with nostalgia for a time without cars and highways. The text is thus a statement on a set of values and a dream of a world in which the pace of walking would be the norm, and Iran is discovered as having lost its innocence through the advent of the car and industrialisation. No longer a paradise, Iran is a medium through which the traveller can access understanding of a mindset and the framing of certain values, but they have to be abandoned in the process. As the author leaves Iran, he leaves Iranians behind, without having gained any intimate knowledge or understanding of how they could be more than a medium. I have shown in this chapter the influence of the orientalist discourse on French contemporary writers narrating Iran and Iranians. Through two examples, the orientalist historical novel and the travel writing on Iran, I have demonstrated that the images of the Iranian Other do not

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depart from the clichés of orientalist interdiscourse. I have shown how the tourist guide plays the same function of interdiscursive burden to the writer-traveller as genre fiction plays for the orientalist historical novel. The Iranian in this chapter is always a far-away Other. He is never described at length or as a character close to the French reader, and is thus rendered alius. In a similar vein, Iran is always described as an abstract setting, and never benefits from extended consideration. The trend to be studied in the next chapter will show a similar mechanism, leading to the re-enactment of the orientalist discourse, this time by writers of Iranian origin in France.

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CHAPTER 2 CONTESTING IR AN: IR ANIAN TEXTS WR ITTEN IN FR ENCH

Iran in the French media Before any analysis of texts, it is essential to study the image of Iran presented by the French media since the readership of these novels is the same as the media audience: a general French public, and one which the writers feel requires information.1 I have chosen to focus on the image of Iran presented in Le Monde, one of the most important French newspapers. It is widely read abroad and can be considered to be the only international newspaper in the French language; it is regarded as a sort of mouthpiece of intellectual opinion-makers in France. Edward Said argues that Le Monde is ‘the’ French newspaper. It represents the French viewpoint, which, according to him, is always alternative: not that of a superpower, and always somewhat a bit different from other European countries: ‘It expresses a politics that has been characterized variously as missionary, pastoral, paternalistic, “socialism with a soul”.’2 I shall focus mainly on the portrayal of the Islamic Revolution, which appears as the essential turning point in the French representation of Iran. As I discussed in the introduction, this shift is the main reason for my decision to base my research on the period beginning in 1979: after that date, the image of Iran becomes crystallised, with nuancing

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only occurring for short periods, such as during the first years of the Khatami presidency. The image of the 1979 Revolution in Le Monde At the outset of the events in 1978, most leftist intellectuals and journalists became excited about both the mass movement and the antiAmerican and anti-imperialist aspects of the uprising in Iran. Foucault is an emblematic example of this position, which I shall look at in details later.3 Interestingly, the rightist press was probably more in tune with the French doxa as regards these events. The French people seemed to find it difficult to relate to an event whose religious connotations, repulsive to the secular French nation, grew stronger over time. The fact that the movement carried concepts from the 1789 French Revolution was overlooked, and the complexities of the events ignored, to insist on the Islamic component. The main reporter for Le Monde, Paul Balta, was one of the very few to make the link to the French Revolution in his book and newspaper articles.4 The image of the events was all the more negative in that the Shah’s regime was positively regarded for two reasons: the Shah insisted on the Aryanness of his country, an appealing idea for the French; and the regime he represented was a westernised one that wanted to enter the circle of superpowers by ‘mimicking’ the West, along the lines of Bhabha’s argument on post-colonial mimicry.5 The Shah had been chosen as ‘Man of the Year’ in 1974 by the magazine Le Point. The fact that Empress Farah was French-educated and that she had met the Shah in Paris reinforced the pride of French people, who saw themselves acting as a role model. The glamorous portrayal of the royal couple in magazines can be understood on this basis. Paris-Match, the magazine featuring celebrities’ lives, is a good example of the positive and somewhat glittering view of the Shah’s regime in the 1970s, especially its issues on the Persepolis celebrations for the 2,500 years of the Iranian monarchy in 1971, despite recent vocal criticism of his dictatorial methods. Between 1975 and 1978, TV news relating to Iran focused only twice on Iranian opposition to the Shah.6 In the still-prevalent Cold War climate, an American Shah was thought preferable, from the

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French point of view, to a Russian Shah. In contrast, the Islamic regime appeared almost impossible for a French audience to connect with. Under the new regime, Iran on the one hand appeared to reject its Aryan heritage to insist on its Islamic and, to a certain extent Semitic, heritage, and on the other hand rejected the West and westernisation. For a French audience, Iran had suddenly become an incomprehensible Other: Suddenly, for many in the ‘West’ and in Iran itself, the country was more Semitic than Aryan, more Iran than Persia, more oriental than Indo-European, more black than white, more Third World than emerging economy, more Eastern than Western.7 On the one side, there is the Iran whose ‘cultural essence’ is considered ‘Persian’. This is the Iran favoured in the ‘West’ [ . . . ] On the other side, there is the Iran whose Islamic and revolutionary identities are in conflict with those representations. This is ‘Hussein’s Iran’, the land of sacrifice in the name of Islam etc [ . . . ]. These emotive ideas, at least, are central to the way the Islamic Republic wishes to portray itself.8 From the beginning of the Iranian events, Le Monde played a leading role in the positive representation of the Revolution, especially with articles by Paul Balta, who was already covering Ayatollah Khomeini’s speeches in Neauphle-le-Château. Questioned by the main TV channel, TF1, in November 1978, the mayor of Neauphlele-Château, declared: ‘The presence of the Ayatollah honours France.’9 The journalist Amir Taheri calculated in his book The Spirit of Allah that over his four-month stay in France, Khomeini delivered 132 interviews (print, radio and television).10 However, Balta’s position changed at the end of 1979, when the excitement of the Revolution subsided and the crackdown began. Balta, who moved in revolutionary and clerical circles and had denounced the Shah’s regime, was on the French plane that brought Khomeini back from his fifteen-year exile, and asked the Ayatollah what he felt on returning to his homeland, to which Khomeini famously replied: ‘Nothing’. In the years 1978–79, a proliferation of books on

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the Islamic Revolution written by leftist journalists reinforced the discourse of Le Monde: Gilles Anquetil, for example, from Le Nouvel Observateur, wrote a sympathetic account of the post-revolutionary climate.11 Pierre Blanchet and his wife Claire Brière, both journalists for Libération, shared the same enthusiasm. Their Iran, la révolution au nom de Dieu, includes a long interview with Foucault.12 Eric Rouleau, a regular correspondent in Iran and director of the Middle-East section of Le Monde, explains this enthusiasm as follows: ‘Khomeini was as hostile to the Soviet bloc as he was to US hegemony, also a popular position in France, which is why he made a good impression in foreign affairs.’13 He continues, ‘Many journalists, including myself, mistook what I call revolutionary anarchy for a democratic upsurge.’14 Interestingly, it might be because of this positive French bias that Edward Said approves of Rouleau’s reports in his study of the journalistic coverage of the hostage crisis.15 After the American hostage-taking in November 1979, there is evident disappointment at the outcome of the Revolution.16 Le Monde then joins other newspapers in their negative reporting on Iran. The Iran–Iraq war reinforces this change of position: France supports Iraq, and prefers its socialist government over the Islamic regime in Iran. Relations with France deteriorate even more when Abolhassan BaniSadr and Massud Rajavi are granted asylum in 1981, which leads to several bombings carried out by Iranians in Paris and to the hostage crisis in Lebanon.17 The 1980s see Iran portrayed in extremely negative terms in Le Monde, as a fanatical, terrorist country, especially during the year 1989, following the Salman Rushdie controversy and the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, who required the execution of the writer.18 Positive images and themes start to reappear in Le Monde in the 1990s, with the resumption of commercial relations after ‘la guerre des ambassades’ in 1987, and especially at the end of the 1990s with the presidency of Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005. Le Monde then publishes enthusiastic articles about women, civil society, Iranian cinema, and the dialogue of civilisations. With the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from 2005, negative stereotyping returns, although the movement had started earlier with the bloody repression against students in 1999, the nuclear issue and the general feeling that

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Khatami had lost control and would not be able to practice what he advocated. For several decades, the famous drawings of the caricaturist Jean Plantu have represented the evolution of this position. Plantu had a drawing on the front page of Le Monde every day from 1985 to 2001, and afterwards on a less regular basis. He liked to draw portraits of Iranian mullahs and terrorists, who had become all the more dangerous since the nuclear crisis. Below is an example of Plantu’s work, a drawing comparing the mullahs’ regime to the Nazis. I would suggest that Le Monde oscillates between extreme positive and negative representations, which correlate with the ability or failure to understand Iran in French terms. When this understanding seems impossible, Iran is represented as an alius. French coverage of Iran is inclined to understand the Other according to well-known categories, insisting on elements that can be readily identified with. Indeed, such an understanding might be unavoidable: how to understand a religious event when most French tools are secular? There is a ‘general tendency to particularize excessively the Iranian issue: shi’ite and Persian particularism, the Persian language, too great a focus on Khomeini’s personality,

© 2010 Plantu, Le Monde, October 28, 2005 (published with the permission of Jean Plantu).

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an insistence on the exceptional geopolitical situation of Iran between the Gulf and its oil supplies and the Soviet Union [ . . . ]. Making of the Iranian revolution a specific and particular revolution amounts to a refusal to see that it poses questions that are not confined to one country.’19 Foucault is representative of this tendency to particularise Iran especially in its shi’ite aspect, and to reiterate the liberal orientalist belief in the cure by the East of the problem of the West. He has been a vocal interpreter of the spiritual shi’ite aspect of the Revolution and put great effort into drawing a portrait of the Revolution as the first of its kind. He insisted on the religious aspect of the Revolution, and not on its similarity with world revolutions of previous decades. In his capacity as a journalist, Foucault wrote many articles on the events, mainly for the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. The images he uses in these articles draw on a set familiar to a leftist French audience. His main issue is to define the Revolution as a political spirituality, and to present it as a subversive force against the Shah and against Western constraints. However, at about the same time as the Le Monde journalists, at the end of 1979, Foucault changed his perspective on the events. Rouleau comments on this rather ironically: ‘after an initial rash and hasty enthusiasm, all the intellectuals had a sense of trepidation, which was rather ridiculous as well. This about-turn meant that Figaro, L’Humanité and Libération all spoke the same language. From the right to the extreme-left they condemned khomeinism in similar terms.’20 Foucault’s position has been heavily criticised, especially by Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson,21 as well as by Rosemarie Scullion.22 The core of both arguments is that Foucault’s engagement with the Islamic Revolution is more than a political mistake and crystallises the problems inherent in his thought. For Afary and Anderson, the main lacuna has to do with the lack of engagement with gender issues; for Scullion, it has to do with the uncritical continuation of orientalism. She says: Yet in classic Orientalist form, in relating the high drama of Iran’s revolutionary moment, Foucault fails to take into account crucial social and historical circumstances that contributed

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decisively to generating the mass revolt, performing, I would argue, a reading of the event that is more revealing of his own post-humanist political desires and anti-authoritarian reflexes than of the movement’s complexities, contradictions, and, most importantly, of its potential eventualities.23 Scullion continues, focusing on the alienating character of orientalism, be it an overly positive or an overly negative one: Although Foucault’s writing on the subject effectively countered what Said called the ‘aggressive hyperbole’ much of the Western press used in manufacturing what quickly came to be an antiIran public consensus, Foucault’s anti-consensus discourse was no less hyperbolic in its idealism.24 For Scullion as well as Afary and Anderson, Iran became the point where Foucault fell for grand narratives and for the opposition between East and West. Journalistic texts: the books of Delphine Minoui In the aftermath of 9/11, many French journalists, often of Iranian origin, have written journalistic books on Iran. Iran’s counter-culture has become a cliché of their texts, reporting on underground music, Northern Tehran parties, or women and their ‘lipstick jihad’.25 Probably the best-known French journalist working on Iran is Delphine Minoui, a winner of the renowned Albert Londres prize who has been reporting for Le Figaro since 2002. Minoui has edited two popularising books presenting alternative images of Iran and aiming to challenge French misconceptions: Jeunesse d’Iran: les voix du changement is a volume combining interviews, narrations and pictures, giving voice to Iranian youth and counter-culture;26 Les pintades à Téhéran: chroniques de la vie des Iraniennes is both a journalistic text and a guide for French people who want to know more about the country’s daily life and who may possibly plan to travel there.27 This last book is characteristic of the drawing of a glamorous image of Iran and Iranian women. Les

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pintades à . . . is a collection targeting women who plan to travel to cosmopolitan capitals, Paris, New York, and London being the previous topics. Minoui’s discourse must be read in line with the other books forming the collection, and with the perceived interests of a female readership. It presents portraits of women and their adaptation to society, and offers advice on things to do in Tehran for female tourists. Both informative and prescriptive, it aims at revealing Tehran and its women. The emphasis on this ‘unveiling’ is reinforced by the facile use of the chador topos. The implicit argument is that the book will give an image of the ‘real country’, as opposed to the one seen in the media. The cover reads: ‘No, in Tehran women are not all veiled in black from head to toe. Yes, they have the right to vote and can even be elected. No, they are not cloistered at home and 60 per cent of students are female. [ . . . ] Discover a female society veiled but not prudish! Dive under the veils and behind the doors to enter the private world of these ultra-feminine but thoroughly up-to-date women, full of contradictions, stories, anecdotes and bright ideas.’ This discourse is also used in Minoui’s weblog and newspaper articles on Iran and its society.28 It has come to constitute an interdiscourse on Iran, on which writers rely for their own representations, as the section of this chapter, on counter-narratives on Iran, will show. Indeed, many current books on Iran use the unveiling topos both for their covers and for their marketing strategy. The accessible metaphor of the veil promises readers that the mysterious country will be unveiled before their eyes. They feel privileged to be able to access such knowledge, and excited by the perverse process, reminiscent of imperialist strategies of domination through the female body. A look at some titles of journalistic and popularising research confirms that showing the unveiled and complex country is a principal theme: ‘L’Iran sous le voile’ by Jean-Pierre Perrin; ‘Dentelles et tchador’ and ‘Rubans et turbans’ by Armin Arefi. Granted that these titles, front covers and cover pages are not necessarily the authors’ choice, they nonetheless feed into the discourse on Iran as a place to unveil. There is thus an interesting dialectic between media discourse on Iran and books on Iran, each feeding the other. Again, it is important to remember that production of a text is linked to the means of its diffusion, especially with texts

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destined for a general readership: ‘The transmission of the text does not come after its production, the way it materially establishes itself is a full part of its meaning.’29 Thesis novels Now that this background has been established, I want to turn my focus to the thesis novels written in French by authors of Iranian origin. Novels belonging to three trends – new orientalist narratives, counter-narratives on Iran and autobiographies of suffering – are the texts that have had the most impact in France, as I will show in the coming sections. Thesis novels (romans à thèse) are important because Franco-Iranian relations are inscribed in a post-colonial situation, and writers situated between the two cultures find it necessary to elaborate on both countries and to educate the French reader. Also, in all these cases, Iran serves as an example for more general issues: in new orientalist narratives, the oppression of women and the fanatical aspect of Islam; in counter-narratives on Iran, the humanity and generosity of people around the world; in autobiographies of suffering, the consequences of authoritarian regimes on human beings. It should always be borne in mind that the writers considered in this chapter are of Iranian origin. The insider element is something they use as a proof of both their honesty and the accuracy of their account. They play on their double, outsider/insider status. On coming to France, most have acquired scientific knowledge through French degrees, and present themselves as possessing both insider and outsider competences, thus as being in the best position for an analysis of Iran. As such, their Iranian status is far from being simply an additional characteristic: it is part of their discursive and educational argument. I use the term ‘thesis novels’ to qualify these texts from Susan Rubin Suleiman’s argument.30 The expression she uses in French is ‘roman à thèse’, which she defines as ‘a novel written in the realistic mode [ . . . ] which signals itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious doctrine’.31 In the case of these Iranian texts, political and religious doctrines are at stake. For Rubin Suleiman, the thesis novel constitutes

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a genre in itself, which the term ‘littérature engagée’ (militant literature) cannot convey. One of the defining elements of the genre is that of an authoritative voice enunciating the truth. Rubin Suleiman explains: ‘romans à thèse formulate, in an insistent, consistent, and unambiguous manner, the thesis (or theses) they seek to illustrate’.32 The three trends analysed in this chapter belong to this category. Whereas no text can be said to be purely literary and not containing a thesis, the purpose of these trends is precisely to expose an argument. They are clear about their statement and can thus be considered as a unified didactic genre. New orientalist narratives offer a negative stance on Islam and Iran; counter-narratives on Iran are based on an appreciation of Iran’s positive characteristics; autobiographies of suffering argue for the need for a fairer world, respectful of justice and compassionate towards the weak. Their common characteristic is to be focused on one single aspect of Iran, or what Chimamanda Adichie calls a ‘single story’.33 Once again, the purpose of this book is not to say that this single story is true or untrue, but to show that it is incomplete. Focusing on one single story of Iran reduces the wealth of the Iranian narrative.

New orientalist narratives A new use of the orientalist tradition New orientalist narratives are written in French, and are autobiographies or autobiographical novels (also called ‘autofictions’, from the French term). Autobiography can be defined as ‘a self-produced, non-fiction text that tells the story of its writer’s life’.34 Autofiction ‘describes one of the forms taken by autobiographical writing at a time of severely diminished faith in the power of memory and language to access definitive truths about the past or the self’.35 It includes clear fictional elements. In the case of Comment peut-on être français, the presence of a heterodiegetic narrator and the very name of the character, which is different from the author’s, reflect the fictional aspect. These texts are aimed at a French readership that the writer wants to educate concerning the deficiencies of Iran. Their principal theme is the opposition between France and Iran: the dichotomy between the two

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countries symbolises the opposition between the supposedly irreconcilable West and East. My use of the term ‘new orientalists’ comes from Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran,36 a critical reading of the best-seller by Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books.37 Keshavarz characteriazes Nafisi’s book as representative of new orientalist narratives. The ‘new’ in these narratives is not new because it comes after Said’s critique of orientalism. The native voice, whose primary concern is to differentiate between good and evil, is what makes it new, reinforcing one of Said’s definitions of orientalism as ‘a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between the Orient and the Occident’.38 However, because a different narrator, the native, comes to the fore, it seems more appropriate to use ‘new orientalism’ rather than ‘neo-orientalism’, as proposed by Ali Behdad or Fahrad Khosrokhavar.39 Indeed, new orientalism is not only a revival of orientalism; it has different characteristics altogether. It has to be distinguished from the French orientalist narratives examined in the previous chapter, which follow an old tradition of orientalism and carry a fascination for Persia, with some positive orientalist clichés. New orientalist narratives are characterized by three discursive elements: a simplified version of Islam; a representation of the world as a bipolar system; and a preference for France. Their ultimate political aim, which is clearly stated, is to demonstrate that the understanding between Iranian and French people has become impossible after the Islamic Revolution and that there is only one way to interfere with the Iranian regime: to fight against it. These thesis novels clearly take a position in favour of direct intervention in Iran. They are what Gillian Whitlock has called ‘soft weapons’,40 appearing as commodities provided by Muslims to Westerners, inscribed into a long history of wishing to unveil the feminine Orient.41 The narratives of these women of Muslim origin are received in a Western context as representative of a condition, and not as accounts of a singular life. They are thus assumed to be illustrative of the fate of a community. I close-read Chahdortt Djavann’s autobiographical novel as an example. I have chosen this text because it sold well (25,000 copies),42 and because Djavann is generally well-known to the French public, appearing on TV and in

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radio shows. As such, she is, with Marjane Satrapi, one of the Iranian figures known to a general audience. Islam and Iran as alius: Chahdortt Djavann’s Comment peut-on être français? Chahdortt Djavann is a prolific writer, published by renowned publishing houses and thus widely known. She has written four novels dealing with Iran: Je viens d’ailleurs, Comment peut-on être français?, La muette, and Je ne suis pas celle que je suis. Psychanalyse I.43 She has also produced several essays and pamphlets, which have to be read in interaction with her novels: Bas les voiles!, Que pense Allah de l’Europe?, A mon corps défendant, l’Occident, and Ne négociez pas avec le régime iranien. Lettre ouverte aux dirigeants occidentaux.44 Djavann left Iran aged twenty-five, and has lived in France for nearly twenty years, during which time she studied anthropology at the Sorbonne. She is a polemical public figure in the French media, taking part in debates on issues such as secularism or the veil. Deltombe, whom I quoted above on the image of Islam in the French media, analyses Djavann’s books in interaction with journalistic interdiscourse: ‘Despite her radical and islamophobic theses, repeated as so many slogans throughout the media, Chahdortt Djavann receives a triumphal welcome, as if from her mouth came “truths” that journalists dared not say.’45 This exemplifies how her status as an insider gives her the right to say things that would not be judged ‘politically correct’ if uttered by non-Muslim journalists. Comment peut-on être français? is an autobiographical novel, mixing elements of the author’s life with fiction. The heterodiegetic narrator describes the condition of the main character, often also letting her speak for herself thanks to the epistolary form. The text recounts the story of a young Iranian woman, Roxane, who immigrates to Paris and narrates her difficulties in the city and with French language. In order to overcome her problems, she writes letters addressed to Montesquieu. The novel consists of three parts, the first two describing Roxane’s life in Paris, and the last one being an analepsis of her years in Iran, during which she was raped by pasdaran (The Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution, the ideological army of the regime) and had to

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travel to Turkey for an abortion before leaving for France. The novel ends with Roxane falling into depression and attempting suicide.46 In Comment peut-on être français? the character describes Iran in her letters to Montesquieu as ‘the country of fear and shame’ (p.156) and declares that ‘Iran has been entirely transformed into a harem, where women are watched over and men castrated by the law of the mullahs’ (p.221). The Islamic Revolution is explained as the empowerment of the mullahs, whose programme is submission to the law of God for Muslim men and submission to men for women. The causes of the Revolution, especially the failures of the Shah’s regime and the complexity of the fight for power among different factions, are not acknowledged. Keshavarz finds the same discourse in Reading Lolita in Tehran: ‘It reduces the genesis and flow of that Revolution to the actions of a few villains.’47 Simplifications sometimes lead to gross error. For example, Roxane says the Koran is an Arab-interpreted translation of the Bible and the Torah, and uses the deprecating and dated term ‘Mohammedan’ under the pretext of communicating with Montesquieu through an Old French vocabulary. Regarding Islam, Roxane, as the embodiment of the author, shares the orientalist’s postulate that religion is the essence of the Orient and that Iran is defined by Islam only. Because of the suffering imposed on her in the name of religious dogma, Djavann consciously represents Islam and the Islamic Iranian regime as a fanatical and threatening Muslim country.48 This has a direct political consequence: ‘Since the events of 9/11, this vastly popular autobiographical genre has played a pivotal role in securing the judgement that Islam’s mistreatment of women is a symptom of a larger pathology that haunts Islam, namely, its propensity to violence. [ . . . ] In our age of imperial certitude, it seems that the fate of Muslim women and the fate of democracy have become indelibly intertwined.’ 49 There is an important intellectual tradition of criticism towards Islam in Iran itself;50 however, I would argue that Djavann does not inscribe herself into this tradition, but in the French orientalist tradition. Indeed, the references for her arguments are invariably French, never Iranian or Muslim. The representations of Iran and France in Comment peut-on être français? are built on a recurrent dichotomy, showing France as a

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country of progress in terms of social mores and representing Iran’s social laws as backward. Roxane’s letters to Montesquieu are a good example: In France, freedom rules. Did you know for example that homosexuality is legalised in your country? In Iran, this is a crime, both according to the law and to the mentality of the people. Yet, paedophilia is a crime in your country, whereas in Iran, like in lots of Muslim countries, little girls are considered ready for marriage at nine years old. Polygamy is forbidden in your country, as it always has been, whereas it still continues in Iran. Democratic countries and the countries of Islam have such different laws that one would think that a thousand years separate them. (p.220) It is only at the end of the book, when Roxane becomes depressed and attempts to commit suicide, that the narrator acknowledges a few negative points about France, especially the sense of living in solitude and surrounded by selfishness. The tendency to ignore the similarities between France and Iran and to insist on the negative Iranian elements creates a feeling close to what Keshavarz calls an ‘Islamization of wickedness’ and a ‘westernization of goodness’.51 It also draws on the French fear of Muslims, caused partly by Islamic terrorism, and by a view of Islam as an ever-present religion and a challenge for the state and for secularism. Djavann’s didactic message is linked to her language preference: she chose to write in French, which she learnt aged twenty-five, rather than in Persian. Interestingly, this decision is paralleled in Comment peut-on être français? by Roxane’s choice, another link showing the closeness between the author’s biography and her main character’s life. Roxane wants to erase her Iranian identity, even one of the main constituents of it, the Persian language: ‘Persian words were irreconcilable with this new world, because they reminded Roxane of a country where barbaric dogmas were enforced as law. For her, the Persian language translated the felonies that darkened the history of the country’ (p.113). She ends up dividing herself into two distinct and irreconcilable parts:

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the French-speaking half, the ideal, the good one, and the Persianspeaking half, the rejected one. The author goes through the same process in writing in French, which amounts to ridding her identity of the native and becoming the Good. In an interview on Radio France Internationale, Djavann described Comment peut-on être français? as a rebirth.52 Even as she declares in the interview that her work is not exactly an autobiography because she invented some elements, she underlines the intimate experiences shared by the character and the author. This is why I refer to the text as an autobiographical novel: the family background, the struggle with the French language and with the memories of Iran, and possibly other experiences in Iran, are shared by Roxane and Chahdortt Djavann. In the interview, Djavann confessed that she underwent psychological therapy for ten years, in French, and that because of this reinscription of her history into French, she could not have written in another language. I argue that Comment peut-on être français? is precisely the text by which Djavann emancipates herself from her Iranian identity and is reborn as a French Self. At the end of the story, the narrator murders the character’s Iranian self. Djavann thus becomes truly French, not by officially receiving French citizenship (which she did prior to the writing), but by writing this book as an act of self-denial and self-definition, which ends in the death of the Iranian Self while the French new Self survives. The book thus appears as an elaboration on the answer to its title, Comment peut-on être français? – a positive and defining answer. The writing of thesis novels in French answers different needs from those addressed by the writing of Persian novels in French (as examined in the final chapter), for which French is an experimental innovation. Their use of French is linked to the educational will of the authors towards a French reader, and can be understood in postcolonial terms, as expressing the prestige of a language for conveying supposedly universal truths. As such, the adoption of a new language is a biased form of agency. Djavann now expresses herself in a language against which she fought a brutal battle that she believes she eventually won. ‘Winning’ is an option for her, unlike for many of her colleagues

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from the former French colonial empire. Writing in French is an equally loaded question for her as for so-called ‘postcolonial authors’, but the reasons for this complexity center around her personal experiences rather than around an imperial past. [ . . . ] In a strange twist, authors such as Djavann [ . . . ] feel as though they have won a battle over the French language by mastering it, but the act of fighting so hard to attain proficiency also reinforces the myth of its prestige. In presenting their battles with the language as examples of the merits of learning and writing in French, they are at the same time reinforcing the exclusivity, not the openness, of the language.53 Because of their social status in France as newcomers, Iranian writers who wish to have a French readership need to situate themselves within the French literary market, where they are in a marginalised position. Casanova states on the issue of the inevitable hierarchy between languages: In order to achieve literary recognition, dominated writers must therefore yield to the norms decreed to be universal by the very persons who have monopoly on universality. More than this, they need to situate themselves at just the right distance from their judges: if they wish to be noticed, they have to show that they are different from other writers – but not so different that they are thereby rendered invisible. They must be neither too near nor too far.54 That France should be preferred over Iran by those writers who have suffered as a result of Iranian politics is understandable. However, it is problematic that this reading of Iran is the only one imposed on the reader by a narrator who claims to possess the sole truth. I shall turn now to their representation of France, the focal point of their discourse. The representation of France Comment peut-on être français? begins with the association between France and freedom: the country represents the incarnation of the

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concept, especially because of its link with Roxane’s family history and her francophile grandfather’s fight for freedom. France is admired in its totality, as the negative and negation of Iran. The character has trouble reconciling her dream of Paris with the city’s reality. The narrator uses the oriental image of the genie to describe Roxane’s fear of seeing Paris disappearing: ‘She does not dare moving, for fear that Paris disappear, like a genie in its bottle’ (p.11). She plays with orientalist topoi applied to Paris and France: ‘Paris was so exotic . . .’ (p.19). Roxane’s vision of the typical behaviour of Parisians – their newspapers, their haste, the cafés, the metro – is as much a representation of how she imagined Paris as it is the reality of what she sees in her first contact with the city. Parisians are living in the eternal present of their being Parisian, acting as theatre characters. Roxane sees them as she would see the waiter conceptualised by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness, playing at being a waiter: they play at being Parisian. The narrator insists on this aspect of her vision: ‘Paris was her own fantasy’ (p.11). In fact, Roxane had already learnt the city plan by heart before her arrival in Paris. Remembering the images she had dreamed, she says, ‘The lion is still here, in the middle of place Denfert-Rochereau’ (p.12, emphasis added). She imagines things and does not analyse them; she superimposes her already-defined images on a reality kept out of reach by the veil of imagination. In fact, since Paris has embodied for Roxane the unattainable place and the unattainable Other for years, she has difficulty reconciling her present circumstances with those dreams. For example, the expression ‘How can anybody . . . ?’ appears several times, always associated with values linked to France. This leitmotiv symbolises the character’s approach to and facing of the incomprehensible but positive model. It associates France with concepts like democracy and republic to underline the character’s inability to see these positive ideals realised, essentially because of her preconceived ideas. These characteristics are based on an emulative occidentalist discourse, present in Iran under various forms in the twentieth century. This emulation still exists, although it is not directed specifically at France anymore, but at the West in general. It is especially common among Iranians abroad as it also appears as a justification for having left Iran. New orientalist narratives thus combine forms of orientalism and occidentalism, both

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forms having the same deprecating discourse on Iran and opposing it to an enlightened France. The discursive aspect is evident in the use of multiple question and exclamation marks. These marks are visual proofs that the text is engaged in a discursive mode. Considerations of literary genre are particularly important in the construction of these images and themes. New orientalist and emulative occidentalist elements have more vitality when employed in the context of autobiographies. Were they works of fiction, they would have a different impact. The genre needs to be understood as contributing to the authors’ argument. Amossy said in this respect that this is the genre ‘or to be more precise the context of enunciation or of enunciation that conditions the use of clichés’,55 a contention all the more meaningful in the case of new orientalist autofictions. The autobiographical element as a didactic device There has been an important change in Persian literature since the publication in 1990 of Afsaneh Najmabadi’s book on women’s autobiographies, in which the author lamented the scarcity of autobiographies written by Iranian women.56 The genre emerged mainly among Iranian women in the West, in contact with Western literary traditions and fashions, who generally had lived in exile for roughly two decades. Since, as Farzaneh Milani argued, for cultural reasons there is no well-established tradition of women’s autobiographical writing in Iran, this belatedness must be seen as a consequence of the traumatic experience suffered by the writers.57 Although Iranian intellectual and political figures, mostly men, have always published their memoirs, the phenomenon of ‘nobodies’ memoirs’ is relatively new to Iranians, and especially to women.58 The number of autobiographies or autobiographical novels published by Iranian women in the West, mostly in Western languages, is growing and far outnumbers autobiographies published inside Iran. Once in the West, women become more daring and choose this most outspoken form, even if autobiographical works exist in Iran and in Persian.59 I use the term ‘autobiography’, as memoirs are generally considered to be reflections on the larger history in which the writer is inscribed, a factor which

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is not predominant in the texts analysed in this chapter.60 Iranians living abroad made the dual discovery of the era of individualism and of a genre which was itself developing quickly, based on a thirst for truthful life narratives. Just as the epistolary genre can be understood in the social context of the salons,61 the autobiography has to be understood in the context of a society centred on the personal experiences of the subject and their exposure. In the 2000s, the demand for autobiographies is so high that it appears difficult for Iranian women authors to publish anything other than an autobiography, at least as a first book: The fact that these women have gained more commercial success for their memoirs than for their poetic anthologies, novels, or academic articles, points, I would argue, to the implicit reason behind their writing in the memoir genre: the command of the market economy and the commercial inaccessibility of nonmemoir genres to Iranian women. [ . . . ] This only perpetuates several frustrations in Iranian exile culture within the larger Western culture: memoir and film have become the only two creative vehicles through which mainstream Western consumers can view Iran and Iranians outside of the one-dimensional view provided by commercial news outlets.62 Iranian writers abroad can thus inscribe themselves into Western mainstream literature, itself fond of life narratives, especially those coming from Middle-Eastern women, owing to the element of ‘unveiling’ assumed in the reading of their books. Autobiography also appears as a convenient medium to reflect on identity: ‘As a means of mapping out the complexities and contingencies of identity, autobiography has been accorded a privileged status in postcolonial and diasporic contexts.’63 The genre of the autobiography thus becomes directly linked to political issues of belonging. New orientalist authors precisely inscribe their texts into both this political belonging and the commercial interest for Middle-Eastern women, playing on the readers’ desire to vicariously unveil them by turning the pages. In addition, this function of the Middle-Eastern autobiography reiterates the patriarchal prejudices on

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the belonging of women to the private sphere, as the autobiography is the unveiling of this sphere. The number of books by Iranians in France exposing women’s lives is not quantitatively important, but it has to be read in relation to the English and American translations of such texts, as well as in interaction with texts by other Middle-Eastern women, especially Afghan and Arab women, to whom Iranian women are linked in the eyes of a general French readership. The most important intertextual reference is to Not Without My Daughter, which, published in 1987 in the United States, was translated into ten languages and came out in France in 1991. The narrator is not a native but a Western woman who nonetheless started the trend of captive women autobiographies in the Middle East. In the five years following its publication in the United States, eleven million copies were sold, most of them in Europe and three and a half million in France: ‘according to the publisher, it is the biggest bookshop success in twenty years’.64 In Comment peut-on être français?, the use of the autobiographical genre leads to two grey areas. Firstly, autobiographical elements and their insistence on the ‘I’ reinforce the construction of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. The form of the autobiography generally leads to the construction of an exceptional individualised character, standing proudly in front of the undistinguished mass. Secondly, the use of a not entirely autobiographical form also creates a blurring of boundaries. Philippe Lejeune has argued that there is no way to tell the difference between an autobiography and a novel by the textual evidence. It is thanks to elements outside the text that one makes decisions relative to the autobiographical genre, since in any case novelists can and will employ the same elements used in autobiography.65 Djavann’s text is mixed with fiction and the line between fact and fiction is thus blurred. Inexperienced readers will have difficulty distinguishing between historical and fictional elements. Keshavarz has also noticed this element in Reading Lolita in Tehran: ‘It is and it is not a factual account of what happened in the messiest, most painful, and most tumultuous moments of contemporary Iranian history.’66 Djavann’s narrative contains many elements of truth, or carefully selected truths, which combine to make it believable. A reader who is not conversant with

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Iranian history will thus believe the other elements that are either untrue or are so simplified as to make no sense within the complicated situation of Iran. This could lead a general readership to think that Iranian men are all violent fanatics, or to forget whole population groups; as Keshavarz puts it: ‘Many are neither particularly religious/revolutionary, antirevolutionary, nor for or against the West. Most love their country, respect other people’s beliefs, do not support extremism or war, and love to see a democratic system that respects their culture and tradition continue to develop in Iran.’67 It is not only entire population groups but also whole sections of history, especially the history of the complex 1979 Revolution, that disappear. As in all revolutions, the processes and protagonists cannot be categorized along black and white categories. These two instances of the blurring of boundaries work effectively because they are directed at a particular audience. Djavann’s readership is the same as the one she addresses in her pamphlets and on TV: a general French audience. New orientalist discourse thus finds an audience that scholars implementing the same discourse cannot reach. Djavann does not specifically address Iranians in France, and her work cannot be considered as an attempt to challenge other Iranian writings on the Revolution and the period of the Islamic regime. The author’s aim is different: it is to fit into a French anti-religious discourse and she uses being Iranian as an element of authority in order to secure her place. In her pamphlets on the veil and on Islam, Djavann often uses the argument of her narrative authenticity. She underlines the fact that she carries the authority of a native informer. It should be noted that she became known for her pamphlet Bas les voiles!, whose jacket emphasises this authenticity: ‘I wore the veil for ten years. It was the veil or death. I know what I am talking about.’ Comment peut-on être français? uses this same authenticity and authoritative argument, which is all the more important in the passages where author, narrator, and character coincide. However, on the one hand, she claims authenticity and inscribes herself within the larger female community; on the other hand, she dissociates herself from other Iranians. The choice of the French language is essential in the writing of this autobiographical genre. Farideh Goldin similarly discusses the issue

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of English language relating to Azar Nafisi’s autobiographical Reading Lolita in Tehran: I asked Azar Nafisi if she ever considered writing a memoir in Persian. She replied: ‘I wanted to write this story when I lived in Iran, but I could not. There were many reasons why this book could not be written in Iran, not all of it political. There were too many restraints, too many rules, imposed by the government and many of the readers. I don’t know if I would have written the same story, in the same style; even the language you write in can decide the way your book is shaped, but I know I had the same urges when I was in Iran.’ Goldin, however, says of her own memoir, close in terms of genre and style to Nafisi’s: ‘I cannot imagine a book as direct as mine would be translatable into Persian, and if it is ever translated, I fear it will be called vulgar.’ Her memoirs, therefore, had to be written in English.68 At a time when direct encounters between French and Iranian people are difficult, new orientalist narratives are not neutral readings: they may push the reader to conceive a regime change in Iran as necessary. If it can be said that no literature happens in a vacuum or without some relation to the world, this is even truer of new orientalist narratives. Interesting in this regard is the fact that Djavann, as a former Muslim, provided testimony on the issue of laïcité after ‘the headscarf affair’. Her narrative had a high impact on the Stasi commission, set up in France in 2003. Saba Mahmood examined Djavann’s discourse and analysed her role, along with that of Fadela Amara, former president of the association ‘Ni Putes, Ni Soumises’. ‘These women’s highly dramatized statements, marshalled as “evidence” of the oppressive character of the veil in the Stasi commission’s report, played a key role in securing French public opinion against the veil and creating a communitas of shared aversion to Islam’s religious symbols and the misogyny to which they give expression.’69 The publishing industry has an important role in the perpetuation of stereotypes on Iran. I can recall many discussions with Iranian writers

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who related how publishers actively pursue exoticism. Albin Michel, for example, asked Nahal Tajadod to put Persian words in her story (as her friend Piruz Sayar recalled during an interview I had with him in Tehran, on 18 October 2008). Chahla Chafiq told me that her collection of short stories (translated into French as Chemins et brouillard) had been refused by both Albin Michel and L’Aube, the latter invoking precisely the fact that the collection was not dealing with Iran. Chafiq explained the publisher’s refusal by the fact that any writer with an Iranian name sending a manuscript out would be judged as representative of her country. The picture of Iran as sensational and exotic, and more so than other countries, informed the publisher’s judgement (interview in Paris in October 2007). The emergence of French new orientalist narratives after September 11, 2001 can be understood in terms of the demands of the publishing market and of an audience who would welcome simplified images of Iran and simple answers to the question of Islam. New orientalists have caught up with the spirit of their time in order to get their books published. Emphatically Othering characters and places, new orientalist narratives suggest that understanding between Iranian and French peoples has become impossible after the momentous events of the Islamic Revolution. This argument is developed in autobiographical form, which makes it almost impossible to question because it is based on lived experiences. Furthermore, the literary argument of these ‘soft weapons’ has its continuation in the political discourse of the authors in the paratext: one does not have discussions with Iranian villains, one just fights them through violent means. Partly as a reaction to new orientalist narratives, the second half of the 2000s has seen the emergence of a literary trend based on a similar model, but situating itself in direct ideological opposition. Its aim is to produce a counter-narrative on Iran, by emphasising its positive and daily aspects. It is a way of ‘writing back’ to the negativity of the general French discourse on Iran.

