Committed Writing or Committed Reading: Revisiting the Hierarchy of the Senses to Read Persian Modernist Fiction

No doubt the literature of commitment and committed literature have succeeded in occupying a significant role on the trajectory of modern Persian fiction. It is, however, extremely important to differentiate committed writing from constructed committed readings. Such readings seek, stereotype, and emphasize tropes which aim to identify sites of struggles (even if they are artificially construed) on which, they argue, one can detect “calls to action”. It stands to reason that such readings have to ignore many aspects of a given work to justify reductionist readings; aspects which in regard to Persian modernist fiction represent, I believe, its most important characteristics. Among a multitude of approaches which could reveal these ignored components, this presentation will focus on the revitalized notion of the hierarchy of the senses—especially in the field of New Historicism—and argue that to architect the potential literary environments of these works, one must begin by dismissing the Aristotelian supremacy of sight (content) and rely on all senses to experience the work. The data generated through the different sensory directions, then, could contribute to the formation of literary realities which demonstrate the non-discursive and non-committed aspects of modernist Persian fiction. As an exploratory effort, this presentation will demonstrate and examine this hypothesis through a musically-inspired reading—listening to sounds and silences—of a few significant yet underexplored works by writers such as Shamim Bahar and Reza Julai and will, hopefully, identify sites of resistance which are not necessarily defined through their commitment or discursivity.