Images of Women in Literature (III)
By: Dr. Azar Nafisi
Sadeq Hedayat's short novel , Buf-e Kur, is divided into two parts, each a central metaphor for the other. Near the end of each part the narrator kills a woman--in essence the two aspects of the same woman. It seems as if in these two (symbolic) scenes the narrator mourns the breakdown of the idealized and sun-speckled relationships of men and women in classical fiction.
In a sense Buf-e Kur creates a distorted version of the typical classical Iranian tale. In this story all the elements of the previous narratives exist, only in reverse form. The narrator in Buf-e Kur too uses external 'reality' only to express his inner 'reality.' The women and men in his narration are mainly symbolic rather than real. In fact, the women in Buf-e Kur symbolize the two polarized images of the classical Iranian narrative: the inaccessible ethereal (athiri) woman and the all too accessible temptress (lakkateh). To the narrator in Buf-e Kur, however, both these women are inaccessible.
In this narration, Hedayat portrays not a vision, not a figment of the imagination, but an obsession which, as expressed in the famous opening line, eats away all the narrator's moments and leads to his complete destruction. The reader is confronted with three different archetypal images of woman the mother, the beloved, and the whore. All carry seeds of destruction, all are madly desired, and two are destroyed by the narrator who never recovers.
Like the frame story of One Thousand and One Nights, Buf-e Kur demonstrates that the male character is not necessarily a victim of female guile, but rather a victim of his own obsessions. In both these stories the close an paradoxical interrelationship between the oppression or liberation are demonstrated. But the female characters in Buf-e Kur are much more passive than the female characters in the classical Iranian narratives. There the women use their powers of imagination to save themselves and to create a new world; in Buf-e Kur the exact opposite happens. The attempt to communicate between the two sexes leads to the narrator's frustrating discovery of his own impotence -- an impotence which is obviously symbolic of a helpless and disintegrating psyche. The only time he succeeds in making love to a woman is when he enters his wife's (lakkateh) bed, disguised as one of her many lovers; and the sexual act itself is so violent that in order to release himself from her grasp he 'inadvertently' kills her with a knife he has brought to bed with him. Sexual fulfillment and death become synonymous.
Buf-e Kur offers many interesting insights into the cultural assumptions underlying male-female relations in Iran It also illustrates a breakdown of dialogue between men and women. In the novels which follow in the wake of Buf-e Kur we observe a lack of dialogue (a sign of the disintegration of her psyche), and a lack of structural cohesion.
In Buf-e Kur the process of the self's disintegration leads to a replacement of dialogue with monologue, and to an urge toward destruction arising out of impotent desire. The male character in Buf-e Kur becomes the first in a series of impotent and obsessive characters who crowd contemporary Iranian fiction. The inability of writers to create active female characters and a dialogue between them and the male characters becomes a major obstacle to the development of the Iranian novel.
The disintegration of fictional characters in the Iranian novel may also point to a fundamental cultural problem, namely, the disintegration of the male Iranian psyche under the pressures and demands of two diametrically opposed cultures: one, the vanishing culture of the past with its unified and hierarchical view of women; the other, the modern western-imported culture of the present with its doubting, ironic view of the world and its fast-changing view of women.
The images of women in Buf-e Kur are said to be based upon the narrator's obsessions and his negation of 'reality.' but they are still more real and have more fictional life than the images which later appear in the so-called realistic novels. In these novels the preoccupation with women becomes so obsessive that unlike in Buf-e Kur it reveals the writer's own obsession In these works the aesthetic distance between the writer and the work breaks down; there exists no cohesive structure which can place the images in creative relationship to one another. These narratives become veiled and insincere autobiographies; they also become loose and chaotic, not individualized and concrete -- mere slogans, demonstrations of condescending goodwill toward women and unfulfilled, unnamed desires about them.
Continued ----- the next issue