Counter-narratives on Iran Counter-narratives on Iran are based on the observation that the image of Iran in France is largely negative, because of the simplistic

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interdiscourse on Iran in which new orientalist narratives participate. This analysis appears as the main motivation impelling the writers of this trend, who work with the perspective of offering an alternative image to a French audience, along the lines of Delphine Minoui’s journalistic books on Iran. The genre, like new orientalist narratives, tends towards autobiography. In form and in their use of a political discourse, these thesis novels are similar to the trend of new orientalist narratives discussed in the previous part, although they are at the opposite end of the political spectrum. Both trends comprise educational texts. Writers of counter-narratives are also close to new orientalists in terms of their own life situations. They write directly in French; they are well integrated into French political and cultural life and have French nationality; they are relatively young, generally in their mid-forties. My opposing them to new orientalists does not in any way imply that they are defenders of the Iranian regime – indeed they are often quite critical of it. Their aim is to use their ‘double’ culture and the cultural power that comes with it to differentiate between the Islamic regime and the Iranians themselves and to show to a French audience the humanity and familiarity of Iranian people. As such, they offer, rather consciously, opposite images of the ones created in new orientalist narratives. In this part, I will make a compared close-reading of two texts: Marjane Satrapi’s Persépolis and Nahal Tajadod’s Passeport à l’iranienne. I wish to make this comparison to show that, despite their different creative values, the texts are inscribed into a similar discourse. Satrapi is doubtless the most famous Iranian artist in France (Abbas Kiarostami is also well-known but to a more elitist audience), and the one whose work has been most widely read and viewed so, although graphic novels are not included in my large corpus, I have made an exception for her work, which can be said to have changed the French doxa on Iran, albeit perhaps in imperceptible ways. Persépolis is a graphic novel published in French in four volumes, which was adapted for the cinema in 2007 by the author in collaboration with Vincent Paronnaud. Critics and the public alike have acclaimed both novel (which sold more than half a million copies) and film. The latter won the ‘Prix du Jury’ at the Cannes festival, and the ‘Best first work’ and ‘Best writing adaptation’ from

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the Césars awards.70 Persépolis is an autobiographical comic strip that recounts the story of Marji, her upbringing in a leftist intellectual family, the first months of the Revolution and the first years of the Islamic regime, her being sent to Austria as an adolescent, and her going back to Iran as a young adult. The story finishes on her arrival in France, seen as the culmination of her wandering. Satrapi was born in Iran in 1969 and educated at the Lycée Français. She came to France in 1994. Passeport à l’iranienne is a novel by Nahal Tajadod. Born in 1960 in Tehran in a family belonging to the cultured elite, Tajadod left Iran in 1977 to pursue her Chinese studies, and later married Jean-Claude Carrière, a writer and director widely known as an important cultural figure in France. She is a scholar of religious relations between Iran and China. Her book, a real-life account of her attempts to renew her passport in Iran, details the many comical aspects, outlandish situations and unexpected meetings involved in a supposedly simple administrative transaction, and offers a funny close-up of everyday life in Iran. Tajadod was awarded the Académie Française’s ‘Grande médaille de la francophonie’ for her literary work in 2007, as well as the ‘Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie’ in 2008. I compare Persépolis and Passeport à l’iranienne because they are representative of different ways of using an educational discourse in a literary work, and thus of two forms of thesis novels. Both authors have a clear consciousness of the political aim they want to achieve in their books, but they use opposite means. Tajadod uses anecdotes, which verge on the style of journalism, while Satrapi uses the innovative medium of the graphic novel. Through this comparison I will show how the trend under consideration is a unified one, owing to its ideological perspective. Both authors elaborate on their educational purpose during the writing process, and confirm in interviews that they are devoted to the task of offering another image on Iran. I shall concentrate on the discourse that prolongs their texts in the next section.71 Tajadod and Satrapi in the paratext During a private interview in January 2009 in Paris, Nahal Tajadod described her book as a political gesture and called herself a ‘little

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soldier of Iran’. This does not mean that she sees herself as a defender of the Islamic regime: rather as a defender of Iran as a country and of Iranians as a people. She elaborated on the issue by putting herself in the category of people who have a double view thanks to their double culture; she mentioned Sara Yalda, Marjane Satrapi and Delphine Minoui as writers with whom she shared this trait, confirming the continuity I am arguing for between the works examined in this chapter. She explained that during the Bush administration, a trend emerged that aimed to defend Iran against US assault. She herself harboured no literary ambition when she wrote Passeport à l’iranienne but was motivated by the desire to ‘do something for Iran’. She had written the novel in French for the purpose of addressing the French people, but she also reminded me that it is her natural language, since she went to the Lycée Razi and belongs to a francophone family. In an online interview, she said: In the book, I try to speak about a paradoxical Iran. [ . . . ] Foreign media speak only about one specific Iran, the one that could lead to the bombing of the country considered by the Bush administration as the ‘Axis of evil’. It is up to us, Iranians, to show also the other face of our country, a dynamic Iran where faculties of medicine are 70 per cent women, where students in agronomy, who have never left the country, are able to question French tourists on Deleuze’s philosophy.72 The book’s synopsis on the publisher’s website presents this purpose of counter-narrative as the most important goal for the author: ‘the renewal of a passport allows a totally different and ultimately funny viewpoint on real life in Tehran today. This is Nahal Tajadod’s narrative from an authentic story that happened to her in April 2005. [ . . . ] An offering which has all the imaginativeness and the untidy generosity of oriental souks [ . . . ]. This is the Iran that Nahal Tajadod reveals with mischievousness and humour, and above all with the great tenderness of a woman who loves her country passionately and refutes its usual image’ (emphasis added).73 Passeport à l’iranienne is indeed full of descriptions of Iranian paradoxes. An example is a scene at

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the photographer’s, where the room is well stocked with items of approved female Islamic attire, as well as make-up and nail varnish removers, so that the women who need their picture taken for official documents can look entirely correct, but where nonetheless the male photographer, alone in the dark with the woman, arranges her hair under the veil and effaces any traces of lipstick with his fingers (pp.15–16). In the paratext, Marjane Satrapi is also clear concerning the purpose of her graphic novel, and explains why she wrote Persépolis in French: ‘If I wrote it in French, it is because I wrote it FOR the French! I wanted to bring an answer to the French who did not understand Iran’s situation and so that they could understand me it was natural to express myself in their language!’74 And also: ‘I wanted people to read this book and say, “Oh, it could have been me.” [ . . . ] In today’s world it is necessary that people read something like this, so they understand that this other that is so scary, this other that belongs to the “axis of evil”, these people have a normal life.’75 The reference to George W. Bush’s ‘Axis of evil’ is used by both authors, who share a similar sense of threat caused by his politics, and offer a counter-discourse reconciling Iranians with the rest of humanity. In her analysis of contemporary memoirs by Iranian women, Farideh Goldin quotes Jumana Faroukhy on Satrapi: From the start, Satrapi makes it clear that her mission is to dispel the Western notion of Iran as a land of fundamentalists and terrorists. In Persépolis, the author portrays her parents as westernised intellectuals who adopted western styles: her mother wears pants, not a chador, and her father shaves his beard against the enforced Islamic rules. In an interview with Janet Saidi, Satrapi added, ‘I wrote this book to give the image of Iran that I knew.’ [ . . . ] ‘Anytime I was outside my country and saw pictures of Iran, it was pictures of women in chadors and guys with guns.’ [ . . . ] To alleviate the west’s fear of the Islamic Republic of Iran, many writers look for metaphoric images to reveal the western side of Iran, the familiar, friendlier aspects of the country and its people as victims themselves.’76

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The message is that Iranians are more like you than you think, that they are also the victims of Islamic fundamentalism and theocracy: From the time I came to France in 1994, I was always telling stories about life in Iran to my friends. We’d see pieces about Iran on television, but they didn’t represent my experience at all. I had to keep saying, ‘No, it’s not like that there.’ I’ve been justifying why it isn’t negative to be Iranian for almost twenty years.77 In her analysis of the reception of Persépolis, Amy Malek explains the positive reception by Western audiences, and especially the numerous and positive reviews on the www.amazon.com website. Reviewers themselves insist on the educational aspect of the book and on how it was profitable to them precisely because of what they learnt in terms of history and social reality.78 ‘As she has often noted, Satrapi’s graphic memoir is an attempt at cultural translation of the Iranian people and its history to non-Iranian communities.’79 Many critics have praised the originality of Satrapi’s work, and scholars have worked specifically on some aspects of it, such as the complexity of her use of graphics.80 My point here is not to reiterate their arguments, but to show that Satrapi’s text can also be understood as a thesis novel and compared to other works that share the same discourse. It would also be possible to consider Persépolis as a hybrid work mixing French and Iranian elements, and thus to integrate it into the hybrid trend analysed in the final chapter. This reminds us that in an imagology study, typology is useful as long as it is not applied blindly, and takes nuances into consideration. It provides useful directions and helps pinpoint similarities and differences between texts. As such, Amy Malek’s reading of Persépolis as a hybrid text is a complement, not a contradiction, to my own reading.81 While I am aware that considering Persépolis as an educational and thesis novel may overshadow the creative aspect of the book, I would argue that my reading is valid if complemented by a more traditional one, of which Malek’s is a good example, considering Persépolis as a creative hybrid work from an exiled writer. Complementary readings would show the

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variety of interpretations possible for this book. In the next section, I shall show how the authors’ texts respond to the paratext and how readers are presented with a counter-image of Iran aimed at educating them about the country. The two authors are in a privileged position to pronounce this discourse because of their status as Iranians from wealthy intellectual families. This intellectual status is clear in both texts and favourably orientates the reader into believing the truths put forward. Educational discourse Passeport à l’iranienne is constructed in a chronological order, with each of the book’s eleven chapters corresponding to one day of the narrator’s adventures in Tehran. The plot is simple and mundane, as it is based on the renewal of the narrator’s passport. However, things are never easy in Iran, and to avoid long queues and several months of waiting, the narrator decides to do things differently. The photographer she meets when having her ID picture taken introduces her to various people who are meant to help her. The framework appears mainly as a pretext for depicting Iranian people and daily life in Tehran. The narrator draws a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. She puts herself, her occidentalised friends, and the French reader in the ‘us’ category, while ‘them’ corresponds either to the government or to the poor people of Iran. This distinction is interesting, as it places the reader alongside the author and the homodiegetic narrator, as well as alongside various friends with whom the reader can identify. The novel thus builds an image of an Iran divided between social classes, a view that is not dominant in the French discourse on Iran, which usually insists instead on the divide between religious and non-religious people, for example in newspapers articles describing the frivolous youth of Northern Tehran. The narrator also creates everyday scenes to show how modern Iran is. For example, in a scene set in the cemetery of Behesht Zahra, the narrator is on the phone and is looking for a pen. In doing so she accidentally spills the contents of her handbag on the tomb of a martyr. The martyr’s widow, who is sitting on her young husband’s tomb, kindly picks up the pen from the glass cage on the tomb and gives it to

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the narrator (p.195). We are far from the portrayal of fanatical women sanctifying the tomb of their husbands. The narrator insists on tangible details of Iranian life, especially on smells (the shanbelileh, fenugreek, is recurrent) and on ta’arof. The narrator explains ta’arof in detail, as it is an important feature of Iranian life, generally unknown to the French and likely to be seen in a positive light: ‘The war of tarofs will take place: insistence to pay on my part, stubborn determination to refuse on theirs’ (p.23). She transcribes it as ‘salamaleks’. This insistence on ta’arof, depicted as a positive and civilised behaviour, is directed at reversing the stereotypes on Iranian backwardness and violence. Because Iran is mostly portrayed in the media through its religious dimension, the narrator treats the subject of religion with irony to show how the Islamic Republic diverted Islam from its meaning. The religion implemented by the state is always described in comical ways, for example when the narrator shakes hands with a foreigner, an act forbidden in the Islamic Republic: ‘since the contact of the hand of a woman could excite a man, make him lose all control and make him stray away from the right path. Since the Revolution, the Islamic man has become particularly fragile and threatened . . .’ (p.38). In many counter-narratives on Iran, lengthy explanations on shi’ism can be found, as the authors want to educate the French reader on this often-misrepresented branch of Islam, and Passeport à l’iranienne is no exception. In Tajadod’s autobiography, Iran is painted as a marvellous country, where everything can happen, full of the generosity and resourcefulness of strangers. Iran appears as a wonderland, full of both good and bad wonders. The narrator does not gloss over the question of corruption, expanding on the fact that even the simple act of renewing a passport is made much easier by knowing somebody high in the administrative hierarchy. Nor does she ignore the nationwide problem of drugs, or the widespread frustration pervading Iranian society because of the ban on non-marital sex. However, she also shows how people she only met five minutes ago are happy to devote their whole day to helping her in her quest. Her conclusion is that the system is crazy, not the people. Although the novel is a succession of anecdotes, its discourse is an

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ideological one. Everyday life is used as a weapon to present a counterimage of Iran, a multiple and paradoxical one. The irony used to treat situations and people (including the narrator herself) makes the book entertaining, and thus more attractive for its target audience. Satrapi, too, achieves the same objective through humour. Persépolis has changed the general perception of French people on Iran, due to the wide diffusion and good reception of both the film and the book. When conversations with French people touch on the subject of Iran, the question is invariably asked: ‘Have you seen Persépolis?’ I shall not focus on the film, but it should be borne in mind that the book and the film work in interaction, the latter being an adaptation and condensed version of the former. Scholars have used different arguments to explain the success and good reception of Persépolis in France, from high literary value to the general interest in Iranian films among the French public. It is also important to note that the work does not focus on Satrapi’s adaptation to France, and thus does not run the risk of criticising France. The difficulties experienced by the main character, leading to her vagrancy and illness, are encountered during her time in Austria.82 In Iran, both the film and the graphic novel have been forbidden, but nonetheless circulate on the black market. Their very existence contributes to give Iranian people a positive image of France as a country of freedom, where it is possible to produce a committed film, to screen it at festivals to wide acclaim and to assimilate it within national artistic life so far as to list it under the ‘French film’ category at the American Oscars. Would this assimilation have happened if she had extended her criticism to France? Much as Tajadod succeeds in creating closeness between herself and her readers, Satrapi imparts a sense of familiarity with young Marji (a diminutive for Marjane) by following her as she goes to supermarkets or listens to Michael Jackson, like any girl anywhere in the world. Iran is described as a country going through problematic times – the Revolution and the Iran–Iraq war – but its people depicted as being like Europeans. Before the Revolution, Marji’s mother wears trousers, drinks alcohol and argues about social class with her husband. As in Tajadod’s novel, daily life is used as an argument to develop an image of Iran that is full of humanity. The

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title of the book is reflective of the educational intention of the author: to show another Iran, and to inscribe the country in its own history, especially its prestigious ancient history. As the reader looks at the vignettes about the Revolution, the title and the glorious civilisation Persepolis refers to are also present and nuance the image. The hard times Iran is facing are thus diminished and shown in the perspective of its long history. The most interesting point in this internalising of the Other concerns the religious issue. Unlike Tajadod, who is ironical about the religious implementations of the Islamic regime, Satrapi paints these as dreadful and insist on how they diverge from people’s Islam. Her discourse is centred on showing the dichotomy between the government’s Islam and Marji’s Islam. She shows that there is no contradiction in Marji’s being a modern occidentalised young girl and a religious girl at the same time. The novel contains countless dialogues between Marji and God, even if she sometimes rejects and doubts him. God is shown as a good father-like figure, a mixture between Allah, Plato and Zarathustra, as Marji has read a lot about the ancient Iranian religion. Her understanding of religion is a personal one, a feature to which French readers can relate more easily than to a state religion. Persépolis and Passeport à l’iranienne as humorous autobiographies: the means of thesis novels The choice of autobiography by writers concerned with educational purposes is an essential element, shared for the same reasons by all the authors studied in this chapter: autobiography gives authority to discourse, and proves the narrator’s honesty, an essential feature in terms of pedagogy. These autobiographies use the three points that Gillian Whitlock contends are necessary to the genre: they refer to lived experiences; they profess subjective truths; and they signal to the reader a fidelity to history and memory.83 These points are made both within the texts and outside them, in the paratext. When the explicit intention of the authors is to teach the reader, how does this challenge traditional autobiography? Because these writers want to inform readers about their country of origin as well as narrate their personal stories, the truth of their personal stories becomes linked to the history of the country. As such, what the authors say about the truth of their stories

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and their honesty as storytellers is an essential element of the narration. Indeed, both authors have devoted much time to discussing this issue of truth in interviews. Tajadod says, for example: ‘In Passeport à l’iranienne, everything that seems unlikely is true and what is plausible, credible, admissible is invented. Characters are for the most part authentic, especially the medical examiner who looks like a ‘70s singer. The course of the narrative is mostly real. But I had to invent some scenes in order to avoid a scrappy story.’84 She thus diminishes the role played by fiction and her involvement as a writer and dons the attire of an interpreter providing a literal translation from one culture to the other. Goldin asks an important question about the implications of language and the use of Western literary traditions like autobiography: ‘Can the language of the west that has preconceived notions of the Iranian culture and the Iranian woman, a language that is based on western patriarchal construct that views the east, views Iran through distorted lenses, be used as the medium to define and defend Iranian culture and thoughts?’85 In other terms, can more objectivity toward Iran be attained through these autobiographies despite the use of French? This concerns not only the use of French as a medium, but also the use of autobiography, as a mainly Western genre (contrary to memoirs, practiced all over the world), recently taken up on a large scale by Iranian authors. I would argue that, even if the truth would have been different had the stories been told in Persian and through different genres, the important point in the two texts is to present to a French audience nuanced and paradoxical images of Iran, and as such, there is no denying that both texts have achieved their aim. I recall an anecdote Tajadod told me when I interviewed her in Paris: at the Iranian embassy in Paris, she had met a couple applying for tourist visas to Iran, who told her they had read her book and been inspired to visit the country. She was well pleased with this result:86 she had ‘written back’ and had been read. The very fact of writing their autobiographies, and of portraying themselves as strong women, challenges the Western stereotype of Iranian women as submissive and enclosed inside the home. Nima Naghibi argues: ‘diasporic Iranian women writers have recently been

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using the genre to challenge the stereotype of the self-effacing, modest Iranian woman and to write themselves back into the history of the nation’.87 The emphasis on the truth value of these female life narratives has to be put into the context of the target audience: a general readership, but also, more specifically, readers who like to hear the voice of the marginal, and would define themselves as humanists and committed. The marketing strategy of these narratives is conscious of this fact and uses it on back covers and in the paratext, emphasising the giving of space to the voice of the unheard. In addition to the autobiography genre, the use of humour is a strategy in the education of the reader; it makes the reader feel close to Iranians. It is an important medium in cultural exchanges, and the authors of counter-narratives on Iran purport to be translators between cultures. Contrary to new orientalist narratives, which did not depart from their serious discourse, counter-narratives on Iran use humour as another way to put forward their ideas, and to make them more easily understandable. The discourse appears to be more easily assimilated when the process is disguised. In Persépolis, the comic strip medium, with its expectation of entertainment, is one of Satrapi’s greatest assets in reaching a wider audience. In Passeport à l’iranienne, humour is inscribed in the text; it is based on the recurrent use of irony. In counter-narratives on Iran, the focus is on Iran and France is not described in detail. As I have argued when examining Persépolis, this is an additional strategy to avoid the risk of upsetting French readers with descriptions of their country. France is deliberately described only in passing, as an objective to be reached by the Iranian woman. The same strategy is at work in the trend I shall turn to next, for a similar reason: the focus is on Iran and the description of France cannot play the same oppositional and positive role as in new orientalist narratives because authors avoid using dichotomies.

Autobiographies of suffering In this trend, I include six narratives by Iranian writers in exile in France, whose purpose is to recount the experience of their difficult times, either through the particular account of a single event (for

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instance, illegal escape from Iran) or by following the events of a lifetime (such as a life in exile, or life within a political group opposed to the Islamic Republic of Iran). There are many such autobiographies published in French by Iranian writers. Examples of these are the memoirs of Fariba Hachtroudi, an ex-member of the Mujaheddin-e khalq (People’s Mujaheddin of Iran, an Islamo-Marxist organisation, recognized as a terrorist organisation by several countries but not by the European Union since 2009),88 the memoirs of Shapur Bakhtiar, Iran’s last prime minister under the Shah, assassinated in France in 1991,89 the memoirs of the members of the Pahlavi family,90 or the many prison memoirs. However, I shall only consider texts describing France in some detail. The immediate purpose of these autobiographies is to give testimony. There is no immediate condemnation of Iran or admiration of France, although both are found in the subtext. France often appears as the country of refuge and salvation, Iran as the place that had to be fled because of its atrocities. The aim is to narrate the story of the narrators’ suffering to a French reader, or to generations of Iranians abroad who are not familiar with them; it is to make up for their ‘ignorance’ by telling their stories. The unveiling takes place through the inscription of the ‘I’ within a historical timeframe. In the two previous trends, the ‘I’ was presented as ethnographic, while in this trend it is presented as historical. Autobiographies of suffering could also be considered as memoirs, the testimonies of a generation that suffered trauma. As such, they are a means to define Iranian identity by keeping alive the memories of that generation. An additional means to implement the truthful narrative is the use of the report form. Chronological organisation is important, but the most important factor is the claim of accuracy as concerns representation of events, and the attendant reporting style. There is as little narrativisation as possible, and the narrator insists on objectivity, rarely imposing his or her individuality on the telling of the story. This process is particularly at work in Sorour Kasmaï’s autobiographical novel. I have chosen this text to show that the same author can write texts belonging to different trends, according to the purpose she has set herself. Indeed, in the last chapter of this book, I will close-read one of

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Kasmaï’s novels, a hybrid text overcoming discourses of identity and belonging. Sorour Kasmaï’s La vallée des aigles Sorour Kasmaï’s La vallée des aigles is an autobiographical narration of the experience of exile.91 It is a first-person narration in which the author tells the story of her many exiles, the first being how, with her younger sister, she fled Iran for France through the mountains of Kurdistan, the second how she went to Russia to find herself, thanks to a new language. Despite the fact that the author has changed proper names, for instance using the name ‘Maryam’ for the protagonist, this is an entirely autobiographical narrative, as suggested by the subtitle, Autobiographie d’une fuite. The homodiegetic narrator is easily recognisable in the main character’s story, and the change of names is a way for the writer to distance herself from her own suffering while writing. Kasmaï confirmed this hypothesis in an email to me (23 July 2010), adding that she did so because she wanted to write the autobiography of an escape and not her particular autobiography. The cover page, which, it is to be remembered, is not written by the author, insists on authenticity and particularity by stating: ‘This breathless plot, full of twists and turns, is significant for its insider description of the Islamic regime’ (emphasis added). We are dealing with a traditional autobiography, albeit one that the author is reluctant to acknowledge and market as such, as she does not wish it to be so much her own story as that of many Iranians, although I personnally do not see a contradiction in these two purposes. In the preface, the author insists on the equivalence between author, narrator and character. The text describes the suffering inherent in fleeing the home country and living through a perpetual state of exile. However, contrary to the Persian literature of exile trend that I will study in the fourth chapter, exile is a subject of discourse and not a means for literary innovation. The text is the memory of exile, written to educate the reader about what happened to the characters, as well as by extension to a whole group of Iranians after the Revolution. The account of Maryam’s arrest and short stay in prison, of the two dramatic moments of escape, and of her return to

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Iran after twenty years in France are directed at a French reader and at younger generations of Iranians who have not lived the experience of exile. The author herself presented it as a didactic reading for young generations of Iranians when I interviewed her in Paris in September 2009. This is why the use of the French language is part of the discourse. The didactic aspect is evident in the form, which does not use any metatext (I use ‘metatext’ as the reflection within the text on the process of narration). Only the introduction and the conclusion of the narration position the author within the story. The rest of the text is the day-to-day account of the events in a chronological order, based on the form of a report, devoid of any reflection so as to look as truthful as possible. The image of France is not directly the subject of discourse, because there is no explicit opposition between the Self and the Other, nor any construction of a dichotomy between France and Iran. However, the intended readership necessitates situating France alongside the narration of suffering and France is portrayed as the refuge from the miseries of life and from the horror of an authoritarian government. France’s status is not depicted at length but it impregnates the narration, and the country is described as the polar opposite of Iran. Being in France is described as a way out of horror. This is another sign that the text is aimed at a national reader, reinforcing the idea of France as a country for political refugees looking for liberty. Even in Iran, French people help the characters in their escape and are positively described. It is a French diplomat who, preoccupied by the fate of Maryam and her sister, puts herself in danger so as to save their lives, helping them to escape the country and obtain a visa to Paris from Turkey. In addition, French nuns run the Catholic school in Tehran where the women find refuge after their first failed attempt to flee the country. There thus seems to be some sort of French protection extended to the characters. There is also a lengthy passage in which the narrator explains why she has French nationality: her father, a translator at the French embassy, was granted French nationality in 1963 because he made a joke that pleased Charles de Gaulle during his state visit to Iran. Arguing that he was proud to be Iranian, the father refused it, but it was passed on to his daughters when they fled the country.

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This chapter has compared three trends of thesis novels by Iranian writers using the French language. It appears that, even when the writers had different goals, condemning Iran, presenting its positive sides, or giving testimony on parts of Iranian history, the writing strategies are equivalent. The autobiographical genre and its authority status is the most important common aspect, all the more significant in that it is not always pure autobiography, but mixed with novelistic aspects. This is especially true of didactic autobiographies, which have the clear and stated aim of putting forward their truth and of proposing their particular narrative of events. The first-person narrator presents a single point of view and dismisses the possibility of others; it narrates a single story of Iran. I have argued there is a link between the writing of autobiographies by Iranian women in France and the pressure of the market, or the opportunity perceived by the writer that the book would sell well if it were using this fashionable genre. The writing in French, without having to resort to translation is essential and ‘accelerates the process of recognition’.92 Unlike similar writers in the United States, some authors are still reluctant to use only the autobiographical genre: most play around it by adding novelistic aspects. My interpretation for this difference in the use of genres is that the readers have different horizons of expectation. ‘The choice a society makes among all the possible codifications of discourse determines what is called its system of genres. The literary genres, indeed, are nothing but such choices among discursive possibilities, choices that a given society has made conventional.’93 And Todorov adds: ‘a society chooses and codifies the acts that correspond most closely to its ideology; that is why the existence of certain genres in one society, their absence in another, are revelatory of that ideology.’94 As American society values multiculturalism, it is common for the US book industry to focus on this aspect and publish texts relating to identity politics. In the French context, this emphasis cannot work in the same way: on the contrary, the publishing industry insists on the universal humanistic aspect in books by foreign authors. Iran is always presented as an example of general issues: in new orientalist narratives, of the oppression of women and the fanatic aspect of Islam; in counter-narratives on Iran, of the humanity and generosity of people

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around the world; in autobiographies of suffering, of the consequences of authoritarian regimes on human beings. The voice of the narrator, the only authorised voice, is here to direct the reader on how to think about these issues. The statement is clear and the reader can make it his or her own after reading.

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CHAPTER 3 THE LITTLE SATAN: IR ANIAN TEXTS ON FR ANCE

France has not proven a widely attractive subject for the Iranian imagination since the second half of the twentieth century: thus texts depicting the country are scarce. I have distinguished previously between two forms of occidentalist discourse, the emulative and the nativist one. In France, while the Shah’s regime was understood to be based on an emulative admiration for the West, the Islamic Revolution and the regime that ensued have been reported as linked to a violent hatred of the West. This could lead to the conclusion that this hatred constitutes a form of interdiscourse that may also find a fertile ground in literary texts. Is this the case? In this chapter, I shall reflect on both forms of occidentalism after 1979 and look for their literary implementation. The representation of France by Iranian writers within Iran can be organised into three trends: the first, based on idealistic narratives, depicts the country as an ethereal land of art and beauty; the second, concerned with defining the Iranian nation against Iranian exiles, portrays it as the incarnation of a certain type of political action. While the former view is positive, the latter, with its implications concerning France as the country where political exiles forget about the realities of Iran, can be tainted by feelings of treason. The third trend is composed of occidentalist narratives on France as a decadent country and a ‘Little Satan’, compared to the ‘Grand Satan’ that refers to the United States.

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In all cases, France is represented as an alius, in its most distant and abstract forms.

Emulative occidentalism and idealistic narratives on France Image of France as land of the arts The image of France in the Iranian interdiscourse as the land of the arts leads to the conception of France in idealistic and ethereal terms. François Nicoullaud, formerly an ambassador to Iran (between 2001 and 2005), states for example: France occupies a rather special place in the heart of Iranians. This is because, unlike other European powers and the United States, she was never in a position to play a politics of power in Iran. Thus, she has always been seen in a better light, as mother of the Arts and the Law. French heroes in Iran were doctors, engineers, military advisers, painters, jurists, and archaeologists.1 For Iranians, this view is linked to their image of Paris, which represents the paradigm of classical culture and of civilisation. If Paris has a similar image in other parts of the world, it has also a special meaning for Iranians because of the sense of shared cultural history noted in the introduction. Both the French and the Iranian see themselves as leading actors in cultural terms, whereas other nations prefer to insist on their own technological or commercial achievements. Paris is seen as embodying beauty, through its architecture, its people, and its aesthetic sensibility. In Iranian magazines and journals, articles on France tend to focus on the arts. In the literary and cultural journal, Bokhara (formerly Kelk), an important number of issues not devoted to Iranian subjects are based on France or French subjects, from lengthy analyses of the life and work of Nathalie Sarraute, Marcel Proust or Paul Eluard to thematic subjects on the Nouveau Roman to articles on the French interest for Persian themes. Most French iranologists have thus been interviewed, and the theme of Persia in the works of Racine, Corneille or Montesquieu analysed. Another journal aimed at

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an intellectual readership, Goft-o-gu, features interviews with foreign intellectuals, often French, as well as regular contributions by important figures such as Paul Ricoeur and Olivier Mongin.2 It is not surprising that cultural journals feature such subjects, but the recurrence of French themes is, whereas most of the country is more Anglophone than Francophone. An additional focus of the Iranian imagination on France is linked to Sadeq Hedayat’s life and works. Hedayat, considered to be the father of the Persian novel, represents the type of the early twentieth-century francophone, educated at the Lycée français, and an expert in the literary heritage of both Persia and France. Casanova reflects on Hedayat’s role in the context of Persian literature as belonging to a country that has a prestigious past but which has lost its status on the world stage: In countries of great but devalued historical capital, international writers are at once introducers of central modernity and international translators, which is to say promoters of a national capital. Thus Sadiq Hidayat was both the transator of Omar Khayyaam into modern Persian [ . . . ] and the translator of Kafka.3 Hedayat committed suicide in Paris, which has since been considered as the city of ‘poètes maudits’ by Iranians. Its special status in Persian culture is thus linked to Hedayat: because the father of modern Persian literature decided to take his life in Paris, Iranians have come to consider the city as their own. An important discourse in this idealistic image, takes place through translations from the French. Translations from European languages are an important part of the Iranian publishing market, and to a certain extent reflect the relations of Iran with other countries. Translations can work as a filter, and offer insights as to what one country wants to know about another and what is transmitted of the Other. I shall use the list of texts translated from French into Persian from 1950 to 2005 compiled by the Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle, the cultural section of the French Embassy in Tehran.4 Interestingly, the translation choices do not show any remarkable changes or ‘evolution’ after 1979, and for that reason I have not excluded texts published

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before 1979. This list of translations, comprising nearly 2,200 references, includes the following information: name of the French author, title of the book in French, title in Persian, translator’s name, publishing house, year and place of publication, and category of book translated. The major category represented is literature, which includes not only literary texts but also literary essays and criticism. Literature makes up 1,677 translations out of the 2,198, that is, 76 per cent of the total. History comes second, with 104 translations, or 4 per cent, followed by philosophy, with 72 translations (3 per cent). Translations from works on economics, engineering, or technologies account for less than 2 per cent of the total. In literature, a few classic authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Gustave Flaubert, Victor Hugo and Jules Verne are regularly retranslated, Verne alone being the subject of 350 translations in 50 years (15 per cent of the total). In an interview, Tinush Nazmju, a translator of theatre in both Persian and French, insisted that there is a generational gap in the reading of French literature. The status of Jules Verne as a children’s classic seems for example to have been challenged by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince.5 Committed authors such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, come next and are regularly translated, 88 titles from the list being translations of Sartre (4 per cent). A French study on the Iranian publishing market has shown that Western popular literature is strictly controlled by the government and that, apart from Danielle Steel and John Grisham, there are few translations of genre fiction: ‘“serious” occidental culture is accepted in Iran, but entertainment culture stays open to doubt.’6 In the first part of the twentieth century, political texts or texts concerned with the idea of social progress were also widely translated. French texts were an important part of the required reading for members of the Iranian communist party (Tudeh), which had many intellectuals and translators in its ranks; francophile translators and their translations are thus linked to the history of this party. There was a Eurocentrist trend in the Tudeh, mainly supported by francophile intellectuals like Iraj Iskandari or Behazin (the pen name of Mahmud Ehtemadzadeh). The Tudeh was attached to the French Communist Party and made reference to texts on social progress such as the works of Romain

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Rolland or Anatole France. The involvement with the Tudeh of translators such as Behazin is reflected in the number of translations from French works, mainly concerned with the idea of social progress, that are almost forgotten in present-day France: French texts were used as models for political and social reflections. There have been some attempts at systematic planning of translations, especially for the practical use of French texts by the Dar al-Fonun at the end of the nineteenth century, through the Royal Institute for Translation and Publication (Bongah-e tarjomeh va nashr-e ketab), on the initiative of Ehsan Yarshater,7 or the Islamic regime’s implementation of a Committee for Translation, Composition and Editing in the early 1980s.8 However, these were partial or short-term attempts, apart from the Dar al-Fonun’s enduring translation project. Hence the importance of analysing translations from the French in the context of an imagology study, as texts reflecting what Iranians themselves consider the important elements of their relations with France. Apart from religious books, decisions as to which texts should be translated are rarely taken by institutions: it is thus all the more interesting to note that translators tend to prefer theoretical and creative texts. This is partly linked to the politics of prestige attached to translation in Iran: translations are a major way to get famous on the literary market, and the interests of scholarship or the market cannot always explain the production of certain translations. However, this tendency is exacerbated in the case of French translation, as this is probably the most prestigious language in Iran, still today. My meetings with translators in Tehran confirm the theoretical impact that French texts are meant to have on the Iranian reader. Some translators are motivated by love for a chosen book – far fewer though than one would expect, unless those I interviewed did not want to admit to a subjective attraction, instead emphasising their professionalism. The common trend mentioned was to translate what are considered the classics of French literature, such as Balzac, Proust or Flaubert. Kaveh Mirabbasi told me that he translates books that he considers important, such as André Breton’s Nadja, Georges Simenon’s texts, or Huysmans’ A rebours (telephone interview with the author, 13 October 2008). Animated by the same idea, Media Kashigar is translating Lautréamont’s Les chants de

