My Uncle Napoleon

454 Pages·2012·2.48 MB·English

by  Pezeshkzad

COPYRIGHT © 1996 MAGE PUBLISHERS
COVER ILLUSTRATION BY ARDESHIR
MOHASSESS
COVER DESIGN BY ROHANI DESIGN, EDMONDS,
WASHINGTON
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
retransmitted in any manner, except in form of a review, without
written permission from the publisher.
Mage and colophon are registered trademarks of Mage Publishers,
Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Pizish, Iraj. [Da’i-i
Jan Napuli’un. English]
My Uncle Napoleon / a novel by Iraj Pezeshkzad; translated from the
Persian by Dick Davis. — 1st ed.
I. Dick Davis, 1945- .
II. Title.
PK6561.P54D313 1996
891’.5533—dc20
eISBN 978-1-933823-49-2
Mage Publishers | www.mage.com | [email protected] | 202 342 1642
CONTENTS
PREFACE
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
MAP
PART ONE
PART TWO
PART THREE
EPILOGUE
GLOSSARY
PREFACE
THE EXISTENCE in Persian literature of a full-scale, abundantly inventive comic
novel that involves a gallery of varied and highly memorable characters, not to
mention scenes of hilarious farcical mayhem, may come as a surprise to a
Western audience used to associating Iran with all that is in their eyes dour, dire
and dreadful. And yet, in Iran itself, this novel is perhaps the most popular and
widely known work of fiction to have been written in the country since the
Second World War. Its wide acceptance by virtually all strata of society clearly
belies the Western stereotype of the country as one that is single-mindedly
obsessed, to the exclusion of all else, with religion and revolutionary revenge.
My Uncle Napoleon occupies a unique place in Iranian cultural and literary
history, because of both the affection in which it is held by its very large
readership, and the self-image of the society which it portrays. In the early
1970s, a few years after its publication, the novel was made into one of the most
successful television series ever to have been aired on Iranian television, and it is
almost impossible for an Iranian to read the novel without the gestures, voices
and faces of the actors who portrayed the characters being present in his or her
mind. Certain of these portrayals, especially the actor Parviz Sayad’s portrayal
of the roué with the heart of gold, Asadollah Mirza, and the late and much
lamented Parviz Fanizadeh’s portrayal of Dear Uncle Napoleon’s servant Mash
Qasem, have achieved the status of inviolable icons in popular Iranian culture.
For a foreign reader perhaps the most intriguing question, beyond the
enjoyment of the novel simply as the comic masterpiece which it undoubtedly is,
must be, How accurate is this portrait of Iranian society? Perhaps the best way of
answering this is to make an analogy with a couple of Western comic fictional
characters and the novels in which they appear. P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie
Wooster seems to his readers—British and non-British—to be quintessentially
British in his foibles and absurdity, and there is no doubt that his portrait draws
for comic effect on features of social behavior that are or have been highly
specific to British society, and yet England is not populated with Bertie
Woosters, even though particular English individuals or customs may
occasionally evoke a laugh of recognition based on familiarity with the
Wodehousian stereotype. In the same way Anita Loos’s Lorelei Lee (in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) could only be an American character—her
mannerisms and preoccupations tie her irrevocably to American society of the
1920s, and yet she is in her American way as unreal and as fantastic as Bertie
Wooster is in his British way. Anita Loos and P. G. Wodehouse have used
elements of their own societies and, by presenting them in the distorting mirror
of farce, have produced versions of those societies that are recognizably based
on features present in reality but are also outrageous exaggerations of those
features—exaggerations that have been allowed, in the interests of facetious
effect, to obliterate more mundane and less comically fertile aspects of social
life. Iraj Pezeshkzad has done the same thing in My Uncle Napoleon. Any
Iranian, and any foreigner who has more than a nodding acquaintance with
Iranian culture, will recognize “real” and very culturally specific elements in the
portraits and some of the situations present in the novel, but the Iran of My Uncle
Napoleon is finally as “real” as Bertie Wooster’s England; it is a fictional
fantasy that uses isolated features of the author’s social background in order to
create the distortions and exaggerations of farce. This is not, though, to say that
nothing in the novel corresponds with Iranian social reality, at least as it once
existed; the book’s author has written elsewhere of how after the novel was
published various individuals would ask him how he had known so intimately
about the speaker’s father or grandfather, so convinced were they that this father
or grandfather must have been the model for Dear Uncle Napoleon.
