Excessive Infatuation; A Scourge That Swallows the Novel’s Identity
The Homeland and Resistance Service of Iran’s Book News Agency (IBNA) – Mohammad Esmaeil Haji Aliyani, critic: The book “He,” written by Meysam Amiri, first edition 1404 (Persian calendar) by Khat-e Moghadam Publications, has been released to the book market. On the book’s dedication page, it states: “With a look at the life of Martyr Imad Mughniyeh (Haj Rizwan),” and on the page after the title page and on the introductory page, it states: “Before the operation, imagine!” (Imad Mughniyeh)
On the author’s dedication page, there is also a paragraph describing “He,” meaning Haj Rizwan or Martyr Imad Mughniyeh, and the author’s interest in the subject, which confirms the author’s complete immersion in the subject.
After this, the author’s infatuation with the subject is listed in the table of contents, which numbers different sections and narratives, something not common in novels. However, the book’s cover and title page identify it as a novel; it’s not a discovery for the reader.
The book “He,” narrated by the mother of the main character or hero, or the author’s favorite subject, after the main character’s martyrdom and by returning to the past, or as Gérard Genette would say, through analepsis, narrates the subject’s birth and then the entire life of the martyr in 42 separate sections with distinct and different first-person narrators.
Three sections of these narratives are told by the character’s mother, two sections by his wife, and a few times, comrades-in-arms also narrate two sections. One section also presents two narratives from the martyr’s two children. The rest are all single sections, each told by a first-person narrator about the character. And one narrative is told by two parallel narrators, one from his friends and one from his enemies, consecutively one after another. At the end of the book, one of its narratives is told by the Jewish planner of this character’s assassination. All narrators are first-person, and the work has been published under the title “The Novel of He.”
This emphasis on the diversity of narrators and their characteristics will be analyzed later in this text, and these details, like the “Pajero” car in this book, can be both a strength and a weakness. These points are called strategic points of the novel. Points that have a very high impact on the fate of the novel. These are separate from turning points, climaxes, catalyst points, and so on. For a better understanding of this text, it is best to have read the book “He” first!
The first narrator of the book, Rizwan’s mother or “He,” tells the story of the character’s childhood. His birth and a miracle in childhood during a car accident, and it continues. The strategically ambiguous point of this narrative is why the character’s mother knows that this book will be read in Iran? She constantly refers to “you Persians” or “you Iranians,” and so on, implying “you are like this” or “you know this.”
Infatuation with the subject should not overflow from every part of a novel. This infatuation appears repeatedly through the narratives of different narrators in this work. When an author is drawn to a subject, it means they have an infatuation with it, and its manifestation in this way changes the nature of the work into biography. As mentioned at the beginning, the author’s intense infatuation is evident in the first 3 pages of the book. Furthermore, when in the narrative of each individual narrator, even in the “final” section by the planner of Martyr Mughniyeh’s assassination, there is an infatuation with his character, whom he refers to as Maurice, although it seems illogical, it again demonstrates the author’s excessive and unreasonable infatuation with the subject.
A story and a novel are narrated in the present tense, not like a memoir where we look at the past from today and with today’s achievements, repeatedly emphasizing the narrator’s position. That is, to make the reader understand: “Hey reader, today the subject has been martyred, and we are narrating it with infatuation.” The time of the work, instead of being present, becomes past, which is a characteristic of history and memoir.
In the section “Naked in the Field,” without the first narrator’s story concluding, the narrator changes, and the neighbor’s son narrates, not the mother. However, the subject is the mother’s kindness and the story of not wearing shoes and taking up arms for battle in adolescence and youth, and the mother bringing shoes, which disrupts the logic of the narrative. What is the necessity for the narrator to change?
From the “Becoming a Guerrilla” section, an Iranian narrator joins the narrators, and the story proceeds through a narrator from Khorramshahr, an intrusive narrator whose name is not revealed until the end of that section. Everything seems to be a sealed secret, for what purpose? And how is the reader supposed to know?
This narrator recounts two sections.
In the “Testing What Was Learned” section, a Palestinian narrator tells the story, but we never find out who he is, not even his name! This same narrator recounts two chapters. The work has become a puzzle of unknowns.