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Maldoror (interview in Tehran, 21 April 2009). This was also the case for Mahshid Nonahali, who translates French art criticism or literary criticism by such writers as Maurice Blanchot, Paul Ricoeur and JeanYves Tadié, as she finds these works essential for Iranian literary and art criticism (interview in Tehran, 20 October 2008). Piruz Sayar’s translation of the French version of the Bible addresses the same need: Sayar considers the French edition the best in any European language (interview in Tehran, 18 October 2008). Although Sayar is unlikely to have read translations of the Bible in all the European languages, his statement is a telling illustration of the position held by French thought and French texts among Iranian translators. In a recently emerging trend, some translators are following French contemporary fashion as regards easily accessible books. For example, the last five years in Iran have seen increasing interest in contemporary writers such as Christian Bobin and Eric-Emmanuel Schmidt, who offer an accessible spirituality and present-day love stories. These are not only translated but also put on the stage and widely discussed in literary reviews. In October 2008, for example, I saw at Tehran City Theatre an adaptation of Eric-Emmanuel Schmidt’s Hôtel des deux mondes, with music scored by famous classical musician Hossein Alizadeh. It will be interesting to follow developments relative to this trend. If this continues, it will provide a counter-argument to my point that translations from the French do not follow prevalent fashion but rest mainly on the conceptual and aesthetic valency of French texts, whether real or perceived. There are also translations of French texts from other languages, mainly English and German. The tendency to translate French texts from the English translation has increased in recent decades, since English became the primary foreign language in Iran. These translations lead to essential processes in the construction of an image of the French Other. If the books appearing on the Iranian market are almost all concerned with aesthetics and theoretical ideas, it seems probable that France will be perceived as an ‘intellectual’ and progressive nation. Although I have been unable to compare systematically with translations from other European languages, I have a sense that German texts are often chosen for the depth of their

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philosophical analysis, Italian ones for their poetical value and English ones for their rationality and usefulness. It appears that French texts provide to translators a unique combination of conceptual and aesthetic valency. I thus argue that the process followed by Iranian translators, and their selection of texts, is a reason for the positive image of France in the Iranian imagination, reflected in the texts I shall analyse in the next paragraphs. Traces of emulative occidentalism: text analysis The relationship with France can be exemplified by many contemporary texts – although mostly in the form of a passing reference rather than an argument developed at length. This characteristic accords with the abstract character of the representation: France is evoked, rather than painted, along emulative lines, as a dreamland of liberty and beauty, and a symbol for humanistic ideas. As references to France in many contemporary texts rarely amount to more than a few paragraphs, I shall not catalogue all such occurrences, but focus instead on two of Zoya Pirzad’s texts, which, because they show with irony the place of France as an idea, perfectly point out the essence of this idealistic discourse on France. Pirzad is a famous contemporary author, now middle-aged, whose remarkably successful books have been translated into French by Christophe Balaÿ.9 Pirzad writes in an accessible style and her texts reflect daily life in Iran. She is not part of the elite to which many Iranian writers studied in this book belong, and has no special connection to France. As she invariably points out in interviews, she is attached to Iran and feels no particular closeness to France.10 This places her among ordinary middle-class Iranians, and gives her the possibility to be ironic about Iranian emulative occidentalism. Her novel, ‘Adat mikonim (We Will Get Used To It), portrays Ayeh, the protagonist’s young daughter, dreaming of returning to France, where her father still lives. Ayeh lived in Paris as a child, and her memories of the city occur as dreams from childhood. As the character is rather vain, this is a way for the narrator to parody this common dream of going abroad. References to France are used in association with old-fashioned

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good upbringing: for example, Ayeh explains to friends that her mother has married her father because he was educated in France and was thus a gentleman (pp.207–8). The ironical tone is unmissable and Pirzad lightly makes fun of this cliché on French upbringing. Mentions of foreign literature in the novel are invariably related to French texts: ‘Arezou got closer to the bookshelves. On the lower shelf, directly on the floor, were aligned the class texts she had bought when she was in high school: Les Mouches, Viewpoint on the history of the world, Les Miserables’ (p.285). These brief references, ironically referring to the Iranian snobbery toward everything French, help us to understand the idealistic image of France in Iranian imagination. Quoting French books is always highly valued as a mark of good taste and education. In a sociological study of the process of memory among Iranians in Paris, Nader Vahabi quotes Aissa, a poet, ex-member of the Mujaheddin-e khalq, who describes what Pirzad ridicules: When I say Europe, the central point for me was France since I knew its literature well and French poets had influenced me in their ideas [ . . . ]. The great Iranian poets like Shamlou and M. Ghazi had translated the most interesting works of French writers. France, for me the centre of Europe, had a dynamic and vivid image. This image gave me the feeling of being close to the French. I did not see their surface appearance but rather their thinking and sensibility. You know, the heroes of Hugo and Zola constantly parade in my head. And I thought that the true personality of the French people was represented by the heroes that we met through these writers.11 In another text by Pirzad, a short story called ‘Per Lashez’ (Père Lachaise), young people and artists also describe Paris along similar vague lines, even though the main characters eventually do visit the French capital.12 The story has been translated into French.13 The presence of Hedayat (who is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetary) and his link to the French tradition are evident in the title, and in quotes such as: ‘Morad is the Sadegh Hedayat of our times! said Jean. In fact, we do not know our own worth. It will need French critics to get interested

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in Morad before we begin to acknowledge him’ (p.108). This quote leads us to think that once again, Pirzad is ironical about her characters: they do not have a proper identity; they are repetitions of previous characters. Not only Morad, who is a copy of Sadegh Hedayat, but also Jean, who, although Iranian, chose a French name for himself, thinking that the name might give him artistic status. Another character in this group of friends, Minouche, says she is learning French so as to read Proust in the original; but her discourse is scattered with only everyday French words that will not allow her to read Proust. While the simple Taraneh is impressed by these sophisticated appearances, it is clear that the narrator gives her preference to Taraneh to mock the other pretentious characters. The story shows Morad and Taraneh travelling to Paris, where they will visit Hedayat’s tomb: this is for Morad a sort of dream come true. Again, there is light irony on the part of the narrator, who ridicules this idolization of Hedayat’s life in Paris. Morad is a vain and unpleasant character, who does not treat the nice character of Taraneh well, and his fetishization of Hedayat’s tomb is mocked. The reference to Hedayat reoccurs at the end of the story, as the female character waits in a hotel room expecting to be told that her husband, who has not returned from his walk, is dead, and thinking that she will have him buried in Père Lachaise, which he had once told her would be a blessing (p.130). This short story can be read as a parody of Francophile Iranian intellectuals, who are all lightly ridiculed. It shows the futility of the myth of Paris as the city of art and spirit. In Persian, Paris is often referred to as ‘the bride of cities’ (‘‘arus-e shahr-ha”), or the ‘queen of cities’, both expressions insisting on its beauty and uniqueness. The philosopher Dariush Shayegan remarks on the dual, intellectual and sensual, image of Paris as well as on its vagueness: We called Paris ‘the queen of cities’, but, to my knowledge, the people who had a precise representation of it were rare. It was the symbol of the fascination for the Other; the fabulous image of a city with an aura of prestige, located beyond seas and mountains; a city of science and voluptuousness where all desires were fulfilled.[ . . . ] The image of Paris was even more attractive since it was both fiendish and knowing.14

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This image is found in several world spaces, as argued by Ruth Florack in a study on the image of France as a nation: From early modern times onwards, Paris, the ‘city of love’, has been looked upon as the prototype of the metropolis both positively and negatively. On the one hand, the metropolis is perceived as a complete microcosmos, full of dynamics and contrasts, which may excite or overwhelm; on the other as a place of sensuous pleasures and sins – giving rise to the topos of ‘new Babylon’.15 This topos of Paris as a Babylon is clear in an anecdote told by Goli Taraqi on her problems with censorship.16 She is questioned about her short story ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’ and the censor insists that she should change the storyline and have her good Muslim character come back to Iran, because he might become a sinner in Paris. The relation to Hedayat adds to the topos of the New Babylon and represents the specificity of the Iranian imagination on the city. In another trend employing France as a setting, the country is drawn as a negative background, as a frame for describing the supposed intellectual failure of Iranians in France and for the condemnation of a whole political generation: Paris is not only a Babylon, it is a decadent Rome.17 Although on a global scale Paris may be seen today as a provincial city, Iranians still see it as a smouldering capital centre. France is also conceived in abstract terms, this time linked to politics rather than to the arts and beauty. The texts that I group under the category ‘definitions of the Iranian nation’ are a testimony to the important place held by the diaspora in Iranian society, relative to which many Iranians situate themselves.18

Definitions of the Iranian nation Image of France as the land of politics The association between France and politics can be dated back to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution in Iran, with its important reference to the ideals of the 1789 French Revolution. However, Nikki Keddie

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argues the French Revolution did not have an immediate impact in the Middle East, although the resulting politics affected Egypt, the Ottoman Empire and Iran after the Napoleonic wars. Core ideas from the 1789 Revolution spread later, because French was the primary language spoken by the educated elite in the Middle East.19 Before the twentieth century, French ideals were not widespread and only inspirational for a few intellectuals. When linking France with the politics of the years following 1906, it is important to remember that French was the language of culture and education in Iran and in the Middle East generally, and that the European ideas circulating were in large part those of French thinkers.20 France thus became the paradigm of European political thought, and the French Revolution a model: ‘both in France itself and in the Middle East and elsewhere, the French Revolution had become a kind of myth in which the revolutionary slogan, Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, came to stand for human rights, the rule of law, and parliamentary government, while the darker side of the Revolution was played down or essentially forgotten.’21 Keddie adds: ‘as a specific model or myth of revolution, the influence of the French Revolution in the Middle East was not equaled by any other until the Russian Revolution came to rival it.’22 The later revolutions of 1830 and 1848, even if not on the same scale, contributed to the construction of this imagination. In a recent interview, the ambassador to the Islamic Republic of Iran in France talked about the special status of France as a political nation and mentions this revolutionary aspect: ‘One should make a distinction between France and other European countries. It is true that France takes place alongside the other countries in the European Union, but in terms of its attitude towards Iran, there are distinct differences. [ . . . ] Due to the characteristics we know of France, including cultural matters, the Revolution, its approach in confronting invaders, and the liberationist mottos and actions of General de Gaulle, whom we know as the symbol of France, we have always had a special vision of this country. We should also remember that our fathers learnt French before they learnt English. Perhaps we could say that Iran is one of the rare countries which, without being a French colony, has always voluntarily promoted the French language.’23 Until the 1970s, France was the privileged place for the Iranian elite to study in Europe. Most of

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this elite was francophone, and France was their terrain of political formation.24 Iranian students at the Sorbonne were often politically active, both in French leftist groups and in opposition to the Shah. Since the opposition was repressed at home from around the 1950s to the 1970s, most of these activities happened abroad, and Paris was a base for student political groups, especially the Confederation of Iranian Students whose founding congress, in which the joint movements from Iran and the United States were united, was held in Paris in 1962.25 The image of France as an important political base for Iranians acquires a new meaning after the Islamic Revolution, when Iranian intellectuals and writers went into exile primarily in France during the first years of the Islamic Republic – even though many later left for other European countries or for North America. Nassehy-Behnam notes: ‘Among the post-revolutionary emigrants, only a small percentage has gone to France, but their importance far exceeds their number, owing to the high percentage of intellectuals and politicians among them; and Paris has been host to almost all Persian opposition leaders in the post-revolutionary era.’26 In the next section, I shall analyse in detail how contemporary Iranians within Iran revisit this association of France with the reality of political action for Iranians. In the years after the Revolution, some Iranian writers within Iran began to consider exiles as traitors and/or losers. The idea of the Iranian nation was incompatible with an Iranian diasporic identity. There has been an interesting debate on the subject between two important poets, Ahmad Shamlu, who lived in Iran, and Esmail Kho’i, who left for London in 1982. Shamlu expressed his disdain for the writers and intellectuals who left Iran in a paper entitled ‘Negarani-ha-ye man’ in a conference in Berkeley. Kho’i answered with a poem. At the time when Shamlu spoke, criticism was directed primarily at Iranians in France, since most members of the Association of Iranian Writers in Exile, the foremost institution for Iranian writers in exile, were in Paris in the 1980s.27 In several novels, this discourse leads to criticism of the misuse of the potential of exile on the part of Iranians. I have chosen to focus on Reza Qeissariyeh’s Kafeh-ye Naderi (Café Naderi), a text that has not as yet been reviewed in Western scholarship, despite being a best-seller in Iran.

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Definitions of the Iranian nation: Reza Qeissariyeh’s Kafeh-ye Naderi Published in 2004 and reprinted at least seven times since, Kafeh-ye Naderi was acclaimed by reviewers and awarded a literary prize. It is a short novel, describing a generation of Iranian intellectuals from a heterodiegetic point of view. The title refers to a café in the centre of Tehran, famous for being a meeting point for intellectual debates as well as for its speciality dishes, like the ‘shatobriyan’ steak or the ‘kafeh glasseh’(!). The book, consisting of three chapters, opens with the main character, Farzad, sitting in the café, immersed in reflections and memories of his time in Europe, especially May 1968; the second chapter follows the interaction of some intellectuals, writers and actors meeting at a party given before the Revolution, while the closing section returns to Café Naderi and revolves around the endless discussions of a group of intellectuals. The structure of the novel is fairly complex: the narrative follows a circular pattern, returning to the beginning at the close of the novel and embedding stories within stories in a manner reminiscent of the One Thousand and One Nights. Multiple characters appear alongside the central couple, Tinush and Farzad Maftun. Kafeh-ye Naderi is the portrait of a generation of leftist intellectuals, a generation which has travelled to Europe, discussed socialism and Marxism, experienced the vital tensions of its times but failed to find lasting solutions to its political and existential dilemmas and is now passively killing time at Café Naderi. Its failure is equated to the failure of occidentalised intellectuals and artists. My analysis focuses on Tinush and Farzad because of the depiction of their migration to France. An important part of the novel is devoted to the couple’s life in France, especially during the events of May ‘68, which were closely observed by Iranian intellectuals, some of whom were studying in Paris at the time. Kafeh-ye Naderi is representative of the novels written by Iranian writers living in Iran because of the abstract, sketchy picture it gives of France, comparable to that given in the idealistic narratives discussed earlier. The author, Reza Qeissariyeh, works as a translator from Italian and lectures in Italian at the university. When I met him in Tehran, Qeissariyeh told me he had not been to France for decades, and had

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relied on his memories for the narration of the story (interview with the author, 7 May 2009). He could not compare his memories to vivid present images of France. While abroad, either in France, Italy or Germany, Farzad and Tinush move into different milieus: she designs clothes and works in the world of fashion, whereas he is a journalist. In order to escape his responsibilities as a husband and father, Maftun leaves Germany for Paris, where he writes for the journal Afriqa-ye Emruz and frequents jazz and flamenco clubs. Paris appears as the place for festivities: for example, a character reflects on the early closure of cafés in Tehran and compares it to Paris:

In Paris, if you close a café at this early hour, you get jailed. (p.120) Paris is also pictured as a city of oblivion, where the main character can forget about his wife and meet beautiful girls. The French are indeed only described through the female sex. Several times in the narrative, Farzad is seen waiting for beautiful girls he has met in cafés – but interestingly there is no description of any of them or account of any encounter. In the passages set in Iran, there is the mention of a French spy who often came to Café Naderi and exchanged information while dancing the tango. She is said to be beautiful, bright and charming, but she is no more than a passing vision, and there is no portrait of her as such. When the artists sitting in Café Naderi evoke their memories of Paris, it appears that all of them, especially the ones working in theatre, have spent some time there: Paris is shown as a fundamental phase in their artistic training, and politics and the arts are linked in such scenes. Another cliché about France is the French interest in ancient Persia. French people are described as fascinated by the myth, languages and history of ancient Iran, a fascination which helped Iranians to better understand their own past:

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Anahita is not Joan of Arc. In Mithraic thought, this God represents the Iranian nation, and she had read this in a French book. Iranians themselves do not have books about this. (p.80) When dealing with ‘revolutionary Paris’, descriptions grow more focused and original, and the narrator takes the opportunity to depict numerous lively scenes. One is set in a café full of revolutionary students, and portrays an old man who, offended by their slogans, leaves, singing the Marseillaise:

The old man stood up and sang the Marseillaise, at which almost all the customers booed him. The old man became really angry. Enraged, he stamped his foot on the floor, made a military salute and left. Some applauded. (p.16) Paris is described in a dual way, oscillating between its gay and illuminated streets and its revolution:

Paris, with all her beautiful places and boulevards, the river Seine with its enticing streetlights, its cafés full of light and people, its parties, the colourful prostitutes of Chatelet and Pigalle who had also become revolutionaries and shouted slogans against de Gaulle, and its indefatigable lovers, had all become a nightmare to him, the noise of police and ambulance sirens making it even more torturous. (p.15)

The red and black flag of the anarchists was seen everywhere, even on top of the Paris Opera. (p.15)

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The characters are shown as experiencing astonishment at the sight of Paris living through another revolution, as if this image did not match the city’s beauty, as if it could not last. This is why Maftun perceives the events of May ’68 as a holiday, and the streets of Paris as a playground: one sings revolutionary songs, writes slogans in all languages (even in Persian), dances African dances, watches films on Vietnam and the Spanish civil war. At no point does the character take the events seriously, implying that it is not a real revolution to him. After de Gaulle’s return, which marked the events’ final loss of momentum, Maftun observes the Champs-Elysées thronged with de Gaulle supporters:

Maftun said: There were so many bourgeois in France and nobody knew about them! There was no sign of revolutionaries, and the Internationale or anarchist songs had also disappeared. (p.17) In another scene, Farzad is in a café in Montmartre, and asks an older Iranian friend whether the student movement in Europe, and especially in France, will have any influence on Iranian students. The friend, who has a PhD in sociology from the Sorbonne, answers that Iranians are too backward: they are trapped in a political spiderweb, and too concerned with their martyrs and their mourning. He uses a Marxist analysis, which he learnt in Paris. The attitude he describes may explain the relative neglect shown by Iranian intellectuals for the events’ potential as a source of inspiration, or their failure to relate them to the facts of the 1979 Revolution: the latter was perceived as a truly ‘political’ revolution, whereas May ’68 was seen mainly as a cultural and social movement.28 On the fortieth anniversary of the events, on Radio Zamaneh, Reza Daneshvar interviewed Iranians who participated in the events. One of them, sociologist Khosrow Mourim, put forward the idea that, because May ’68 was a social and not a political movement, it has had little impact on Iranians; he also insisted on the importance of feminism in the May ’68 movement, and on how this was not a concern for Iranians.29 In direct opposition, sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar argues

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that there are many parallels between the Islamic Revolution and May 1968, mainly a similar ‘religion de la spontanéité des masses’ in reaction to the alienation of modernity.30 According to him, in both cases there was no pre-established plan to offer an alternative to modernity, and it was the youth and not the working class who led the movement. However (and this is in my view a further point in favour of Mourim’s analysis), Khosrokhavar only states these facts and then proceeds to argue for the similarities between the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the 1789 French Revolution – which have often been compared. This reinforces the discourse at the core of Kafeh-ye Naderi. The novel thus works in line with an interdiscourse on the part of the Iranian intellectuals who stayed in Iran and consider exiles to have failed. Alain Lance, a French poet who was in Iran in 1968, recalls his conversations with Iranians on the subject: ‘My Iranian friends followed the event with a circumspect eye. A revolution without a single death after fifteen days is at best an aesthetic object, said one of them. For another, it is clear: the protesters are controlled by the CIA, who want to destablise de Gaulle, since his foreign politics upsets the United States, as we have seen with the notorious Phnom Penh debate.’31 Kafeh-ye Naderi describes the Iranian experience in France as a failure: France appears as a metaphor for abdication. When we consider all the setbacks experienced by the novel’s characters, including in their personal lives, the title’s reference to the emblem of Iranian intellectual life, Café Naderi, is ironic, highlighting the supposed intellectual failure of Iranians during this period and their inability to use their theoretical and experimental knowledge to bring their ideals to fruition. The novel contains recurrent comments from the narrator on the futility of their life in France. For example, Farzad explains that his return to Iran stems from the feeling of uselessness he had experienced there:

Well, what was he doing here? He had come back for good. He was tired of aimlessly striding along the streets of Paris. (p.13)

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As the story develops, Farzad becomes more critical of Iranians abroad, with their internal quarrels and their inability to organise themselves. It is because he can no longer cope with these problems that he stops accepting journalistic collaborations with them. The novel’s last chapter is entirely concerned with a discussion of their failure, which is traced back to their years abroad and infused with much nostalgia and a painful awareness of what could have, but has not, been achieved in the end. France has long embodied the political struggles of Iranian exiles, first under the Shah, then under the Islamic Republic; but for Iranian writers who stayed in Iran after 1979, it has shown its limits as a model for political experience. Kafeh-ye Naderi expresses the disillusion experienced by the occidentalised francophone generation, and implicitly points to the emasculating power of France, a comfortable modern society that led them to abandon their ideals. It affirms that the idea of the Iranian nation is incompatible with an Iranian diasporic identity and that Iranian exiles have no say in the definition of the nation. Criticism of France and its working in line with an occidentalist discourse appears even more prominent in another trend of texts written by Iranians within Iran: occidentalist narratives.

Nativist occidentalism and occidentalist narratives Occidentalist narratives have to be placed within the context of nativist occidentalist discourse. In the 1970s, Iranian intellectual discourse was focused on a return to the origins of Iran, both pre-Islamic and Islamic, and on a rejection of the West. This movement saw its culmination with Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s pamphlet Gharbzadegi (Westoxication),32 published in 1962 and circulated without government authorisation well into the 1970s. This was originally a report which Al-e Ahmad had prepared for the Ministry of Education, in which he criticised the indiscriminate borrowing from the West and Iranian mimicry of the West, and drew a portrait of what he calls the ‘gharbzadeh’ (Westoxicated), the person who has been contaminated by the West, like the ‘fokoli’, or ‘bow-tied ones’ of Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman,33 or Paul Sprachman’s Westomaniac:

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Westomaniacs were so successfully elastic as a stereotype that they were able to appeal to both leftist and Islamic opponents of the Pahlavi regime. Resorting to such stereotyping is evidence of a strong parallelism between the thinking of those in the West who study Iran, on the one hand, and those who prescribe reform in Iran, on the other. The law of stereotypical symmetry states: for every ethnic stereotype there is an equal and opposite stereotype. To ignore this law and focus exclusively on the misconceptions of the Western media about Iran, for example, is to deny the totality and complexity of proper cultural studies.34 This is how Al-e Ahmad describes gharbzadegi: ‘I speak of “occidentosis” as of tuberculosis. But perhaps it more closely resembles an infestation of weevils. Have you seen how they attack wheat? From the inside. The bran remains intact, but it is just a shell, like a cocoon left behind on a tree. At any rate, I am speaking of a disease: an accident from without, spreading in an environment rendered susceptible to it.’35 The term has become a noun, and was associated in the 1970s with the cure to the disease, a return to the Islamic origins of Iran, especially in the writings of Ali Shariati. This movement has been called ‘gharb-setizi’ (anti-occidental). Hamid Dabashi says on the issue: The coinage of the term ‘Westoxication’ became the pinnacle of ideological nativism in the contemporary Iranian political culture. [ . . . ] Much of the isolationism of Iranian intellectuals abroad, their historical affliction with being unable to formulate a place of dignity and a position of agency for themselves outside their self-ghettoized limitations is directly traceable to this nativist conception of ‘Westoxication’.36 The most noticeable aspect of Iranian discourse on France in the contemporary period is the scarcity of such a nativist occidentalist trend.37 While it is true that 1970s nativist discourse was not particularly directed at France, France was sometimes included in it, along with other countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and Israel. In the strongest discourses, France was a ‘little Satan’,

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as opposed to the ‘Great Satan’, the United States. In contemporary discourse, Iranian nativist occidentalism has lessened and France is certainly not its focus. I would argue that 1970s occidentalist discourse has gradually disappeared over the years of the Islamic regime because it could not sustain confrontation with reality. As it became a state discourse, rather than the discourse of opposition that it used to be in the 1970s, it lost its attractive theoretical power for intellectuals.38 It is today a governmental rhetoric upon which few intellectuals reflect. From another perspective, Dariush Shayegan explains this quasi-disappearance in terms of Iran becoming more occidentalised and having the West as one of its primary references, a rather schizophrenic mind-set.39 Nonetheless, there exists at least one nativist occidentalist narrative employing 1970s discourse to put forward an image of France as decadent, Hassan Purmansuri’s ‘Arus-e faransavi, ‘arus-e kuhestan (The French bride, bride of the mountains).40 Although I have been unable to access the text in Iran, as it was not stocked either in bookshops or at the Dayerat ol-ma`aref-e bozorg-e eslami’s library,41 my findings on the author and on readers’ reviews on the internet, as well as a summary of the text, have given me a reasonable idea of the book.42 While a close-reading is not possible (and this is the single instance in this book of an analysis not supported by close-reading), I am at least able to describe the book’s essential traits. The story begins with the arrival of the French Doctor Jean and his grand-daughter Jeannette in the city of Ramsar, where they will stay as the guests of Doctor Bavand, with whom Doctor Jean studied at the Sorbonne. The story of the characters is intertwined with political events, but at the end, Jeannette takes the name of Zahra, which probably means that she converts to Islam, and marries an Iranian engineer. The discourse of the novel seems to be to encourage a potentially gharbzadeh reader to see the failures of Western society, as embodied by France and the French characters, and to show that they can be led on a better path through Iranian society. Nativist occidentalist discourse is linked to a positive Islamic discourse, which portrays Islam as the remedy to Western failures. The French bride converts to Islam and starts living a simple life in the Iranian mountains with her Iranian husband.

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There might be other occidentalist narratives concerned with France, but they are not widely available. One of the aims of my fieldwork in Tehran in October 2008 and in April–May 2009 was to research occidentalism in Iran as I had researched orientalism, but I was surprised to find almost no example of such a trend, if one excepts ‘Arus-e faransavi, which in any case appears to be an obscure text, unavailable to a general reader. I expected to find texts and discourses that would convey occidentalist ideas at the core of this trend, so prevalent during the previous phase of Iranian intellectual history. Interestingly, the discourse on the West before the 1970s, which includes satire on westernised, stupid and arrogant Iranians, has returned as the predominant discourse after the brief interval characterized by nativist occidentalism in the 1970s. In 1921, playwright Hassan Moqaddam created the character of Ja’far Khan, a stupid young man who returns from France to his religious family, imbued with French manners and language, accompanied by his little dog ‘Carrot’. At the same date, Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh drew a similar francophone character in one of his short stories in the collection Yeki bud, yeki nabud.43 Similarly, in contemporary discourse, the reflection on the West amounts to a criticism of Iranians themselves. Like the criticism addressed to the fokolis or to the Ja‘far Khans, it is a criticism directed at Iranians and at their inability to use the West in a creative manner. Thus, if nativist occidentalism has been accused of being blind to Iran’s own failures, contemporary discourse cannot be accused of the same deficiency. Such self-criticism forms an important part of Persian literature at all times. Let me just mention an earlier example, Asb-e chubi by Sadeq Chubak, published in 1966, which portrays a French woman who married an Iranian man when he was a student in Paris; she goes with him to Iran, but soon sees him changing, marrying a second wife, and neglecting her and their son. The French character is positive, and used as a mirror to show Iranians the deficiencies of their society. As such, it is a form of Iranian Persian Letters, the Other serving as creative critique of internal problems.44 The West under accusation in Iran is usually the Anglo-Saxon world, whereas France is excused for its political imperialism. A striking example is the discourse on the involvement of Western powers during the 1979 Revolution. While the UK was blamed for interfering

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via the BBC, France was not accused of any similar involvement, despite logistic support and the media focus on Khomeini. Even as one of the most active European supporters of Saddam Hussein during the Iran–Iraq war, France was rarely singled out in debates.45 French involvement is recognised, but only among other instances of Western involvement. In such cases, France is not accused of failing to live up to its standards of liberty and law, whereas the US is immediately accused of parading the garb of democracy while only serving its own economic and imperialist interests. In short, France does not polarise negative Iranian sentiments, partly because of its comparatively minor status in world politics during the period 1979–2009, partly because of the prevailing benevolent feeling towards the country: it benefits from a positive bias. As an example of this bias, most of the Iranian political refugees interviewed by Nader Vahabi mention their idealistic image of France as an element of choice for the country of their exile. They cite French freedoms, the Revolution, the ‘Commune’, and so on. Even if other factors may have been more important at a time when choices were limited, the fact that they mention these elements in their accounts is essential to our understanding of the status of France among politicised Iranians.46 Through the analysis of three trends of texts written on France, this chapter has shown that Iranian writers within Iran use the image of France predominantly as a metaphorical one, for idealistic images of beauty and the arts, as an abstraction for politics, and much less as a symbol of Western decadence, along a nativist occidentalist discourse. These writings contribute to making France an abstract setting, rather than a real stage for lively characters. The country is described as an alius to put forward other discourses, and its inhabitants alienated, making it impossible for the general Iranian readership to identify with French characters. However, it is important to remember that these texts are not numerous and we can hypothesize that the Iranian imagination has become rather indifferent to France. It has produced less and less texts on France since the country has lost its status on the world stage. The analysis undertaken in this and previous chapters leads me to conclude that the interdiscourse on France and Iran is hegemonic and

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makes it difficult for most writers to depart from it easily. Mutual Iranian and French interdiscourses impregnate writers’ texts; discourse and texts reinforce each other to create fixed images of the Other. In the eight trends analysed in Chapters 1, 2 and 3, the texts reproduced images of the Other found in French and Iranian discursive formations. It is not that all texts necessarily reproduce clichés, but they represent the Other country abstractly, either by not developing rounded characters or by not offering concrete descriptions of the countries. In the coming chapter, I shall analyse Persian texts that depart from this dialectic between text and context thanks to their inscription into a space of exile, characterized by a more fluid interdiscourse.

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CHAPTER 4 FOR EVER IN-BET WEEN: THE PER SIAN LITER ATUR E OF EXILE

The literature of exile and the figure of the exiled artist have been given a romantic interpretation in the last century. However, as Edward Said rightly remarks: Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in the exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.1 The concept of exile has been transformed into an enriching motif in modern culture, but in Said’s view cannot be made to serve notions of humanism in a world where it is the consequence of modern warfare and totalitarian rule.2 In the case of Iran, being in exile has indeed led to creativity, although Said’s warning does apply: the experience of exile itself has been terrible for the many Iranians who fled the Islamic regime after 1979. This chapter will focus on the uses of exile as a

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creative literary device in the important production of texts written in France, using the example of Goli Taraqi’s short stories. I shall argue that such literature is defined by three characteristic uses – thematic, stylistic and generic – of exile. I base this on the hypothesis that this literature is a new phenomenon: although some Persian literature had been written in exile before the post-revolutionary period, exile had never been narrated so frequently, nor by so many different writers, and had never before been used as more than a thematic device. In quantitative terms, this trend is the most important in my corpus, comprising thirty texts, novels and short stories. It has to be remembered though that exile literature is not as important within Iran; it is only because of the experience of describing France that these texts become the most important trend of the corpus. I shall differentiate between the texts written in French and those, much more numerous, written in Persian, and show that the use of exile not merely as a theme but also as a formal and stylistic device, makes the Persian texts richer from a literary point of view. Indeed, it complicates the representation of the French Other. However, exile also inscribes itself into a proliferating discourse, and can lead to futile praise of perpetual wanderings and multiple belongings, for the sole purpose of not being from/in any one place. In this chapter and the following, I shall use the adjective ‘Persian’ rather than ‘Iranian’ because I argue for the extended and decentralised system of Persian literature. The focus on national and political issues led me to use the term ‘Iranian’ in previous chapters. However, in the context of exile literature, a global vision of the Persian literary system is necessary. Indeed, the use of ‘Iranian’ referred to the national space of Iran while ‘Persian’ will refer to the cultural space of Persian literature, which goes beyond national boundaries. I make this choice partly because ‘Persian’ resonates more in cultural terms to a Western audience than ‘Iranian’. As such, this chapter nuances the book’s argument on the belonging of French and Persian texts to national contexts. I shall not use the term ‘diaspora literature’. Firstly, because it does not reflect the sense of loss common to all the texts of the trend, and secondly, because the term ‘Iranian diaspora’ does not immediately

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apply to the French context, in contrast to the contexts of the US or UK.3 Exile is more appropriate if one considers that the main difference between exile and diaspora is that the exile’s primary relationship is with the homeland, not with compatriot communities outside it.4 It is worth noting that Iranians in France have not striven to construct an organised community that could have formed a diaspora since their arrival en masse in France in the 1980s and that their primary relationship is with Iran. The difference is strikingly apparent in other countries and cities, especially if we compare Paris with London. The former does not have a single Iranian school (although there are associations that provide Persian language classes), and only hosts a few cultural organisations where Iranians can mix (such as Aftab, the centre for young Iranians, the Pouya Cultural Centre and the Cultural Centre of the Islamic Republic), as well as a few professional associations mostly concerned with supporting Iranian people with employment-related issues, rather than with the purpose of maintaining an Iranian community in France. In contrast, London has at least two Iranian schools and a dozen religious and cultural community centres, mainly based in north and west London, such as the London Academy of Iranian Studies, Magic of Persia, Kanoon Towhid, the Iranian Community Centre, and the Iranian Association, among others. To date, not a single Iranian religious or faith-based centre has been established in Paris. I argue that this difference is linked to the profile of Iranians who settled in France, as distinct from that of those who settled in the UK: France has attracted mainly intellectual secularists, and this may be one of the reasons for the relative lack of ‘diasporic’ organisation. Iranians in France are mainly linked to the intellectual and financial elite, groups tending to keep to themselves when abroad.5 The Khavaran bookshop in Paris, managed by Bahman Amini, is a telling example of the lack of community spirit among Iranians in Paris. Khavaran used to be an important meeting point in the 1980s for Iranian intellectuals and people interested in maintaining the link with Persian culture. From its beginning as a press printing and publishing Persian books, Khavaran became an active venue for readings and talks organised by the Iranian intellectual community in Paris. Over the years though, and since its move to the Nation area, these

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activities have stopped and Khavaran has become a simple bookshop selling its Persian books at the back of the shop: Persian books have been exiled. It seems that the aging of first-generation exiles contributes to this process, since second-generation Iranians tend to read fewer Persian books and are less interested in keeping the intellectual link alive. A further explanation for the lack of a Persian diasporic community might be that the social structure of France does not encourage such communities, because of the country’s Jacobin heritage. This is reflected in scholarly terms by the fact that the literature produced by Franco-Iranians writing in French is not an object of study in France, whereas in American universities the texts of Iranians writing in English have acquired much importance over the last decades. There are, for example, no anthologies of writings by Franco-Iranians, as opposed to at least half a dozen by American-Iranians.

