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Al‐e Ahmad's Fictional Legacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael C. Hillmann
Michael C. Hillmann*
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Extract

In a twenty-four-year writing career that began in 1945 with the publication of the story “Pilgrimage” in Sukhan magazine and ended in 1969 with a heart attack at age 46, Jalal Al-e Ahmad established himself as a major voice in modern Persian fiction. His first and best known collection of short stories, The Exchange of Visits, appeared in 1946, followed in short order by Our Suffering (1947), Sihtār (1948), and The Unwanted Woman (1952), which was reprinted in 1964 with two additional stories. A fifth collection of stories entitled The New Generation remains unpublished, although a sampling of stories from that collection entitled Five Stories was published posthumously. The first of five longer pieces of fiction, Tale of the Beehives, was published in 1955. Three years later The School Principal appeared. Then, in 1961, came The Letter ‘N’ and the Pen, followed in 1968 by The Cursing of the Land, of which several chapters had previously been published separately. A final novel, A Stone on a Grave, remains unpublished.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1976 , pp. 248 - 265
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1976

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References

Notes

1. The exclusive focus in this article on Al-e Ahmad's fiction does not imply an imputation of greater significance to his fictional works vis-à-vis his considerable corpus of non-fiction, which receives critical scrutiny in this writer's forthcoming Jalāl and Forugh: Spokespersons of the Iranian 1960s.

2. In Persian, besides numerous brief treatments and reviews of Al-e Ahmad's fictional works, there is Andishah va Honar 5, No. 4 (1964)Google Scholar, the whole issue of which is devoted to Al-e Ahmad. Unfortunately, after his death, no critical study of Al-e Ahmad's works in Iran developed as one would expect, because of the government's apparent unwillingness to allow commemorative issues of journals and studies on Al-e Ahmad to appear. Nevertheless, during the years after his death, Al-e Ahmad's popularity among university and other non-establishment rawshanfikr (intelligentsia) readership has proved unflagging. For example, according to Firdawsi 25, No. 1152 (February 18, 1974): 23, more than 30,000 copies of the fifth printing of The School Principal were sold during the April 1973 to January 1974 period.

3. Mostafavi, Rahmat “Fiction in Contemporary Persian Literature,” Middle Eastern Affairs 2 (1951):273-279Google Scholar; Avery, Peter W. “Developments in Modern Persian Prose,” The Muslim World 45 (1955):313-323CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shaki, Mansour “An Introduction to the Modern Persian Literature,” Charisteria Orientalia Jan Rypka, ed. Tauer, Felix (Prague: Ceskoslovenske Akademie Ved, 1956), pp. 300-315Google Scholar; Nafisi, Sa'id “A General Survey of the Existing Situation in Persian Literature,” Bulletin of the Institute of Islamic Studies, No. 1 (1957):13-25Google Scholar; Yarshater, Ehsan “Persian Letters in the Last Fifty Years,” Middle Eastern Affairs 11 (1960):298-306Google Scholar; Bausani, Alessandro “Europe and Iran in Contemporary Persian Literature,” East and West, N.S. 11 (1960):3-14Google Scholar; and Machalski, Franciszek “Principaux courants de la prose persane moderne,” Rocznik Orientalyczny 25, No. 2 (1961):121-130.Google Scholar In the middle 1960s, Kamshad, Hasan Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge: University Press, 1966), p. 125Google Scholar, is still referring to Al-e Ahmad as one of the “younger generation of writers” and mistakenly terms the allegorical Tale of the Beehives (1954) a collection of stories; Destree, Annette “Les tendences actuelles de la litterature persane,” Correspondence d'Orient: Etudes 11-12 (1967):30Google Scholar, footnote No. 1, makes the same mistake. The evidence apparently indicates that these scholars had not read Tale of the Beehives, just as Machalski, Franciszek “Principaux genres et especes de la prose persane contemporaine,” 25th International Congress of Orientalists 1960 (Moscow, 1963) 2:279Google Scholar, seems not to have read the short story collection Our Suffering, which he calls a novel. More significantly, in Kamshad's history of Modern Persian Prose Literature, only two of 226 pages are devoted to Al-e Ahmad while, for example, twelve pages are given to Mohammad Hejazi. In the 1968 revised English edition of Rypka's, Jan History of Iranian Literature (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1968), p. 416CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in the course of a sixty-page survey of 20th-century Persian literature, Vera Kubickova dismisses Al-e Ahmad in a single sentence, and that one sentence is misleading in that it cites Our Suffering as the work with which he launched his writing career. Finally, in a recent article on modern Persian literature in The Encyclopedia of Islam: New Edition 4 (1973):70-75Google Scholar (in which, incredibly, the name of Gholamhoseyn Sa'edi does not even appear in the discussions of contemporary fiction and drama), Al-e Ahmad again receives mention only in passing.

