A PROPOSAL
I know that writers are generally familiar with the 'story within the story' structure, and that many of them have used it in their work. The genealogy of this form can be found in India, reaching the Arab world through Iran. In such stories, there has always been present an element of dramatic tension, of which of course the most famous are the stories of the Persian Shahrzad in the One Thousand and One Nights. If the king can guess the ending of a story, she will be executed, at the same time, if she can not keep him in the state that Forster calls the suspense of 'then what?', again she will lose her life. All of this seems rather simple, of course, but I think we should still talk about it in some detail in the discussion following my presentation.

Lack of time precludes the possibility of sufficient discussion, at the moment, of my next point, too. Let us accept as only an axiom the proposition that the style of storytelling in the Old Testament - in the Pentateuch - is linear. The storyline follows the sequence of external events. In the Qor'an, with the exception of the story of Joseph, events are deconstructed and narrated in a rather circular fashion, from the beginning to the end, from the middle back to the beginning. My second point, equally in need of proof, is that the stories in the Pentateuch are not only linear but composed of different layers. It must then be accepted that in the Old Testament and in the Qor'an there are two different kinds of storytelling.

The first leads to realism, surrealism, even magic realism, or examples like Tristram Shandy. The Qor'anic tradition, on the other hand, is in my opinion a continuation of the Zoroastrian or Vedic heritages. My proposal in the realm of fiction is inspired by this tradition and can open new avenues in the techniques of writing. I myself have sometimes written in this tradition. Some of my stories, like "Innocence V" or "The House of the Enlightened" to which I will briefly allude at the end of my talk, are both written in this style. In Avesta, particularly in the hymns of Gathes, or Yeshts, there is often only a hint to an aspect of a story, a myth or an event. With the exception of the story of Joseph, the same style is used in the Qor'an. Implicit in this style is the apparent assumption that the reader already knows the story. An allusion is all that is needed. With a mere hint, the story is recollected. It is as if the mere mention of the name of a goblin or a genie will make them appear, or a reference to the sleeve of a shirt can fashion a whole being or, as in magic, a person can be conquered through his clipped fingernails. It all of course reverts back to the strange story of the relationship between the whole and its parts.

On the other hand, it seems clear that this kind of storytelling is another instance of the Platonic idea of recollection (anamn?sis). The reader is immersed in a cycle of mythology. In order to allude to the totality all the storyteller needs to do is to hint at one part of the whole.

There is of course another characteristic that can be deduced from narrative qas?dehs in Persian and Arabic, or even sonnets that attempt to tell a story.

We know that every line of a qas?deh is at once independent, and dependent on other lines. It is independent in that it has an independent beginning and end, and must, by necessity, carry within itself, free from other lines, parts of reality. A similar condition can be witnessed in those verses of the Qor'an that seem to employ the tradition of the Platonic recollection. Such verses follow a kind of a recognizable metre that is broken only at the end of each verse, where it nearly takes the shape of prose. The pseudo-rhyme of each line takes on the characteristics of a line from a qas?deh. On the whole, then, each verse is independent.

On the other hand, the same independent line is dependent on other lines on account of the fact that each line is part of the elaborate and rigid metric system. Thus each line is both independent from other lines and dependent on them as well.

Can this characteristic be of some use to us in the art of storytelling? If we break an event into small constituent parts, let us say, four or five minor events, and then consider the pieces independent of the linear logic of the event, and then proceed to construct from the pieces a totality based only on the logic of language, we will then have one verse from the collection of verses that together make a story. If this event, because of its contiguity, or of a shared aura, fits into the same cycle as another event, then every component of the story becomes at once dependent and independent and can, relying upon the common experiences of humanity, awaken in us the experience of a table, of death, or a street, and thus our mind can create that which is suspended between the writer and the reader, between the writer and the blank sheet of paper.

This style at the same time follows our traditions of carpet weaving, miniatures, fine woodwork, and printed fabric.

It is clear that such a technique of fragmenting reality into fragments befitting the reality of the story hardly fits in the Shahrzadian suspense of 'then what?', since from the beginning, the new kind of story divulges the ending and gives the king the choice of killing, or not killing, the storyteller, and it forces the reader to either close the book, or begin to search for something more than just 'then what?'. Thus the experience of reading becomes the experience of delving into the depths, every object is itself either a myth, or in the shadow of its mythical prototype: every act is eternal. Humans in the story move not in a line but in a circle, and the reader must, at every moment, hold the whole of existence in his mind's eyes. For example a tree, although seen by a narrator, is at once a tree and the eternal (Platonic) idea of a tree; the death of an individual is also at once the other death, and the death of all human beings.

