Iran’s nearly decade-long war with Iraq has spawned a plethora of literary and cinematic works. Starting in the first year of the war and continuing unabated until today, “the literature of Holy Defense” as it has become known in Iran, has sought to embody the official state-narrative of the war. These works of literature and film depict the official history of the war: an imposed and religiously sanctified fight between absolute good and evil. With stories that take place largely on the war-front, writers of this genre dutifully aestheticize the righteousness of the Iranian cause, the religiously-inspired heroism and martyrdom of the fighters, and the painful, but loyal support of mothers and widows on the home-front. Since the appearance of the first war stories in 1981, literary realism, with a heavy emphasis on the religious beliefs of the fighters, has dominated the realm of war fiction in Iran. State-sponsored newspapers, publishing houses and prizes have encouraged this, making what some critics have called “Islamic Realism” the form of Holy Defense literature par excellence, thus establishing firm links between ideology, aesthetics, form and genre that have remained highly influential until the current day. However, modernist Persian literature is not without its influence on war writing in Iran. Modernist and experimental writers such as Hushang Golshiri, Shahriar Mandanipour, Hossein Mortezaiyan Abkenar and have subtly challenged the state narrative of the war, not only through the content of their stories, but especially through the radical reformulation of the form of the war story, creating new discursive spaces for the discussion of the war in Iranian society. Moreover, with the implementation of modernist techniques, these writers have created ideologically alternative narratives of the war, fragmenting time and space, shining light on the unspoken aspects of the war, and casting doubt on the certainty of the official war narrative. Informed by the theoretical work of Hayden White and Terry Eagleton, and with special emphasis on Hossein Mortezaiyan Abkenar’s award winning novella, The Scorpion on the Steps of the Andishmak Railroad (Aqrab Ru-ye Pelleh-ha-ye Andishmak), this paper investigates the relationship between form, content and ideology in Iranian war fiction. I argue that the creation of successful counter-narrative of the Iran-Iraq War in contemporary Iranian fiction has relied on the use of alternative literary forms that draw heavily from the tradition of modernist Persian fiction, while avoiding contemporary ideological associations between literary realism and the war.

In the preface to his 1921 short story collection, Yeki Bud Yeki Nabud, Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh presented a manifesto which both urged and predicted an imminent novelization of Persian prose. The novel, and specifically the realist and socially critical novel, Jamalzadeh argued, would unite the Iranian polity, educate the masses, preserve the knowledge of Iranian history and tradition, and acquaint both Iranians and world citizens with the reality of Iranian custom, heritage, and daily life. Ironically, then, the first Iranian novel to acquire both national and global fame after this manifesto stand was Sadeq Hedayat’s Blind Owl, a surrealist labyrinth of shadow doubles, false awakenings, extreme alienation, and everywhere a deeply realism-resistant atmosphere of anachronism. What Irving Howe ironically termed “history as nightmare” in reference to Orwell’s 1984, manifested itself as one of Hedayat’s dominant literary devices in the novel: the protagonist constantly fights against an apparent “awakening” into a dark, ambiguous historical past, in which all of the idealized, Romantic/Symbolist imagery of his apparent waking life takes on sinister connotations. This paper argues that a progressively developing theme of “history as nightmare” can be traced in works by Hushang Golshiri, arguably Iran’s most prominent modernist writer of the generation following Hedayat’s. In these works (Golshiri’s novels Shazdeh Ehtejab – Prince Ehtejab – Ma’sum-e Panjom – the Fifth Innocent – and Shah-e Siahpushan – King of the Benighted), history not only lacks any morally positive qualities such as the ability to bestow national pride or a sense of collective heritage, but is in fact presented as a deeply unstable, ontologically distinct, and nihilistically deceptive alternate reality. As one might argue Faulkner’s Quentin Compson learned between Absalom Absalom and The Sound and the Fury, the reconstruction of history is both epistemologically fraught and impotent, ultimately, to provide “answers” to the existential crises of the present. Golshiri’s heroes do not study the past to learn from its mistakes and educate their contemporaries, as Jamalzadeh envisioned, but rather become trapped in nightmare worlds of past time from which they cannot awake. Besides Irving Howe, this paper draws upon notions of the “historical nightmare” developed in studies of European Gothic fiction, as well as upon the narratological theories of Brian McHale, Thomas Pavel, and Marie-Laure Ryan, which explore the notion of history as an alternate reality with a troubled and complex relationship with objective, “present” time.

The social, cultural, literary, and theatrical efforts of pre-Constitutional and Constitutional Iran are often examined as mere political intentions, and strictly read in light of political theory. Even though the literary and dramatic productions of this period were often the works of individuals with a bold presence on the oppositional scene, political analyses of these literary and dramatic productions have made them understudied in their immediate disciplines. After political historians, these sources have been examined by literary scholars, less so by legal historians, and in the English academia, almost never from a theatrical perspective. This paper is an effort to read Mirza Malkom Khan’s Qānun newspaper (1890-93) as a foundation of modern Iranian playwriting. The paper revisits theories of Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911) from a theatrical perspective, and, as a case-study, examines Qānun newspaper for its politicization. In order to create unity between various social types present in the constitutional movement, Qānun created fictitious conversations, and put real historical figures in imaginary dialogues. These dialogues constitute the theatrical issues of Qānun. In a close reading of these issues, the paper argues that their significance is in their appearance as written theatrical scenes with an author-audience awareness of their theatricality, lying the foundation of modern Persian playwriting.

A corpus of what Linda Hutcheon calls "historiographic metafiction" or "innovative historical novels," as Brian McHale puts it, was already established within the North and Latin American literary establishment by the end of the 70s. In Iran as well as in other Middle Eastern countries something similar was starting to take place; many of innovative historical fictions emerged after 1979 Revolution, among them Reza Baraheni's The Mysteries of My Homeland and Azadeh Khanum and Her Author or Dr. Sharifi's Private Auschwitz. These two consciously self-reflexive novels are significant as they challenge aptly the very act of fictional and historical writing. Internalizing what Baraheni himself terms 'Iranian historical instability' in their forms, both novels, specifically Azadeh Khanum, bare the process by which a naïve conception of history as something always-already stabilized could be deconstructed and alternated by a conception of the utter indeterminacy of the past. Perpetual change and instability become the nature of the past; a past which is forever being rewritten. Baraheni's works fit many of the criteria of "innovative historical novels," integrates multiple possible worlds by which post-modernist fiction highlights ontological concerns, and emphasizes fictionality by drawing attention to the process of installing order. This presentation will focus mainly on the Reza Baraheni's notion of the interdependency of fiction and history as it is depicted in the above-mentioned novels. Witnessing the overwhelming birth of 1979 Iranian Revolution, in The Mysteries of My Homeland, Baraheni offers a personal recreation of the contemporary history of Iran through mosaic narratives. Baraheni's works, far from trying to capture an objective vision of this contemporary history, are conscientious construction in which the author intentionally mixes factual historical data, nostalgia, memorabilia, as well as a whole range of fictional, semi-historical and historical characters in order to create a peculiar revision of "Iranian historical instability" before and after Revolution. In Azadeh Khanum, also, instead of surrendering his novel to the constraints of a specific historical era already textualized, Baraheni brings the elements of that historical era into his fictional narrative. Once the reader assumes Baraheni's tenet that the traces of the past, events as well as characters, are entirely unreliable and discursive -i.e. fictional- there is no need to keep the historical and the fictional in distinct categories. Baraheni, in this sense, depicts a set of fictional characters who merge and interact with historical figures of the contemporary era, including himself.