Orientalism Versus Occidentalism

Literary and Cultural Imaging Between France and Iran Since the Islamic Revolution

Laetitia Nanquette

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786721204
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

At a time when Iran is represented in the French media as a rogue state obsessed with its nuclear programme, and when France is portrayed in the Iranian media as a decadent and imperialist country, this book highlights the role of cultural representations and perceptions. Here, Laetitia Nanquette examines the functions, processes and mechanisms of stereotyping and imagining the 'other' that have pervaded the literary traditions of France and Iran when writing about each other. She furthermore analyses Franco-Iranian relations, exploring the literary traditions of this relationship, the ways in which these have affected individual authors and reflect socio-political realities. With themes that feed into popular debates about the nature of Orientalism and Occidentalism, and how the two interact, this book will be vital for researchers of Middle Eastern literature and its relationship with writings from the West, as well as those working on the cultures of the Middle East.

CHAPTER 1

HOW CAN ANYBODY BE PERSIAN? FRENCH TEXTS ON IRAN

Defining contemporary French orientalism

I would like to start with an example of French orientalism’s inscription within a discourse system through an article on the history of Iranian studies in France by Bernard Hourcade.¹ Interestingly, the author himself is not concerned with the issue of orientalism, although the debate was fierce in the academy at the time of writing. Hourcade’s article underlines two facts. Firstly, French orientalists saw the Iranian world as a distinct entity, different from the Turkish and Semitic civilisations, and thus their relation to Iran was often based on the idea of a shared Aryan identity.² This can be explained by the insistence on philological and archaeological works, which had been orientated towards this Aryan framework since the finding of similarities between Sanskrit and European languages by Sir William Jones.³ Indeed, the French Ministry of Public Education was given the monopoly of archaeological excavations in Persia from 1894 to 1931.⁴ Thus the French created an object of study that was the Persian world and, thanks to this Aryan narrative, Persia could be understood as not entirely alien.⁵ Secondly, French orientalism has always been more interested in ancient Persia than in contemporary Iran, even if this tendency changed around the middle of the twentieth century, to be replaced by a flood of researches on contemporary Iranian society and politics; medieval, pre-modern and modern periods were not of high interest either, and are still poorly represented in Iranian studies. This interest in ancient Persia has some historical background, explained partly by the fact that Persia was primarily known by proxy, that is, through books and manuscripts, until late in the history of French orientalism, as opposed, for instance, to the Ottoman empire, where orientalists travelled with reasonable ease.⁶ This insistence on the ancient is a characteristic described at length by Edward Said. According to Said, the object of study is analysed in its artificially fixed past. Thus, the two notions of French orientalism delineated by Hourcade (creating an Aryan identity for the Persian empire and studying mostly ancient Persia), are testimonies to Said’s demonstration that scientific analysis cannot be excluded from general power discourse, and up to a point, from the French imperialist discourse.

But what is the specificity of French orientalism today in the wider non-academic discourse? Might it be, for example, Islamophobic?

William Beeman, who has worked on American-Iranian relations, argues that the weight of orientalism is traced into today’s discourse towards the Other: ‘The West has a ready-made code of invective that could be invoked. The code itself is not descriptive; it is evocative of emotional and prejudicial overtones that go back centuries.’⁷ According to him, the old orientalist discourse just needs to be reinvigorated, and Islamophobia, as the prejudice against Islam and Muslims, represents this reinvigoration.⁸ The term Islamophobia is increasingly used to refer to religiously motivated hostility directed at Muslims, especially at North Africans in France. In general, it has become more prominent in public discourse since the Islamic scarf controversy in France (and the interdiction of wearing the hijab in public schools) and afterwards, with 9/11.⁹ It is interesting to note that Islamophobia in France can be traced back to the Iranian Revolution and the idea of Islam conveyed at the time, especially by the media.¹⁰ The Algerian war of independence laid the ground for this negative view of Muslims, as has the settlement of populations of Muslim origin, who had for many years been termed ‘immigrant travellers’ and not specifically defined in religious terms. Thomas Deltombe insists on the fact that until 1979, Islam was unknown to most people, and was certainly not considered a problem. However, with the Iranian Revolution, widely reported and broadcast, Islam became a subject of talk in French dining rooms and Islamic symbols became common references.¹¹ Despite this genealogy, there is no particular French Islamophobia toward Iran in contemporary times, since the fear of Islam in France is focused mainly on the fear of North Africans, whose practice of this religion is seen as interfering with French ‘laïcité’. The elements of Islamophobia I could trace in the French context referred only to a few ‘new orientalist narratives’ by writers of Iranian origin. I shall expand in the following chapter on these orientalist discourses, which exaggerate the status of Muslims or Islam as a ‘threat’ to the West.¹² Thus it appears that Islamophobia is not a good framework within which to think of the French image of Iranians, as it is mainly found in some of the writings produced by Iranian exiles rather than by the French themselves.