The main event in my story "Innocence V" is the wait for a messiah. In centuries past, every twelve years, people tied a horse near a town's portal, so that when the messiah arrives, he will mount the horse. A narrator from the past has recounted this story. The contemporary narrator is using this old testimony, but the -same old narrator reminds us that each epoch has produced a similar narrative, and in the novella, all the different narratives, from different times, move forward concurrently. Ultimately the whole of the narrative turns out to be a series of accounts of the same event.

In "The House of the Enlightened" the narrators are the atoms of a house recounting the story of the disappearance of the author, an author who refused to commit suicide lest his body be taken advantage of for unsavory purposes. In compensation, he writes, he describes a cave, or a grave, and then he disappears inside his writing and the objects in the house. The style of the narrative, the fragmentation of the reality in the reality of the story and the way it has chosen to recount each segment has both the independence of a line in a qas?deh or a Qor'anic verse, and is dependent on other events.

I know that talking so briefly about two projects that each consumed a few years of my life can not explain much. The work itself, still available only in Persian, must be read to fully convey my proposal, and the writer behind it.

(Translated from the Persian by Abbas MILANI. - The text is the paper the author made available to the participants of the Berne symposium as a basis for discussion at the open panel on Monday, July 14th 1997. The phrasing has been altered in some instances, and footnotes inserted, by the editors for the purpose of publication.)

Life without reality: the word rules OK in post-revolutionary Iran
As you know many Qor'anic verses are prefaced by the words: 'In the name of God the benevolent and the merciful....' What you may not be quite so conscious of over here is that in Iran the emphasis is put more on the name of God and not at all on God's benevolence and mercy, to the extent that a stranger to our culture would imagine that the name of God is of at least equal significance to the actuality that is God. The word has become the thing itself. So in newspapers in Islamic Iran whenever they want to mention the name of God, for example when referring to "Ayat-Allah Ruh-Allah Khomeini", instead of "Allah" three dots will appear: "Ayat... Ruh... Khomeini" Because of the widespread belief that the name of God is God, this practice is thought to protect God from the many errors of fact that can occur in the newspaper world. By avoiding using God's name they avoid offending God. Traditionally, men in Iran forbore to mention the name of their wife in front of others. This was remarked upon by visitors to the country as long ago as the seventeenth century: if asked the name of their wife, Iranian men would blush; if the visitor was lucky enough to be given an embarrassed explanation, it went like this: "for a Muslim Iranian the name of the wife is herself and mentioning her name recalls her body." This old practice has been revived and legitimised in recent years. For example, I remember when ex-President Hojatol Eslam Rafsanjani was telling the story of an attempt on his life, he wanted to say that his wife intervened to save him; he called her my Ayal (my dependants) or my family. Some men refer to their wives as "house". My father, like many others, used to call my mother by the name of his first son ("Ahmad's mum"). This is supposed to protect the name of the woman from any extra-familial scrutiny, and from the eye and tongue and hand of outsiders. In the Qor'anic Creation story, we read that God said "Be" and it became; an assumption is therefore made that to say is to become. This is why so many people believe it best not to use words in case they turn out to be prophecies. At its extreme, this belief is simply explained: if you foretell the death of somebody that person will die. So it is safer to be silent.
The Arabic alphabet in which we write is regarded under Islam as sacred: in the Tafsir (Qor'anic interpretations), the book of Kashf-oI-Asrar includes the statement that the first letter Alef (written as a vertical stroke like the letter "I") is not only the origin of origin of all other letters but is the essence or epitome of God. People really believe this. If everything begins with God, as represented or epitomized by Alef, then all other letters can be formed out of Alef: make it horizontal and turn both ends up to form Be (ب), bend it over to make and Dal (د), turn it into a semicircle to make Nun (ن), and so forth.

Whereas in the West letters are described as the Alphabet (short for Alpha, Beta, etc.), Arabic cultures (and the Indo-European Persian language is, as you know, written in the Arabic script) use a standard systems to describe their alphabet. It is called "Abjad, Havaz , Hoti..."; "Abjad" consists of a shape made out of the letters Alef, Be, Jim, Dal. In this arrangement the numerical value of Alef is one, Be is two, Jim is three and Dal is four. And all other letters can be given a numerical value in the same way.

