Missing Soluch In The U.S

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

Finally, the claim that any work suffers from “unnecessary elaborations” is of course subjective in literature, but for any reader of Melville, Woolf, Joyce or Delillo (to only name a few prominent if sometimes wordy, English-language authors), the level of detail that is presented about the daily lives of the characters of Missing Soluch would seem hardly excessive. For example, there are long and detailed descriptions of the work of harvesting, or of the clearing of snow in the village. These may appear “unnecessary” for the storyline, but contribute a great deal to the rich ambiance of the novel and its rootedness to a particular environment and culture. In addition, there is not a single instance of the “narrator addressing the reader” -- at least as far as what is called the “Dear reader” mode of narration is concerned. So far off the mark are her claims about the work, one wonders if Nafisi had even read the book at all.

Since Nafisi doesn’t offer any further substantiation or elaboration -- unnecessary or not -- of her claims, I would have to conclude that this article is less a work of criticism than an unpleasant bit of polemics, offered so as to simple-mindedly prop up a scornful and disdaining posture towards this and certain other works of modern Persian literature, and thus to dismiss certain complex and rich books through simplistic and clearly uninformed claims about them. Clearly, there is much to discuss concerning the representations of women in modern Persian novels, including Missing Soluch -- but one does need to take the works much more seriously than Nafisi does if one wishes to present a well-founded perspective on the issue.

And yet, seems most disturbing to me in Nafisi’s argument is the fact that these erroneous statements about the book are prefaced with a facile claim that this and other examples of modern Persian literature “lack” qualities that give “Western realistic novels such amazing lights [sic] and shades [sic].” Is the measure of all modern world literature to be whether or not they conform to the framework of Western realistic novels? Is truly there no point in trying to sympathetically assess non-Western literatures as bringing their own “amazing” qualities that may be quite different than those of canonical Western writing? One has the sense from this article that Nafisi thinks not.

While hoping to simply set the record straight here, I also raise the issue of Nafisi’s article to illustrate the problem of how modern Persian literature is valued -- both in and outside of Iran -- and how this influences, for example, the economy of translation and publishing of these works. It is my sense that Nafisi is generally dissatisfied with these works for reasons that have little to do with the works as such -- she is apparently trying to read what she sees as cultural traits into works of art, an act that is often prone to failure when dealing with complex or imaginative creative work. If our only judgment of good literature is presented by setting canonical “Western” literature as the measure for all literary work, we will certainly miss an opportunity to have modern Iranian literature contribute to the larger body of what has begun to be termed world literature. For by setting these limiting criteria as measures, we are only confirming -- rather foolishly -- that modern Iran is not modern Europe (or the US) and does not share their histories. This view concludes that Iranian literary productions cannot be worthwhile if they are not essentially imitative, which in fact very often they are not.

This is a significant problem, one that we may begin to address through supporting and encouraging translation of modern Iranian literature -- if for nothing else than due to fact that perhaps by reading these works in English translation, readers such as Nafisi may have a chance to comprehend the richness and complexity of books such as Dowlatabadi’s Missing Soluch.