Over the past five or six years a new trend can be seen in the work of a younger generation of Iranian writers. Iranian fiction has entered a new era whose most distinctive feature is its transitory nature.  The Islamic revolution, like many great upheaval, has shaken all values and norms within the society.  Some norms have persisted or reappeared in different forms.  But this era, in Ian as well as in the world itself, is generally an era of doubt and uncertainty.  Now, the images of women have to be rethought and redefined.  Under extreme pressure, women must look at themselves not only as members of their society or their country, but as individuals whose very private lives and liberties are being redefines.

In this state of flux, when everything is questioned, when the present feels more unreal than the past, the earlier seemingly tangible and real images of women can no longer function.  In the most recent novels, the images seem to have gone on strike altogether, as if they refuse to work under the present conditions.  In these novels, especially those of younger writers (two of whom are women), the narrative voice either breaks down or becomes one long toneless monologue and the characters are even more shadowy and unreal than in earlier novels.  The novels express a tendency to preach, and doubt and uncertainty about what is being preached.

In Tuba va Ma'na-ye Shab, we see this process.  The anecdote I quoted at the beginning of this chapter shows that Parsipur is aware of the Iranian male intellectuals' instinctive fear of the social issues directly related to women.  In this sense, her novel, like Moniru Ravanpur's latest novel Del-e Fulad (Heart of Steel, Tehran, 1991), provides interesting insights.  Both novels are about a woman's search for her place in the world. but this search never comes into focus, never becomes concrete, internalized or fictionally real.  The heroine in Ravanpur's novel, a contemporary woman writer, is less tangible than a shadowy ghost in the mind of a delirious patient.  Ravanpur skillfully generalizes her character out of existence.

Tuba va Ma'na-ye Shab also becomes one long narrative in the mind of its narrator/author.  It begins with concrete images, but ends as a pseudo-philosophical treatise.  Rather than creating interrelated images and voices, the novel presents a series of voices that are not differentiated, and which do not create dialogue.  In essence, Tuba va Ma'na-ye Shab is just one voice, monotonous, at times hysterical, pouring out what has been stored up for many long years.  The book's structure is based upon commentary and not image, monologue, not dialogue; and thus does not fit the form of the novel which is supposed to be multi-voiced, concrete, and individualized.  Tuba va Ma'na-ye Shab is almost frightening; it seems like an endless cry in the void.  The Iranian novel for the past few years seems to have either created voices without images, as in Tuba va Ma'na-ye Shab, or images without voices, as in Talar-e Ayneh.

The importance of this stage in the history of the Iranian novel is its transitory nature and the doubt it has cast upon all previous fixed images.  The tension between the novelist's tendency to preach and moralize and the uncertainly which runs counter to any form of preaching is an expression of this doubt.  The contradictory quality of preaching is an expression of this doubt.  The contradictory quality of these novels makes them interesting ; but it also makes the reader feel as if s/he was reading about imaged created in a void.

One further point needs to be mentioned, although its elaboration is beyond the scope of the present chapter.  The literary problem in Iran is not only to create fictionally real and creatively subversive images of women, but also to create a proper framework that could embody such images.  Also, unlike the claims made by some feminist critics about western women, the problem in Iran is not that Iranian women, as opposed to Iranian men, have not yet developed their own narratives, but that both women and men have as yet to create their own contemporary form of narrative, their own form of the novel.

Dialogue is by nature subversive; it simultaneously asserts one's own argument and undermines it by destabilizing it, turning it into a question through the other side's argument.  Since its beginning, the Iranian novel has been only superficially subversive because its writers concentrated on social or political statement.  There is a need for creating subversive literary images as well as dialogues among these images.

The images in the void teach us that without tracing the complexities and ambiguities which surround the modern woman, without understanding her private world, no coherent image of women can be created.  In fact, a truly subversive novel would present the image of woman as a private self, and within that context would create many levels of reality surrounding and emanating from the self, including the social, historical, and philosophical levels of experience.

But writing in the void is better than writing according to fixed formulas.  Courageously accepting the existence of this void perhaps will lead us to a creative reappraisal of where we stand in relation to our literary past and future.

Going back to the first example in this chapter, I agree with the adib that once women become aware of themselves, once they begin to think independently, they create a great upheaval.  In the Iranian novel this upheaval has not yet happened; it has not as yet created the 'real' woman, the full woman, body, soul, and mind.  Without her, men in the Iranian novel will continue to be either absent or impotent.  The Iranian novel awaits that great moment, when those wise, strong, and gracious women of the classical Iranian narrative will find their worthy peers within contemporary Iranian fiction.

End