So now the word is sacred, the letters are sacred and even the numbers have been sanctified. The mere act of saying the word can create the thing: to say is to create.

The written word has the same value as the object it describes. The numerical value of a word equates to the word and therefore to the thing itself.

(All this reminds me of how, in Iranian/Arabic sorcery, if you wanted, for example, to summon the body of your lover, all you had to do was find the numbers associated with the lover's name, the lover's mother's name, and your own name: out of these three numbers you could form a talisman. And thus the body of your lover would be yours.)

These beliefs - in the sanctity of the word, the letter and the number- lie deep in the subconscious minds of our leaders, juries and critics, including so-called "new" Iranian critics. Today I shall only consider the implications of these beliefs on the world of fiction.

If we believe that the written word, in a graphic image, is the object it describes, there can be no distinction between the writer of fiction and the narrator in fiction: the writer is not the creator of the characters - the writer is the characters. Their every action, however ugly or sinful, is the writer's action. It follows that the writer must be called to account. You probably think it is not possible to draw such stark conclusions from these hypotheses. Let me give you a few examples that might help in understanding what I am saying.

In the opening scene of of one of my novels that was published just a year before the revolution, the main character of the novel - a man called Ra'i - is drinking vodka. Not long after the revolution, the person in charge of censorship in the ministry telephoned me; after the usual helloes and how-are-yous, he asked me in all seriousness "What are you doing at the moment?" "Oh, I'm reading, I'm writing," I replied. "I suppose you're doing what Ra'i was doing ?" he asked. I conclude from his question that he made no distinction between Ra'i and Golshiri. Since it is forbidden for writers to create "prohibited" or "sinful" scenes, characters in novels must behave with decorum and propriety, just like any model citizen. A prominent "new" critic who has written a very long article about my next novel, Mirrors with Doors, mentioned that Mr X (he meant me) should remember that once, in Paris, he had been the guest of a member of SAVAK (the Shah's secret police). In the novel, the narrator is the guest of his ex-beloved who had once been married to a member of SAVAK: it follows, according to this critic, that I had once been the guest of a Savak agent. Worse than this is that at the end of this novel the narrator avoids making love with his ex-beloved because he would find it all the more difficult to say goodbye to her. Besides, he wants to return home. After this novel was published, many exiles living over here were curious as to which city I would visit the next time I came over: they thought they would be able to guess who that woman, Sanam Banou, was. They hoped to recognise her and therefore label her, and therefore label me. In Iran too I was often told that the reason there are no love-making scenes in the novel is that I am afraid of my wife. This confusion in people's minds of the writer and the fictional characters, the attribution of the actions and the words of a character to the writer,and the total misunderstanding of the border between reality and fictional reality creates a vicious circle within which writers in Islamic Iran are trapped. You might call this phenomenon the misreading of Fiction. It is not unique to Iran. When societies ordain the morals according to which people should live, and then extend those morals to the world of fictional reality, the domain of words, we should not be surprised when it leads to an intractable problem like that of Salman Rushdie and The Satanic Verses.

One interesting effect of this confusion of realities and the sacredness with which words are treated is that the writer becomes in some sense sacred too. Haven't we always believed that poets are inspired? These days, the censors read a text over and over again revealing how deeply they care about the writer and the written word. I'll give you an example from my own experience: in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance there were eleven interpretations written on one of my short stories. Does it take eleven employees (all of course on high salaries and with good literary qualifications) just to understand what I have said in one short story? One of the senior censors read two of these eleven interpretations out to me (how kind!); he also told me the outlines of the other interpretations, and to my surprise I realized that at least three of them were very good; so then of course the censor wanted to know which was the best. I could tell that the poor man had become enchanted by the magic of literature. He read a passage in which I describe a dusty earth grave; the language is old, and the epic tone is of a kind we would use to describe, say, the site of Persepolis. He was very anxious to know who was buried in this grave. The language made him assume that someone of revolutionary importance was buried there. He was right in a way. In real life a friend of mine had been executed in prison, and this story was dedicated to him.

I thought it was quite interesting that after this particular censor was dismissed and taken to court for allowing the publication a book thought by his seniors to be "unsuitable", he became the editor of a literary magazine, in which capacity he came to our house and asked me for a short story. Could it be that the reason our officials in the Ministry of Guidance have to change their censors every three months is that Literature casts a spell over them?