My argument is that the French doxa on Iranians today is not characterised by Islamophobia but by an inability to distance itself from the heavy interdiscursive presence of an orientalist image of Persians, originating with Montesquieu and perpetuated by orientalist scholars. The horizon of expectation of a French reader has not moved drastically since the first images of Persians appeared in French literature; the fixed images on Iran and Iranians found in contemporary French literature are due to a fetishistic view of Montesquieu’s characters and images and to the inability of writers to overcome this textual reference.¹³ My use of ‘fetish’ is based on Homi Bhabha’s concept in The Location of Culture, where he argues that stereotype is a form of fetish: it both desires and rejects the Other. It is ‘a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always “in place”, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated’.¹⁴ This tension can be found precisely in French contemporary texts and their orientalist referent. The link that I make is between the fetishisation of the image of Persians and its stereotyping in French letters. I prefer to use ‘cliché’, as a literary term focused on the imagination, rather than ‘stereotype’; but by replacing stereotype with cliché, I subscribe to the above definition by Bhabha.

In Montesquieu’s famous epistolary novel, a French character exclaims: ‘Oh! ah! A Persian, is he? Most amazing! How can anybody be a Persian?’¹⁵ The Persian Letters features two Persian characters arriving in Paris and describing the city and its people through letters to their relatives. The characters represent at the same time figures of Others looking at the French Self (what in imagology is called the ‘meta-image’), and pretexts for the French Self to analyse and criticise itself through an allegorical novel. This allegorical role is important: Usbek and Rica’s exotic belonging is idealistic; it is a detour taken in order to better see oneself and warn against possible governmental errors. But there is also a realistic reference to Persia: the letters written by the Persians to their relatives in Iran, and the relatives’ replies, are pretext for describing Persia, in orientalist terms, based on interdiscursive references to the harem and to the despotic power of men over women. Joep Leerssen interestingly notes that the Persian nationality of Usbek and Rica’s correspondents is more important than their own nationality, which he sees as simply exotic. Readers take the place of the Persian correspondent, Roxane, Ibben, or Mirza, and as such, penetrate the actual Persia, which they were not able to do through the encounter with the Persians in Paris.¹⁶ This represents the mise en scène of the appropriation of Iran through narration, albeit a multivocal appropriation.

The Persian Letters was often re-edited, both during Montesquieu’s lifetime and after his death. Olivier Bonnerot has counted fifty re-editions, including twelve in the year of publication, 1721.¹⁷ When analysing the recurring aspect of the query ‘How can anybody be Persian?’ in the French imagination, it is essential to remember that Montesquieu’s epistolary novel comes after the fashionable travelogues by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Jean Chardin. The Persian is by then a known figure of the exotic and a privileged figure of the oriental Other.¹⁸ Olivier Bonnerot discusses the ways in which Persia is seen as both fascinating and frightening because of its supposed violence and cruelty, and this in several milieus: the religious, scientific, poetic and ideological. Bonnerot argues that the tension between the fantasy of its pleasures and the horror of its atrocities has given the myth of Persia its greatness.¹⁹

