Simin Daneshvar and Bewilderment

Simin Daneshvar is one of the most influential female writers of narrative fiction. Her realistic presentation of society, culture and historical moments are closely intertwined with her own experiences of those moments. Such heavy reliance on, and stubborn adherence to, personal experience in her narrative bestows her stories with authenticity and authority, called ‘authority of experience’. The sequel novels of The Island of Wandering and The Wandering Cameleer are woven with realism and fiction. They are populated with real historical figures and fictional characters. Nevertheless, her narrative does not fit into the definition of ‘historical novel’. The current paper aims to locate the genre of the work. Furthermore, it presents a discussion of Danehvar’s echoing of the narratives of the ideologies of religion, nationalism or secularism at the spatial-temporal world of the story. In her aesthetic experience, beyond such vacillations between imagination and the real, Daneshvar oscillates between polarities of modernity and tradition, west and non-west, religion and secularism, at times favoring one over the other and shifting positions. The paper investigates if Daneshvar’s story was merely a portrayal of perplexity and wonderment of the characters, and the nation by extension, in their desperate struggle to seal a discrete, nativist identity of their own. The paper addresses the question of how far this perplexity—ideological, political and spiritual—reflects the author’s own perplexity. It also deals with the author’s struggle in creating an imaginary space by reconciling the paradoxical binarities, a kind of ‘non-secular secularism’ or ‘non-religious religion’, called postsecularism.