My Uncle Napoleon is at least three kinds of novel—a love story, a farce, and
a satire on local manners and preoccupations. As regards the first two categories
the Western reader should have little trouble following what is going on. The
narrator links the love story in which he is involved to both Iranian archetypes
(Farhad and Shirin, Amir Arsalan and Farrokh Laqa) and Western ones (Romeo
and Juliet, Paul and Virginie). The only aspect of this element that may give a
young Western reader pause is the narrator’s insistence that he distinguish his
love for Layli from any sexual feelings he may have, and his horror at his uncle
Asadollah Mirza’s suggestion that he try to sleep with her—but this would have
been the case also for many Western heroes created before the 1960s: the Paul of
Bernardin de St. Pierre’s Paul et Virginie is even more determinedly chaste and
pure in his intentions toward Virginie than Pezeshkzad’s narrator is toward his
Layli.
As a farcical comedy the novel has undoubtedly drawn on culturally specific
features and phenomena (some of the situations are reminiscent of those used by
the Iranian folk comic drama tradition of ru-hozi performance), but it also has
clear parallels with the Western comic tradition; the authors of Tom Jones or
Gargantua and Pantagruel or The Good Soldier Schweik would have had no
trouble in responding to what was happening in much of My Uncle Napoleon,
and anyone acquainted with the Western comic tradition will easily recognize in
this novel familiar elements of farce and comic invention. While translating this
work, however, I have been made aware of how unsympathetic some presently
modish opinions in Western intellectual (more especially academic) circles are
to farce; the stereotypical treatments of sexuality and sexual roles that are
inherent in the genre, and the anarchic amorality that drives many farcical
situations, are neither of them very amenable to sympathetic interpretation by
current politically correct standards. This may well be political correctness’s
loss, but if a Western reader feels uncomfortable with the farcical elements of
the novel it is more likely to be for this reason than because the elements are
unfamiliar in the Western tradition. Or to put it another way, if the reader can
relish the farce in Tom Jones and Gargantua, the farcical elements in My Uncle
Napoleon should prove equally accessible.
Satire is the most culturally and temporally specific of all literary genres, and
thus it tends to have the shortest shelf life and be the hardest to export. If a satire
is to survive the age in and for which it was written, and to appeal to readers
from other cultures, it needs to contain substantial elements beyond the satire of
local institutions and individuals, as is the case with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,
for example, a work whose survival is probably due as much to its elements of
fantasy and magical realism avant la lettre as to its satirical intentions. Certainly
My Uncle Napoleon contains enough within its pages for it to make a broad
appeal to readers quite unfamiliar with the specifics of Iranian cultural history,
but equally certainly a knowledge of some features of that history will increase a
reader’s comprehension and therefore enjoyment of what is happening in the
novel.
Much of the immediate historical background of the work can be gleaned from
the novel itself, and the few details necessary for an understanding of the plot
which the novel does not spell out are easily told. In 1941 the Allies (specifically
the British and the Russians) invaded Iran, fearful that its government might
declare for the Axis powers or that its oil reserves might fall into Axis hands.
The country was occupied after a very brief campaign and the Allied forces
stayed in Iran until the end of the war, forcing the abdication of the then shah
(king) in favor of his son (who was the shah finally ousted by the Islamic
Revolution of 1979). What is not apparent in such a summary outline of events
is the cultural resonance of the invasion, and it is this cultural resonance which is
the source of one of the chief comic devices of the novel, Dear Uncle
Napoleon’s obsession with the hidden hand of the English.
