| by Dr. Reza Baraheni During the last decades, the literati of Afghanistan have been familiar with the three well-known images of the Iranian writer, Reza Baraheni, namely: the poet, the novelist and the literary critic. But they have hardly been familiar with his other dimension, the original social critic, which has presented itself in such works as Masculine History, The Crowned Cannibals, What Happened in the Iranian Revolution and What is Going to Happen, and the recently published articles on tradition and modernity in the disintegrated societies of the world, serialised in the weekly Shahrvand of Toronto, Canada. Some of these works are in Persian and some others in English. The present article, "The Discourse of Unevenness in Our Cultural Territory", is the result of a long interview given by Baraheni to our periodical, which we decided to compile in the form of an independent article by Baraheni. The concept of unevenness in the Middle Eastern societies first appeared in Baraheni's works in 1969 in Masculine History, and later developed into a comprehensive outlook encompassing history, society and culture. In the present article, Baraheni argues that the main characteristic of all the non-European societies and cultures during the last two centuries has been their uneven development. The period by period evolution of the European societies, or the even development of history, in an exception to the rule of unevenness dominating the rest of the world. The onrush of Western concepts of modernity in the Middle East, has brought a spiritual and intellectual dislocation in the area which has manifested itself in literature more than any other sphere of life. The conflict of indigenous traditions with foreign concepts of modernity has created a leadership crisis in the forms and genres of literature and the discourses governing them. All forms are in crisis; they are in flux; they are all almost unnameable and disintegrated. It is from this disintegrated clay of the spirit that the new forms of culture and literature rise in their distorted figures, and present the society, and represent their own disfigurement. That is why Baraheni sees irregularity, asymmetry, and disharmony in place of regularity, symmetry and harmony. His main contention is that the literature of disintegration and fragmentation is more ontological than historical. Several historical periods come together in one period; realism, modernism and post-modernism combine and converge in order to present and represent the contemporary scene. Disintegration becomes the theme of all major works of literature. Even those adhering to organic concepts of form, find themselves in the ironic position of contradicting themselves when they produce better works of literature. The notice, rather than the historic, is the order of the day. Baraheni's article discusses all these complicated problems within the framework of Iranian culture and literature; but he also gives his views of where Western cultures and literature's stand in comparison with universal drama of disintegration. Baraheni subvert Western concepts of universality and historicism to account for the universal disintegration which has taken hold of Africa, Asia and Latin America. |