Exile in Persian literature Defining the Persian literature of exile Seidel defines the exile as ‘someone who inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another’.6 My definition of the exile and his text stems from this definition and its application to literary characteristics. The consequences of being away from Iran are reflected in the texts written, and it is this reflection, which emerged as an important trend after the 1979 Revolution, that I qualify as ‘exile’ and propose to study in this chapter. I define exile in broad terms. The writers who draw on it encompass a wide spectrum because the distinction between political and personal reasons for exile cannot be easily drawn, and to attempt to do so would be outside the scope of this literary study. The writers I consider as exiled range from those who have integrated themselves into French society and participate in it as full citizens, such as Chahla Chafiq, a published sociologist and activist, to authors like Goli Taraqi, who tend to mix mostly with other Iranians. I base this broad definition on Peyman Vahabzadeh, for whom the dichotomy between exile (as forced) and immigration

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(as voluntary) is not applicable to the case of Persian literature: ‘Many of the exiled and banished of yesterday who longed for a vindicating return to their homeland transformed into today’s emigrants who have come to terms with their permanent conditions of alterity and foreignness in Outlandia.’7 Vahabzadeh efficiently deconstructs the dichotomy between exile and immigration proposed by critics such as Maliheh Tiregol, who use a systematised definition of exile as a unified category that denies the plurality of experiences.8 Both exile and immigration writers are between two states, whatever the circumstances that led them to the host country: sentiments of alienation from both the host country and the homeland are shared in the sense of loss and the desire to return. Naficy argues that the idea of return structures exile, and that without it, exiles ‘would be émigrés, expatriates, refugees, and ethnic subjects’.9 In terms of the psychological effects of leaving the country, there is a difference between exile, refugee, expatriate and émigré, but I contend that these differences are only partially reflected in literature. Therefore, I do not make a distinction between adabiyat-e tab‘id (literature of exile) and adabiyat-e mohajerat (literature of immigration). Before beginning my textual analysis, I shall first look at the metatext of writers on exile. How do they situate themselves in relation to this issue? How have Iranian writers defined exile? Several Iranian writers have dealt with the theme since their exile from Iran.10 In the French context, the emblematic figure of the playwright Gholam Hossein Saedi is the necessary intertextual reference. Saedi embodies the feeling of a whole generation of exiles in a revealing quotation: ‘I have been homeless in Paris for almost two years. I feel that I have been cut off from my roots. I see the buildings in Paris like a theatre backcloth. I feel that I live in a postcard.’11 As soon as he arrived in Paris, Saedi fell into deep depression and alcoholism. Although he was a psychiatrist, he did not attempt to cure himself. He felt disconnected from the source of his inspiration, from Iran and Iranians, with nothing to live for. Interestingly, Saedi embodied the paradox of exile:

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although he suffered from it both as a writer and as a man, he was able to see its importance for creators as an incentive. In a lecture delivered at Père Lachaise on Hedayat’s tomb in 1983, Saedi emphasised the necessity of exile for the writer: ‘Writers are always homeless, “avareh”. Becoming alienated or being in exile is at the heart of any researcher, even if he does not find anything. A person who doesn’t move and knows only the four points around him, might as well be encased in a black or gold frame, of no use except as an inheritor of the dead, rotting away in the corner of some basement.’12 This statement insists on the necessary distance of the writer and, for some exiles, being away from the homeland facilitates this distance. In such cases, the literary lesson of exile is to find a home in one’s writings. It is in the spirit of Saedi that I have defined the trend of Persian literature of exile. I contend that all the writers analysed in this chapter are frontiersmen and women, and that their writings are attempts to find a home.13 It is because of this issue of belonging that most works in this trend are composed in Persian, a space of memory, which often appears as the last refuge left and the only belonging possible for exiled writers. Writing is mostly in Persian because the language is both the crucial point of contact with life before exile and the common element shared by Iranian writers, who can thus recreate a nation outside Iran and establish correspondences.14 Belonging is also found in memory, which appears as the main driving force when all the rest is questioned. Ali Erfan expresses this reliance on memory in the postscript to one of his books: ‘It is the narrative of a state that happens outside time, in a present without present: exile in France for twenty years. After all these years, I think I know what living in a waiting room is like. You even can start to imagine what you are waiting for, and thus live in the future. But if you ask yourself why is it “here and now”, you can only answer by remembering and by living the past thanks to memory.’15 In the close-reading for this chapter, I have chosen to focus on Goli Taraqi’s texts as representative of the Persian literature of exile because the notion imbues all aspects of her writings, ranging from language to structure and theme, as well as because she offers a discourse on the subject. Her stories contain exacerbated features of Persian literature of

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exile and can thus be used as representative of the whole trend, since they clearly point out attributes that are less prominent or not always combined in other texts. Moreover, Taraqi is a renowned Iranian writer whose books are best-sellers that have each been reprinted at least five times.16 Some readers may therefore be familiar with her writings. I will study the short stories by Goli Taraqi to trace elements of occidentalist and orientalist discourses, but show that these are mostly deconstructed to be replaced by a discourse on exile as the focus of the writing. Because exile is a less doxic discourse than orientalism and occidentalism, texts of this trend appear less discursive than those included in the trends analysed in previous chapters. Goli Taraqi and exile Taraqi left Iran during the Iran–Iraq war, and now lives most of the year in France; she publishes all her books in Iran and travels back to Tehran at least once a year. Interestingly, although she belongs to a privileged category of exiles (she is not banned from Iran and is relatively comfortable in financial terms), her texts are the most convincing in terms of a reflection on exile, maybe because of the perpetual shuttling between the two countries and the ‘in-between’ status it leads to, situated at the intersection of French and Iranian culture: ‘physically placed outside its original homeland, it is mentally and emotionally both here and there, and, as a result, it is both local and global’.17 Taraqi expanded on her identity within this double belonging: I have double nationality: I am an Iranian with a capital I, but a French citizen with the smallest possible ‘F’, almost invisible. This phantom-like citizen is the size of an ant, in comparison with my gigantic Iranian being. Nevertheless, this small ant exists and claims its individuality and civil rights. [ . . . ] She’s a modern ant, and in spite of her small size she has the force and the audacity to occasionally kick out the other part, meaning the Iranian self. This double life has marked my literary imagination; it has become the central theme of almost all my writings.18

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The ‘double life’ affecting her literary imagination is predominantly found in her attempts to find a home through literature: one example is Do donya (Two Worlds), a collection of short stories, in which the opening story depicts a committal to a psychiatric clinic in a suburb of Paris, while the last story ends with an exit from this same clinic.19 In between, the process of writing has taken place, starting with remembrance and the writing of childhood memories. The homodiegetic narrator herself states in the last short story that she was saved by literature. A new beginning emerges, in a new country, where she can finally visualise the possibility of a future, while also creating and recreating her past through her childhood remembrances. This very process is present in the title, which insists on the existence of a here and a there. Taraqi also said on the theme of exile: For a long time I was silent. I could not write. Living abroad, getting acquainted with this new world, discovering a great culture and learning a difficult language, plus all the fears, dizzy spells, griefs, joys and stupors, did not leave space for writing. But this was all good and necessary. The question of exile – all sorts of exiles – was revealed to me.20

Comparing the uses of exile in three short stories Taraqi’s books are written in Persian and published in Iran, and most of them are translated into French and English, which means that her audience is broad and diverse. As opposed to Christophe Balaÿ’s argument that Persian is a language of poetry not entirely suited for prose,21 Taraqi states that everything is possible with Persian, when one does not fight against it or fear it.22 She is aware of the challenge of writing Persian prose today, and her use of Persian is thus not only a strategic defence to keep her Iranian Self alive, but a positive tool for writing Persian prose. She could write in English, the language in which she was educated, but thinks it is important to write prose in Persian. Taraqi is considered a successful writer of short stories: she has written only one novel, Khab-e zemestani (Winter Sleep). ‘Anar Banu va pesar-ha-yash’23 (The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons), ‘Madam Gorgeh’24 (Mrs She-Wolf) and ‘‘Adat-ha-ye gharib-e Aqa-ye

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“‘Alef” dar ghorbat’25 (The Strange Behaviour of Mister Alpha in Exile) are three short stories emblematic of Taraqi’s writing of exile.26 I shall compare them in order to achieve a synthesis on exile as a theme, as a style and as a genre, showing that exile is inscribed in the writing at all these levels. All three stories have been translated into English and the second one in French as well. ‘Anar Banu’ is an autobiographical short story, in which the narrator leaves Iran to return to France, where she lives most of the year. At the airport in Tehran, she meets an eighty-three-year old woman, who is leaving her village in the province of Yazd for the first time in order to visit her sons, who have lived in Sweden for twelve years. The old lady is illiterate, which adds to her difficulties in travelling; she complains about having to leave her dear homeland and her village, where she was born under a pomegranate tree. The narrator helps the pomegranate lady on the journey and tries to point her in the right direction at the airport in Paris where she has to change flights, but realises three days after their parting that by mistake she has kept the lady’s plane ticket from Paris to Sweden. No matter how hard she tries, she cannot find any information about what has become of the old lady. The end of the story becomes surreal, as the narrator imagines her happy in Sweden, surrounded by her sons, preparing traditional Iranian food for them. This surreal and unlikely end becomes the dream of the narrator to find her own roots again. ‘Madam Gorgeh’ relates the story of an Iranian woman living with her two young children in a Parisian building, and their conflict with the downstairs neighbour. It is a short story told by a first-person narrator, who can again be easily identified as the author. More precisely, it is a fable, where the neighbour is portrayed as a she-wolf, whose constant complaining about the noise coming from the upstairs flat eventually leads the Iranian mother and children to avoid laughing, playing or inviting friends to their home. The situation changes one day when the narrator, absolutely certain that there is no noise in her flat while the neighbour still complains at the door, realises that she can shout back, thus ending the tyrannical game: the neighbour reverts to being her silent, lonely old self, and the narrator resumes her normal life.

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In ‘‘Adat-ha-ye gharib-e Aqa-ye “‘Alef ” dar ghorbat’, a short story told through a heterodiegetic narrator and forming part of a novel not yet completed, Mister Alpha, a middle-aged Iranian history teacher, migrates to Paris after the turmoil that eventually led to the Islamic Revolution, when his pupils attack him in his classroom for being anti-revolutionnary. In an interview published in the magazine Bokhara, Taraqi explained how she met the person that inspired the character of Alpha, a lonely Iranian man giving bread to pigeons in a Parisian park.27 In Paris, Alpha lives alone, jobless, wandering aimlessly through the city streets and inside his own memories, remembering his past in a middle-class Tehrani background and his platonic love for Mrs Nabbovat, the physical education teacher at his school. Because he has always lived in a confined environment, Alpha is unable to adapt to France. Moreover, he has exiled himself out of fear, without thinking, because of his inability to make choices and his tendency to follow the crowd. The introduction to the English translation insists on this social aspect of Mister Alpha, who may be seen almost as an anti-hero: ‘Painstakingly, in depicting the character of Mr. Alpha, Taraqi delineates the stereotype of the Iranian middle-class intellectual: passive, detached, self-absorbed, and genuinely baffled by the turn of events that have caused him inconvenience and distress. He is clearly vapid and ineffectual, suggesting that the suffering he has received at the hands of others, including a harsh, martinet father, is generally the result of his own inanity and lack of moral resolve. He is the kind of person that can be victimised and exploited but never martyred.’28 The theme of exile The sense of being a wanderer is recurrent in ‘Anar Banu’, both from the old lady’s viewpoint, as she travels from Yazd to Sweden so as to die in the arms of her sons, and from the point of view of the narrator, the figure of the writer:

‘O sons of mine,’ she says. ‘What am I going to do with you? I wish I could stop loving you, so that I would not become the wanderer that I am today.’29 (‘Anar Banu’, p.53)

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Wandering and exile are also recurrent and important features in the narrator’s emotional life. The first lines of the short story are emblematic of this importance:

Mehrabad Airport, Tehran. Air France, flight 726 Two o’clock in the morning: a sleepless night. Confusion, tiredness, hurry, mixed with nostalgia, vague anxieties, and crazy ideas like the one of leaving and never coming back, or else of staying here in my beloved Tehran, with all its good and bad and not moving away from here anymore: even crazier! Well, a bloody life of wandering, eternal comings and goings (eternal compared to my lifetime), of middle-of-the-night flights, opening my suitcase, going through the customs (this bridge of paradise) and the humiliating body search, shoes, pockets, bag, ears, nose.30 (‘Anar Banu’, p.45) The homodiegetic narration appears in this passage as a way to navigate through space and to establish a connection between the narrator’s different Selves. Franklin Lewis argues: ‘Taraqqi maintains the traditional narrative framework of the psychological or stream-of-consciousness novel and, like Proust and also Hedayat in The Blind Owl, she dwells on time, change and memory.’31 The space of the airport is symbolic of the space of exile and its unreality. It is to be noted that the short story is entirely set within the framework of these middle spaces, the Mehrabad and Charles de Gaulle airports, and that the places the two characters talk about (Iran and Sweden) become unreal places for reinventing the past and dreaming the future. Even though the characters stop in Paris, the city is not mentioned as a place where people live: it

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is just one stop before Sweden, where the lady’s family reunion is supposed to happen, and another Western place, as unknown to the old lady as Sweden is. Exile has plagued the lady’s family and sorrow has been the cause of her husband’s death. Both husband and wife lamented their boys’ exile, and their loss of Iranian-ness through occidentalisation and marriage to foreign women. The husband especially thought that they had become effeminate when he saw their pictures, and died from shame and anger. However, the painting of exile itself is nuanced; it is portrayed as a way to reunify Iran symbolically. The unification of the homeland happens in the story through the relationship between the two antagonistic Iranian women. The pomegranate lady functions as a synecdoche for Iran, but so does the exiled narrator. It is a recurrent argument of post-colonial studies that women are linked to the land, and their bodies compared to the nation’s soil; the pomegranate lady embodies this tie and the narrator embodies the decentralisation of the Iranian homeland.32 The narrator is a modern occidentalised woman, hurried and intolerant of the old lady’s failures to understand her surroundings, while the old lady represents the traditional Iran lost by the narrator. Yet through their exile, the two female characters realise that they both represent Iran and are longing for it. Though the narrator finds some of the old lady’s reactions exasperating, she describes her in a sympathetic way:

She has a gentle voice and laughing eyes. She is round, plump, and short. Her feet dangle in the air, not reaching the cabin floor. Her face resembles a succulent, squeezed pomegranate, with red cheeks and full lips. She is a charming and lively old woman.33 (‘Anar Banu’, p.55) This short story is similar in its design and themes to ‘Khaneh’i dar aseman’ (A Mansion in the Sky), another text by the same author, in which an old Iranian woman wanders between European cities to be

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with her children, who live in different countries and eventually come to consider her as a nuisance.34 However, in ‘Anar Banu’, the narration evolves in a positive way: antagonisms between the two kinds of Iranians – one modern, occidentalised and living in both lands, the other traditional, staid and never stirring from the home country – disappear. The narration shows the reunification of Iran through the encounter of two characters, as opposed to ‘Khaneh’i dar aseman’, which was precisely the narration of the rupture between these categories. In ‘Anar Banu’, exile becomes the only status and identity within which the two characters can define themselves, and eventually comes to be understood as a positive state. On the last page, the narrator explains to the old lady that exile and looking for a new place are themselves ways of life, and that as such they probably make her sons happy. ‘Madam Gorgeh’ is another embodiment of exile, as well as a satire of Parisian life, where neighbours are an ever-present nuisance. While the last short story was set in the abstract space and time of exile and of air travel, ‘Madam Gorgeh’ unfolds in the daily-life space of exile, when one is not at home even in one’s own flat and relives the constant threat of displacement. Even home is not the last secure bastion against a hostile world: exile is represented as a constant battle. Life in exile has become a miniature of earlier life, shrinking human beings and making them claustrophobic. In ‘Madam Gorgeh’ this is exemplified by the comparison between the tiny scraps of nature found in Paris in the two square metres of the family’s balcony and the wide-open spaces of Darband in Tehran.35 The term ‘garden parties’ applied to such a small space becomes an ironical reflection on this diminishing of the Self and on the claustrophobic tendencies of exiles. The children suffer even more acutely, as they cannot understand the reasons for leaving their loving family for a cold foreign place:

From the bosoms of their grandmothers and aunts, source of inexhaustible resources of love and affection, they have been exiled to a cold and sad place. (‘Madam Gorgeh’, p.143)

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The story’s happy ending, however, depicts exile as a temporary and conceivably constructive period. Whereas the stories analysed above are innovative in formal terms, an early story by Taraqi, ‘‘Adat-ha-ye gharib-e Aqa-ye “‘Alef” dar ghorbat’, introduces the theme of exile in its most recurrent form among Persian literature: through a nostalgic narration. The character of Alpha is an abstract embodiment of the exile: in fact, Alpha is more the personification of an idea than a short story character, symbolising various concepts by his very name. He has no proper name other than Mister Alpha, a letter, and the first of a series yet to come. Even when referred to as a child, he was called ‘Little “A”’ (p.213): just a practical appellation, carrying no reference to his identity, given solely to avoid confusing him with other children. This sense of anonymity is reinforced by the name being enclosed in quotation marks. Mister Alpha, who does not belong to the majority of Iranian immigrants in France, whose comfortable financial circumstances and good educational background makes them familiar with French mores and culture, is faced with redefining his own social status. In this sense, Taraqi’s text is a universal writing on the difficulty of exile and on the miseries of an undocumented resident in the big city of Paris. Alpha is an archetype, with whom the reader cannot identify. He is designed thus to let the narrator draw on her main subject: exile as the transforming experience of the loss of one’s own being. In the story, Mister Alpha is feeling all his ‘-ness’ disappearing: his Iranian-ness as well as what he calls his Alpha-ness, the very essence of his own self:

It was as if he had been transformed into someone else, someone he did not particularly like. [ . . . ] He felt a deep anxiety that his foreign sojourn would, like an acid, corrode his ‘Mr. Alpha-ness’ [ . . . ] Life beyond the windowpanes seemed to have no relation to him.36 (‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’, p.190)

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He summarises his feelings in a letter to his colleague Mister Fazeli:

I am lost and bewildered here. [ . . . ] I do not understand things. My past is all lost to me, and I can’t see beyond the end of the week. [ . . . ] Sometimes I even doubt my mental health and fear that in this foreign atmosphere I may lose the meagre balance of my sanity.37 (‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’, p.175) The narrator depicts exile as an unreal experience, and draws on Alpha’s feeling of being lost in time and space. The relation between the characters and the representation of space is revealing in this short story: the experience of exile is a deep and physical one. The first pages deal with Alpha’s waking up to a new environment.38 All his senses experience new and strange feelings: hearing, with the sound of the bell, smell, touch, sight; only the sense of taste is safe from this trauma. Time is also physically experienced as foreign: Alpha does not know how to adapt to the new temporality: he is perpetually confused about the time of day. Since exile is an experience of remembering, it is interesting to notice that Alpha’s most used adjective is ‘known’ and its various opposites: because he finds security in the known, and cannot adapt to new situations, he defines things according to two categories: known and unknown. The discourse of this text is complicated by the fact that Alpha is an anti-hero without personality. We see him becoming another through the experience of the Revolution, as he becomes another through the experience of exile: he has no specific traits, is malleable; there is no such thing as his Alpha-ness. However, if exile is depicted in a negative light, this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Alpha is an anti-hero and cannot therefore be considered a model. I do not read Alpha as an embodiment of Taraqi, although she has compared her story with his in the Bokhara interview previously mentioned. He is less close to Taraqi as a writer than the first-person narrators of the two other short stories. It is hardly surprising that a writer with a life experience such as Taraqi’s would write on exile. What I find interesting, though, is the

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way this theme has led her writing through a stylistic evolution. This change can be illustrated by a comparison between ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’ and the other stories. The metaphors and structure of a text of exile The pomegranate lady is both a plausible and an extreme figure of the Iranian exile. She has no clues to her new environment, so she looks at things in a fresh and innocent manner. The narrator and main character sees the reflection of her own suffering in the loss and feelings of this old woman. Home, embodied in this countrywoman, thus becomes a dream-like country, idealised in its traditions as represented by basic activities such as cooking and sharing food. The pomegranate fruit is important to this embodiment of the nation in the lady, who bears such an otherwise improbable name. The pomegranate is emblematic of Iran, through its long association with an array of meanings deeply embedded in Persian literature.39 It becomes almost a fetish, a talisman protecting the character of the old lady against the West. The earthly aspect of Iran is also represented by references to its cuisine: it is a reason for pride, even a reason for returning to the home country, invoked by the old lady (p.58). Exile is thus inscribed within the text through the metaphors of the lost homeland and culinary objects as preferred objects of fetishization in the Persian literature of exile, with the pomegranate playing an important role.40 In ‘Madam Gorgeh’ the metaphor around which the text is structured centres on the linguistic element: the story is a description of the power of language, and of the battle to overcome and appropriate such power: an important problem in the life of the exile, for whom language is both a question of belonging and of survival in the new country. The narrator is harassed by her neighbour because of her inability to speak French. When she finds in herself the words to fight the neighbour’s verbal attacks and overcome the French language, she becomes the winner:

I twitter like a nightingale and swim in an ocean of words. My thoughts are the same as my language. (‘Madam Gorgeh’, p.153)

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‘Madam Gorgeh’ is both a metaphor on language and a statement on its empowering force. In this sense, the short story is a fable: structured as the initiation process of the heroine, who is held up as an example for potential readers. As for ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’, the text is more realistic than metaphoric, its most striking feature in terms of style being linked to the structuring of the narration through the alternation (almost equal in quantitative terms) between narrative sequences set in Paris and memories of the past. The psychological loss experienced by the character resonates in the narrative structure so as to make the reader participate in the sense of uncertainty and confusion as to space and time. In fact, Parisian scenes are pretexts for the analepses of Alpha’s life in Iran. In exile, the present has no real consistency; what is meaningful is the space of dreams. There is no space of any solidity: one is in the unstable space of exile, between old dreams and reality. Exile is thus the feeling of not being able to distinguish between dream and reality, and of looking for the in-between that allows for not making choices and taking refuge in memories. Thus the very structuring of the short story around this dialogue between past and present evolves from the theme of exile. The three short stories thus have a style directly linked to exile, through metaphors for ‘Anar Banu’ and ‘Madam Gorgeh’ texts, and through structure for ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’. In the next section I shall demonstrate how exile is also part of the writing process within a specific genre. Exile and the short story genre In terms of genre, two aspects are characteristic of Taraqi’s writings analysed here: firstly, two of the three texts are short stories playing with the convention of the fable genre; secondly, all the stories have autobiographical features. An evolution can be noted in Taraqi’s writing from the realistic genre of ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’ to the use of tale conventions in the other short stories. I contend that this evolution reflects the maturity of Taraqi as a writer, as she detaches herself from her first-hand experience of exile to create stories out of it, and distances herself from the trauma of the arrival in France. Iranian writers within Iran have often argued that one

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of the ways to avoid censorship is through the use of the conventions of tales and fables. Yet, I would argue that this is also a characteristic of Persian literature abroad, where innovations on the tale are reproduced even when censorship is no longer a direct threat. The determining factor is a stylistic trait characterizing the whole of Persian literature. Indeed, the tale realises the potential of a contemporary literature using all the richness of its tradition. Balaÿ has argued that this use was linked to fragment-writing (‘l’écriture du fragment’), dominant as much in the novel as in the short story.41 In the case of the tale, this argument is fitting, and demonstrates that Persian literature abroad can use the form of the tale even when censorship has ceased to be a direct threat. ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’ appears less innovative in terms of genre, precisely because it does not use such effective devices and restricts itself to the form of a classical, realistic short story. I would suggest that at the very beginning of her life in Paris, exile was still too deeply bound with Taraqi’s emotional state, and that the motif had not had sufficient time yet to transform her writing. In fact, ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’ is peculiar in Taraqi’s output because of its unfinished aspect. In ‘Ashna’i ba Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’ (Encounter with Mister Alpha), Taraqi describes the difficulties she encountered when the story, initially conceived as the first part of a novel, was submitted to censorship, and tells of having to alter the ending. She had to have Alpha coming back to Iran, because the censor objected that such a good man might be perverted by life in Paris: ‘Twenty years ago, I started a long novel, The Bizarre Comportment of Mr Alpha in Exile. But in Iran I could not even publish the first chapter, since the censor wanted to know why I had sent this eminent professor of history to the capital of vice that is Paris. For sure, he would be corrupted! I assured him that Mr Alpha was a pious man who would resist all temptations, but the censor answered that I had to bring back Mr Alpha immediately. “If he comes back, what about my novel about exile?” “That is your business, Madam.”’ 42 Taraqi had to cut short the narration of Alpha’s exile, leaving both story and novel unfinished. This is why, I contend, this loosely structured story is less effective. In the Bokhara interview, Taraqi states that she vowed to finish the novel about Alpha (thus confirming that she does conceive the text as a novel), if it were the only thing that she managed to finish in

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her life. She speaks about the novel as a genre, and how much energy and talent it requires, and insists that she is not the kind of writer to write long novels.43 She seems to me very lucid when, speaking of ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’, she states that the text resists her. She realises she might be a better writer of short stories than of novels. A comparison with the two other short stories shows that a more innovative generic use is beneficial to the treatment of exile. This is especially true of the use of the fable conventions, if we consider the fable as ‘a brief tale in verse or prose that conveys a moral lesson, usually by giving human speech and manners to animals and inanimate things’.44 In ‘Anar Banu’, these elements come mostly from the character of the pomegranate lady. Her unlikely name refers directly to myths: her birth under a pomegranate tree and being bred by trees harks back to the myth of the Iranian nation, in which the pomegranate is an essential intertextual element. Similarly, the old lady’s narration transforms her own journey into an arduous adventure in which she crosses mountains and oceans to achieve her goal, with courage and prowess worthy of a fairytale hero. The story’s imaginary happy ending also confirms that Taraqi had the fable form in mind, since it is very close to the fairytale’s: ‘And they lived happily ever after. . . .’, even though in this case ‘they’ are not a prince and princess but rather a mother and her two sons. ‘Madam Gorgeh’ is a short story about tyranny and the necessity of revolting against unjust rules, as well as a fable on exile and adaptation to the new country, especially through language. The narration follows the structure of a fable, the heroine-narrator getting rid of the monster-neighbour when she succeeds in ridding herself of her own fears (the language). The devices employed in the fable also appear in the choice of images used, especially in the animal form taken by the characters: the neighbour-she-wolf, and by extension the lamb as the wolf’s prey. At the beginning of the story, the narrator is the lamb, but the situation is reversed, with the neighbour subdued by the narrator, who transforms herself into all sorts of monsters:

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I have grown taller and my teeth are like Dracula’s. I have grown horns and a beard. I look like a dragon and I love that. (‘Madam Gorgeh’, p.153) This fantastic style helps to transform exile into a universal tale, where the issue of empowering is as important as the particular experience of exile. The necessity of mastering the host country’s language is underlined in humorous passages. The use of the tale plays a different function in short stories of exile, as compared to short stories written in Iran, where it is mainly used in order to escape censorship. In exile, the tale is used as a tool to reinforce discourse on the Other, as it is also a device for narrations on far-away lands. The tale in short stories written in exile demonstrates that the Other is like the Self, if not similar, and that there is a lesson to learn from him or her. Another generic characteristic of these short stories is their important use of autobiographical features. As mentioned above, the main character who helps Anar Banu and the main character in ‘Madam Gorgeh’ are both aspects of the author. The character in ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’ also shares some characteristics with the author. Alpha evolves according to Taraqi’s life, his story being part of an unfinished novel.45 As such, exile as a personal experience enhances the author’s writing. However, ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’ is the least autobiographical of the three stories. Unlike the autobiographies by Iranian writers analysed in the second chapter, Taraqi’s stories employ life narratives in combination with other devices, especially with fable elements. The most creative stories are those where a balance is achieved between imagination and life narrative. Autobiographical elements are not used in a discursive or educational perspective; rather, they are combined with other narratives to bring the reader to the shared experience of the complexity of exile. The image of France The Persian literature of exile is as much acted upon by the representation of the Self as by the representation of the Other, as exile is precisely defined by this state where redefinitions of identity happen, when the confrontation with the Other has become mandatory. It is through

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the redefinition of France and the French that the narrators’ Selves are delineated in Taraqi’s texts. This passage through the Other is an important characteristic of the Persian literature of exile. It is because the Other is defined as complex that the Self acquires new meanings and cannot be defined along essential lines, as it was in the trends analysed in previous chapters. ‘Anar Banu’ is not concerned with France in a precise way, though the country is always in the background, part of a West unknown to the old lady, for whom both France and Sweden are distant and incomprehensible locations. Paris is an indeterminate Western space where people are in a hurry: a pretext for generalisations on Western society. For example, Westerners are shown to be indifferent to the plight of others: at the airport in Paris they pass the old lady as she sits on the floor helplessly repeating ‘Sweden’ without thinking of stopping or giving help. When the narrator realises that the suffering pomegranate lady needs to be carried, she helps her onto a trolley and tries to comfort her against embarrassment:

‘Dear Mama,’ I say. ‘Nobody knows you here. Here in the West nothing is disgraceful.’ 46 (‘Anar Banu’, p.65) But the strict opposition between the West and Iran is blurred by the fact that the narrator is herself representative of Westerners: she insists on having a thousand things to do and is abrupt when addressing the old lady. Only from time to time does she remember the tradition of generosity of her country and resolves to continue giving help. ‘Madam Gorgeh’ also posits an opposition between French and Iranians, the former portrayed as serious, self-contained people who prefer to meet friends in a café rather than opening their homes to them. There is a funny depiction of French people taking an inordinately long time to open their doors with their many locks and making sure that the person at the door is reliable, while the Iranian narrator says her door is always open, a welcoming cup of tea ready for anybody who might like to come in (pp.62–3). There is definitely a criticism at stake in this short story, employing the extended metaphor

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of the wolf–lamb dyad to present Western society as a place of constant struggle where the weak are necessarily dominated by the strong. At the end of the story, the weakened neighbour disappears without anybody noticing: this implies that Western society is a place where a person can become lost and disappear. But, as in ‘Anar Banu’, the criticism is also applied to the narrator herself, who knows how occidentalised she has become: at the end of the story, busy preparing dinner for the friends she is expecting, she herself forgets about the loneliness of a tramp in the street and the despair of her downstairs neighbour alone in the cold. Mixed with negative Western characteristics, the Iranian self can no longer be purely Iranian, so the criticism of French society is also self-criticism. The narrators of ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’ and of ‘Anar Banu’ often use the term ‘Farang’ to refer either to France or to the West. This is interesting considering that they have the choice of using the modern term ‘Faranseh’. ‘Farang’ refers both to a poetic symbol, the ancient term being evocative of travelogues and poetic images, and to a political stance, because ‘Farangestan’ is also a generic term to designate the whole Western world and has negative connotations. Taraqi remarked on the element of irony because of the term’s association with the Qajar era (interview with the author in Paris, 9 January 2009), stating that she had used it because of its humorous connotations. In ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’, this choice of vocabulary is confirmed by the fact that for Alpha, France is a Western country of exile like any other. Alpha has no particular attachment to French values. The only ones he approves of are general: for example, he praises the civility of the people. In his depiction of the West, the narrator deals with the topos of a busy, selfabsorbed place:

He reminded himself of the fact that Europeans have a special view of time and are unwilling to waste it in inconsequential talk, that they are very cautious and conservative and do not generally confide in strangers.47 (‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’, p.203)

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For Alpha, Notre-Dame cathedral incarnates Paris, with its frightful solidity and all its weight of stone, symbolising the chill of the country, its beautiful, ancient, but inaccessible nature. Paris is depicted as too sumptuous and too distant for Alpha’s expectations. It is also an anonymous city where one does not want to hear or befriend one’s neighbours, solitude being the corollary of coldness, as in ‘Madam Gorgeh’. Sometimes, the positive topos of Paris as ‘the most beautiful city in the world’ tempers this depiction: Mrs Nabbovat, Alpha’s platonic love, is particularly representative of this opinion in the letters she writes to him.48 Taraqi does not hesitate to use topoi and clichés on the country, as well as to mix positive and negative images. This balance between negative and positive representations, and between self-criticism and criticism of France, is a way for Taraqi to present a nuanced way of looking at the Other.49 The tables at the beginning of this book show the complexity of this trend of Persian literature of exile, which includes texts in different genres and languages (both French and Persian, as well as bilingual), with different types of narrators, addressed to varied readerships, and with complex or conflicting images of the Self and the Other. It is the largest trend in the corpus, and I have considered it as unified because of its focus on exile; yet the heterogeneity of the texts might make it difficult to arrive at a general conclusion without oversimplifications. In this chapter I have shown that representations of France were as creative as they were nuanced, thanks to the state of exile imposed on the authors and consequently on the narrators. The short stories by Goli Taraqi do contain elements of occidentalist discourses, in both its emulative and nativist forms, but these are mostly deconstructed to be replaced by a discourse on exile as the focus of the writing. Thus, texts of this trend appear less discursive than those included in the trends analysed in previous chapters. In some, however – and mainly those written directly in French – the primary drive is to represent the French Other as an alius and to use the discourse of exile towards this aim. In these texts in French, exile is often used as a topos to condemn the circumstances causing it and thus joins didactic discourses analysed in the Chapter 2. Used for its didactic potential, exile rarely leads to creative writings in the Iranian context.

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CHAPTER 5 OVERCOMING OTHER ING: FR ENCH AND PER SIAN HYBR ID TEXTS

In this chapter, I shall link a trend which includes French literary texts with one comprising Persian texts written in French, on the basis of the common process they employ to depict the Other as alter, as opposed to the alius encountered in the first chapters. I shall argue that it is because of their hybrid characteristics that these texts achieve such representations of the Other, although they are not comparable in their hybridity because they belong to different literary systems. This process of representation derives from the distance from the orientalist/ occidentalist intertexts, a distance that writers belonging to previously analysed categories did not overcome. In other words, the textuality of these French and Persian texts is precisely linked to the distance from the orientalist/occidentalist interdiscourse, and thus to the creation of new images of the Other. This chapter will demonstrate the possibility of resistance to hegemonic interdiscourses: some writers bear witness to the actual possibility of apprehending the Other through non-stereotypical lenses, as an alter ego. It will examine examples of resistance to the hegemonic intertext and interdiscourse and, in doing so, contradict Edward Said’s idea that Europeans are ontologically incapable of representing the oriental as an alter ego. In this case, French do represent Iranians as such. It also contradicts some occidentalist assumptions that Orientals have to represent Westerners as alius since some Iranian

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writers represent the French as alter. These texts can overcome type characteristics because they focus on individuals, and not on the Other merely as an Iranian or French person; they also enter into precise descriptions of both people and places and avoid abstractions in these descriptions. They recognise that Self and Other are not fixed and that each contain a little of the Other, blurring the line between national identities and necessitating a rethinking of the national framework used for this study. They can still be understood within their own national contexts, but there is an undeniable element of agency and transnationalism on which I would like to concentrate at the close of this book. I shall first reflect on hybridity and genre in the two literary systems, and then focus on what I call Persian novels in French, as well as on the French texts that transcend orientalism.

The novel and hybridity The definition of hybridity The novel, as a long narrative fiction in prose, has been subverted and interrogated throughout its history. Hybridity of the novel is to be found in the form. My definition of hybridity departs from Bakhtin’s and applies to formal literary characteristics, and especially to generic ones.1 It refers to texts that constitute a heteroclite generic form, Lautréamont or Joyce being good examples. It is the distance from a norm, but not formalised enough to constitute a separate genre, either in the French or in the Persian literary system. Hybridity must also be understood according to the reader’s horizon of expectation. Indeed, a hybrid text is always read as compared to what would have been expected, that is, to a moving horizon of expectation, and thus requires, to some extent, a hybrid reader. Persian novels in French, for example, do not have a single national readership, but one comprised of French people and Iranians reading in French, the latter being particularly hybrid because of their diasporic experience. One element that needs clarifying in the aesthetic approach I introduce in this closing chapter is what constitutes a good novel, as well

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as what constitutes a successful genre, since I will be defining some novels as successful. The most important criterion for a good novel is to allow for the possibility of multiple interpretations. For example, in the current Persian literary system, the famous novel The Blind Owl, published in 1936 by Sadeq Hedayat, seems to provide infinite interpretations for readers, and has led to all sorts of analysis and criticism. The counter-example is represented by the Iranian social novel of the first half of the twentieth century, such as Ahmad Ali Khodadadeh Teymuri’s or Mohammad Massud’s novels. These novels offer only a monolithic interpretation, couched in terms of social critique, a constraint from which the Iranian novel recently began to emerge. As far as the novel as a genre is concerned, it can be considered successful when it leads to a dialogue between text, reader and critic. For the novel to be a lively genre, there must be a dialogue between the genre itself and literary criticism, as Todorov has underlined: ‘The historical existence of genres is signalled by the discourse on genres.’2 Specific novels and the novel as a genre are thus defined as successful if they allow for a plural discourse outside the text. This success is the reflection of the polyphony present in the text, an essential characteristic of the novel. Many scholars have engaged in debate about the reasons for the chaotic development of the Persian novel. However, I hope to show that some Iranian writers have already found an effective way to overcome this historical imperative, precisely through the use of another language than Persian and of the codes of another literary system, at least to begin with. I hope the close-reading that follows will show that my statement is not Eurocentrist: my point is to demonstrate that a certain form of novel written by Iranians uses a Western language to best achieve its aims. I conceive this use of a Western language as a phase only, among others, before the genre reverts to using the Persian language, at the same time subverting traditional Western forms of the novel. Just as the Persian short story became a renowned and successful genre in the second half of the twentieth century through its interweaving of both the European short story and the tradition of tales and legends,3 the Persian novel has, in my view, the same potential for success, thanks to a similar combination. This combination has

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been studied for the Persian novel in the US, and I would like to study a similar movement happening in the French literary context. Persian novels in France constitute a hybrid genre, thanks to different form and content features of the narrative: writing or rewriting in French, hybrid structure and internal discourse on the novel. However, there still is a chaotic aspect in this new development in the fact that, even if some solutions are given by Iranians through a new language, the problem of the novel largely persists in Persian, the most important language of the Persian literary system. How hybrid are the French texts? Concerning hybridity in the French literary system, my argument is that the nine French texts that transcend orientalism achieve this thanks to innovative formal constructions. Interestingly, only two of them are subtitled ‘novels’, with the others tending to redefine the use of the story genre. Battue for example is divided in several cantos, and though the plot proceeds in a way similar to the unfolding of a novel, it does not read like a novel, because of its poetic form. Le cure-dent, as I will show in the close-reading, is a paradigm of literary hybridity, mixing biography, autobiography and novel. In exact opposition to orientalist historical novels and accounts of travel to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the generic form of these texts is complex. As the expectation of the reader is not directed to certain images linked to a well-defined subgenre such as the historical novel or travel writing, the reader is more open to the possibilities offered. The indefinite character of the genre makes it easier to accept non-stereotypical images, as the reader is in a state of receptivity towards creative elements in the writing. The texts analysed in this chapter represent an exception in the writings illustrative of Franco-Iranian relations. Their main characteristic is to stray away from the orientalist intertext – which does not mean that they do not employ images present in the intertext. For example, Le cure-dent uses the figure of Omar Khayyam. However, firstly, these images are not in themselves the purpose of the narration, but means to a literary end and to formal innovation; and secondly, they take place within hybrid texts, and have thus more space to be subverted

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and rewritten. Some critics use the term ‘nouvelle fiction’ to characterize such French texts that plunder myths and exoticism for their material.4 This denomination is to distance them from autofiction, the autobiographical novel as conceptualised by Serge Doubrovski at the end of the 1970s, which has dominated the reflection on the novel and the production of texts in the last thirty years in France. I will expand on generic denominations in the close-reading. How hybrid are the Persian texts? My argument in this chapter will be that the Western novel has been partly ‘persianised’ at the margins of the Persian literary system, within the diaspora. Persian culture is thought to be given to the appropriation of foreign schemes and this particularly applies to contemporary literary forms.5 As there exists today a flux between Iranian writers living and working in Iran and those operating in the diaspora, the notion of the novel as linked solely to the Iranian nation is obsolete. Many of the writers mentioned in this chapter continue to travel to Iran and sometimes have their novels translated and published into Persian. Because of the hegemonic status of the Western publishing industry and of Western literary forms, a first appearance of their works in the West will doubtless lead to an underground circulation in Iran itself and will also influence the work of writers within the country. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha argues that such post-colonial identities create a transnational space, where issues of national belonging have to be rendered complex.6 This is why it may be unsatisfactory to categorize Iranian writers who write in French as Iranian, because it feeds into the nationalist discourse. For the purposes of typological analysis, I have used such categorization, but they certainly need to be nuanced and this chapter tends to consider new dynamics, although still inscribed in the national framework requested by the other texts of the book. However, the hybridity of Iranian writers and their texts is different from the one described by Bhabha: it does not easily apply to them, since the relationship of Iranian writers to the French language is different from Indian writers’ relationship to English, the language of the coloniser. French does not play a colonising role in the

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Iranian imagination, though it belongs to the post-colonial context as a language of the centre, while Persian is a language of the periphery. Modern Persian literature has produced renowned works of art in terms of short stories, and a few ‘good’ or, shall we say canonized, novels, like Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. However, it is today commonly agreed that if some novels are admired and work as models, the genre as a whole has not been exploited very effectively until recently.7 Scholars researching contemporary Persian literature have argued that, maybe paradoxically, it has experienced a rebirth after the period coinciding with the Revolution and with the exile of many writers around the world.8 I see in Persian novels in French a contribution to this rebirth. The novel has long been understood either as committed to the idea of social progress or as popular (see, for instance, Fataneh Haj Seyyed Javadi’s best-seller Bamdad-e khomar, with its simplistic morals); this is why many writers preferred to use the short story instead.9 The contested terminology in Persian for ‘novel’ is an illustration of the problem with this genre. ‘Qesseh-ye deraz’ or ‘dastan-e boland’ (long story) are sometimes used, but it is highly problematic that the novel should be considered an extended story, and not a genre in itself. The word ‘roman’ is more often used in Persian literary criticism, a significant borrowing from the French term.10 This reflects the genesis of the Persian novel and its link to the Western one. Critics like Mohammad Khorrami have argued against the thesis that Iranian writers applied the Western novel to the Persian context from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. That the Western form influenced Iranian writers at this period is beyond doubt and critics do not dispute it;11 but, in my opinion, that hardly means that the importation of the Western form of the novel into the Persian literary system equates to the prevalence of Western literature on Persian literature. It is important to be careful about the nationalising of the Persian novel by tracing it to pre-modern times, because it might render the genre inoperative in terms of literary criticism, as Pascale Casanova has authoritatively shown. She states on this point that the battle for continuity or seniority is the main form of the struggle for and through literary capital.12 Indeed, such nationalising might erase its historical evolution as a genre of modernity. Of course, Iranian modernity is different from European

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modernity but, if this link is deleted, I doubt that the reflection on the novel might be useable in terms of literary criticism. I find it more useful to reflect on the import of the novel in Iran as a post-colonial issue, in the form of a genre of the centre imposing itself on the periphery.13 To conclude on genre, we should note that the Iranian writers concerned with writing novels and reflecting on the genre mention poetry as a burden for them. Several writers I met told me about the oppressiveness of this narrative form (for example, interviews in Paris with Ali Erfan, 26 January 2009, and Sorour Kasmaï, 2 September 2009).14 Breaking away from poetry appears as a real challenge for Iranian writers, firstly because poetry was for hundreds of years the main form of literary expression in Persian, and secondly because it is seen as ‘sacred’, whereas one of the main characteristics of the novel is often said to be its acceptance of several voices, thus including criticism: the poetic ‘I’ is no longer divine, because there are several ‘I’s fighting for meaning.15 Such a hybrid status of the writer is conceived within Iran in its most negative and tragic form, as noted by Dariush Shayegan.16 This is one of the reasons for hybrid Persian novels not making an early appearance in Iran.