Since the early nineteenth century Iran had been an area squabbled over by the
British and the Russians. The immediate reason for this was the presence of the
British in India, and their desire to protect this jewel in the crown of the empire,
and Russian expansion southward into the areas now occupied by the Moslem
republics of central Asia. At the opening of the century the British and Russian
borders in Asia were over two thousand miles apart; by the close of the century
they were in places barely twenty miles apart. The Russians felt that the British
had no business being in Asia at all, and the British feared a Russian threat to
India. British and Russian agents and envoys both tried vigorously to control the
shahs and tribal leaders of Iran and Afghanistan, and to influence them to favor
their respective governments. Unfortunately for Iran, during most of the
nineteenth century her government was severely strapped for cash and the
country was in much need of both fiscal and social reform. Tribal discontent was
an easy prey for foreign interference, and the ever-pressing need to raise money
meant that successive shahs granted outrageous trading and development
concessions to foreign businesses—particularly but not solely British—in return
for (often not very much) cash on the table. Iran also went to war briefly with
Britain (over Herat, in western Afghanistan), and twice went to war, with
disastrous losses of territory as a result, with Russia. In 1907 Britain and Russia
concluded an agreement at St. Petersburg by which Iran was to be divided into
three “spheres of influence”—British (the southeast), Russian (the north) and
neutral (the rest of the country, much of it desert). Iran was not invited to send
representatives to the conference which led to this agreement, and naturally felt
extremely affronted by its terms. Soon the ex-viceroy of India, Curzon (who was
British foreign secretary from 1919-24), was pressing for Iran to be brought even
more securely under British control. In the same period, agitation for democratic
reform within Iran was at best ambiguously received by England, as one of the
main demands of the reformers was the expulsion of foreign economic and
political interests from the Iranian scene. The fall of the Qajar dynasty in the
1920s and the rise of Reza Shah (the king deposed by the Allies in World War
II) were also seen by many Iranians to have been engineered by the British, and
there is still scholarly disagreement as to whether the British were in fact
involved in the coup that brought Reza Shah to power, and if so, how far they
were implicated. Certainly they were instrumental in removing Reza Shah, and
certainly, too, they strongly influenced the American decision to remove, by CIA
covert action, the popularly elected prime minister, Mosaddeq, in the 1950s.
Iranian suspicion of the power of the British to influence events in Iran, and of
their motives and behind-the-scenes methods, has not therefore been—to put it
mildly—without foundation.
Given such a background, Dear Uncle Napoleon’s obsession with the British
becomes more explicable. His (lying) claims to have been active in the
Constitutional Movement for democratic reform, and to have fought against
insurgents in the south of the country, locate his career in times and places where
he could have come into conflict with what were seen as British interests and
machinations. The British maintained connections to both sides of the
constitutional conflict, and they at the least liaised with tribal factions
antagonistic to the central government. Dear Uncle’s paranoia is an extreme and
comic exaggeration of a common phenomenon in Iranian culture, a conviction
that much of the last two centuries of Iranian history, if not every minute detail
of it, has been engineered from outside, and probably from Britain and/or (since
World War II) the United States. This conviction can lead to what seem, for a
Western observer, to be incredibly bizarre claims, including the very commonly
held belief among some Iranians that the British organized the Islamic
Revolution of 1979, and the almost equally common claim that the United States
deliberately provoked the Gulf War against Iraq in order to have an excuse to
send war ships to the Persian Gulf so that they could keep a closer eye on Iran.
To question these claims is to label oneself either as hopelessly naive or as a
sympathizer, open or covert, with those who wish Iran ill.
The brilliance and popularity of Iraj Pezeshkzad’s portrait of this desperately
paranoid patriot has led to a Persian equivalent of the term “Dear Uncle
Napoleon-itis” being adopted as a name for such readiness to see conspiracy
theories and the hidden hand of the West behind any and every local Iranian
event. And yet there has been a real irony in the popular reception of the novel.
In the same way that surveys in the United States have found that some of the
audience for the fictional television bigot Archie Bunker in fact identified with
his lumpen racist and sexist tirades, rather than finding them ridiculous, many
readers of My Uncle Napoleon have taken the novel not so much as a
lampooning of such paranoia but as a confirmation of the lasting relevance of
such attitudes as a way of interpreting Iranian political life.
There is also of course an irony, of which I could not fail to be aware, in the
fact that this novel, which bases so much of its comic effect on suspicion of, not
to say hatred for, the English is here translated into English, and that the