In a culture that believes writers to be inspired, and the text to be so important that it has to be checked word for word, occasionally you will find that the text itself protects the writer from execution. After a story-reading in Germany a member of the audience asked me "Why are you alive?" What he meant was: if you have written and published such things as you have just read to us, and if by some chance you are not an agent of the regime, how come they let you live?

The right answer must be because the word is God; the word has power; and therefore the speaker of the word has the power of God. The word is our sceptre and our shield. Or to put it in terms of sorcery, it is our rod. Let me give you one or two further examples which may explain how and why writers are both cherished and censored.

Two years ago a friend, who had fought in the war and seen many of his friends butchered, asked me "Do you know why you are alive?" I said I did not. He pointed upwards and said "Many of them are waiting to read your next story." I asked him whether he was serious, whether he was certain. "Yes", he replied. For us, writing is not a habit, or something we happen to do to fill the days; it is the means by which we recognize and interpret the world and our relationship with others. By casting our imagination into fictional reality, it is possible to reach a greater understanding. - Nearly 27 years ago I was an observer of a triangular relationship, a couple and a friend of mine. I wrote about what I heard and saw. Two weeks later I read out what I had written into a tape recorder; playing my words back made me realise the narrator is in love and is not just an observer. And I was in love.

I continued to write about everything and eventually this became a novel in seven chapters. The text was read for those who were involved and the reading changed the reality. And now I think because the narrator was in love, the writer fell in love. So perhaps in some ways a text can foretell the future.

In a novel that for nearly 20 years has not been allowed to be published, I wrote about an ascetic character, a Sufi. One day he happens to meet a woman who tells him she has slept with a man for the sake of two pieces of bread. The man has to order the woman to be stoned to death. (According to the Islamic Law, it is the duty of the man to declare the guilt of the woman.) Right up to the time of his death she appears in his dreams, blood dripping from her chin.

The effect of words is sometimes even greater than this. You know that in the Islamic Law, in some cases, instead of killing or beating the culprit, a price in camels may be paid by him or on his behalf. This has become common practice in Islamic Iran. I wrote a story (set in northern Iran) in which twenty-five camels appear in the town wakening people from their sleep. Afterwards it becomes apparent that a boy's eye has been injured in a juvenile quarrel; a judge orders that the father of the boy must give twenty-five camels to the father of the injured boy. Other incidents in this story are not important now, but what is significant to me is that after publishing this short story I was fully expecting to be punished formally or informally or at least vilified in government-owned newspapers or as European newspapers sometimes claim, by some "pressure groups." Nothing happened. But after a few months the value of punishment had changed in law from camel to gold then silver and then to ordinary currency. You can make of this what you will. I am not saying anything changed because of my story, but nevertheless things changed for the better. We are trapped in a vicious circle where there is no distinction between the word and the writer of the words, between the "I" in a poem and the poet, between the fictional character and the writer. Just as there is scope for many interpretations, so there is a natural wish to rescue us from the consequences of our own words. Some people quite deliberately write ambiguously in the hope that someone will interpret the words in such a way as to save the writer's life. We are constantly expecting to be imprisoned or assassinated or taken to court. Yet at the same time we hope that the authorities will allow us to live, in the hope that they can read the next story we write.

The only way to tolerate this vicious circle is to fall in line with the belief that the sound of a word or the written shape of a word does actually signify the meaning of the word and, by extension, is actually the thing described.

If as a society we do not wish to lay the "crime" on the shoulder of the writer, then we should be ready to accept (and to enshrine in our Islamic laws) that the morality of Islam is not the same as the morality of fiction. When we take that step it will be possible to read a novel as a novel and behave towards a writer as a writer. We need to realize that saying is not necessarily becoming. Saying "Down with the US" has not yet brought about its destruction.

These days, the attitude of the Ministry of Guidance in Iran, as I tried to describe earlier, is one where the vocal and written aspects of the word are paramount. What matters is sound and shape. Until this attitude changes, our literature will continue to be censored: every time we read a poem or a short story or a novel we read it badly, mistakenly, as they did in the USSR or in Hitler's Germany, or now in Saddam's Iraq and Saudi Arabia - any country where right wing censors operate on the people's literature.

So as we continue our efforts to express ourselves and the world around us through our imaginations, it would be wonderful if our censors were to reach a greater understanding too. En-Sha-Allah [God willing].