Persian novels in French Seven Iranian writers and texts share similar characteristics and can be seen as forming a whole in the French literary panorama. Writers of Iranian origin, who live in France and are well integrated in the host society, publish in French their fiction works, which interestingly appear to be novels.17 This is all the more important because those writers who also live in France but tend to write in Persian, and appear less well integrated, prefer the use of short stories, as Chapter 4 demonstrated. My argument is that the choice of the French language as a means of expression is the essential element leading these writers to the creation of Persian novels in French, which I consider to be a necessary phase for the development of the Persian novel as a genre. A language carries different codes, and the French language carries a literary code of the novelistic. I argue that this new genre represents an interesting achievement in the Persian literary system – and indeed, Persian novels in French are well published and well reviewed.

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Can these writers be described as ‘Iranian writers’, since they do not publish in Persian and have an audience living mostly in the West? This question, formulated by some Iranian scholars, appears to derive from a sense of betrayal: Iranians in Iran sometimes see Iranian writers in the West as having forsaken Iran and their Iranian readers.18 It is indeed true that some writers in the category are disconnected from their Iranian audience, but they have also attracted a new audience and renewed a genre. Moreover, in all cases, Iran imbues their writing and represents ‘une géographie affective’, in Andrée Chédid’s words. Nasrin Rahimieh quotes Donné Rafat, an Iranian author living in the United States and writing in English, on this issue, in his novel The Caspian Circle: ‘Yet at the moment of the writing, I was Iranian to my core and marrow; for what I had, in lieu of the language, was the vision: more than that, the experience of the vision. From nowhere else could that vision have come: this was the country’s gift to me. Not the language – which I was fated to lose – but the vision.’19 In this book, I classify texts as hybrid, both belonging to the francophone literary system, and having an impact on the Persian literary system. Writers belonging to this trend use Persian and French literary characteristics and are both profoundly Iranian and profoundly French, thus representing a paradigm of hybrid writers. It is actually because of the hybrid identity of the writers that nationality is no longer sufficient as a criterion for excluding them from the Persian or French literary systems: new belongings have to be considered. In this light, the trend ‘Persian novels in French’ should not be considered too literally. In the next section, I shall close-read Sorour Kasmaï’s work to show how the choice of formal narrative features (the use of the lexicon, as well as the structure) and of content narrative features (internal discourse on the novel) determine the writing of the text as a novel. I have chosen Kasmaï’s text because it is particularly representative of Persian novels in French and of hybridity, thanks to its exaggeration of several narrative features. It is a polyphonic novel that supports multiple interpretations. Sorour Kasmaï’s Le cimetière de verre Kasmaï was born in 1962 in Tehran, and raised speaking both Persian and French in a francophile family: her father worked as translator to

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the French ambassador, and she went to the Lycée Razi. She arrived in France in 1983, where she became a specialist in Russian theatre. She is a representative of a dual Franco-Iranian identity. Kasmaï’s novel Le cimetière de verre is difficult to summarise, as the author herself confirmed in an interview for the magazine Bokhara.20 She compares it to a puzzle, with many pieces, which the reader must reassemble. The narration is told in external focalisation. As the story progresses, the reader realises that the seven main characters are linked by the same obsession with the presence of a city underneath Tehran, although their obsessions are determined by different reasons. The characters are mostly Iranians, apart from the French archaeologist Père Vincent; passing mention is made of a few other French archaeologists who were the guests of Mithra’s parents in the past. Mithra is the only living female character; the other mentioned is Madam Fakhr-Oldolleh, her mother. The narration is mostly set in the present of post-revolutionary Iran, while a few flashbacks to the time of the Shah and of the Islamic Revolution serve the purpose of explaining the characters’ situations and obsessions. The places of the narrative are Tehran and its neighbouring city, Rey, most of all the underground spaces of the two cities, whether in the form of the cemetery, the ‘qanat’ (underground irrigation system) or the tunnels of the train network. At the end of the novel, all the characters meet at the office of the Prosecutor-of-theHoly-Faith and the denouement centres on their converging efforts towards finding out the truth about underground Tehran. All the elements of the novel, be they characters, space or time, are under the influence of Jamshid, who appears to be the main character of this novel though he has a different function than the ‘real’ characters: Shah Jamshid is considered one of the most important of the first shahs in Ferdowsi’s Book of Kings. Ferdowsi based his narration on the Jamshid that appears in the Zoroastrian Avesta. The root ‘Jam’ comes from the Sanskrit word ‘Yamah’ (twin), while ‘shid’, also from the Sanskrit, means ‘shining’. The underground is the second term of the equation at the basis of the novel’s progress: the other part of Jamshid, his twin, is the dark underground, and the quest towards it by the characters is a continuation of Iranian legends. I shall show later on that the object of the quest may be linked to Persian literature and its

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production of a new genre through the novel. Jamshid is known in the Avesta for having been the king of a prosperous and ageless humanity. Sensing an impending catastrophe, Jamshid creates underground cities peopled with females and males from each species, to ensure that life continues after the end of the great winters. In Ferdowsi, Jamshid is also a king who rules in prosperous times, but overcome by vanity believes himself to be the reason for such prosperity. His pride is punished and from the time of his fall humanity begins to know wars and death. The structure of the novel is complex and hybrid: it comprises several narrations and uses different characters, seven of whom have one or more chapters devoted to them. Before the characters find themselves converging at the end of the novel, their only common element, and the underlying thread that links the novel’s narratives, is their concern with the underground spaces of Tehran and Rey. For example Mithra, an archaeologist married to a philandering and drinking coroner, is on a quest to retrieve both some Avestan texts, and some of the memories of her childhood in the early days of the Revolution, when she had to flee through the qanat; the Young Engineer is in charge of the construction of the Tehran underground train network; the intellectual Farivar remembers his lost friend Hekmat and his fascination with his city’s underground in the days of their intellectual debates before the Revolution; Said Jahdi, who as a child wanted to be a cosmonaut, has returned from the frontline of the Iran–Iraq war as one of the numerous ‘living martyrs’: he has been confused with a dead soldier and his tomb has been given to another, so he is in search of his lost identity and underground place. In the interview previously mentioned, Kasmaï stated that when she writes a novel, she thinks of the Persian myths and thus writes in Persian.21 She wrote Le cimetière de verre in Persian, but translated and rewrote it in French. In a private interview with the author (Paris, 2 September 2009), she stated that her novel did not exist as such in Persian. It appeared that Persian was a barrier to the embodiment of the text as a novel, and French helped her to put in place a novel; the Persian text was a draft and the novel only took form with the writing in French. This does not mean that Persian was left aside in the final

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process: on the contrary, the two languages worked in symbiosis from the start, Persian imbuing the text with its references. In some other novels belonging to this trend, this lexical feature is replaced by linguistic hybridity during the writing process. Writers use Persian and French together in the first stages of the writing, and come to use only French for the completion of the novel. I would contend that Kasmaï needed to rewrite her text in French precisely because she wanted to write a novel, something that she found impossible to achieve through the Persian language. The result was a hybrid novel which received good reviews and sold 3,000 copies – decent sales for a first novel by an unknown author.22 However, it is not entirely faithful to its ambition as it is not written in Persian and belongs to Persian novels only in a peripheral way. Since Kasmaï wrote the novel in Persian and then rewrote it herself into French, her choice not to translate several words is interesting: she deliberately makes some Persian words appear as marks of the Other for the French reader. Through a lexical analysis of these words I will show that the dialogue between the languages is also the dialogue between the traditional and the modern, made all the more problematic in that Kasmaï is confronted by two modernities, the French and the Iranian. All the Persian words used in the novel are words referring to Persian legends and traditions. For example, the word ‘qanat’ is kept in Persian throughout the novel. The ‘qanat’, a traditional irrigation system, is described as a living being – in fact, as a pagan god asking for human sacrifices in exchange for the water he provides. The ‘Allah akbar’, mostly used in the plural, are familiar to a French audience; while they keep their exotic sound, and maybe a connotation of fanaticism, they refer to an essential element of Persian tradition, Islam, as is also the case for ‘medresseh’. Interestingly, the word ‘Underground’ is always used in English and with a capital. It embodies modernity through Western technology. Said’s monologues, in which he dreams about the moon and NASA, are also all in English, confirming that modernity, as represented by the English language, is thought of as a foreign language. So, these words are the Persian and English terms that the writer did not want to translate, although easy equivalents

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could be found, precisely because they respectively represent tradition and modernity. In between is the writing in French, fulfilling the synthesis between the traditional and the modern. The dialectic of the text towards a hybrid form, between Persian and French, is thus achieved at the level of the lexicon. It is to be noted though that this form of hybridity is different from the ‘creolisation’ of the French language implemented by the post-World War II writers of former colonies, such as Raphaël Confiant or Patrick Chamoiseau. It is not politically directed at decolonising the language, since French has never been an instrument of active political colonisation in Iran. Another formal characteristic of this hybridity is to be found in the novel’s structure, which reproduces this equilibrium between languages at another level. Indeed the Persian form of the dastan (story) imbues the novel. Structure has become a defining element of the hybrid novel, because of the recognition by Iranian writers of a lacuna and of their insistence on filling it. In a private interview, Kasmaï argued that the great Iranian writers of the second half of the twentieth century did too much work on language and too little on structure: they were the heirs of the heavy burden of poetic canon. For Kasmaï, what makes the novel is not the theme nor the language, but the structure. I would suggest that it is through a structure which combines the French novel with the Persian dastan that Kasmaï partially succeeds in writing a Persian novel: in fact, the structure of Le cimetière de verre is hybrid precisely because it combines these two forms. Balaÿ, who made the important point that the short story imbues the novel from within, confirms this process of interweaving by the Persian form of the short story in the Persian novel in general.23 Kasmaï’s text appears first as a collection of dastan and then expands: the author unifies the stories of the different characters, whose lives she initially presents as separate, and thus succeeds in her aim of writing a novel. The plots seem to multiply, the structure grows more complex, and is finally resolved around the theme of a rite of passage. The novel thus created takes its first inspiration from the tradition of the Persian story, and progresses through the deconstruction values of the post-modern novel to finish in a classical format. This work on the structure was continued throughout the novel; while writing, Kasmaï

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learnt from her characters. She elaborated on this in an interview: ‘I think the novel is not like a short story or a tale where the author chooses which story he will tell, and with which characters. The novel is not simply a story; it is a living being, an organism with its own energy. It moves you along. Sometimes, I have characters who come, impose themselves and narrate.’24 Now that we have dealt with the formal narrative features of Persian novels in French, I shall turn to a narrative feature related to content. No two novels in this trend have the same content or theme, but what links them in terms of content is their conscious use of novelistic processes, leading to internal reflections on the novel. Kasmaï’s text is again an exacerbated example of this characteristic. The discourse on the novel appears as an important characteristic of hybridity: the novel does not just flow, but breaks into reflections on how it flows. Most classical hybrid texts, like One Thousand and One Nights or Don Quixote, were first defined as hybrid because of the distance installed between the text and the author through different levels of meta-reflections. In this text, it is the sign that the author is aware of the challenges she is facing, and establishes a discourse on the genre as the way to overcome them. It has been argued that such variations of metafiction are important in the balance between the discursive and the textual aspect of a narration; metafiction refuses to prioritise one over the other, and points out the fabricated aspect of the text, which is another way to break from the doxa.25 It stimulates reflection as it insists on the question of representation. Le cimetière de verre is clearly a reflection on the novel, especially in the dialogues between Farivar, a translator who wants to be a writer and Hekmat, an established writer. ‘And the friends started to laugh and pronounce diatribes: “A good translation is a thousand times better than a bad novel . . .” “Do you think that anybody can write novels”’ (p.21). On the next page, the mention of Hekmat’s suicide in Paris is no coincidence: the immediate intertextual reference to Sadeq Hedayat is a reminder of the problems inherent in writing novels in Persian literature. It may be that in this reference, Kasmaï had in mind Erfan’s view that Hedayat committed suicide because of his inability to write a proper Persian novel.26 Here are the first lines

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of The Blind Owl, which has been studied by so many critics: ‘In life there are certain sores that, like a canker, gnaw at the soul in solitude and diminish it. Since generally it is the custom to relegate these incredible sufferings to the realm of rare and singular accidents and happenings, it is not possible to reveal them to anyone.’27 According to Erfan, Hedayat committed suicide not because of psychological instability and suicidal tendencies, but because he could not write a Persian novel: The Blind Owl thus appears as the narration of this failure. This argument is problematic in a literary history perspective, but important when considered from the viewpoint of Erfan as a writer, and it might have been the same idea that guided the author of Le cimetière de verre. The reflection on the difficulty of writing a novel is present in other places. Hekmat says, ‘The novel! . . . The time of epics is finished. If Jam is the most important character of our culture, he cannot continue to be an epic character . . . He is a man in the contemporary sense of the term! A rebel! He says no to Ahura Mazda; he is thrown out of heaven, but he does not surrender and constructs a subterranean citadel . . .’ (p.183) I see in this the confirmation of my hypothesis that Jamshid is the most important character in the novel, although he is not present in the same way as the other characters. Kasmaï’s novel is precisely the attempt to write the novel of Jamshid, and to transform him from an epic character to a novel character. In this sense, she partially achieves what the two writers within the novel, Hekmat and Farivar, had attempted: both began to write novels with Jamshid as a protagonist but did not succeed. In the novel, the characters incessantly refer either to a quest or to an initiation. Mithra searches for a text, and it is this text that the writer is also pursuing. The initiation for the Young Engineer to the fact that Persian legends have to be taken into account in his work is also to be read in the light of the initiation of the writer herself, who cannot use Western techniques alone, without taking Persian traditions into account. Kasmaï seems to be optimistic as to the development of the Persian novel: in an interview on www.medi1.com (1 April 2002), she stated that she wrote a Persian novel because of the challenge it represented, and that she thought she had succeeded,

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or at least written a full stop. But precisely because the novel took shape in French and does not exist as such in Persian, I think it has not entirely fulfilled its own ambition. Kasmaï had to use the French language to write a Persian novel. However, I do not see this use of French, rather than Persian, as a failure; on the contrary, all the novels in the category show that it is by combining French language and forms with Persian literary elements that they have been successful as innovative and hybrid works. I would say that Kasmaï succeeded as a writer because her polyphonic novel supports multiple interpretations, though she may be mistaken as a critic of her own work. The hybrid elements that constitute the Persian novel in French are decisive in the building of a literary representation of France, and I argue that it is because of this hybridity that images stray from orientalist and occidentalist intertexts, to depict the Other as alter. The representation of France as alter, although not a main topic of the novel, is essential to its structure, because of the use of French and of the elements from the French literary system that I have previously underlined, as well as of its brief appearance in the novel’s motifs. In an analepsis, the reader learns that as a young man Farivar went to France, referred to as ‘the country “of Franks”’, to study linguistics (p.19). With Hekmat, he belonged to a club called ‘Anatole France’. This French writer’s name is used many times in the novel, and returns as an invocation when France is mentioned. Although Anatole France is one of the best-known French writers in Iran (which is surprising considering his quasi-disappearance in the French literary system), I suggest that the writer has chosen this figure because of his family name, as an embodiment of France as a country. Anatole France is indeed the paradigm of the French writer and intellectual that Iran has been interested in since the nineteenth century: a secular, progressive thinker. So it is also logical that he represents the paradigm of the devil atheist for the zealous Prosecutor-of-the-Holy-Faith, who associates him with Freemasonry: all secular thinkers must suffer from this suspicion (p.225). The novel makes a distinction between the technological aspect of the West and mythical Iran, but the cliché is overcome by the fact that France does not belong to the West as such in this opposition: France is seen as somewhere in the middle between tradition and modernity because of

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its obsession with archaeology. The cliché on the West is not lingered on, but the middle-place of France is, and represents an innovation. The analysis of Persian novels in French has shown that the literary hybrid space created is a space of negotiation, through formal and content narrative features. The same phenomenon can be found in other European languages, especially in the United States, where many Iranian writers were exiled. An analysis of Modaressi’s The Pilgrim’s Rules of Etiquette relies on a similar line: The quick, light, glancing manner in which [Modarressi] achieves this “double-writing” or arabesque surely has to do with the fitting of his Iranian self into his American setting, of the remembered Persian tongue into the practiced English one. This produces a language – and a way of thinking – that is not Western, nor quite Eastern, but a shimmering amalgam of the two.28 Rahimieh adds: This particular expression of exile indicates that contemporary Iranian literature can withstand exile. More importantly, Modaressi’s example indicates that exile may in fact lead to the type of expansion and internationalisation advocated by Alavi. Far from being isolated and condemned to oblivion, exiled Iranian writers are becoming part of a new international literary phenomenon: i.e., a class of writers who are not limited by their nationality and do not write for a single national audience.29 Within the American context, these characteristics can be compared to those I have analysed in this section, although writers in France are less transnational and more attached to the French national space. Persian novels in French are innovative in their use of French and Persian contents and forms, because of their appropriation of hybrid characteristics. Thus, although the seven novels in this category differ in terms of style and content, I have grouped them together, considering their unity of intention in the building of a new form of novel as more important than their stylistic distinctions. The novel genre was

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a particular challenge for Iranian writers arriving in the West, a challenge that some have innovatively taken up. Persian novels in French are the example that shows Iranian writers need not be confined to the short story, to didactic novels or to fashionable life narratives in a French form, but have opened the way, along with writers in other countries outside Iran, for a new genre, even if it is a transitory one.

Narratives on Iran as an alter ego A number of contemporary French novels follow a similar process in their construction of the Other. Thanks to their generic hybrid status, they transcend hegemonic orientalist discourse and construct images of the Iranian Other as alter. However, the list of texts considered in this chapter may not be exhaustive since their less discursive nature made locating them more difficult: they were not readily available through search engines in libraries, bookshops, or commercial websites, since ‘Iran’ and ‘Persian’ were not usually read as keywords in their description. Scholars or critics working on Iran do not mention these works because they are considered outside the scope of Iranian studies. They benefit nonetheless from a good reception on the French literary market: Jean-Yves Lacroix’s novel, that I will close-read, sold 4,500 copies at the beginning of 2010, a year after its publication, which is appreciable for a first book by an unknown figure published by a small publishing house.30 I have chosen to close-read Lacroix’s novel because, like some Persian novels in French, it is an exaggerated form of the trend. Its hybridity is one of the first features to strike the reader, and its transcending of orientalist images is all the more interesting in that its focus is on the figure of Omar Khayyam, a character on whom orientalism has crystallised. It will be an interesting example of the overcoming of orientalism through a clichéd character. Jean-Yves Lacroix’s encounter with Omar Khayyam: Le cure-dent Lacroix was born in 1968. He studied literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and translated several books by Herman Melville; he is today a dealer in rare books in the South of France. Le cure-dent is

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his first book, with slightly fewer than 100 pages. It is a fictionalised biography of Omar Khayyam that slowly unveils as an autobiography of the author, who depicts himself under the traits of the Persian figure. It can be described as a mythobiography. An introduction in the first person explains how the narrator came to write a book on Khayyam, and the conclusion shows him burning his Persian library, in a bonfire faithful to Khayyam’s gesture towards knowledge. Apart from the introduction and conclusion, the narrator is a heterodiegetic one, describing Khayyam as he turns away from science to devote himself to wine and love. The structure is complex, as the narration is not a linear biography of Khayyam, but concentrates on a few of his traits, within the gaps of his known biography. As such, as its short length indicated, it is not entirely a novel. It does however follow a chronological pattern typical of novels, opening with Khayyam forsaking science and ending with his death. The narration of his death coincides with the explanation of the incongruous title. There is one detail that is certain about Khayyam’s life: when he was found dead, a golden toothpick was one of his very few possessions: he was lying on one of Avicenna’s books, with the toothpick as a bookmark.31 Since there is an essential tie between the narrator and the author, the toothpick also appears as a symbol of the writing process. The toothpick which, as the text states, cleans away dead meat, is also the metaphor for the cleaning away of the orientalist interdiscourse on Khayyam. In the narration we encounter the figure of Avicenna, the proclaimed master of Khayyam, who died a few years before Khayyam’s birth, and who is said to have had a similar relationship with drinking. Lacroix also evokes the figure of Ettore Majorana as a comparison to Khayyam. Majorana was a physicist who, according to legend, abandoned science, just as Lacroix imagines Khayyam did. But the most important character, apart from Khayyam, is the poetess Schahine, with whom Khayyam has a long amorous relationship. Khayyam’s life is depicted in accordance with his Rubbaiyat (Quatrains), but his literary production is not extensively considered. The text concentrates on his philosophy, and the pursuit of wine and love as ends in themselves, as marks of excellence and perseverance. Focusing on the

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points where the narrator/author joins Khayyam, the narrative cannot be interpreted as a hagiography of the medieval poet, since he is portrayed with all his human foibles, especially his short temper. In the Introduction to this book, I underlined that there are multiple forms of exoticism, corresponding to different attitudes to the Other, and especially to the alter/alius opposition. Segalen understands exoticism as the feeling we have of ‘Diversity’: ‘Exoticism is therefore not an adaptation to something; it is not the perfect comprehension of something outside one’s self that one has managed to embrace fully, but the keen and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility.’32 In its literary creation, exoticism becomes the aesthetics of Diversity. Such a form of feeling and of aesthetics is found in Le cure-dent, which embodies Segalen’s exoticist writing as an encounter, as ‘the forceful and curious reaction to a shock felt by someone of strong individuality in response to some object whose distance from oneself he alone can perceive and savor.’33 This reaction describes exactly Lacroix’s encounter with Khayyam, in which the Other can never be entirely possessed nor reduced. I find an implementation of this original use of exoticism in Lacroix’s description of Nishapur. The city appears in its urban characteristics, making it close to the current reader, but the distance element, both in time and in space, is not erased: ‘Nishapur is often shown as the paradise on earth. In this opulent and populous capital of the Orient, in those days one of the four or five most important on the surface of earth [ . . . ] In this industrial, commercial, administrative, scholarly and military city [ . . . ]. Nishapur offers multiple areas for debauchery.’34 Nishapur is depicted as both familiar and distant, its exotic character affirmed and denied at the same time. The author deliberately distances his writing from the stereotype of the Eastern city to draw it as a space to which the reader can relate. He also sets out to reverse those stereotypes. For instance, the narrator says of the supposed dark times in Central Asia during the Middle Ages: ‘Even if this portrayal, which ignores the splendour of the Orient, ignores everything else, had a little truth in it, could one really believe that a man of these times was more narrow-minded than us? To tell the truth, Omar Khayyam lived at the centre of the world’ (p.18).

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Merging biography and autobiography as a literary device for the encounter: a form of mythobiography In a radio broadcast on France Culture, Jean-Yves Lacroix noted that nobody had written a biography of Khayyam, although his name is very well-known;35 according to Lacroix, there is only one book in English that summarises all the information we have on Khayyam’s life – that is, very little.36 All the other texts, Lacroix adds, are mere fantasies on different aspects of the man, as a poet, as a mathematician, as a philosopher, as an Epicurean, a figure wholly appropriated by Westerners. Especially, there is a lack of information on the period from his fortieth birthday to his death at eighty-three. Lacroix was thus motivated to write in between these gaps. The relative paucity of biographical knowledge (though it is not as severe a lack as he states) led him to write a personal text, infused with many autobiographical aspects, which I shall demonstrate may be seen as mythobiography, as defined by Claude Louis-Combet. The genesis of the text is particularly interesting for understanding the writer’s personal involvement with his character. In a private interview, Lacroix told me that his encounter with Khayyam was a chance one, and that real interest was awakened in him only after the discovery that he shared Khayyam’s condition as an orphan, both losing their father at a young age. A whole chapter (pp.32–6) is devoted to Ibrahim, Khayyam’s father, and how he died at thirty-five, when his son was nine years of age. But more than a biological orphan, Lacroix makes of Khayyam a metaphysical orphan, an exceptional figure who was unable to find his master in this life: ‘Orphan of father, orphan of God, child of chaos, Omar Khayyam behaved as a man without example except the one he was inventing for himself’ (p.31). Whether Khayyam was an orphan at an early age or not is hardly the point: it was this supposed proximity that led to a literary encounter. Most sequences on Khayyam’s life make sense when they are considered as identification with the narrator/author. For example, Lacroix himself met a poetess who was very much like Schahine; also, he had a view on drinking as destiny and as an instrument to gauge a man’s strength, then he stopped drinking, as Khayyam did. The novel

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should thus be read in terms of the confrontation between biography and autobiography. This is why it is interesting that characters are constructed as dyads: Khayyam reflects the narrator and Avicenna mirrors Guy Debord (Lacroix’s model). I suggest that this doubling accounts for a twinning of French and Iranian characters, and is representative of the whole dynamics of the book towards the welcoming of alterity through the mythobiographical genre. Lacroix’s writing process is very close to what Louis-Combet has called ‘mythobiography’ to characterize his own texts. The traditional biographical pact is subverted, as Lacroix affirms that his aim is to fill the gaps in the biography. The text is thus not a biographical quest, founded on objectivity, but the borrowing of certain traits of the historical character to draw Lacroix’s own biography. Louis-Combet uses the same process to draw mythobiographies of historical and mainly mythical characters such as Catholic saints. In the postscript to the new edition of Marinus et Marina, he states: I suddenly understood that the romantic and hagiographic framework of early Christian times offered me, with its shadows and light, a projection screen for both history and my own being. [ . . . ] In this moment the directing principle for mythobiography was, for the main part, formulated: a fictive text, inspired by a legendary or mythological biography, revealing the historical existence of the narrator, writer or subject of the text, not so much inspired as inhaled by the narrative, confronting it as both fictional character and as witness, while never forgetting who is master of the work and holds responsibility for its aesthetic qualities.37 Because of Khayyam’s mythical status in the French imagination, the mythobiographical status of Lacroix’s text is appropriate. Khayyam has been an important Persian figure in the French imagination for centuries, and the lack of information on him has not been a deterrent to this construction. Lacroix invests himself in the life of Khayyam and inserts in the text his own paradigms. It is not an invented life, but more a life reconstructed and recomposed. Lacroix’s short hybrid

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narration appears both erudite and based in biography, and mythobiography appears as a paradigm of hybridity. Because Lacroix had an encounter with Khayyam and saw himself in his traits, he did not try to create a background for him, nor to assert that he had found the essence of the character. He filled the gaps of Khayyam’s life by writing his own life into them. Le cure-dent thus appears as a paradigmatic example of a book that refers to an Other as an alter: Lacroix is truly the alter ego of Khayyam and vice versa. Because he both projects himself into Khayyam and interiorises the figure, his portrait is the subjective drawing of a man, neither a hero nor a mystic. It is a non-picturesque text on a Persian figure, with a Persian setting, and far from the orientalist interdiscourse. The subject is Khayyam as an initiator and a twin. The idea is not to give a truthful representation of Khayyam nor of Lacroix but to build a relationship to oneself less indulgent than traditional autobiographies, through the depiction of Khayyam in his earthly qualities. It is interesting that there are few mentions of the Rubbaiyat, and only one quote in the novel, which Lacroix admitted he had taken from Guy Debord’s movie In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.38 Thus, the only quote from Khayyam appears through the prism of Debord, and not through the traditional Western references to the English translation by Fitzgerald or to the Epicurean tradition. The text thus distances itself from the orientalist intertext attached to the Quatrains. It looks in another direction: Khayyam as an alter ego, all the more challenging in that the poet is a preferred figure of French imagination and, as such, a crystallisation of many clichés. I would suggest there is no fascination for Khayyam as an exotic figure on the part of Lacroix; he has chosen a man to whom he felt close and his being Persian and a renowned poet was of little consequence. This is demonstrated by the fact that Lacroix portrays Khayyam as an ordinary man and scarcely refers to his poetry. This chapter has demonstrated that the French and Persian texts studied offered alter representations of the Other thanks to their hybrid literary characteristics. Because the genres are hybrid and not inscribed into the orientalist/occidentalist forms of the earlier chapters, and because topics are varied and not directed at educating the reader,

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a greater textuality and thus a relative understanding of the Other is achieved, partly by making the Other closer, like an alter ego. He or she is not the distant Other of orientalist historical narratives but can be a neighbour and chosen as a friend. Despite the different a priori aesthetic evaluations for the French and Persian literary systems, the assessment of textuality according to the distance from the immediate intertextual and interdiscursive references is effective and it is possible to define creative value in these texts according to the image given to the Other.

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CONCLUSION

In this book, I have not judged texts according to their literary value, but rather assessed their images according to their originality relative to interdiscourses. This assessment has led me to an understanding of what constitutes textuality within the contemporary French and Iranian contexts. Textuality seems to be present in only three trends of writings: Persian novels in French (Chapter 5), French narratives on Iran as an alter ego (Chapter 5), and some of the Persian literature of exile (Chapter 4). In the remaining eight trends, discourses of the doxa are prevalent, which renders the possibility of literary originality difficult. By a process of elimination, some texts show their originality relative to an interdiscourse and an intertext: this is why I have described them as textual. The originality of my analysis lies in the fact that I come to such a conclusion after a demonstration of this elimination process and an analysis of trends representing alius and alter forms of the Other, rather than positing it as an aesthetic hypothesis. I do not consider that this position diminishes the possibility of literature to be a counter-discourse. Literature gains from being studied as a discourse, and from the analysis of its creation and reproduction of types: not only because the knowledge thus achieved is valuable in itself, but also because types are essential elements to apprehend cultural history and broader national issues. Moreover, my analysis in the last chapter, concerned with hybrid French and Persian texts, shows that literature sometimes appear as a counter-discourse, as it resists orientalist, occidentalist, or even exilic discourses. As such, the very existence of these few texts of resistance is a counter-argument to Edward Said’s thesis that Europeans are ontologically unable to represent the

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oriental Other as anything else than an alius. I have shown here that it is only that they do not do so frequently. I have contributed in this book to the theoretical apparatus of imagology by linking it to Northrop Frye’s typological work – a link which had surprisingly not been made in previous studies of literary images. I have shown how they can be used as complementary readings and adapted to European academic research. This combination has helped me to focus on the potential for the theoretical framing of imagology, which is traditionally not seen as a methodology as such, but as a reading practice. My other theoretical contribution to imagology was to insist on the reader’s horizon of expectation: I have argued that in all texts the form, and especially the genre, were part of the discourse. As the genre is a model including canonical works, the choice of a genre implies a contract between the writer and the reader; hence I have implemented a systematic dialectical reading between text, writer, and audience. Taking into consideration the writing process, as well as the reading process, rather than only the final product, was one of the assets of my analysis: it is thanks to this dialectic that I was able to assess images in relation not only to the interdiscourse but also to the targeted reader, the genre, and the writer’s purpose. In terms of knowledge, this book is a contribution to the growing body of research on the question of image within national contexts. Since literary texts relate not only to society at large, but also to literary traditions and to individual writing processes, their study brings plural issues to the fore. The specific literary issue of image is an indicator that offers valuable insights into the workings of a society and its literary and non-literary imagination, and that furthers the understanding of larger cultural phenomena. The precise and exhaustive study of mutual images has illustrated the predominance of clichés associated with the representation of the Other. In this context of national representations, literature happens only when images are deliberately complicated, when the simple opposition between Self and Other no longer obtains. The specificity of my research has been to insist on the study of these images in their mutual aspect. I have argued that both sides need to be studied in order to arrive at a clear picture of the processes of Othering and to counterbalance one-sided

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Eurocentric tendencies. Although Iran was never colonised by France, or indeed by any other Western power, despite being under British and Russian influence, the history of their relations appears in contemporary texts within a post-colonial paradigm. It is thanks to the use of a post-colonial reading that I could achieve this balance, by defining ‘post-colonial’ within the context of Franco-Iranian relations, to which the classic works by Homi Bhabha could not be applied systematically, given that the countries considered do not have a shared colonial history. I have assembled and analysed an important and tentatively exhaustive corpus of texts. This required much searching in order to locate and access the texts themselves, as well as extensive reading, including not only the nearly eighty works of the corpus, but many that did not fit into this study, in addition to the secondary reading. Whilst the texts were usually not immensely rewarding as reading experiences in themselves, their rather low aesthetic value probably helped me to achieve a balanced distance that I might not have been able to maintain if reading texts closer to my own taste. I also conducted many interviews with researchers, translators and French and Iranian embassy personnel on issues linked to Franco-Iranian relations, contemporary literature in both countries, and literary theory. I further held several interviews with writers to discuss their texts. Appendix 2 contains a list of people I have personally interviewed, some on multiple occasions, in Paris, London or Tehran. My findings on French and Iranian mutual images are centred on the issue of the prevalence of orientalist and occidentalist interdiscourse. I have emphasised the multiple sites of contemporary orientalism, stressing that far from being a one-way process informing French views of Iran, orientalism has been re-appropriated by Iranian writers in France, as shown in the second chapter, or could be combined with a feminist outlook, as shown in the first chapter. As well as using orientalism as a versatile element, I have attempted as far as possible to subvert binaries between Self/Other and Occident/Orient, in that they tend to reproduce a discourse of domination (the latter element invariably being subordinated to the former).1 However, most of the texts analysed pointed to the fact that this scholarly stand is not necessarily

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in line with actual literary production, which does not describe complex characters nor delve into descriptions of land and people as more than sketches. In the early stages of this research, I found myself debating as to how knowledge of one country would impinge on how it is perceived, where clearly the point was not to think of this knowledge as true or false according to the realities of the given country. I have frequently argued in this book that imagology precisely avoids this pitfall by considering the image both in its own right and within its discursive context. Thus, the idea that Iran would know more about France or vice versa is not linked to the idea of more adequate representation, but to lessened abstraction and idealisation in the representation itself. This book demonstrates the causal link between the post-colonial character of the discourse and the difficulty for French and Iranian writers to bypass clichés. Since this characteristic would exist in different degrees in other texts, it is an all the more dominant process in the descriptive works studied in this book. The precise study of images has led me to the conclusion that the degree of knowledge, or indeed ignorance, of one nation on the other was not directly transcribed into the texts. Other strategies came into play, and the main quantity to be measured was the level of adherence to the intertext and the interdiscourse. Iranian writers in France faced the double challenge of having to situate themselves vis-à-vis French and Iranian intertext and interdiscourse. There is a temporal dichotomy in the fact that, although French writers are interested in the Persian empire and pre-modern Iran, some also deal with contemporary Iran, while the opposite is not the case. There is no contemporary prose fiction produced by Iranian writers, either in exile or based in Iran, dealing with pre-modern France. This is in line with the post-colonial argument that the interest of countries such as Iran in Western countries is primarily linked to a desire for modernity, and that often the genealogy of this modernity is not taken into account. On the other hand, countries like France produce intellectual works that keep a focus of interest on all periods of Iranian history for post-colonial purposes. Hegemony is achieved through this continuous knowledge of the Other. However,

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to nuance this idea in relation to the quantitative data, the findings show that, leaving aside texts written by Iranians in exile, French writers have produced more images on Iran than vice versa: there are twenty French texts on Iran, and fifty-seven Iranian texts on France, but only six of these are by Iranians within Iran. I do not think this gap in production would be linked to a repression of creativity by the Iranian regime. These simple figures express, in my view, a change in world power relations: France is no longer an attractive literary topic for Iranians, although it remains an object of discourse because of the post-colonial situation of mass exile. This lack of interest by Iranians within Iran nuances the post-colonial idea that France has imposed its hegemony on literary imaginations, as a dominating nation. In the course of the twentieth century, France seems to have lost its status in Iran, whereas Iran still appears as a marvellous, mysterious and frightening land, and in some cases, as an alter ego, in the French literary imagination. Another important finding is the description of the mechanisms underlying Franco-Iranian cultural relations. The hypothesis at the core of Iranian studies is often that the two countries have primarily interacted through their cultures. Through text analysis, I have shown in detail the basis on which this hypothesis rests, and demonstrated that, despite the evidence of a cultural exchange, other mechanisms are also at stake in Franco-Iranian relations, including orientalist/occidentalist and post-colonial relations of power. I have been able to demonstrate this precisely because of my focus on the specific question of the image. Representations as alius and alter are not mutually exclusive; rather, they complement each other and work dialectically within a society. In Iran, the representation of France as the land of the arts and laws complements the opposite image of the country as decadent and soulless. In France, the representation of Iran as a country heavily compromised by religious fanaticism complements the picture of a glorious and sophisticated civilisation. While the interplay of these general images is not specific to Iran and France, I have shown how the two countries have formed and framed detailed specific representations, and demonstrated how they were shaped.