It is striking, when browsing French prose texts concerned with Iran in different periods, to see how often French intellectuals and writers use Montesquieu’s query to qualify the relations between Iran and France. It is also the sign of the influence of Persian literature on French literature, starting from around the seventeenth century with Racine’s use of Persian themes, down to Aragon’s Le fou d’Elsa. Even though Persian themes became less current in the second half of the twentieth century, one can still find several ‘New Persian Letters’ by French writers, as well as numerous references to Montesquieu. Indeed, I have found it difficult to locate French texts that do not at some point make use of this reference. Even though the Persian Other may no longer be a privileged Other after colonisation and its focus on North-African or African Others, the question ‘How can anybody be Iranian?’ is a recurring way of reflecting on difference.²⁰ What is at stake in this query is the French reflection on Otherness, the exact Otherness being embodied by Persians/Iranians. Here it might be necessary to remind the reader that ‘Iranian’ is a large category including different groups of languages and of peoples; although ‘Persian’ refers to only one of these languages and to one group of Iranians, it has been a general term to designate Iranians in the West. Be that as it may, the famous question is so predominant that it has become an insurmountable introduction to or conclusion on Iran – that is, a cliché. Most writers feel the need to situate themselves relatively to it, and are caught in the rhetoric of the question. This is the burden of orientalist interdiscourse. The cliché works as a way of inscribing oneself into a literary tradition, more than as an attempt to find an original answer to the question. It is thus an object of both literary desire and rejection. French contemporary texts allude to the same old French references on Iran as well as to one another, using neither Persian texts nor Iranian references as ways to vary the image. This closed intertextuality is in my view partly explained by an important factor, the scarcity of translations from Persian into French.

Such translations as have been made include Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, over fifteen years after its publication in Persian.²¹ Although Hedayat can be considered as the only internationally recognised Iranian writer, José Corti announced in 2008 that The Blind Owl had sold 50,000 copies – hardly exceptional for the masterpiece of the best-known Iranian writer in France, over a period of more than fifty years.²² Many important twentieth-century Persian authors have not been translated: from Simin Daneshvar to Sadeq Chubak to Mahmud Dowlatabadi, from poets Simin Behbahani to Ahmad Shamlu, and it is only with Christophe Balaÿ in the last two decades that there has been a systematic revival of translation of modern and contemporary texts.²³ Classical poetry, too, suffers from this lack of interest: Charles-Henri de Fouchécour’s French translation of the whole Divan of Hafez was only published in 2006. Even Rumi, a best-seller in the United States, has hardly benefited from an interest in mystical love poetry in France. Since so few Persian texts have been translated, there are almost no images to oppose that of Montesquieu and we find ourselves in a closed circuit where images refer endlessly to one another. This makes it difficult for writers to go beyond the cliché.

In the next two sections I shall analyse French contemporary texts on Iran to show their difficulty in overcoming the orientalist tradition. I have classified these texts into two categories: orientalist historical novels, and travel writing on Iran (summaries of the texts can be found in the Appendix). Although different in their formal characteristics (historical novel versus travel writing, pre-modern setting versus contemporary setting), they share a similar discourse of orientalism and their aim is to register in the orientalist referential tradition. Both trends have imitation at their core – but as no writer simply wants to imitate, some originality must come from the intertext, a point that I shall illustrate in the close-reading. Both genres are thus based on this paradoxical desire to say new things within a similar frame, to expose new mysteries of Iran while relying on previous discoveries. Images thus appear as variations on the same theme, as in music. They are repeated under different forms. This does not disqualify the inscription of their discourse in the orientalist tradition. On the contrary, Ali Behdad has demonstrated that the irregularities found in some texts and the dissatisfaction they show with the official orientalist discourse reinforce orientalism as an institution: in highlighting its shortcomings, they facilitate its adaptation to new strategies; as such, these irregularities can be understood as explanations for the long history of orientalism and its survival.²⁴ I thus argue that these French texts, enclosed in their interdiscursive referent, construe the Iranian Other as an object both of desire (primarily in orientalist historical novels), and of rejection (primarily in travel writing). The point is not to show that these orientalist representations are misrepresentations, but to detail how they work and constitute a system of fetishisation, where a dialectic between the Self and the Other is at work.

Orientalist historical novels

I want to begin by drawing an enlightening parallel between orientalist historical novels and French spy novels on Iran produced in the same period. Indeed, orientalism comes as much from genre fiction than from the classics, if not more; the most quantitatively productive orientalism may be pulp orientalism. This is why this book wants to look exhaustively at contemporary French texts, including pulp orientalist ones, as there have already been numerous analysis of orientalism in classical French texts.

Converging images of Iran in genre fiction and orientalist historical novel...