4. For example, Borecky, Milos “Persian Prose Since 1946,” Middle East Journal 7 (1953):240-241Google Scholar; Law, Henry D. G. “Introductory Essay: Persian Writers,” Life and Letters and the London Mercury 63 (December 1949):199-200Google Scholar; Monnot, G. J. “Jalal Āl-e Aḥmad, ecrivain iranien d'audjourd'hui,” Melanges de l'Institut domincain d'etudes orientales du Caire 9 (1967): 221-225Google Scholar; Sabri-Tabrizi, G. R. “Human Values in the Works of Two Persian Writers,” Correspondance D'Orient: Actes, No. 11 (1970):411-418Google Scholar; Tikku, Girdhari “Some Socio-religious Themes in Modern Persian Fiction,” Islam and Its Cultural Divergence (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1971), pp. 171-176Google Scholar; Yarshater, Ehsan “The Modern Literary Idiom,” Iran Faces the Seventies (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 305-308Google Scholar; Zavarzadeh, Mas'ud “The Persian Short Story since the Second World War: An Overview,” The Muslim World 58 (1968):311-312CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hillmann, Michael “Introduction,” The School Principal (Minneapolis and Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1974), pp. 7-32.Google Scholar

5. It is available in Newton's, John K. translation The School Principal (Minneapolis & Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1974)Google Scholar; the reader is advised of Clinton's, Jerome W. negative appraisal of the translation and some aspects of my introduction to it in Iranian Studies 8 (1975):191-196Google Scholar (naturally, I do not agree with Mr. Clinton's assessment and am even at a loss for words with which to respond to Mr. Clinton's suggestion that my positive view of Mr. Newton's translation had something to do with personal friendship). For the reader who does not know Persian, besides The School Principal, the following works by Al-e Ahmad are available in English translations: “The China Flowerpot,” tr. Michael Hillmann, in “Introduction,” The School Principal, pp. 8-12; “The Pilgrimage,” tr. H. D. G. Law, Life and Letters, pp. 202-209; “The Old Man Was Our Eyes,” tr. Ricks, Thomas M. The Literary Review 19, pt. 1 (Fall 1974):115-128Google Scholar; “Someone Else's Child,” tr. Gouchenour, T. S. Iranian Studies 1 (1968): 155-62Google Scholar; and “What Are Education and the University Accomplishing?,” tr. Michael Hillmann, in “Introduction,” The School Principal, pp. 13-18. Forthcoming translations from Al-e Ahmad's works include: “The Hedāyat of The Blind Owl,” in Hedayat's ‘The Blind Owl Forty Years After (Austin: University of Texas, 1977)Google Scholar, three stories in Major Voices in Contemporary Persian Literature (Minneapolis & Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1977)Google Scholar, and several stories in “The Persian Short Story,” Literature East and West, ed. M. A. Jazayery (forthcoming).

6. One unidentified reviewer in “Mudīr-e Madraseh,” Rāhnamā-yi Kitāb 1 (1958):119Google Scholar, almost apologetically certifies the veracity of the picture which Al-e Ahnad paints. Muhammad ˓Alī Jamālzādah, “Mudir-e Madraseh,” Rāhnamā-ye Kitāb 1 (1958):174Google Scholar, observes that the chief success of The School Principal lies in Al-e Ahmad's comprehensive realism and total avoidance of the sentimental and melodramatic.

7. Baraheni, Reza Qiṣṣah-nivīsī, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Ashrafi, 1969), p. 291.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., pp. 442-43.

9. Michael Hillmann, “Introduction,” The School Principal, pp. 23-24, translates the opening scene of The Cursing of the Land and briefly discusses similarities between it and The School Principal.

10. Yarshater, “The Modern Literary Idiom,” p. 307.

11. Baraheni, Qiṣṣah-nivīsī, pp. 443-44.

12. Āl-e Aḥmad, Jalāl “Guftugū bā Jalāl Āl-i Aḥmad,” Andīshah va Honar 5, No. 4 (1964/65):393.Google Scholar

13. Elwell-Sutton, L. P. “The Influence of Folk-tale and Legend on Modern Persian Literature,” Iran and Islam, ed. Bosworth, C. E. (Edinburgh, 1971), pp. 251-52Google Scholar, notes that the Tale of the Beehives embodies “the folk-tale form as a vehicle for…social criticism,” but gratuitously adds that it “was no doubt suggested by Karel Capek's Insect Play.

14. Al-e Aḥmad, Jalāl Arzyābī-yi Shitābzādah (Tabriz, 1965), p. 78Google Scholar; Ṣabri-Tabrizi, “Human Values,” p. 414.

15. This view contradicts the prevailing opinion in Iran, and Shamīm Bahār, “Mudīr-i Madraseh va Nūn va al-Qalam va Jalāl Āl-i Aḥmad,” Andīshah va Hunar, pp. 490-504, goes so far as to call the book a failure. But, as this writer experienced in delivering papers on the subject at the Tehran Central Youth Palce (August 1973) and the Fourth Annual Iranology Congress in Shiraz (September 1973), Iranian readers are nonetheless receptive to a reevaluation of The Letter “N” and the Pen and a reappraisal of its place in Āl-e Aḥmad's fiction. And Banani, Amin during a Society of Iranian Studies panel discussion at the Middle East Studies Association 1974 Annual Meeting (Boston, November 7, 1974)Google Scholar, even stated that The Letter “N” and the Pen may well be Al-e Ahmad's best piece of longer fiction, although he feels that the use of traditional folk-tale phrases and narrator comments is somewhat excessive and heavy-handed, thus constituting a possible flaw in the story.

16. Al-e Ahmad, Arzyābi, pp. 104-105.

17. Ibid., p. 93.

18. Ibid., pp. 93 and 100.

19. Al-e Ahmad, Gharbzādagī, p. 23.

20. Idem, “Maalan Sharḥ-i Aḥvālāt,” Jahān-e Naw 24, No. 3 (1969):7.Google Scholar

21. The question is briefly discussed in Michael Hillmann, “Persian Prose Fiction: Iran's Contemporary Mirror and Conscience,” Highlights of Persian Literature, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (forthcoming).

22. Bill, James A. The Politics of Iran (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1972), p. 76.Google Scholar

23. Ricks, Thomas “Samad Bihrangi and Contemporary Iran: The Artist in Revolutionary Struggle,” The Little Black Fish and Other Modern Persian Stories by Behrangi, Samad (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1976), pp. 97 and 110.Google Scholar