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I would like to conclude by making some remarks on the impact of this book, the most important one being the impact on FrancoIranian relations. I hope that my findings will raise awareness of the mechanisms of stereotyping and Othering among French and Iranian people, and might lead to the lessening of essentialism in our relations to the Other and to a heightened acceptance of alterity. This is why I have applied my literary analysis to both France and Iran as well as to the contemporary period. I hope this has made my work immune from reiteration of orientalist and occidentalist essentialisms. By focusing on the dialectic between text and context, I have also tried to avoid the problems linked to textualism. I have argued that the issue of essentialism should shift from the question of its existence to the issue of its recognition and analysis. This book has been an attempt to analyse and describe essentialist processes in detail, so as to lessen them in both the scholarly and everyday world by the understanding of their mechanisms.

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APPENDIX 1 LIST AND SUMM ARY OF TEXTS

Orientalist historical novels Ghislaine Schoeller’s Marie d’Ispahan is summarised and close-read in the first chapter. Sauver Ispahan by Jean-Christophe Rufin tells the adventures of JeanBaptiste Poncet, an apothecary, and his family in Isfahan in the eighteenth century. While Jean-Baptiste has to leave Isfahan in search of a friend in the Caucasus and Central Asia, the Afghans besiege Isfahan. Poncet’s family is saved from the invaders but Isfahan will never recover. Poncet was a real-life character who wrote his own memoirs. Le soleil de la Perse by Guy Rachet is the life-story of king Cyrus, as told by a storyteller walking with a caravan towards Susa. It describes his reign, but most of all recounts his love stories. It is an orientalist epic in a romantic tone, based on historical sources, especially Herodotus. Roxane l’éblouissante, le dernier amour d’Alexandre by Joséphine Dedet is the first-person narration of the love of Roxana for Alexander. It is an intimate account of the life of the hero through the eyes of one of his wives, based on both historical sources and the legends surrounding the character of Roxana.

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Avicenne ou la route d’Ispahan by Gilbert Sinoué is the fictionalised biography of Avicenna, describing his roving life from one court to the other on the quest for knowledge, and his positions as vizier and doctor. His disciple El-Jozjani tells the story after his death. Avicenna is described as a libertine, and his adventures with women, especially with Yasmina, are widely narrated. Louison ou l’heure exquise by Fanny Deschamps is the story of a clever and beautiful woman in eighteenth-century France, in the form of a romance describing her love affairs with noblemen as well as with a handsome Persian. I do not include in this trend the texts by cosmopolitan writers who belong to the French writing tradition, as my aim is to focus on French writers within a national perspective. Francophone writers have contributed to writings on Iran, especially Amin Maalouf, whose books are always on the best-sellers list (Samarcande; Les jardins de lumière).

Travel writing on Iran Bernard Ollivier’s Longue marche is close-read and summarised in the first chapter. Chantal Vervaet’s Voyage en Iran: des yeux bleus sous le tchador is the guidebook of a woman who travelled to Iran through a tour-operator. It is a practical text meant for potential travellers, as well as a reflection on the sadness that she felt surrounded her in Iran. Gilles Lanneau’s Trente oiseaux face au soleil is the journal of a committed man who has travelled for twenty-five years in countries that are predominantly Muslim. Iran forms an important part of his text and is seen in a positive way, in opposition to the American way of life and American imperialism. Michel Drancourt’s Les nouvelles lettres persanes is a multiform text, in which the narrator imagines a present-day Usbek in contemporary France. It is the narration of his journey to France and his vision of it from the standpoint of a modern Iranian coming to France on business and looking at the country to understand how best to further his projects.

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Nicolas Rousseau’s Petits tableaux persans. Je t’écris d’Iran is the epistolary journal of a man who visits Iran as a tourist in 2002, and then returns in 2003 because he feels the need to be more realistic about his first enthusiastic experience. He recounts his travels and encounters to his imaginary lover waiting for him in France. Stéphane Dudoignon’s Voyage au pays des baloutches is the travel guide of a Frenchman, recounting his travel to Baluchistan as a researcher on Sunni Muslims, and explaining the situation of the province at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is a didactic ethnographic account of contemporary Baluchistan, recalled in a humorous tone. In addition to these, many Silk Road narratives pass through Iran: a few examples are Julien Delpech and Jacques Von Polier’s Davaï, sur les routes de l’Eurasie ; Philippe Valéry’s Par les sentiers de la Soie, à pied jusqu’en Chine ; Gérard Pasquet’s Ma route de la Soie, d’Erevan à Samarcande. In other narratives, Iran is part of a larger picture of the Middle East: Olivier Weber’s Le grand festin de l’Orient; or Central Asia: Alain Dugrand’s Les cendres de l’empire and Antoine de Changy and Célina AntomarchiLamé’s L’appel de la steppe. Some pass through Iran on their world tour, like Benoît Quignard’s De Beyrouth . . . à Bali. These journeys may be done by walking, cycling, driving, or on horseback. In these texts, Iran is usually a place of transit and does not take up more than a few pages – hence I have provided only a few examples and did not tend to exhaustiveness.

New orientalist narratives Chahdortt Djavann’s Comment peut-on être français? is analysed in detail in the second chapter. Ladane Azernour’s, Les larmes de l’exil. L’Iran confisqué, is a memoir recounting the various exiles of the Azernour family, to the Soviet Union, to Algeria, then to France. A third of the novel recounts Ladane’s adolescent years in revolutionary Iran. A significant number of translations from the English add to the new orientalist trend on the French literary market. I include them here

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especially on account of Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter, the book (and later film) which in my view started the wave of new orientalism in the West. These books in English translated into French cannot be ignored because of their interaction with French texts, especially because of the intertextual reference to Not Without My Daughter. One can cite among these translations from the English, Marina Nemat’s Prisonnière à Téhéran and Susan Azadi’s Fugitive.

Counter-narratives on Iran Nahal Tajadod’s Passeport à l’iranienne and Marjane Satrapi’s Persépolis are analysed in the second chapter. Sara Yalda’s Regard persan is the autobiographical novel of a journalist writing for the newspaper Le Figaro who returns to Iran after twentyseven years in France, where she arrived aged eight. It is the expression of the rebirth of a woman who had voluntarily forgotten most of her Iranian identity and who decides to face it by returning to her place of origin. This coming back also represents for the author a possibility to offer an alternative image of Iran, depicted through its daily-life situations. It is a first novel, written by a journalist under the form of ‘return narrative’, and may be compared to its more numerous counterparts in the United States, such as Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran. Naïri Nahapétian’s crime novel Qui a tué l’ayatollah Kanuni? is set in Iran in 2005: after living most of his life in France, the protagonist, Narek, goes to his parents’ country to cover the presidential elections and is involuntarily caught up in the murder of an ayatollah. The criminal plot is thin, serving merely as a prop for the narration focused on the depiction of today’s Iran and the explanation of the power games and social realities characterising the country. It is a novel and not an autobiography, yet by all other criteria belongs to the genre of counter-narratives on Iran. The first novel written by this journalist, it has been widely reviewed and positively received by the French press as a first Iranian crime novel – although more accurately it is one of the first crime novels written by a francophone writer, and thus accessible to the French public.

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Ali Reza Sadry Alai’s two-volume Les jumeaux de la révolution (only the first volume of which has been published), is a historical novel recounting the Revolution through the life of a couple for whom France represents both knowledge (the main character studies medicine there) and liberty.

Autobiographies of suffering Sorour Kasmaï’s La vallée des aigles is discussed in the second chapter. Mahindokht’s La vie d’une Iranienne au 20è siècle is the homodiegetic narration of an Iranian princess, describing the misfortunes of her life and how she survived them. The text focuses on the important episodes of her life in Iran and in exile, but does not make any direct reference to the broader Iranian context. Raphaël Djavani’s L’enfant du blé is the political autobiography of an exMujaheddin-e khalq, born in a poor Azerbaijani peasant family, narrating his involvement with the movement in the Iranian countryside and in Iraq and his subsequent falling away from it in France. Tabib Hibat’s Téhéran-Paris. Résistant en Iran, innovateur social en France is the autobiography of an important member of the Fedayin-e khalq (a Marxist revolutionary group), exiled in France after the Revolution. He describes his work as a social worker in the suburbs of Paris, and refers to his engagement in Iran. Nocturne iranien. Mémoires d’exil du colonel Bidgoli Rad, de l’armée de l’air impériale iranienne was written by Claudine Monin-Krijan to narrate the memories of this important member of the Iranian imperial army. As such, it is an example of testimonio, a narrative written by another than the speaking subject, and whose author is the writing subject.1 It is based on the discussions Monin-Krijan had in French with Bidgoli Rad, and written in the first person; the last part focuses on Rad’s escape from Iran with his family in 1983 and on the process of adaptation to life in France. Azadée Nichapour’s Pour l’amour d’une langue. Lettre ouverte d’une immigrée ‘intégrée’ au Président de la République et aux Français is a letter

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written by this francophone poet in the context of the French debate on national identity as the testimony of an exile, describing the process of the author’s integration into French society.

Idealistic narratives on France Zoya Pirzad’s ‘Per Lashez’ and ‘Adat mikonim are described in the third chapter. I have mentioned that I could not catalogue all occurrences of references to France since some texts do not give more than a few paragraphs on France. Pirzad’s texts are a good example of this brief mention of France as an ideal.

Definitions of the Iranian nation Kafeh-ye Naderi by Reza Qeissariyeh is analysed in detail in the third chapter. Sorraya dar eghma (Sorraya in a Coma) by Esmail Fassih is a novel with a heterodiegetic narrator. The protagonist, Jalal Aryan, leaves his native Khuzestan, during the war with Iraq, for Paris, where he has been asked by his sister to take care of his young niece, Sorraya, who has had an accident and is in a coma. His visit is an occasion to meet old friends who left the country after the Revolution, as well as Leila Azadeh, his former lover. The novel expands on the circle of Iranian exiles in Paris, with their endless debates, broken lives, and ruptures of creativity, which both attract and repel Jalal. Iranian exiles in Paris refer to themselves as ‘the lost generation’. Sorraya appears in the novel as a metaphor for Iran and Iranians, and it is striking that she never awakes. The book was translated into English by the author, who also wrote a preface insisting on the metaphorical aspect of the coma. It is a criticism of Iranians’ failure to use exile as a creative device. Instead, exile only leads them to self-pity, according to Fassih, who has also argued this point in other places: ‘Intellectuals are the rare birds of Iran. They can sing only at a certain fixed temperature, given certain fixed foods and drinks. Otherwise they fly West.’2

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Hushang Golshiri’s Ayeneh-ha-ye dar dar (Folding Mirrors) is an autobiographical novel recounting the journey of a writer, Ebrahim, to Europe, mainly France and Germany, in the 1980s. He is introduced into literary circles and reads his texts to Iranian exiles. He also has a chance encounter with his first love, who reminds him of his childhood years. It is a critical account of the circles of intellectuals the author meets in Europe, especially in Paris.

Occidentalist narratives Hassan Purmansuri’s ‘Arus-e faransavi, ‘arus-e kuhestan is analysed in the third chapter.

Persian literature of exile I have summarised the three short stories by Goli Taraqi close-read for this trend in the fourth chapter. Reza Qassemi’s Hamnava’i-ye shabaneh-ye orkestr-e chub-ha (Night Symphony for Wood Orchestra), translated into French by Harmonie nocturne, is one of the best-received novels in the Persian literature of exile. It has been popular in Iran, where it received the Golshiri award for best first novel in 2002, as well as in France, with positive reviews in Le Monde and other major newspapers. This is a fantastic novel, based on parallel plots: a murder in a Parisian building, and the daily life of Iranian exiles under the roof of the same building. Life grows progressively more unreal as the narration unfolds, with characters’ identities blurring and shading into one another. Exile transforms vision, while the narrator becomes uncertain of the veracity of his narration. It is also a meta-novel, with the main character writing a novel resembling the one we are reading. Hamid Sadr, ‘Nameh’ (Letter), published in several anthologies including in Dar tab’id. 23 dastan-e kutah-ye irani (In exile, 23 Iranian short stories), is a short story narrated from the point of view of an Iranian man and describing the difficulties of exiles in Paris. It uses another

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Iranian exile character as an example for the loss experienced by exiles in the French capital. It features one of the recurring literary device characteristic of Persian exile literature, the use of analepses. Here, analepses are centred on the narrator’s hometown, the city of Rasht. Sadr himself is exiled in Austria. Ali Erfan’s many texts have been written in Persian and immediately translated into French, but they have not been published in Persian. I consider most of his writings (Le dernier poète du monde, La 602è nuit, La route des infidèles) as part of the Persian literature of exile. Only the last work mentioned is a novel; the others are short story collections. All collections contain at least one short story set in France, and the novel has as a central character a French architect. Kamran Behnia’s short novel ‘Arefi dar Paris (A mystic in Paris) portrays the mystical journey of an Iranian man in Paris, who enters in dialogue with Nasser Khosrow. One of Mahshid Amirshahi’s novels is concerned with representations of France: Dar safar (Away). It is a homodiegetic narration told by a female character, set in Paris just after the 1979 Revolution and narrating the life of Iranian exiles in France. Madaran va dokhtaran (Mothers and Daughters) comprises four volumes describing the lives of the members of a family over several generations. In part of the third volume and in most of the fourth volume, Amirshahi deals in detail with the subject of exile. Chahla Chafiq, a sociologist working on women’s issues in Islam, has written two collections of short stories Jadeh, meh va . . . (The path, the fog and . . .) and Sug (Mourning), which have been translated into French and collected as Chemins et brouillard. The first part of Chemins et brouillard is concerned with various narrations in Tehran and in Paris, while the second part is the first-person account of the loss of the narrator’s daughter. The loss described in the second part echoes the sense of loss evoked in the first part, which is concerned with the exile’s feelings. Shahrokh Meskub’s Ruz-ha dar rah (the title is translated into French on the front cover as Sur le chemin des jours) is an autobiographical diary in two volumes, dealing mostly with the writer’s years of exile in Paris,

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and describing his family life, meetings with friends in different parts of the world, including Iran, and feelings of sorrow. In a collection including three short stories by Meskub translated into French called Partir, rester, revenir, the first story, ‘Mossafer nameh’ (Letter from abroad) and the last one ‘Safar dar khab’ (Nightly journey) are both concerned with feelings of exile and critical representations of France. Hossein Dowlatabadi’s Istgah-e Bastil (Bastille station) is a short story collection in which the title piece describes an Iranian couple’s failure to adapt to life in France. Javad Javaheri’s short story collection Rokh (Face) comprises two short stories of exile in Paris in a first-person narration. His Kucheh-ha-ye mavazi (Parallel alleys) consists of two short stories, each portraying one French character, respectively a flying instructor and the manager of the garage where the narrator works. M.F. Farzaneh has written several novels and short stories in the same vein as Sadeq Hedayat, his mentor. Farzaneh left Iran at the age of twenty and spent sixty years in France working as a writer, film producer and businessman.3 Some of his short stories are concerned with aspects of France, especially recounting the 1960s–70s when he was mixing with intellectuals in cafés, for example, ‘Bibi kukumeh’ (The Night-Bird) and ‘Shab-e zendedari’ (New Year’s Eve Party), as well as his Ashna’i ba Sadeq Hedayat (Encounter with Sadeq Hedayat), which is a biography of Hedayat through the eyes of the young Farzaneh and describes their meetings in Tehran and in Paris. Many of Tahereh Alavi’s short stories in the collection Zendegi-ye man dar seshanbeh-ha etefaq mioftad are concerned with scenes of loneliness and loss set in the city of Paris. Their titles are: ‘Shabi-ye Charli’ (Like Charlie), ‘Jenab-e sarhang’ (Mister Colonel), ‘Khahar-e rohani-ye man’ (Dear Nun), ‘Halat-e avval’ (Original Position), ‘Kisseh-ye kuchak-e charmi-ye avizan az kamar’ (The Small Leather Bag Hanging by the Belt). The narration is told by a homodiegetic narrator, who describes scenes in Paris, encounters with the French and with foreigners (e.g. a nun, a young Greek man). Tahereh Alavi (a writer I have so far been unable to locate) spent many years in France, especially during her student years: this collection is inspired by her experience of exile.

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Homa Sayar’s La pierre philosophale is the only bilingual work in my corpus. It comprises several philosophical tales on the narrator’s state of exile in Paris, in a poetical first-person voice. It narrates scenes of everyday life in Paris, encounters with French people, and reflections on exile and on the homeland, as embodied by the narrator’s mother. The following works are written directly in French, sometimes with the help of native French speakers. Ali Reza Sadry Alai has written a short story collection, Six nouvelles cruelles, in which the story ‘Solitude’ deals with the love between an old Iranian painter and a young French girl. Sans te dire adieu by Mariam Sachs tells the story of a married Iranian woman in exile in Paris who falls in love with a young Russian man she sees in a restaurant and later takes him to the hospital when he is hit by a car in the street. The story details the protagonist’s conflicting feelings and gives flashbacks of her early life. Maria Adle’s Tous mes jours sont des adieux is the story of three generations of women from the Adle family travelling between France, England and Iran, and the narration of their journeys between East and West. It is a family autobiography in which Adle also situates herself. Mehdi Dadsetan’s Passagers des trois mondes is the autobiographical narrative of an Iranian exile. Closely focused on the protagonist’s love story with a Lebanese woman in France, it depicts at length his situation in France and the difficulties of integration, as well as giving detailed insights into the Iranian Revolution. In L’espèce errante by Afsaneh Eghbal, the homodiegetic narrator attempts to uncover the story of her twin sister, Alissa. The sisters had been separated since childhood, the unnamed twin living in Iran and Alissa being raised in France by their Iranian father and her French stepmother and then leaving for Africa, where she shared the destiny of two fighters resisting the central power, Zabou and Khalil. The use of exile and separation is complicated by the presence of a third space, Africa, which appears as the true home.

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The Hourglass by Mahasti Shahrokhi is a short story narrating the tensions between Iranians who left Iran, in this case for Paris, and the ones who are coming for only a short visit. It has been translated in an English anthology but is not published in its original Persian version. Shusha Guppy’s A Girl in Paris, although written in English, has the same function as the texts of exile written in French. It is an autobiography of the young Shusha arriving in Paris, describing her singing lessons, her loneliness in the city, but also her encounters within the artistic milieu of the 1950s (Prévert, Camus, Sidney Bechet).

Persian novels in French Sorour Kasmaï’s Le cimetière de verre is analysed in detail in the last chapter. Ali Erfan’s Adieu Ménilmontant is the first-person narrative of an Iranian refugee in the famous émigré neighbourhood of Paris, Ménilmontant. It is the joint narration of the protagonist’s integration into neighbourhood life and the account of other inhabitants’ lives, in a mixture of realism and fantasy. While deepening his acquaintance of his shopkeeper neighbour, he realises that he is becoming her accomplice in her crimes against the Jews during the Second World War. The ending is obscure and violent. Ali Erfan is the Iranian author most published and translated in France. Some of his other texts are studied in the category of the Persian literature of exile. Fariba Hachtroudi’s J’ai épousé Johnny à Notre-Dame-de-Sion is an autofiction. It recounts the adolescent years of the Iranian narrator in a Parisian Catholic pension in the mid-1960s, in a light form, concerned more with the problems of adolescence than with identity issues. Hachtroudi has written many others texts in French, all dealing with her political involvement along the Mujaheddin-e khalq, and then distanced herself from them. Amir Parsa has written several hybrid poetic texts and one hybrid prose text called Kobolierrot, a modern epic focused on the eponymous character and set in various spaces. He has also written theoretical

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reflections on his practice, concerned with hybridity, polyglottism and exile. He has lived in the United States for several years. Javad Javaheri’s Le soupir de l’ange is a love story between an Iranian man and an American woman. They spend their last moment together in Brittany before her departure. They are unable to root themselves and to depend on each other, both having fled their countries and their difficult childhoods. Javaheri has written short stories about his exile in Persian, before this first novel, written directly in French. Serge Rezvani’s Le testament amoureux is the autobiography of a famous composer and painter of Russian and Iranian origins, who reflects on his childhood, his love for his wife Lula, and his family, especially his Iranian magician father. Dariush Shayegan’s Terre de mirages is an epistolary novel featuring two characters, Marianne, a French woman, and Kaveh, an Iranian man. It has won the ADELF prize of the Association of French Authors. After a love relationship lasting several years and taking place both in France and Iran, Marianne leaves Kaveh, deciding that the cultural distance between them is too big. The novel consists of the letters they exchange over the few months after this decision, as they analyse their relationship and the difficult problem of adapting to the Other. Shayegan is known for philosophical works on Iranian identity and Iran’s relation to the West.4 I also include in this category the long short story by Hossein Amir Rouhi, entitled ‘Théocoma’, included in his collection Fantasmes. The homodiegetic narrator called Jean, a young Iranian man who has taken a French name, marries Julie, an amazingly beautiful Iranian woman who has also chosen a French name. As Julie, who had never really loved him, becomes a famous actress, Jean divorces her. Through his French friends and the owner of the restaurant where he works, he is gradually introduced to the Templars sect, which attracts extraordinary figures, whatever their social condition. The story is realistic and precise in its descriptions of France, as Jean is very curious about French arts and history. Born in 1926 in Tehran, Amir Rouhi has lived all his life between Tehran and Paris.

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Narratives on Iran as an alter ego Jean-Yves Lacroix’s Le cure-dent is analysed in detail in the last chapter. Chahrouz le voyant by René-Jean Clot is the embedded narrative of the life of a young Iranian man, as recounted by his French teacher. During his two stays in Paris, Ali Chahrouz tells his story to a teacher: on the first meeting, he relates how, on his father’s death, he has inherited eight rugs, the most marvellous in the world, in which he has learnt to read the future. He loses all the rugs but one in various circumstances. The second meeting is devoted to the narration of his relationship with his brother, a fanatical Muslim who became a minister under the Islamic regime. Whereas the storyline might give the idea of a stereotypical fantastic and exotic narration, clichés on Persian carpets, the magic of the Orient and the fanaticism of Islamists are subverted by the hybridity of form and of images. The character of Chahrouz and minor characters are complex, and Iran is described in precise terms. L’année de l’éclipse by Philippe de la Génardière is the heterodiegetic narration of a love story between a middle-aged French man and a young Iranian woman in Paris. Basile is unable to recover from his divorce and too dispirited to write his book when he meets Shadi, a would-be Iranian opera-singer who has always lived in Paris. Their story lasts for a few months, until she decides to go to Iran. Upon her return, the lovers finally separate, but this encounter with the Orient as embodied by Shadi has reconciled Basile with humanity. Battue, by the same author, is an earlier story, written in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. Ismaël, a French cellist, travels to Shiraz to play at a music festival, where he meets Shorée, the young woman who acts as his guide in Iran. Their love story, set in Iran and in France, is narrated in the form of cantos. It leads to many descriptions of Iran and its revolutionary events, as well as Paris. Darius, by Jean Grosjean, is a heterodiegetic poetical narration on the Persian king Darius, a biblical character who questions himself about the God of Israel. It is a philosophical updating of the Book of Daniel,

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who appears in the story as the Jewish secretary of Darius. It embodies the positive representation of Persian kings in the Bible in a poetical prose. Nouvelles lettres persanes. Journal d’un Français à Téhéran by Serge Ginger is the journal of a businessman in Iran, describing his encounter with the country. The journal form is overcome by the narrative of the relationship. ‘Le tailleur de Téhéran’ by Guillemette Resplandy is a short story set in 2002 and narrating the inner dialogue of a tailor who reflects on his cousin’s proposal to join him as an émigré in Los Angeles. The tailor argues that his life is in ‘his’ Tehran, and in the tiny evolutions that Islamic society allows women in terms of dressing. Livrets Cartes Postales ‘Omar Khayyam’ comprises several short stories by French writers on the theme of Khayyam and his Quatrains. The texts are: ‘Amertume et douceur’, by Nicole Yrle; ‘D’un rouge presque noir’, by Florence Rieger; ‘La deuxième vie de Dédé’, by Jean Pézennec; ‘La cave de l’Enfer’, by Bernard Jurth; ‘Un jardin à Nishâpur’, by Corine Pourtau; ‘La robe écarlate’, by Éric Fouassier; ‘Les mots du clos Vougeot’, by Anne Poiré; ‘Au détriment de sa réserve’, by François Bonneau; and ‘Retour’, by Renata Ada Ruata.

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APPENDIX 2 PEOPLE INTERVIEWED IN THE COUR SE OF WR ITING THIS BOOK

Researchers: Abolhassan Najafi, Zia Movahed, Iraj Afshar, Shafi’i Kadkani, Mohammad Eslami Nodushan, Shahrokh Tondrow-Saleh, Tahmuress Sajedi, Mansureh Ettehadieh, Hamid Fulladvand, Javad Tabataba’i, Christophe Balaÿ, Elmira Dadvar, Ali Dehbashi, Nasser Pakdaman, John Gurney, Ehsan Naraqi, Hossein Mir’abeidini, Ramin Kamran, Ali Miransari, Nasser Mohajer, Alexis Nouss, Ali Behdad, Rouhollah Hosseini, Gilbert Lazard. Translators: Media Kashigar, Mariam Askari, Piruz Sayar, Mahshid Nownaholli, Farideh Rava, Tinush Nazmju. Writers: Reza Qeissariyeh, Mahmud Dowlatabadi, Goli Taraqi, Ladane Azernur, Chahla Chafiq, Reza Daneshvar, Dariush Shayegan, Hossein Dowlatabadi, Ali Erfan, M.F. Farzaneh, Jean-Baptiste Para, Jean-Yves Lacroix, Sorour Kasmaï, Alain Lance, Hassan Safdari, MohammadAli Sepanlu, Mahasti Shahrokhi, Nahal Tajadod, Simine Varasteh, Mohsen Yalfani, Philippe de la Génardière. Others: Mohammad-Hossein Abdollahi (Cultural attaché of the Iranian embassy in Paris), Sylvain Fourrière (Cultural attaché of the

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French embassy in Tehran), Ahmad Salamatian (politician and owner of bookshop Le Tiers-mythe in Paris), Bahman Amini (owner of the bookshop Khavaran in Paris), Maryam Mussavi and Armand Gudarzi, translators and employees of the Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle de l’Ambassade de France en Iran. Telephone interviews: Sepideh Farsi (film maker), Kaveh Mirabbassi (translator), Dariush Homayun (Minister of Information and Tourism in Jamshid Amuzegar’s cabinet).

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NOTES

Introduction See for example: Beller, Manfred, and Joep Leerssen. Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey, Studia Imagologica; 13. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. The series ‘Studia Imagologica’, based in Amsterdam, attracts many researchers working on imagology. In France, the method is unified under the leadership of Jean-Marc Moura. For an introduction to French imagology, see: Moura, Jean-Marc. ‘L’imagologie littéraire: essai de mise au point historique et critique’. Revue de littérature comparée 66, no. 3 (1992), and Pageaux, Daniel-Henri. ‘Une perspective d’étude en littérature comparée: l’imagerie culturelle’. Synthesis 8 (1981). 2. Moura, Jean-Marc. L’image du Tiers Monde dans le roman français contemporain. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992. 3. Said, Edward. Orientalism. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage, 1979. 4. This is Rosello’s position on treating bad with bad. Rosello, Mireille. ‘Du bon usage des stéréotypes orientalisants: vol et recel de préjugés anti-Maghrébins dans les années 1990’. L’esprit créateur 34, no. 2 (1994). 5. Doxa can be defined as the ‘ensemble of shared beliefs and opinions that underlie communication and authorize verbal interaction’. Charaudeau, Patrick, and Dominique Maingueneau, eds. Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours. Paris: Seuil, 2002. p.547. See Amossy’s article for a lengthy explanation of the term ‘doxa’: Amossy, Ruth. ‘Introduction to the Study of Doxa’. Poetics Today 23, no. 3 (2002). 6. Daniel-Henri Pageaux notes that stereotype is ‘the maximum reduction of a representation; it gives a minimum form of information for the greatest communication’. Pageaux, Daniel-Henri. ‘Une perspective d’étude en littérature comparée: l’imagerie culturelle’. Synthesis 8 (1981). p.173.

1.

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7. Said. Orientalism. p.20. 8. Freitag, Ulrike. ‘The Critique of Orientalism’. In Companion to Historiography, edited by Michael Bentley. London: Routledge, 1997. p.620. The article makes a good summary of the polemic. 9. Charnay, Jean-Paul. ‘L’Orient: concepts et images’. Paper presented at the XVth colloquium of the Institut de Recherches sur les Civilisations de l’Occident moderne, Paris 1987. 10. Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora. Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. p.7. 11. Behdad, Ali. ‘The Eroticized Orient: Images of the Harem in Montesquieu and His Precursors’. Stanford French Review 13 (1989). 12. Halliday, Fred. ‘“Orientalism” and Its Critics’. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 20, no. 2 (1993). pp.158–59. 13. Sayyid, Bobby. A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism. London: Zed Books, 1997. p.134. Alastair Bonnett challenges the idea that occidentalism came after orientalism, on an action–reaction basis. He argues that China, for example, helped to define the West. The idea is interesting theoretically but too vague to be applied to the context of French orientalism/Iranian occidentalism. Bonnett, Alastair. The Idea of the West: Culture, Politics and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Juan Cole’s articles on Indo-Persian narratives on the West are a good counter-argument to Bonnett, showing that Persian occidentalism was formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under the influence of the West and as a reaction to the Western narrative. Cole, Juan. ‘Invisible Occidentalism: EighteenthCentury Indo-Persian Constructions of the West’. Iranian Studies 25, no. 3 (1992). 14. Scholars have analysed the interest in the West and especially the writings of travelogues by Iranian Qadjar princes to nuance this argument. See for example Adib-Moghaddam, Arshin. ‘A (Short) History of the Clash of Civilizations’. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 21, no. 2 (2008); Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohammad. Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. However, these travelogues have not been used to constitute a discipline. Nematollah Fazeli focuses on the example of Iranian anthropology to show both that it was deeply influenced by Western, and especially French, anthropology, and that it is still restricted to the study of Iran, and not concerned with the study of the West or, for that matter, of any other culture: ‘Iranian anthropologists have mainly ignored other cultures. It seems as if Iranian anthropologists see culture rather as an isolated entity’. Fazeli, Nematollah. Politics of Culture in Iran. Anthropology, Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge, 2006. p.209.

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15. Shadman, Seyyed Fakhroddin. Taskhir-e tamaddon-e farangi. Tehran: n.p., 1948. 16. Boroujerdi, Mehrzad. Iranian Intellectuals and the West. The Tormented Triumph of Nativism. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996. p.13. 17. Naghmeh Sohrabi’s argument in her dissertation is that the date where scholars usually situate the Iranian interest in the West, from the middle of the nineteenth century, is still too early. She demonstrates convincingly that Qajar princes who travelled to Europe did not do so as much to learn about it or meet people but to show themselves in the attires of power. Sohrabi, Naghmeh. ‘Signs Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Persian Travel Literature to Europe’. PhD diss., Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 2005. The literature of the safarnameh has been widely studied but differently understood, especially in its relation to the visited Other. 18. Adib-Moghaddam. ‘A (Short) History of the Clash of Civilizations’. His book elaborates on this topic: Adib-Moghaddam, Arshin. A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism. London: Hurst, 2011. 19. Occidentalism as a negative and essentialist portrayal of the West comes from Buruma and Margalit’s essay, and it is today the most widely received use of occidentalism, especially in the media, though not the one I use, because its definition is too loose. Buruma, Ian, and Avishai Margalit. Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2004. Occidentalism appears in their pamphlet as originating from the West and from counter-Enlightenment discourses, a thesis that Iranians reflecting on the concept in Iran have adopted. Claire Conceison has provided a history of the term in her book on China as a post-colonial space exercising occidentalism. See especially pp.41–67: Conceison, Claire. Significant Other. Staging the American in China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004. 20. An interesting study of such emulative discourse among Arab writers and intellectuals is: El-Enany, Rasheed. Arab Representations of the Occident. New York: Routledge, 2006. 21. Wagner, Tamara Silvia. ‘Emulative Versus Revisionist Occidentalism: Monetary and Other Values in Recent Singaporean Fiction’. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39, no. 73 (2004). p.78. Boroujerdi explains the second form as follows: ‘it renders the “other” opaque and undertakes an essentialist and unabashed criticism of that other while refraining from a harsh scrutiny of its own cherished assumptions’. Boroujerdi. Iranian Intellectuals and the West. p.179. 22. In his study of the image of the West in the Iranian novels of the twentieth century, Mohammad Ghanoonparvar describes several periods. He argues

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24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

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that the novels of the first half of the century give an idealistic and superficial image of the West, while in the second half, because of Western involvement in Iran, the representation is more concrete and less clichéd. This is because Iranians have met Westerners, both in Iran and during their studies in the West. In sum, until the beginning of the twentieth century, Iranians spoke about the West as an object of wonder; only later did the West become a touchstone to evaluate their own society. Ghanoonparvar, Mohammad. In a Persian Mirror. Images of the West and Westerners in Iranian Fiction. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. p.139. Wagner, Tamara Silvia. ‘Occidentalism: Edward Said’s Legacy for the Occidentalist Imaginary and Its Critique’. In Paradoxal Citizenship: Edward Said, edited by Silvia Nagy-Zekmi. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006. p.147. For more on this: Mirsepassi, Ali. ‘Religious Intellectuals and Western Critiques of Secular Modernity’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26, no. 3 (2006). For a theoretical reflection on the invention of tradition: Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Boroujerdi. Iranian Intellectuals and the West. p.14. Al-e Ahmad, Jalal. Plagued by the West. Translated by Paul Sprachman. New York: Caravan Books, 1982. p.73. See also the comparison of three intellectuals on gharbzadegi by Hanson, Brad. ‘The “Westoxication” of Iran: Depictions and Reactions of Behrangi, Al-e Ahmad, and Shariati’. International Journal of Middle East Studies 15, no. 1 (1983). Nabavi, Negin, ed. Intellectual Trends in Twentieth-Century Iran: A Critical Survey. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003; Mirsepassi, Ali. Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; Boroujerdi. Iranian Intellectuals and the West. The notion of intertextuality, although a recent introduction in literary studies, is given several definitions and has led to many theories. It was introduced and coined into French (intertextualité) for the first time by Julia Kristeva, based on her reading of Michael Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism. Roland Barthes, and then Gérard Genette, took up the term, to refer to the presence of elements of other texts within a text, and to define how texts rework each other, are translated and rewoven into different contexts. Kristeva, Julia. Sémiotiké, recherches pour une sémanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1969; Barthes, Roland. ‘Théorie du texte’. In Encyclopaedia Universalis. Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1973; Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes. Paris: Seuil, 1982.

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29. Foucault defines discourse as a system of representation, and takes the term away from its traditional linguistic meaning to link it to power, truth and knowledge. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock, 1972. For Stuart Hall, Foucault understands discourse as ‘a group of statements which provide a language for talking about – i.e., a way of representing – a particular kind of knowledge about a topic. When statements about a topic are made within a particular discourse, the discourse makes it possible to construct the topic in a certain way. It also limits the other ways in which the topic can be constructed.’ Hall, Stuart, and Bram Gieben, eds. Formations of Modernity: Introduction to Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992. p.291. Interdiscursivity plays the same role to discourse as intertextuality plays to text. By the discourse to which the text refers, I understand not only the discourse of the social environment, but also the literary discourse, especially that on genres. There is an interdiscourse between texts and the theoretical reflections on what they are, constituted over the centuries. 30. Maingueneau, Dominique. Le contexte de l’œuvre littéraire: énonciation, écrivain, société. Paris: Dunod, 1993. p.75. 31. Ibid. p.19. 32. I use capitalised forms of Self and Other for the sake of readability. This should not be understood as hypostasis. It is important to remember that the use of the dichotomy between Self and Other is relatively new in literary studies, as it comes from psychoanalysis and especially Melanie Klein’s works. Lowe, Lisa. Critical Terrains. French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. p.22. The main reference used to be to ‘Us’ versus ‘Others’, in a typical tribal perspective. Ferreux, Jean. ‘The Other as an Historical Invention’. In Imagining the Arab Other: How Arabs and NonArabs View Each Other, edited by Tahar Labib Djedidi. London: I.B.Tauris, 2007. pp.3–9. In nation-states, a foreigner is one who has a different nationality, while an Other can be both internal and external. In this study using imagology, the Other is always the foreign Other. 33. One famous example is Iraj Pezeshkshad’s best-selling novel Da’i jan Napoleon, published in 1973 in Tehran and later turned into a popular TV series (in English translation: Pezeshkzad, Iraj. My Uncle Napoleon. Translated by Dick Davis. Washington: Mage, 1996. In French translation, Mon Oncle Napoléon. Translated by Sorour Kasmaï. Paris: Actes Sud, 2010). The book illustrates both the conspiracy theory about the English among Iranians, and the positive influence of France, Napoleon being the name given to the narrator’s uncle, who has great admiration for the emperor and invents stories about his own battles in Napoleon’s army. Pezeshkzad has lived in exile in Paris for many years.

