The Hikāyat of Modernity: Re-Periodizing Modern Iranian Literature

Placed in evaluative rather than historical terms, Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh’s collection of short stories Yakī Būd Yakī Nabūd (Once Upon a Time, 1921) is said, in standard accounts of modern Iranian literature, to have marked the decisive break with traditional modes of writing and initiated “modern” prose literature in Iran. The latent sense of belatedness in the ideological and ahistorical paradigms which inform such accounts (advent, founder, imitation/translation of an idealized Western form) derive from the underlying assumption that there is a temporal distance between the time of tradition and the time of the modern, collapsing the many temporalities of modernity onto a calendrical vision of history. Placed in its historical context, however, Jamalzadeh’s Yakī Būd Yakī Nabūd emerges as a narrative of various temporalities (the traditional, the contemporary, the quotidian), of various genres (the inshā’, the hikāyat, the novel, the proverbial, the scriptural, the poetic), of various localities (the national, the transnational, the regional, the global), and of various ideologies. The coexistence of these diverse accounts of identity in Yakī Būd Yakī Nabūd disrupts the alleged temporal difference between the traditional and the modern and instead creates a narrative of simultaneity where multiple ideologies and their attendant temporalities vie for expression, informing, contesting, and re-appropriating each other in the process. The narrative structure and rhetorical strategies that enabled the inclusion of multiplicity and simultaneity in Jamalzadeh’s collection were those of the munāzirah (debate). Itself re-appropriated from its classical literary-religious form and function into a narrative sphere for dialogue, the munāzirah had been used for over half a century (dating at least to the 1860s) prior to Jamalzadeh as a narrative of contestation and adaptation where rival discourses engaged in debating competing notions of modern Iranian identity. The dialogical potential of the munāzirah unleashed an impetus for debate which transcended narrative (or merely literary) productions and entered the sphere of cultural and discursive practices. Far from being the initiator of modern prose literature for “introducing” a Western genre into Iran, Jamalzadeh’s Yakī Būd Yakī Nabūd falls along the continuum of this culturally specific, locally determined, historically situated, and dialogical tradition of Iranian literary modernity.