Third World National Allegory in Sadeq Chubak’s Tangsir

Abstract

There is a common consensus among critics that Sadeq Chubak shirked quotidian life in his oeuvre and wrote “apolitical” works that portrayed an absurd world populated by outcasts, addicts, criminals, beggars, and the like. Rejecting this line of argument, this paper draws on Fredric Jameson’s triangular model of examining literary texts to analyse Tangsir, the Iranian novelist’s debut novel, as a national allegory. Accordingly, it will be first proposed that Tangsir (1963) imaginatively resolves the problem of domestic/foreign exploitation by allowing the protagonist to aggressively wipe out the oppressor. Second, it stages the concept of justice and represents two widespread approaches of the society of its time to it, and, by extension, addresses the national problem of Iran’s then exploitation by the West. Third, it exemplifies the synchronous development of several modes of production in Iran by inscribing the elements of romance and modernist fiction into an apparently realistic novel.

Keywords: Sadeq Chubak, Tangsir, national allegory, symbolic act, generic discontinuity.