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36.

37. 38.

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For a study of the image of Persia/Iran in French literature: Bonnerot, Olivier. La Perse dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIè siècle. De l’image au mythe. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1988. See also: Hadidi, Javad, and Dominique Carnoy. De Sa’di à Aragon: l’accueil fait en France à la littérature persane (1600–1982). Téhéran: Éditions internationales Alhoda, 1994; and Huré, Jacques. ‘Un siècle de présence iranienne dans le récit français 1872– 1963’ (Des Nouvelles asiatiques au Fou d’Elsa). Luqman 8, no. 1 (1991), as well as a few articles in Luqman on the presence of Iran and the Orient in French texts, including in Pierre Loti and Marcel Proust. The Encyclopedia Iranica’s article on the subject offers an overview, albeit also going no further than Aragon: Duchesne-Guillemin, Jacques. ‘The Image of Persia and Persian Literature among French Authors’. In Encyclopedia Iranica, edited by Ehsan Yarshater. http://www.iranica.com/articles/france-ix, accessed 01/09/10. Hellot-Bellier, Florence. France-Iran, quatre cent ans de dialogue. Leuven, Belgique: Peeters Press, 2007. p.40. French orientalism towards Persia has been mainly dealt with through the study of orientalist figures, such as Arthur de Gobineau, Ernest Renan, and Eugène Flandin. See articles by Tahmuress Sajedi in Persian in Nameh-ye farhangestan. Sami`i, Ahmad, ed. Nameh-ye farhangestan (The Quarterly Journal of Iranian Academy of Persian Language and Literature). Tehran (1995– present), as well as dictionaries of orientalism, especially: Pouillon, François, ed. Dictionnaire des orientalistes de langue française. Paris: Karthala, 2008. Gobineau is widely known in Iran and his fascination for Persia has produced numerous reflections and writings within Iran. His main texts have recently been translated into English under the revealing title: Gobineau and Persia: A Love Story. O’Donoghue, Daniel. Gobineau and Persia: A Love Story. Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2010. See the works by Homa Nateq, especially: Nateq, Homa. Karnameh-ye farhangi-e Farangi dar Iran. 1837–1914). Paris: Khavaran, 1994. Later on, the Lycée Razi, with its French curriculum, was the meeting point for future francophile intellectuals. It still has an alumni page: http://www.razihighschool.com, accessed 22/08/10. Nateq. Karnameh-ye farhangi-e Farangi dar Iran. Richard, Yann. ‘Francophonie-persophonie, destins croisés’. Luqman 37 (2002–03). See also his earlier article: Richard, Yann. ‘Sources françaises pour l’histoire de l’Iran (entre 1918 et 1921)’. Luqman 10, no. 1 (1993). The current Iranian ambassador in Paris, Mehdi Mir Abu Talebi, recalled this aspect in an interview: ‘Safir-e Iran dar Paris: pedaran-e ma qabl az in ke zaban-e englisi biamuzand, zaban-e faranseh ra amukhtand’. Jam-e jam, http://www.shafaf.ir/fa/pages/?cid=25133, accessed 23/08/10.

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39. Bouvier, Nicolas. L’usage du monde. 1st 1963 ed. Paris: Payot, 1992. p.246. 40. Habibi, Mariam. L’interface France-Iran, 1907–1938: une diplomatie voilée. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004. 41. Purjavadi, Nasrollah. ‘Faranseh dar Iran’. Nashr-e Danesh 16, no. 3 (1999). 42. Hadidi and Carnoy. De Sa’di à Aragon. pp.521–22. 43. Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. Voyages de Perse. Paris: Veuve Lepetit, 1810. p.45. 44. Dad, Babak. Khatami dar Paris. Tehran: n.p., 1999. p.50. 45. Hamed Fulladvand expanded on this aspect when I interviewed him in Tehran in May 2009. 46. Balaÿ, Christophe. ‘French Literature in Persia’. In Encyclopedia Iranica, edited by Ehsan Yarshater. http://www.iranica.com/articles/france-x-frenchliterature-in-persia, accessed 01/09/10. There are dozens of dissertations on the influence of French authors on Iranian authors, as one can see in the catalogue of Iranian dissertations at the University of Tehran. 47. Hadidi and Carnoy. De Sa’di à Aragon. 48. Wali Ahmadi offers a good critique of influence studies in the context of Persian literature: Ahmadi, Wali. ‘Exclusionary Poetics: Approaches to the Afghan “other” in Contemporary Iranian Literary Discourse’. Iranian Studies 37, no. 3 (2004). 49. For an enunciation of the link between ‘the soul of Iran’ and ‘the soul of France’: Grousset, René, Henri Massé, and Louis Massignon, eds. L’âme de l’Iran. Paris: Albin Michel, 1951. 50. Richard. ‘Francophonie-persophonie, destins croisés’. 51. See the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov’s statement, given on the occasion of his journey to Iran in 2006, where he had been invited by the Institut Français de Recherches en Iran. On the question of the perception of Iran in the West, he answered: ‘Prejudices exist but I do not think that the vision of Iranians or instead of Iranian society is purely negative. I think there is a curiosity, a respect for a millenary culture, although some distance, that can of course be discussed, exists on certain political choices. [ . . . ] For me, it is precisely this slightly conflicting image that motivates my curiosity and my desire to know Iran better’. Neuve-Eglise, Amélie, and Saeed Kamali Dehghan. ‘Entretien avec Tzvetan Todorov’. La revue de Téhéran (21/10/2006). http://fr.sibegazzade.com/2008/05/entretien-avectzvetan-todorov, accessed 21/12/07. 52. For more on this: Yamauchi, Edwin, and Donald Wiseman. Persia and the Bible. Grand Rapids: Baker B, 1990. The early positive perception of Persians is analysed by Laurence Lockhardt in the chapter Persia as Seen by the West in Arberry, Arthur John. The Legacy of Persia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. He says, for example, that the average Frenchman looks at Persia as a land

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54. 55.

56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61. 62.

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of romance, due to Pétis de la Croix’s famous translations, Mille et un jours, contes persans; to the adventures of Marie Petit in Persia, which were widely known; as well as to Mohammed Reza Beg’s voyage to France. p.355. Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin reminds us that her source was Xenophon’s Cyropedia, in which the king is depicted as a model ruler. DuchesneGuillemin. ‘The Image of Persia and Persian Literature among French Authors’. Yourcenar, Marguerite. Mémoires d’Hadrien. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. p.328. Nietzsche was fascinated by Islam as an ‘affirmative Semitic religion’ (in The Will To Power) and described it as unencumbered by ethics and carrying its philosophy in its actions. Ian Almond has a whole chapter on the subject entitled ‘Nietzsche’s peace with Islam’. Almond, Ian. The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard. London: I.B.Tauris, 2007. For a critique of the works on the Assassins by orientalists, see: Daftary, Farhad. ‘The “Order of the Assassins”: J. Von Hammer and the Orientalist Misrepresentations of the Nizari Ismailis’. Iranian Studies 39, no. 1 (2006). Maalouf, Amin. Samarcande. Paris: JC Lattès, 1988. Frye, Northop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. p.29. I have greatly benefited from the articles on France in the Encyclopedia Iranica, especially the one by Duchesne-Guillemin previously mentioned, and from one bibliography: Abolhamid, A., and Nasser Pakdaman. Bibliographie française de civilisation iranienne, Vol 1–3. Téhéran: Presses Universitaires de Téhéran, 1972–74, which, although focused on an earlier period than the one examined in this study, provided a useful model for the systematic organisation of my research. These included the national libraries in Paris and London and the Dayerat ol-ma`aref-e bozorg-e eslami in Tehran, as well as SOAS library and the Library for Iranian Studies in Acton, London. I have frequently visited the Iranian bookshops in Paris during the three years of this research: Khavaran, Le Tiers-mythe and Lettres persanes. A study on the publishing sector in Iran notes that the yearly turnover in 2001–02 in Iran represents 9 per cent of the French turnover for the same year. Arnold, Jean-Christophe. L’édition en Iran. Enjeux et perspectives de l’adhésion de l’Iran à la Convention de Berne. Paris: Bureau international de l’édition française, 2003. p.9. Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Moura. ‘L’imagologie littéraire: essai de mise au point historique et critique’. pp.285–86.

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63. See for example: Parrinder, Patrick. Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 64. Anderson’s concept of imagined community is that people imagine themselves ‘as a nation’ through the development of cultural processes associated with print-culture. Nationalism, seen as a product of modernity and not as a primordial entity, brought groups of people as members of a single community through an imaginative relationship. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. 65. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Also The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2002.

Chapter 1

How can anybody be Persian?

1. Hourcade, Bernard. ‘Iranian Studies in France’. Iranian Studies 20, no. 2 (1987). 2. Hourcade insists that Montesquieu’s choice of a Persian was not random: ‘In order to mark the identity of the Iranian civilization in contrast with the Semitic or Turkish ones, emphasis has often, in France, been placed upon the Aryan character of the Iranian peoples. It was not by chance that Montesquieu chose a Persian instead of a Turk or an Indian to symbolize the independent foreigner’. Ibid. p.2. 3. Vaziri, Mostafa. Iran as Imagined Nation: The Construction of National Identity. New York: Paragon House, 1993. p.2. Vaziri insists in his study on the nationalist and racist construction of orientalism as a scholarly discipline. 4. Hourcade. ‘Iranian Studies in France’. p.2. 5. This constitution of an Aryan doctrine by orientalists concerned with Iran is studied in detail in the second chapter of Fazeli’s Politics of Culture in Iran. Many Orientalists, following the ‘scientific racism’ dominant in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, privileged Iran as an ‘Aryan’ country above Semites. It is dominant in the works of Arthur de Gobineau or Ernest Renan, who argued that all the achievements of the Muslim world had come thanks to the Aryans. This scientific racism would deeply influence the Aryan idea promoted by Nazi Germany. The Aryan doctrine nuances the orientalist model proposed by Said, based on the idea of a Western superiority on the Semites, but it does not contradict it. The main criticism of the model is valid despite the making of this Aryan link, because it is Iranians who are seen as attached to the European race, not the other way round. 6. Hellot-Bellier. France-Iran, Quatre cent ans de dialogue.

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7. Beeman, William. The ‘Great Satan’ Vs. the ‘Mad Mullahs’, How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2005. p.43. 8. For a criticism of this stand and a good account of the discourse on Islamophobia: Halliday, Fred. ‘“Islamophobia” Reconsidered’. Ethnic and Racial Studies 22, no. 5 (1999). For example: ‘The past provides a reserve of reference and symbol for the present, it does not explain it. The Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683 or the crusades do not explain current politics, they are used by them’. p.895. 9. Zebiri, Kate. ‘The Redeployment of Orientalist Themes in Contemporary Islamophobia’. Studies in Contemporary Islam 10 (2008). p.13. 10. Deltombe, Thomas. L’Islam imaginaire: la construction médiatique de l’islamophobie en France, 1975–2005. Paris: Découverte, 2005. 11. Deltombe. L’Islam imaginaire. See also for the same argument: MacMaster, Neil. ‘Islamophobia in France and the “Algerian Problem”’. In The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy, edited by Emran Qureshi and Michael Anthony Sells. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 12. Zebiri. ‘The Redeployment of Orientalist Themes in Contemporary Islamophobia’. p.5. 13. Hamid Naficy has argued that stereotyping is a form of fetishizing, as it points out the absence by focusing on a replacement object. The fixation on the stereotype stops the difference. It becomes a frozen piece of knowledge to be recycled in order to marginalise and control the Other. Naficy, Hamid, ed. Otherness and the Media. The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged. Langhorne, USA: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993. p.98. 14. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. p.66. 15. de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis. The Persian Letters. Translated by John Davidson. London: Gibbings & Company, 1899. Letter 30. 16. Leerssen, Joep. ‘Montesquieu’s Corresponding Images: Cultural and Sexual Alterity in Pseudo-Oriental Letters’. Comparative Criticism. An Annual Journal 9 (1987). p.140. 17. Bonnerot. La Perse dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIè siècle. p.67. 18. This subject has been dealt with at length in an early study: Van Roosbroeck, Gustave Leopold. Persian Letters before Montesquieu. New York: Institute of French Studies, 1932. 19. Bonnerot. La Perse dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIè siècle. p.321. 20. Two examples of these new Persian Letters are: Ginger, Serge. Nouvelles lettres persanes: journal d’un Français à Téhéran 1974–1980. Paris: Anthropos, 1981. Drancourt, Michel. Les nouvelles lettres persanes. Paris: JC Lattès, 1975.

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21. Hedayat, Sadeq. La Chouette aveugle. Translated by Roger Lescot. Paris: José Corti, 1953. 22. Farzaneh, M.F. Rencontres avec Sadegh Hedayat. Le parcours d’une initiation. Paris: José Corti, 1993. 23. Balaÿ discusses the problem of lack of interest in Persian literature on the part of publishers. Shahrokhi, Mariam. ‘Goftegu ba Kristof Bala’i’. Kelk 27, no. 2 (1992). Balaÿ has translated many collections of short stories and poems, as well as novels in the last years: Hedayat, Sadegh. L’homme qui tua son désir. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ, Gilbert Lazard, and Dominique Orpillard. Paris: Phébus, 1998; Royaï, Yadollah. Signatures. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Rennes: Dana, 2001; Golchiri, Hushang. Le Roi des NoirVêtus. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Paris: L’Inventaire, 2002; Parsipour, Shahrnoush. Femmes sans hommes. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Paris: Lettres persanes, 2006; Pirzad, Zoya. Comme tous les après-midi. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Paris: Zulma, 2007; Pirzad, Zoya. On s’y fera. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Paris: Le livre de poche, 2008; Pirzad, Zoya. Un jour avant Pâques. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Paris: Zulma, 2009; Pirzad, Zoya. Le goût âpre des kakis. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Paris: Zulma, 2009; Pirzad, Zoya. C’est moi qui éteins les lumières. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Paris: Zulma, 2011; Vafi, Fariba. Un secret de rue. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Paris: Zulma, 2011. 24. Behdad, Ali. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1994. 25. Although Ken Gelder uses the term ‘popular fiction’, to which I prefer ‘genre fiction’, which better renders in my view the important aspect of these novels as produced, marketed and consumed generically, his book is a good introduction to the subject. Gelder, Ken. Popular Fiction. The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. New York: Routledge, 2004. 26. Eco, Umberto. Du superman au surhomme Paris: Le livre de poche, 1999. I base this contention on Umberto Eco’s work on serials and apply his argument to the whole of the genre. 27. Eco says concerning the James Bond series that the reader does not question the stereotype, he recognises it and takes pleasure from this recognition. Eco, Umberto. ‘James Bond: une combinatoire narrative’ in Communications. L’analyse structurale du récit 8 (1966). p.90. 28. Saudray, Nicolas. Les mangeurs de feu. Paris: Balland, 1994. 29. Dupré, Jean-Louis. L’Imam caché. France: Publibook, 2003. 30. Each volume is published in a run of 200,000 copies and quickly goes out of print. 31. Neveu, Erik. L’idéologie dans le roman d’espionnage. Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1985.

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32. de Villiers, Gérard. La veuve de l’Ayatollah. Paris: Plon, 1985. 33. de Villiers, Gérard. Alerte plutonium. Paris: Editions Gérard de Villiers, 1992. 34. de Villiers, Gérard. Programme 111. Paris: Editions Gérard de Villiers, 2006. 35. This analysis is based on my reading of three novels of the series concerned with Iran over a span of twenty years. De Villiers. La veuve de l’Ayatollah, Alerte plutonium and Programme 111. 36. In this light it is surprising to note that in the last James Bond novel, Devil May Care, the scene is set in Iran, but the villain is not Iranian. This is important considering the success and almost immediate translation of James Bond books into French. Faulks, Sebastian. Le diable l’emporte. Translated by Pierre Ménard. Paris: J’ai lu. 2009. 37. Labrousse, Pierre. ‘La Java des polars’. In Rêver l’Asie. Exotisme et littérature coloniale aux Indes, en Indochine et en Insulide, edited by Denys Lombard. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1993. p.486. 38. Ibid. 39. Pageaux, Daniel-Henri. La littérature générale et comparée. Paris: Colin, 1994. 40. Schoeller, Ghislaine. Marie d’Ispahan. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992. 41. Rufin, Jean-Christophe. Sauver Ispahan. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. 42. There is a humorous article in Le Monde on this fascination for Cyrus: Foucard, Stéphane. ‘Cyrus le Taiseux’. Le Monde 18/08/07. 43. Dédet, Joséphine. Roxane l’éblouissante. Le dernier amour d’Alexandre le Grand. Paris: Nil éditions, 2001. 44. Forsdick, Charles. ‘Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism’. Paragraph 24, no.3 (2001). In a volume edited by the same author, Jennifer Yee notes that the use of imagology will be particularly helpful in the analysis of exoticism: ‘Such a willingness to take exoticism seriously, so that the gaze turned outwards towards the other is not automatically – or not only – read as exploitative, is nowhere more apparent than in the critical approach known as imagologie’. Yee, Jennifer. ‘French Theory and the Exotic’. In Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World, edited by Charles Forsdick and David Murphy. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. p.193. 45. Marie d’Ispahan has been a bookshop success. The publisher told me that they did not keep the records of the exact sales number, but that it had sold around 30,000 copies. Correspondence with Mireille Bianchi on the 6 September 2010. 46. Hout, Syrine. ‘Critical Encounters: Feminism, Exoticism, and Orientalism in Freya Stark’s The Southern Gates of Arabia’. Studies in Travel Writing 6 (2002). p.59.

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47. Melman, Billie. Women’s Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718– 1918: Sexuality, Religion and Work. London: Macmillan, 1992. Montagu, Mary Wortley. Turkish Embassy Letters. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993. 48. Girard, René. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1961. 49. Wagner, Tamara Silvia. Occidentalism in Novels of Malaysia and Singapore, 1819–2004: Colonial and Postcolonial Financial Straits and Literary Style. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. p.xiv. 50. Behdad. ‘The Eroticized Orient’. pp.109–26. 51. Melman, Billie. ‘The Middle East/Arabia: “the cradle of Islam”’. In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, edited by Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. p.107. 52. Lowe. Critical Terrains. p.2. 53. Behdad. Belated Travelers. p.34. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. p.viii. 56. Behdad sees Nerval’s Voyage en Orient (1851) as announcing this change from one genre to the other. 57. For a detailed analysis of orientalist tourist guides, see Behdad, Ali. ‘Orientalist Tourism’. Peuples méditerranéens 50 (1990). 58. Susan Sontag describes photography as an act of non-intervention. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador USA, 2001. p.11. She has interesting pages on picture-taking by tourists: ‘Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on.’ p.10. 59. Behdad. Belated Travelers. p.48. 60. Some studies define tourism as an extension of cultural domination. See for example: Nash, Dennison. ‘Tourism as a Form of Imperialism’. In Hosts and Guests. The Anthropology of Tourism, edited by Valene Smith. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. 61. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957. 62. Ibid. p.114. 63. It is only in the second half of the twentieth century that travel writing came to be seen as a literary object and to be differentiated from tourist guides. Beller and Leerssen. Imagology. p.448. 64. Thouroude, Guillaume. ‘Towards Generic Autonomy: The Récit de voyage as Mode, Genre and Form’. Studies in Travel Writing 13, no. 4 (2009). p.385. 65. Magri, Véronique. Le discours sur l’autre. A travers quatre récits de voyage en Orient. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1995. p.131.

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66. See Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. 67. Girard. Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. 68. Philip, Jim. ‘Reading Travel Writing’. In Recasting the World. Writing after Colonialism, edited by Jonathan White. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. p.243. 69. Al-e Ahmad. Plagued by the West. Halliday mentions sharqzadegi (‘struck by the East’) as a corresponding disease: ‘If there is a condition such as gharbzadegi, there is also one which I would call sharqzadegi, the uncritical reproduction of myths about the region in the name of anti-imperialism, solidarity, understanding, and so on’. Halliday. ‘‘‘Orientalism” and Its Critics’. p.161. 70. Said. Orientalism. p.157. 71. This point has been made in: Melman. ‘The Middle East/Arabia: “the cradle of Islam”’. p.117. 72. Nicoullaud, François. Le turban et la rose. Journal inattendu d’un ambassadeur à Téhéran: à la découverte d’un autre Iran. Paris: Ramsay, 2006. 73. Ollivier, Bernard. Longue Marche. Vers Samarcande. Paris: Phébus, 2005. I asked Phébus, the publisher, to tell me how many copies were sold but they would not do so. However, I have seen it on most bookshop tables in Paris over some months. 74. ‘Thus, not only does the literary topos of travel express the French preoccupation with land and empire, but travel as a representation of imagined territorial expansion becomes an available discursive means of registering and regulating the domestic culture’s concern with internal social differences and change during the ancient régime’. Lowe. Critical Terrains. p.54. 75. The theme of wonder has been studied by Bhabha in his chapter ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ in The Location of Culture. pp.145–74. 76. Roger Garaudy is a polemist French scholar, famous for his virulent antiSemitic and anti-Zionist positions and his denial of the Holocaust. He got widespread media coverage for his conversion to Islam. 77. Clark, Steve. Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit. New York: Zed Books, 1999. p.13. 78. Valéry, Philippe. Par les sentiers de la Soie. A pied jusqu’en Chine. Paris: Transboréal, 2002.

Chapter 2 1.

Contesting Iran

Gérard Genette makes a helpful distinction between the public and readers, since even people who do not read a particular book are part of the public when they see the book in a bookshop or hear about it on TV and on the radio. The public is more numerous than the sum of the readers. Genette. Seuils. p.7.

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2. Said, Edward. Covering Islam. How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. London: Vintage, 1997. p.127. 3. In his chapter ‘Foucault’s Iran and the madness of Islam’, Ian Almond notes that there were also leftist intellectuals, such as Philippe Sollers, who saw the Revolution from the beginning as a form of tyranny. I contend however that Foucault, and up to a point the opinion of Le Monde, are representative of a tendency that began in the first months of the uprising. Almond. The New Orientalists. pp.22–41. 4. Balta, Paul. L’Iran insurgé: 1789 en Islam? Un tournant du monde. Paris: Sindbad, 1979. 5. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. pp.121–32. 6. Deltombe. L’Islam imaginaire. p.19. 7. Adib-Moghaddam. ‘A (Short) History of the Clash of Civilizations’. p.4. 8. Ibid. p.14. 9. Deltombe. L’Islam imaginaire. p.24. 10. Quoted in Pryce-Jones, David. Betrayal: France, the Arabs, and the Jews. New York: Encounter Books, 2008. p.125. 11. Anquetil, Gilles. La terre a bougé en Iran. Paris: Hachette, 1979. 12. Blanchet, Pierre, and Claire Brière. Iran, la révolution au nom de Dieu. Paris: Seuil, 1979. 13. Mongin, Olivier, ed. ‘Table ronde. Tiers-Monde et information’. ESPRIT (Janvier 1980). p.145. 14. Ibid. p.146. 15. Said. Covering Islam. p.123. 16. Eric Rouleau: ‘The capture of US diplomats as hostages in November 1979 marked a turning point in the attitude of the European media and governments’. Mongin. ‘Table ronde. Tiers-Monde et information’. p.146. 17. For a detailed analysis see: Jalali Jafari, Fatemeh. ‘L’opinion de la presse française sur la révolution iranienne (cas “Le Monde”) août 1978 jusqu’à la fin de l’année 1984’. PhD diss. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1985. 18. Mongin, Olivier. ‘Le Monde, prudence et journalisme’. ESPRIT (Janvier 1980). 19. Mongin, Olivier. ‘Khomeinisme, islamisme, Tiers-Monde’. ESPRIT (Janvier 1980). p.7. 20. Mongin. ‘Table ronde. Tiers-Monde et information’. p.80. 21. Afary, Janet and Kevin B. Anderson. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution. Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 22. Scullion, Rosemarie. ‘Michel Foucault the Orientalist: On Revolutionary Iran and the “Spirit of Islam”’. South Central Review 12, no. 2 (1995).

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23. Scullion. ‘Michel Foucault the Orientalist’. p.18. 24. Ibid. p.30. 25. The expression comes from a memoir by an Iranian-American journalist. It characterizes women’s fight towards more liberty through their use of more colourful scarves, lipstick and high heels. Moaveni, Azadeh. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America and American in Iran. New York: Public Affairs, 2005. In the French context, the journalist Armin Arefi uses a similar dichotomy in his blog ‘Dentelles et Tchador. L’Iran comme vous ne l’avez jamais soupçonné’, hosted on Le Monde website: http://iran.blog.lemonde.fr/, accessed 18/10/2010, and in his first book: Arefi, Armin. Dentelles et Tchador. La vie dans l’Iran des mollahs. La Tour d’Aigues, France: Editions de l’aube, 2009. 26. Minoui, Delphine. Jeunesse d’Iran: les voix du changement. Paris: Autrement, 2001. 27. Minoui, Delphine. Les pintades à Téhéran: chroniques de la vie des Iraniennes. Paris: Jacob-Duvernet, 2007. The book has been re-edited in pocket format in 2009, confirming its best-seller status. 28. http://blog.lefigaro.fr/iran/delphine-minoui.html, accessed 10/08/2008. 29. Maingueneau. Le contexte de l’oeuvre littéraire. p.84. 30. Rubin Suleiman, Susan. Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 31. Ibid. p.7. 32. Ibid. p.10. 33. Adichie, Chimamanda. ‘The Danger of a Single Story’. TED (July 2009), http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_ story.html, accessed 10/12/2009. 34. Jolly, Margaretta, ed. Encyclopedia of Life Writing: Autobiographical and Biographical Forms. London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001. p.75. 35. Ibid. p.86. 36. Keshavarz, Fatemeh. Jasmine and Stars. Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. 37. Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2003. 38. Said. Orientalism. p.3. 39. See Behdad and Williams’ chapter on neo-orientalism: Behdad, Ali, and Juliet Williams. ‘Neo-Orientalism.’ In Globalizing American Studies, edited by Brian T. Edwards and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. The chapter very well describes neo-orientalism in memoirs on Iran by writers living in the West, mainly in the United States, either of Western or Middle-Eastern origins. In the French case, new

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40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

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orientalism is not to be found among French writers: it is a specificity of writers from Iranian origin, and there is an essential distinction between previous orientalists, mainly of French origin, and new orientalists, who are all ‘native’. See Khosrokhavar’s article on French neo-orientalism: Khosrokhavar, Farhad. ‘Du néo-orientalisme de Badie: enjeux et méthodes’. Peuples méditerranéens 50 (1990). Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons. Autobiography in Transit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Ibid. p.13. Correspondence with Flammarion publisher, Alice d’Andigne, 8 September 2008. Djavann, Chahdortt. Je viens d’ailleurs. Paris: Autrement, 2002. Djavann, Chahdortt. Comment peut-on être français? Paris: Flammarion, 2006. Djavann, Chahdortt. La muette. Paris: Flammarion, 2008. Djavann, Chahdortt. Je ne suis pas celle que je suis. Psychanalyse I. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. Djavann, Chahdortt. Bas les voiles! Paris: Gallimard, 2003. Djavann, Chahdortt. Que pense Allah de l’Europe? Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Djavann, Chahdortt. A mon corps défendant, l’Occident. Paris: Flammarion, 2007. Djavann, Chahdortt. Ne négociez pas avec le régime iranien. Lettre ouverte aux dirigeants occidentaux. Paris: Flammarion, 2009. Deltombe. L’Islam imaginaire. p.353. The following close-reading has been partially published in an article: Nanquette, Laetitia. ‘French New Orientalist Narratives from the “Natives”: Reading More Than Chahdortt Djavann in Paris’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29, no. 2 (2009). Keshavarz. Jasmine and Stars. p.18. For a comment on this portrayal of Islam by the experience of its excesses in the American intellectual context, see: http://www.religiondispatches. org/archive/politics/2635/the_polite_Islamophobia_of_the_intellectual_, accessed 19/07/10. Mahmood, Saba. ‘Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror’. In Women’s Studies on the Edge, edited by Joan Wallach Scott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. p.83. The tradition encompasses thinkers like Ahmad Kasravi for example. Keshavarz. Jasmine and Stars. p.119. Fruchon-Toussaint, Catherine. L’exil: invitée: Chahdortt Djavann, Radio France Internationale. 03/02/2006. Kleppinger, Kathryn. ‘What’s Wrong with the Littérature-Monde Manifesto?’ Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14, no. 1 (2010). pp.80–81.

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54. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by Malcolm Debevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 204. p.156. 55. Amossy, Ruth, and Anne Herschberg Pierrot. Stéréotypes et clichés. Paris: Armand Colin, 2007. p.144. 56. Najmabadi, Afsaneh. Women’s Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. 57. Milani, Farzaneh. Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers. London: I.B.Tauris, 1992. 58. See for the explanation of the tide of mainstream memoirs: Adams, Lorraine. ‘Almost Famous: The Rise of the Nobody Memoir’. Washington Monthly (April 2002), http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0204. adams.html, accessed 12/04/09. 59. Taj al-Saltaneh, the Qajar princess, wrote her memoir as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was not published until 1993: Taj alSaltaneh. Abbas Amanat, ed. Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity 1884–1914. Translated by Anna Vanzan and Amin Neshati. Washington: Mage, 1993. 60. Jolly. Encyclopedia of Life Writing. p.135. 61. Maingueneau. Le contexte de l’oeuvre littéraire. p.67. 62. Malek, Amy. ‘Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production: A Case Study of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis Series’. Iranian Studies 39, no. 3 (2006). p.364. 63. Naghibi, Nima, and Andrew O’Malley. ‘Estranging the Familiar: “East” And “West” in Satrapi’s Persepolis’. English Studies in Canada 31, no. 2&3 (2005). p.223. 64. Baguet, Georges. ‘Jamais sans ma fille, un mythe raciste?’ ESPRIT (Mai 1992). p.162. 65. Lejeune. Le pacte autobiographique. 66. Keshavarz. Jasmine and Stars. p.137. 67. Ibid. p.123. 68. Goldin, Farideh. ‘Iranian Women and Contemporary Memoirs’. Iran Chamber Society (2004), http://www.iranchamber.com/culture/articles/ iranian_women_contemporary_memoirs.php, accessed 22/08/10. 69. Quoted in Scott. Women’s Studies on the Edge. pp.86–87. 70. Hamid Naficy argues that the fame of Iranian cinema in European festivals for more than a decade can be linked to the unpopularity of the Islamic regime. As such, Iranian films are also awarded a palm of martyrdom. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001. p.87. There is a growing body of work on Iranian cinema and its relation to a Western audience. Franco-Iranian cinematic relations became crucial with the advent of La

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71.

72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80.

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nouvelle vague and its dedicated journal, Les Cahiers du Cinéma, with figures such as Yussef Issaghpur, Fereydun Hoveyda or Cyrus Ghani. This was confirmed two decades later when Abbas Kiarostami won the Palme d’Or from the 1997 Cannes Festival for The Taste of Cherry. Kadivar, Darius. ‘Iranian Pioneers of the French New Wave Cinema’. http://www.babakandfriends. com/community/writers/DariusKadivar/2006/IranianFilmPioneers.cfm, accessed 07/01/2008. For more on the issue, see: Devictor, Agnès. Politique du cinéma iranien: de l’Ayatollâh Khomeyni au Président Khâtami. Paris: CNRS, 2004. Genette disinguishes between ‘paratexte auctorial’ and ‘paratexe éditorial’, and between ‘péritexte’ (which is part of the book, including preface, dedication, illustrations) and ‘épitexte’ (which is outside the book, including interviews of the author). Genette. Seuils. Comprendre ce là-bas. ‘Entretien avec Nahal Tajadod’. http://comprendrece-la-bas.blogspot.com/2009/08/entretien-avec-nahal-tajadod.html, accessed 14/04/09. J.C. Lattès. ‘“Passeport à l’iranienne” de Nahal Tajadod’. http://www. editions-jclattes.fr/livre/jc-lattes-282401-Passeport-a-l-iranienne-hachette. html, accessed 21/07/10. Satrapi, Marjane. http://www.abusdecine.com/fiche-entretien.php?numero= 2062, accessed 18/06/10. Levy, L. et al. ‘The Newcomers, 2002–03’. The Newcomers (January–February 2003). Goldin. ‘Iranian Women and Contemporary Memoirs’. Satrapi, Marjane. ‘On Writing Persepolis, as Told to Pantheon Staff’. Pantheon Graphic Novels. http://www.randomhouse.com/pantheon/graphicnovels/satrapi2.html, accessed 22/08/10. Malek. ‘Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production’. p.375. Ibid. p.380. See for example Naghibi and O’Malley. ‘Estranging the Familiar’. The article argues that the literary value of Persépolis comes from its nuances in making similar and rendering alien, subverting a Western reader’s expectations by mixing the familiar and unfamiliar. The use of the comic strip form plays an important part in this equilibrium: regarded as a low form of culture, the comic puts the reader on shifting ground: ‘by adopting a naïve, childlike drawing style, by using a child as the autobiographical subject, and by working in a medium associated primarily with either low-brow or juvenile readers and narratives, she effectively “camouflages” the complex politics of identity and nation Marji’s story raises in the guise of simplicity and universal accessibility’. p.234.

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81. Malek also mentions the pedagogical aspect of Satrapi’s memoirs, although she does not make it the focus of her analysis. Malek. ‘Memoir as Iranian Exile Cultural Production’. pp.378–79. 82. I wish to thank Amena Moinfar for sharing her views on this with me. It is crucial to note that the text avoids lengthy descriptions of France and only mentions it in passing as an objective during Marji’s dark days. 83. Whitlock. Soft Weapons. p.12. 84. Comprendre ce là-bas. ‘Entretien avec Nahal Tajadod’. 85. Goldin. ‘Iranian Women and Contemporary Memoirs’. 86. Interview with the author in Paris on 2 September 2009. 87. Naghibi and O’Malley. ‘Estranging the Familiar’. p.224. 88. Under a pseudonym: Kafi, Hélène. L’exilée. Paris: Payot, 1991. Hachtroudi, Fariba. A mon retour d’Iran. Paris: Seuil, 2008; and, Khomeiny Express, Itinéraires clandestins en République Islamique d’Iran. Vevey, Suisse: Xenia, 2009. 89. Bakhtiar, Chapour. Ma fidélité. Paris: Albin Michel, 1982. 90. Pahlavi, Ashraf, Marie-Josée Tubeuf, and Robert Bré. Visages dans un miroir: la soeur du Shah témoigne. Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1980. Pahlavi, Soraya, and Louis Valentin. Le palais des solitudes. France: Michel Lafon, 1991. 91. Kasmaï, Sorour. La vallée des aigles. Autobiographie d’une fuite. Arles: Actes Sud, 2006. 92. ‘Adoption of the dominant literary language –which is always a painful decision– is often a provisory solution intended to accelerate the process of recognition.’ Casanova, Pascale. ‘Consécration et accumulation de capital littéraire.’ Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 144 (2002). p.16. 93. Todorov, Tzvetan. Genres in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. p.10. 94. Ibid. p.19.

Chapter 3

The Little Satan

1. Nicoullaud. Le turban et la rose. p.203. 2. Merat, Zarir. ‘Goft-o-gu, c’est-à-dire dialogue’. Cemoti 22 (2005). http:// cemoti.revues.org/document145.html, accessed 28/12/09. 3. Casanova. The World Republic of Letters. p.327. 4. The list will soon be available online but is not yet in a publishable format. I thank M. Armand Goudarzi and the Service de Coopération et d’Action Culturelle for making it available to me before its publication. There are reference works like Navvabi, Davud. Tarikhche-ye tarjomeh-ye faranseh beh farsi dar Iran az aghaz ta konun. Kerman: Daneshgah-e Kerman, 1984. See also

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5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

Orientalism versus Occidentalism

the article by Balaÿ for a brief history of translations into Persian since the nineteenth century and a bibliography: Balaÿ. ‘French Literature in Persia’. Interview with the author in Tehran, 21 May 2009. Arnold. L’édition en Iran. p.12. Emami, Karim. ‘Translation of English Literature into Persian’. In Encyclopedia Iranica, edited by Ehsan Yarshater. http://www.iranicaonline. org/articles/english-5-translation-into, accessed 18/09/09. Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad. ‘Persian Tradition’. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha. London: Routledge, 1998. p.500. Zulma, Pirzad’s publisher in France did not want to give me the sales numbers, but the novel On s’y fera (‘Adat mikonim) has been republished in a Livre de poche edition, which indicates that it has found its readership. I have not been able to find precise sales numbers in Iran but the number of re-editions of her texts testifies to their commercial success. ‘Adat mikonim, for example, has seen twelve printings since 2004. Mostafavi, Hamdam. ‘Entretien avec Zoyâ Pirzâd’. http://www.zulma.fr/ auteur-zoya-pirzad-300.html, accessed 18/05/10. I am grateful to Omid Azadibougar for sharing with me his thoughts on irony in Pirzad’s texts and helping me to read her in a fresh manner. This part owes him a lot. Vahabi, Nader. Sociologie d’une mémoire déchirée. Le cas des exilés iraniens. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. p.158. Pirzad, Zoya. ‘Per Lashez’. In Seh ketab. Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz, 2002. Pirzad, Zoya. ‘Le Père Lachaise’. In Le goût âpre des kakis. Translated by Christophe Balaÿ. Paris: Zulma, 2009. Shayegan, Dariush. Les illusions de l’identité. Paris: Editions du Félin, 1992. p.149. Florack, Ruth. French in Beller and Leerssen. Imagology. p.157. Dehbashi, Ali, and Mehdi Karimi. Goli Taraqi. Tehran: Nashr-e Qatreh, 2004. p.566. For the link between decadence and the status of women, see TavakoliTarghi, Mohammad. ‘Women of the West Imagined: the Farangi Other and the Emergence of the Woman Question in Iran’. In Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminism in International Perspective, edited by Valentine M. Moghadam. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. Women are sites of exoticism on both sides: in the form of the harem for France and in the form of the libertine for Iran. Fariba Adelkhah reminds that it is common in most families to have at least one member living abroad. Adelkhah, Fariba. ‘Partir sans quitter, quitter sans partir’. Critique internationale 19 (2003). p.152.

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19. Keddie, Nikki. ‘The French Revolution and the Middle East’. In Iran and the Muslim World: Resistance and Revolution, edited by Nikki Keddie. London: Macmillan, 1995. See also Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohammad. ‘Persia and the French Revolution’. In Encyclopedia Iranica, edited by Ehsan Yarshater. http://www.iranica.com/articles/france-vi-persia-and-the-french-revolution, accessed 18/08/09; Mohammadi, Manucher. Enqelab-e eslami dar moqayesseh ba enqelab-ha-ye Faranseh va Russieh. Tehran: Ma’aref, 2003. It is important to remember that many intellectuals who participated in the constitutional movement belonged to French-style Freemason Lodges defending the ideas of progress and modernism, especially ‘Bidari-ye Iran’ (The Awakening of Iran), recognised by the Grand Orient of France. See: Vaziri, Chahrokh, ‘Quelques indications sur le rôle des associations et loges maçonniques d’inspiration française dans la propagation des idées de la Révolution française en Iran: le cas de la loge “Réveil de l’Iran”’ Cemoti 12. http://cemoti.revues.org/document379.html, accessed 15/05/10. 20. Keddie. ‘The French Revolution and the Middle East’. p.233. 21. Ibid. p.248. 22. Ibid. p.249. 23. Safir-e Iran dar Paris. ‘Pedaran-e ma qabl az in ke zaban-e englisi biamuzand, zaban-e faranseh ra amukhtand’. Jam-e jam, http://www.shafaf.ir/fa/ pages/?cid=25133, accessed 23/08/10. 24. An example can be seen in the biography of Shapur Bakhtiar, the Shah’s last Prime Minister, who was recalled at the end of 1978 to provide credibility for the dying regime. Bakhtiar was educated in France, fought in the Resistance in 1939, was married to a French woman, and called his daughter ‘France’ (for the country, as well as for the writer). Bakhtiar. Ma fidélité. 25. There is a good historical analysis of the Confederation by Matin-Asgari, Afshin. ‘The Iranian Student Mouvement Abroad: the Confederation of Iranian Students, National Union’. In Iranian Refugees and Exiles since Khomeini, edited by Asghar Fathi. Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 1991. See also for the history of the Iranian community in France: Nassehy-Behnam, Vida. ‘Persian Community in France’. In Encyclopedia Iranica, edited by Ehsan Yarshater. http://www.iranica.com/articles/france-xvii, accessed 22/04/08. 26. Nassehy-Behnam. ‘Persian Community in France’. 27. See the website of the Kanun-e nevisandegan-e Iran (dar tab‘id): http://www. iwae.org, accessed 05/09/10. A similar association is the Iranian PEN centre (in exile): http://www.iran-pen.org, accessed 05/09/10. Many writers belong to both associations. They are not as active today as they were in the 1980s and most young writers do not participate in their debates.

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28. In a private interview in Paris, Nasser Pakdaman also mentioned that a good number of students belonging to the Confederation did not dare return at the beginning of the turmoil, and thus did not participate in the preparatory stages of the Revolution. 16 February 2010. 29. Daneshvar, Reza. ‘Khosrow Mourim’. (16/05/2008), Radio Zamaneh. http:// www.zamahang.com/podcast/2008/20080516_Reza_Daneshvar_Khosro_ Morim_part_2.mp3, accessed 17/05/10. Bijan Hekmat has the same argument in the series of interviews. Daneshvar, Reza. ‘Bijan Hekmat’. (10/07/08), Radio Zamaneh, http://zamaaneh.com/daneshvar/2008/07/print_post_92. html, accessed 17/05/10. 30. Khosrokhavar, Farhad. ‘Révolution française et Révolution islamique: esquisse d’une comparaison’. In L’image de la révolution française, edited by Michel Vovelle. Paris: Pergamon Press, 1989. p.1841. 31. Lance, Alain. ‘Mon mai 68’. In Longtemps je me suis souvenu de mai 68, edited by Cercle Barbara Salutati. Paris: Le castor astral, 2002. 32. Al-e Ahmad. Plagued by the West. Al-e Ahmad has often been criticised, but his influence is nonetheless recognised: ‘He did not engage in any systematic evaluation of traditional institutions, knowledge, or value judgment, and his analysis barely went beyond the level of introducing historical arguments into a political controversy. Yet, in spite of this, Al-Ahmad enjoyed significant influence and personal charisma among Iranian intellectuals in the 1960s, and his views reflected much of the ideological rhetoric of the Revolution of 1979’. Gheissari, Ali. Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. p.92. Mehran Kamrava summarises this by saying that he is today considered an ideologue and not an intellectual. Kamrava, Mehran. Iran’s Intellectual Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. p.52. It is important to remember that the gharb-setizi discourse was an alternative to ‘the previously dominant universalist ideology of the Left’. Mirsepassi. ‘Religious Intellectuals and Western Critiques of Secular Modernity’. p.420. 33. Shadman, Seyyed Fakhroddin. Tariki va roshana’i. Tehran: n.p., 1950. Seyyed Fakhroddin Shadman conceptualises the figure of the fokoli (from the French faux-col, the bow-tied one) in this novel and in other essays. 34. Sprachman, Paul. ‘Hajji Baba Meets the Westomaniac: the Convergence of Two Stereotyped Iranians’. In Persian Studies in North America, Studies in Honor of Mohammad Ali Jazayery, edited by Mehdi Marashi. Bethesda, MA: Iranbooks, 1994. p.305. 35. Al-e Ahmad. Plagued by the West. p.27. 36. Dabashi, Hamid. Post-Orientalism. Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009. pp.260–61.

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37. The context is entirely different but Juan Cole reaches a similar conclusion in his article on the representations of Westerners by shi’ite notables. Cole. ‘Invisible Occidentalism’. He finds that the negative portrayal he was expecting does not exist in texts, and that these texts are influenced by the self-image of Westerners more than they are native constructions: ‘we might expect to find in these texts, written at a time of unprecedented European encroachment on the Muslim lands, a mirror-image of Orientalism, a systematic critique of Western colonialism and Western culture. But do we?’. p.4. He concludes: ‘Occidentalism was not the mirror-image of Orientalism, but rather an extension of the Western power to shape images. Westerners often fashioned a representation of the Orient, which they then substituted for the actual thing, so that they created a representation of themselves as the Orient’. p.15. 38. Clawson, Patrick. ‘The Paradox of Anti-Americanism in Iran’. Middle East Review of International Affairs 8, no. 1 (2004). 39. Shayegan, Dariush. Le regard mutilé. Schizophrénie culturelle: pays traditionnels face à la modernité. Paris: Albin Michel, 1989. 40. Purmansuri, Hassan. ‘Arus-e faransavi, ‘arus-e kuhestan. Tehran: Nashr-e Nazir, 2002. 41. See the library’s online catalogue: http://simorgh.cgie.org.ir/simwebclt/ WebAccess/SimwebPortal.dll, accessed 05/09/10. I only found out after I had left Tehran that the book was at the National Library of Iran: http:// opac.nlai.ir/opac-prod/bibliographic/660034, accessed 10/07/11. 42. The summary of the book can be found on http://ketab.ir/HomePage.aspx?T abID=3564&Site=ketab&Lang=fa-IR&BookID=316419, accessed 24/08/10. 43. Moqaddam, Hassan, ed. Ja‘far Khan az Farang amadeh, edited by Hassan Javadi. Oakland, CA: Jahan, 1984. Jamalzadeh, Mohammad-Ali. ‘Farsi shekar ast’. In Yeki bud, yeki nabud. Berlin: n.p., 1921. 44. Chubak, Sadeq. ‘Asb-e chubi’. In Cheraq-e akhar. Tehran: n.p., 1965. 45. Since Iraq was backed up by Western states, the Iran-Iraq war was also seen by Iranians as a war against the imperialistic West. Yavari-d’Hellencourt, Nouchine. ‘“Etranger” et “identité collective” dans les slogans révolutionnaires en Iran’. Cahiers d’étude sur la Méditerranée orientale et le monde turcoiranien 9 (1990). 46. Vahabi. Récits de vie des exilés iraniens.

Chapter 4

Forever in-between

1. Said, Edward. Reflections on exile: and other literary and cultural essays. London: Granta Books, 2001. p.173.

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2. Ibid. p.174. 3. I use for this argument a combination of the open definition of diaspora by Gabriel Sheffer and the post-colonial one by Stuart Hall, who reminds us of its Greek etymological origin as dispersion of the seeds. For a summary of the different definitions, see: Dufoix, Stéphane. Les diasporas, Que sais-je? Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003. 4. Naficy, Hamid. The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. p.17. 5. Nassehy-Behnam. ‘Iranian Immigrants in France’. 6. Seidel, Michael. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. p.ix. 7. Vahabzadeh, Peyman. ‘Where Will I Dwell? A Sociology of Literary Identity within the Iranian Diaspora’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28, no. 3 (2008). p.496. 8. Tiregol, Maliheh. ‘Si sal-e adabiyat-e farsi dar tab‘id’. asar.name/2004/06/ blog-post.html, accessed 06/02/08. 9. Naficy. An Accented Cinema. p.229. 10. The essayist and writer Reza Baraheni, now based in Canada, is emblematic of this obsession. Baraheni, Reza. ‘Exilic Blindness: the Unwritten Autobiography of a Dramatist in Paris Posthumously Dictated to a Friend’. Modern drama 46, no. 1 (2003). The poet Esmail Kho’i represents a similar paradigm. The very name of his poems shows the predominance of exile as a literary device: ‘Getting adjusted’, ‘Outlandia’, ‘The soul oppressed by exile’, ‘What a sense of being lost’. 11. Saedi, Gholam Hossein. ‘Sharhe-ye ahval’. Alefba 7 (1986). 12. Saedi, Gholam Hossein. ‘Sar-e-mazar-e Sadeq Hedayat’. Alefba 2 (1983). p.167. 13. ‘Frontiersmen’ is the term used by Reza Baraheni in ‘Exilic Blindness’. 14. An interesting documentary film about Iranians in exile in France shows that all of them mention the language as an essential element in their feeling of exile. Hossein Dowlatabadi, whose work I include in this trend, appears in this film. Farsi, Sepideh. ‘Le monde est ma maison’. Rêves d’eau, 1998, DVD. 15. Erfan, Ali. La 602e nuit. La Tour d’Aigues, France: Editions de l’Aube, 2000. For a sociological study of the process of memory amongst Iranians in France: Vahabi. Sociologie d’une mémoire déchirée. 16. I have been faced again with the problem of getting precise sales numbers from her publisher, but all her books have been reprinted at least five times. 17. Naficy, Hamid. ‘Identity Politics and Iranian Exile Music Videos’. Iranian Studies 31, no. 1 (1998). p.51.

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18. Nafisi, Azar. ‘Between Two Worlds, by Goli Taraghi’. In Lifelines: The Literature of Women’s Human Rights. Washington D.C., 07/03/2001, http:// www.loc.gov/locvideo/womensday, accessed 06/10/10. 19. Taraqi, Goli. Do doniya. 5th ed. Tehran: Nilufar, 2002. 20. Fakhariyan, Samira. ‘Goli Taraghi, “Chronique de la quête de soi”’. La revue de Téhéran 39 (2009). p.85. Quoted from Dehbashi, Ali and Kamran Fani. ‘Goftegu ba Goli Taraqi’, Bokhara 19 (2001). p.45. This article is full of interesting quotations by Taraqi discussing her works. 21. Balaÿ, Christophe. La genèse du roman persan moderne. Téhéran: Institut français de recherche en Iran, 1998. 22. Dehbashi and Fani. ‘Goftegu ba Goli Taraqi’. 23. Taraqi, Goli. ‘Anar Banu va pesar-ha-yash’. In Ja’i digar. Tehran: Nilufar, 2009. 24. Taraqi, Goli. ‘Madam Gorgeh’. In Khaterat-ha-ye parakandeh. Tehran: Nilufar, 2004. The very name of the collection, ‘Dispersed memories’ or ‘Fugitive Recollections’, accounts for the dissolution of the Self, arguing that it is impossible for the exile to write proper memories. Rohani, Omid. ‘Ma hamishe kharej az tarikh budeh-im’. Adineh 57 (1992). 25. Taraqi, Goli. ‘‘Adat-ha-ye gharib-e aqa-ye “‘Alef” dar ghorbat’. In Khateratha-ye parakandeh. Tehran: Nilufar, 2004. 26. Taraqi is preparing a short story about the return of a woman from Paris to Tehran, which should be an interesting complement to these three short stories. Interview with the author in Tehran, 6 May 2009. 27. Dehbashi and Fani. ‘Goftegu ba Goli Taraqi’. p.43. 28. Taraqi, Goli. A Mansion in the Sky. Translated by Fereydoun Farrokh. University of Austin: Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, 2003. p.7. 29. Taraqi, Goli. The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons. Translated by Karim Emani and Sara Khalili. http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-pomegranatelady-and-her-sons, accessed 12/10/07. 30. My translation. 31. Lewis, Franklin. ‘Winter Sleep, Goli Taraqqi, Translated by Francine Mahak’. Iranian Studies 31, no. 1 (1999). p.168. 32. Pazargadi, Leila. ‘The Womb of the Universe: Figuring Woman as the Nation in Goli Taraghi’s “Khanah Dar Asiman”’. In International Society for Iranian Studies, Toronto 2008. 33. Taraqi. The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons. 34. Taraqi, Goli. ‘Khaneh’i dar aseman’. In Khaterat-ha-ye parakandeh. 5th ed. Tehran: Nilufar, 2004. 35. Taraqi. ‘Madam Gorgeh’. p.143. 36. Taraqi. A Mansion in the Sky. pp.123–24.

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37. Ibid. p.119. 38. Taraqi. ‘Aqa-ye “‘Alef”’. p.97. 39. The pomegranate is also present in other literary imaginations, e.g. the Turkish or Armenian. 40. For an elaboration of Iranian fetishes, see the chapter on ‘Televisual Fetishization’ by Naficy in Otherness and the Media. 41. Balaÿ, Christophe. ‘Stylistique du récit court dans l’oeuvre de Zoya Pirzad’. www.zulma.fr/datas/files/stylistique_pirzad.pdf, accessed 05/02/08. Balaÿ and Cuypers define the short story as ‘un tout achevé, orienté vers un dénouement unique et inattendu, et un décor familier à l’auteur’. Balaÿ, Christophe, and Michel Cuypers. Aux sources de la nouvelle persane, Paris: Editions Recherche sur les civilisations, 1983. p.70. 42. Zanganeh, Lila. ‘Goli Taraghi et José Manuel Prieto: la liberté par-dessus tout’. Le Monde des livres (25/05/2007). 43. Dehbashi and Fani. ‘Goftegu ba Goli Taraqi’. p.43. 44. ‘Fable’. Oxford Reference Online. http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY. html?subview=Main&entry=t56.e440, accessed 15/06/10. 45. Dehbashi and Fani. ‘Goftegu ba Goli Taraqi’. p.43. 46. Taraqi. The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons. 47. Taraqi. A Mansion in the Sky. 48. Ibid, especially p.118. 49. It is also important to remember that Taraqi received an English education and that she experienced France through the prism of an Anglo-Saxon outlook (interview in Tehran, 6 May 2009).

Chapter 5 Overcoming Othering 1. Bakhtin, Michael. ‘Discourse in the Novel’. In The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and M. Holquist. pp.259–422. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 2. Todorov. Genres in Discourse. p.17. 3. Balaÿ. La genèse du roman persan moderne. 4. Guichard, Thierry, Christine Jérusalem, Boniface Mongo-Mboussa, Delphine Peras, and Dominique Rabaté. Le roman français contemporain. Paris: Culturesfrance, 2007. 5. I am not aware of a consistent study on this issue but this is a recurrent argument in the national discourse, as exemplified by this quote from former president Khatami: ‘Our country throughout its history has been exposed to invasions and floods, but the great nation of Iran

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has in no place let its identity go when faced with the invading ethnic group; rather this nation’s greatness in culture has even been the reason that, after a period, the foreign invading ethnic group is subdued by the greatness of this nation and has been influenced by Iranian culture and even changed its own culture’. Khatami, Seyyed Mohammad. ‘Hoviyat-e irani-eslami’, in Islam, ruhaniyat va enqelab-e eslami. Ba moqaddameh’i az Seyyed Mohammad Ali Abtahi. Tehran: Tar-e now, 2000. p.61. Quoted by Shabnam Holliday. ‘Khatami’s Islamist-Iranian Discourse of National Identity: A Discourse of Resistance’. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 1, no. 37 (2010). p.5. Bhabha. The Location of Culture. p.162. Balaÿ. La genèse du roman persan moderne; Mir’abeidini, Hossein. Sad sal-e dastan-nevisi-ye Iran (2 vol). 1st ed. 1987. Tehran: Cheshmeh, 2007. See for example: Davaran, Ardavan, ed. ‘Iranian Diaspora Literature since 1980: Contexts and Currents’. The Literary Review (1997). Hajj Seyyed Javadi, Fattaneh. Bamdad-e khomar. Tehran: Alborz, 1995. Interestingly, the preface of Yeki bud, yeki nabud by Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh introduces the genre of the novel as full of promises and as a model to follow, but the collection is composed of short stories. The preface does not discuss short narrative forms. This incoherence is an example that the characteristics of the different genres, and especially of the novel, were not entirely assimilated at the time (in 1921). ‘Most studies on the history of Persian prose fiction begin with the apparently-accepted myth that the Persian novel and short story were imported to Iran from the West’. Khorrami argues that this assumption comes from an internalised orientalism, and that, if translations from Western literary works did influence modern Persian literary works, there is no reason to see this factor as a cause for the whole development of Persian prose. Khorrami, Mohammad-Mehdi. Modern Reflections of Classical Traditions in Persian Fiction. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. p.5. It seems to me that the influence of European and especially French literature on Persian literature has been interestingly argued in studies like Balaÿ’s La genèse du roman persan moderne. On poetry and more recently, the argument is discussed in a PhD thesis: Ahmed, Amr Taher. “La Révolution littéraire. Étude de l’influence de la poésie française sur la modernisation des formes poétiques persanes au début du XXè siècle.” Université Sorbonne NouvelleParis 3, 2009. Kamran Rastegar has an interesting book questioning the relation between the novel and modernity in the Persian, Arabic and English literatures of the 19th century, through the reading of circular texts and the study of

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12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Orientalism versus Occidentalism ‘literary transactions’. His argument is interesting when applied to circular texts like The One Thousand and One Nights, which saw multiple exchanges between Western and Eastern traditions, but it may not work for many texts. Rastegar himself warns in the introduction that his work may lack systematicity. Rastegar, Kamran. Literary Modernity between the Middle East and Europe. Textual Transactions in Nineteenth-Century Arabic, English, and Persian Literatures. London: Routledge, 2006. I thank Omid Azadibougar for his enlightening reflections on this issue. Casanova, Pascale. La République mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. p.328. Erfan mentioned this aspect, as well as his use of both French and Persian when writing, in a radio interview: http://209.85.129.132/ search?q=cache:EHP1txa6o2QJ:www.medi1.com/player/player.php%3F i%3D307562+ali+erfan&hl=fr&ct=clnk&cd=20&gl=fr&client=firefox-a, accessed 15/07/10. During a private interview with the author, Erfan argued that he could write an occidental-style novel because he was critical of himself and had accepted the distance necessary to the novelistic ‘I’. Bakhtin is one of the first researchers to have presented this argument. See his: Problems with Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Shayegan, Dariush. La lumière vient de l’Occident. Le réenchantement du monde et la pensée nomade. La Tour d’Aigues, France: Editions de l’aube, 2008. p.130. Shayegan added that this was not the case for Anglo-Indian or LatinoAmerican writers. Franco-Iranian writers of the previous generation produced entirely different texts, inscribed in the European and French tradition of the novel, without the elements of the hybridity of later writers. See for example the texts by Emineh Pakravan and Fereydun Hoveyda, who were part of diplomatic and elite circles. Pascale Casanova analyses this tendency to reject writers from the margins who assimilate to the literature of the centre: ‘Artists who seek assimilation in the center, and so betray the national literary cause, in a sense cease to belong to their native land.’ Casanova. The World Republic of Letters. p.209 Rafat, Donné. ‘Talk at the MESA conference’, Middle East Studies Association, Toronto 1989. Rahimieh also elaborates on Taghi Modaressi’s elegant metaphor of the quince orange-tree to describe the possibilities of hybridity for writers using a language other than their native tongue. Rahimieh, Nasrin. ‘The Quince Orange-Tree or Iranian Writers in Exile’. World Literature Today 61, no. 1 (1992). Modaressi has also spoken of ‘accented writing’. Modarressi, Taghi. ‘Writing with an Accent’. Chanteh: The Iranian Cross-Cultural Quarterly 1 (1992). Naficy has coined his concept of ‘accented cinema’ on Modaressi.

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20. Dehbashi, Ali. ‘Roman-nevis-e irani dar Faranseh, goftegu ba Sorur Kasma’i’. Bokhara 24 (2002). 21. Dehbashi. ‘Roman-nevis-e irani dar Faranseh’. p.229. 22. This is an estimate from Kasmaï herself, in an email dated 14 April 2010. It has been re-edited in May 2010 in the pocket edition published by Actes Sud, Babel. 23. Balaÿ. ‘Stylistique du récit court dans l’oeuvre de Zoya Pirzad’. 24. Kasmaï, Sorour. ‘Le roman est un être vivant’. Typomag.net (02/06/2008), http:// www.typomag.net/sorour-Kasmaï–le-roman-est-un-etre-vivant/a68c8848–4a21– 473b-9c90–0425aa567496.aspx, accessed 25/08/10. 25. Lepaludier, Laurent, ed. Metatextualité et métafiction, théorie et analyses. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002. pp.42–3. 26. Erfan, Ali. ‘Nous avons tous tué Hedayat’. Libération 03/10/1996. 27. Hedayat, Sadeq. The Blind Owl. Translated by Iraj Bashiri. http://www. angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/BlindOwl/blindowl.html, accessed 23/08/10. 28. Quoted by Nasrin Rahimieh in ‘The Quince Orange-Tree or Iranian Writers in Exile’. p.45. Desai, Anita. ‘Head to Come’. New Republic 04/12/1989. 29. Rahimieh. ‘The Quince Orange-Tree or Iranian Writers in Exile’. p.42. 30. Correspondence with Johanna Sztanke of the publisher Allia, 15 February 2010. 31. The narrator quotes this anecdote from Abolfazl Beyhaqi. It exists in other sources, for example in Shams al-Din Shahrazuri. 32. Segalen, Victor. Essay on Exoticism. An Aesthetics of Diversity. Translated by Yaël Rachel Schlick. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. p.21. The image of the Other as an alter can also be seen in Emmanuel Lévinas’ philosophy. Lévinas has built up a system around the ‘metaphysics of the face’, which recognises the Other as an encounter with infinity. See for example: Lévinas, Emmanuel. Altérité et transcendance. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1995. 33. Ibid. p.21. 34. Lacroix, Jean-Yves. Le cure-dent. Paris: Allia, 2008. pp.19–22. 35. Casanova, Pascale. Les mardis littéraires. France Culture, 13/01/2009. 36. Aminrazavi, Mehdi. The Wine of Wisdom: The Life, Poetry, and Philosphy of Omar Khayyam. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2005. Lacroix was speaking of the European context, as biographies of Khayyam do exist in other literatures, especially in Persian. 37. Louis-Combet, Claude. Marinus et Marina. Paris: José Corti, 2003. 38. Interview with the author in Paris, 17 December 2008.

Conclusion 1. Lowe. Critical Terrains. p.24.

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Appendix I List and summary of texts 1. Nagy-Zekmi, Silvia. ‘Testimonio’. In Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, edited by John Charles Hawley. Westport: Greenwood, 2001. pp.431–34. 2. Fassih, Esmail. ‘The Status: A Day in the Life of a Contemporary Iranian Writer’. Third World Quarterly 9, no. 3 (1987). p.837. 3. From an interview in Paris on 12 March 2009. 4. Shayegan said to Lila Azam Zanganeh on his writing a novel: ‘I have always loved literature, and learned much from the great novelists and philosophers. As once I published poems in French, and they were bad, a youthful indiscretion, perhaps this book is an old man’s folly. [ . . . ] All in all, this novel is, ultimately, the humble tribute of an Iranian to the genius of the French language.’ Hertzog, Gilles, ed. La question iranienne, La règle du jeu. Paris: Grasset, 2004. p.165.

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BIBLIOGR APHY

Primary literature Adle, Maria. Tous mes jours sont des adieux. Paris: JC Lattès, 1998. Al-e Ahmad, Jalal. Plagued by the West (Qarbzadegi). Translated by Paul Sprachman. New York: Caravan Books, 1982. ——. Safar-e Farang. Tehran: n.d., 1997. Al-Saltana, Taj, and Abbas Amanat. Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity 1884–1914. Translated by Anna Vanzan and Amin Neshati. Washington: Mage, 1993. Alavi, Tahereh. Zendegi-ye man dar seshanbeh-ha etefaq mioftad. Tehran: Qasideh Sara, 2001. Amirshahi, Mahshid. Dar safar. Los Angeles: Nashr-e Ketab, 1995. ——. Madaran va dokhtaran (4 Vol). Spanga, Sweden/Stockholm: Baran/Ferdowsi, 1998–2010. Anquetil, Gilles. La terre a bougé en Iran. Paris: Hachette, 1979. Arefi, Armin. Dentelles et tchador. La vie dans l’Iran des mollahs. La Tour d’Aigues, France: Editions de l’aube, 2009. ——. Rubans et turbans: Iran, la jeunesse contre les mollahs. Paris: Denoël, 2010. Azadi, Sousan. Fugitive. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1990. Azernour, Ladane. Les larmes de l’exil. L’Iran confisqué. Paris: Les quatre chemins, 2004. Baker, Patricia, and Hilary Smith. Bradt Guide Iran. Chalfont St Peter, UK: Bradt Travel Guides, 2009. Bakhtiar, Chapour. Ma fidélité. Paris: Albin Michel, 1982. Balta, Paul. L’Iran insurgé: 1789 en Islam? Un tournant du monde. Paris: Sindbad, 1979. Baraheni, Reza. ‘Exilic Blindness: The Unwritten Autobiography of a Dramatist in Paris Posthumously Dictated to a Friend’. Modern drama 46, no. 1 (2003): 113–18.

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INDEX

1789 French Revolution 12–13, 57, 104–105 1906 Constitutional Revolution 13, 104 1979 Islamic Revolution in counter-narratives on Iran 85, 86–87 and exile 106 in French media 56–62 and Islamophobia 26–27 in new orientalist narratives 66, 68, 75–76 similarities to 1789 12–1 in travel writing 47–48 and Western powers 115–116 Adichie, Chimamanda 65 Adib-Moghaddam, Arshin 7 Ahmad, Jalal Al-e see Westoxication Aissa 102 Amara, Fadela 77 Amossy, Ruth 73 ancient Persia exoticism of 28, 36, 39 French focus on 25–26, 108–9 violence and cruelty in 28, 32–33 Anderson, Benedict 19, 194 n.64 Anquetil, Gilles 59 anti-occidentalism 112–113 Ashura 52

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Assassins 15 Association of Iranian Writers in exile 106 autobiographies 64–78, 87–94, 137 Avicenna 35, 36, 158, 161 Bakhtiar, Shapur 90, 207 n.24 Bakhtin, Mikhail 142 Balaÿ, Christophe 30, 101, 125, 135, 152, 196 n.23 Balta, Paul 57–58 Barthes, Roland 45–46 Beeman, William 26 Behazin 98–99 Behdad, Ali 30, 41–42, 43, 66 Beller, Manfred 2, 186 n.1 Bhabha, Homi 27, 57, 145–146, 166 Bible, the 14, 100 Blanchet, Pierre 59 Bokhara 17–18, 96 Bonnerot, Olivier 28 Bouvier, Nicolas 12 Boroujerdi, Mehrzad 9, 188 n.21 Brière, Claire 59 caricatures 60–61 Casanova, Pascale 71, 97, 146–147 Catholics 11, 53

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INDEX

249

Chafiq, Chahla 78, 121 Chow, Rey 5 Chubak, Sadeq 115 classical architecture 13 Confederation of Iranian Students 106 counter-narratives on Iran 78–89 Cyrus 14, 15, 37

Franco-Iranian relations and archaeology 11, 25, 155–156 and military exchange 12 perceived common traits in 13–14 shared Aryan identity of 25, 26 French language 12 Frye, Northop 16–17, 165

Dabashi, Hamid 113 Dar al-Fonun 12, 99 dastan 152–3 De Gaulle, Charles 15, 93 De Scudéry, Madeleine 14–15 De Villiers, Gérard 32–34 Dehbashi, Ali 17–18 Deltombe, Thomas 26–27, 67 dervish 52 diaspora, Iranian 16, 104, 119–120 Djavann, Chahdortt 65–77 Dowlatabadi, Mahmud 13

Garaudy, Roger 53, 199 n.76 gender relations in ancient Persia 28, 40–41 in Iran 88–89 Genette, Gérard 18, 189 n.28, 204 n.71 genre fiction 31–32 Ghanoonparvar, Mohammad 8, 188–189 n.22 gharb-setizi see anti-occidentalism gharbzadeh see Westoxication Girard, René 39, 47 Goft-o-gu 96–97 Goldin, Farideh 76–77, 82–83, 88

Ehtemadzadeh, Mahmud see Behazin Erfan, Ali 123, 147, 153–154, 214 n.14 exile in autobiographies 91–92 and diaspora 119–120 definition of 18 in France 106, 112, 116, 120–121 literature of 118–140 and nativist occidentalism 112 fanaticism 50–51, 76 Fardid, Ahmad 8 Faroukhy, Jumona 82–83 Ferdowsi, Hakim Abol Qasem 149–150 Florack, Ruth 104 fokoli 8, 112–114 Forsdick, Charles 36 Foucault, Michel 59, 61–62 France, Anatole 155

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Hachtroudi, Fariba 90 Halliday, Fred 6, 199 n.69 harem 28, 37, 40–41 Hedayat, Sadeq 29–30, 97, 102–104, 143, 146, 153–154 hijab 26, 76–77 historical novels exoticism in 36 feminism in 37–43 orientalism in 31–42 romanticism in 42–43 as scientific orientalism 35 and travel narratives 36 hospitality 50–51 hostage-taking 59 Hourcade, Bernard 25–26 Hout, Syrine 37 L’Humanité 61

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hybridity 141, 142–147, 148–157, 161–163 Il Corriere della Sera 61 imagology 2–4 Iran-Iraq War 53, 59 Iranian men in literature 33, 42, 76 Iranian women in literature 33, 42, 62–63, 88–89 Iranzadeh 48 Islam 21, 26–27 Islamophobia 26–27, 69 Jamalzadeh, Mohammad-Ali 115, 213 n.10 Jamshid 149–150, 154 Jones, Sir William 25 Kashigar, Media 100 Kasmaï, Sorour 91–93, 147, 148–156 Kelk see Bokhara Keshavarz, Fatemeh 66, 68–69, 75–76 Khavaran 120–121 Khatami, President Mohammad 13, 59–60, 212–213 n.5 Khayyam, Omar 14, 15, 144, 157–162 Keddie, Nikki 104–105 Kho’i, Esmail 106 Khomeini, Ayatollah 58–59, 60 Khorrami, Mohammad-Mehdi 146, 213 n.11 Khosrokhavar, Farhad 66, 110–111 Labrousse, Pierre 34 Lacroix, Jean-Yves 157–162 Lance, Alain 111 Le Figaro 61, 62 Le Monde 56–57, 58–61 Le Nouvel Observateur 59, 61 Leerssen, Joep 2, 28 Lejeune, Philippe 75 Lewis, Franklin 128 Libération 59, 61 Loti, Pierre 36

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Louis-Combet, Claude 160–161 Lowe, Lisa 43, 52 Lycée Razi 11, 81, 149, 191 n.36 Maalouf, Amin 15 Mahmood, Saba 77 Maingueneau, Dominique 2, 10 Malek, Amy 83 May 1968 107, 109–111 metafiction 153–155 Milani, Farzaneh 73 Minoui, Delphine 62–64, 79, 81 Mirabbassi, Kaveh 99 Mirsepassi, Ali 8 missionaries 11 Modaressi, Taghi 156 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 38 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de 27–30, 53, 67–69, 115 Moqaddam, Hassan 115 Moura, Jean-Marc 2, 18 Mourim, Khosrow 110–111 Mujaheddin-e khalq 90, 102 mythobiography 157, 160–162 Naficy, Hamid 122, 195 n.13, 203 n.70 Nafisi, Azar 66, 77 Naghibi, Nima 88–89, 204 n.80 Najmabadi, Afsaneh 73 Nassehy-Behnam, Vida 106 nativism 8, 9–10, 112–114 nativist occidentalism 112–117 Neveu, Erik 32 new orientalist narratives 27, 64–78 Ni Putes, Ni Soumises 77 Nonaholli, Mahshid 100 Not Without My Daughter 75 Ollivier, Bernard 47–48, 50–55 One Thousand and One Nights 39, 107, 153 Operation Eagle Claw 33

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INDEX Pahlavi, Shah Mohammed Reza 57–58 Paris-Match 57 pasdaran 67 People’s Mujaheddin of Iran, see Mujaheddin-e khalq Persian lexicon, use of 34, 39–40, 151–152 Petit, Marie 37–38 Petit Futé Iran 44–46 Pirzad, Zoya 101–103 Plantu, Jean 60 political fiction 32 portrayal of Iran in French media 56–62 post-colonialism 20, 43, 70–71, 145–146 Proust, Marcel 103, 128 publishing houses 77–78 pulp orientalism 31–32 Purmansuri, Hassan 114–115 Qeissariyeh, Reza 106–112 Rachet, Guy 37 Rafat, Donné 148 Rahimieh, Nasrin 148, 156 Richard, Yann 12, 14 Ricoeur, Paul 97, 100 romans à thèse, see thesis novels Roxana 14, 35, 42 Rouleau, Eric 59, 61 Rubin Suleiman, Susan 64–65 Rufin, Jean-Christophe 34, 38 Rushdie, Salman 59 Sabbah, Hassan 15 Saedi, Gholam Hossein 122–123 Said, Edward on exile 118 and historical novels 26, 41 and imagology 3, 5 on Le Monde 56, 59 and new orientalism 66

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on Oriental as alter 141, 164–165 and travel writing 49 Sartre, Jean-Paul 15, 72, 98 Satrapi, Marjane 67, 79–89 Sayar, Piruz 78, 100 Sayyid, Bobby 6 Scheherazade 15 Schoeller, Ghislaine 34, 37–43 Scullion, Rosemarie 61–62 Segalen, Victor 36, 159 Seidel, Michael 121 sexualizing the Orient 41–42 Shadman, Seyyed Fakhroddin 7, 8, 112 Shah, the see Pahlavi, Shah Mohammed Reza Shamlu, Ahmad 106 Shayegan, Dariush 103, 114, 147, 216 n.4 she’r now 14 Silk Road, the 48 Sprachman, Paul 112–113 Stark, Freya 37 Stasi commission 77 spy novels 31–34 ta’arof 40, 85 Taheri, Amir 58 Tajadod, Nahal 78, 79–89 Taraqi, Goli 104, 119, 121, 123–140 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste 13, 28 Tehran bookshops in 17 as fictional settings 33 publishing houses in 17 schools in 11 University of 7 women in 62–64 thesis novels 64–66, 79–80, 83, 87–89, 93–94 Thouroude, Guillaume 46–47 Tiregol, Maliheh 122 Todorov, Tzvetan 93, 143, 192 n.51 translation French into Persian 97–101 Persian into French 29–30

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travel guides and travelogues as a genre 44–47 and historical novels 36 and the Islamic Revolution 44, 48 and occidentalism 8 about Persia 28 role of narrator 49 by women 49 Tudeh 98–99

Vahabi, Nader 102, 116 Vahabzadeh, Peyman 121–122 Valéry, Philippe 54 Wagner, Tamara 7–8 Westoxication 8, 112–113 Whitlock, Gillan 66, 87 Yarshater, Ehsan 99 Yourcenar, Marguerite 15

unveiling 63–64, 74–75, 76–77, 90

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