Time and place are lost in this work. Chronotope, which is a unique characteristic of a novel, is ignored. The locations, perhaps with somewhat poetic descriptions, might be imaginable for those who have visited Beirut, but for the original language audience, Iranians who want to know the subject or the hero character, will they have any grasp of the place? Regarding time, the matter becomes more difficult because most narrators speak from the past and constantly link back to the present, and the narrative is fundamentally full of flashbacks and flashforwards, but the time is not discernible. In one or two places, time is given in Gregorian years, in a few others, in Solar Hijri. In some places, we don’t even know which time the author intends; for example, “early 80s” – we don’t know if it refers to Gregorian or Solar Hijri or what. For instance, on page 57. Since the narrators return from today to the past, this temporal transgression and the unspecified time further confuse the reader. For example, the time of martyrdom is not specified until the end of the work, which is one of its strategic points.
In the “Unknowns” section, we also have another anonymous Iranian narrator who talks about Damavand. In this section, memory is explicitly mentioned; on page 69 of the book.
The method of footnotes or endnotes in the book is exactly the clarification method used in oral history, memoirs, and biographies, not for the necessity with which they are used in a novel. A novel is a continuous and coherent text and fundamentally should not have footnotes. For example, this footnote on page 27 under the title “Bint Jbeil” states: “Hezbollah’s stronghold right next to Israel. Sayyed’s famous speech, in which he said Israel is weaker than a spider’s web, was delivered in this city’s stadium. Haj Qassem of Hezbollah, Mr. Khalid Ahmad Bazi, was born in this area and was martyred in this city during the July War with astonishing resistance. He and his few companions did not let Hezbollah’s flag be lowered in the city’s stadium. He was among the most important officers martyred in the 2006 war.” Well, what introduction can this extensive explanation provide to the reader about the city of Bint Jbeil? Does it clarify the place, time, or geography of this city for the reader, or what? Of course, all the events mentioned in this footnote, such as the speech, even the flag, and even the martyrdom, are also present in the rest of the book’s text and cannot be considered historical identity data. It is inefficient data for clarifying the name of a city, and simply has no application in a novel.
In the section “With the Bandits,” there is another unknown Lebanese narrator with an unfinished story.
Several other unknown narrators also tell stories in the book until it reaches the “Honeymoon” section, where, due to the nature of the topic – the narrative of marriage and conjugal life – the unknown narrator, in contrast to other narrators, becomes somewhat more familiar due to their causal relationship with the subject, but still, neither their name nor anything else is revealed.
Unfortunately, until the middle of the work, no narrative thread is closed by the narrators. All threads remain open, which further adds to the reader’s confusion. A mysterious subject, mysterious narrators, unfinished and mysterious cases and events—the sum of mysteries adds nothing to the reader. It yields neither knowledge, nor experience, nor understanding.
A cultural strong point of the work is its correct use of food and its types, methods of cooking, and consumption. It can be confidently said that this book is a field of study for the food subcultures of the Middle East.
A positive point of the work is the high number of interviews the author conducted during research before writing about the subject, or had access to, and utilized these interviews. The author’s hand is full of minor narratives about the character. Has the author been able to leverage this capacity?
On page 183, the name of the hero character, the subject, is revealed. Although his surname was mentioned in the first 100 pages, with some doubt. So, the full name of the mysterious hero of the work is completed in the final third of the text. Is all this concealment necessary? Especially in a portrait novel? Leaving aside the dedications, after 183 pages and about twenty narratives from multiple narrators, the reader is only then informed of the name of the hero everyone is infatuated with, let alone other physical characteristics and interests. However, when on the ninth line of this very page 183 it says: “Imad… He… He is here…”, the strategy of character concealment is over, and after that, using the pronoun “he” for the hero can no longer function and is merely playing with the reader’s psychology, which, unfortunately, continues until the last line of the book.
However, in the “Ahmad Operation” section on page 211, the narrator even ridicules this use of “he.” In the first paragraph, which is quite absurd, the author himself mocks his failed strategy, and on page 212, speaking through the narrator, he goes further, drawing the genres of novel and biography into his jest and denying that the work is a story. Why all this contradiction in one work? Especially when the first three pages of the work are entirely about Martyr Imad Mughniyeh!
The most narrative-like story among the multiple narrators of this work is the “Secret Agent” narrative. From page 201 to 209, although the narrator is still unknown, details of the past and future are intertwined with the present of the story, and the narration is in the present, unlike the rest of the narrators who recount past events. However, I will say later that the last section of the work is a novelistic narrative. This secret agent’s account is the most story-like narrative among the memoir-like fictional narratives.
Apart from narrators such as the wife, daughter, or mother, whose relationship with the subject, the book’s hero, through verbal covenants on this topic and terms like “mother,” “daughter,” “father,” or similar, enables the reader to establish a better connection with the narrator, even if the narrative text lacks detailed story elements and is full of emotion and sentiment. However, these emotions are archetypal rather than unique and personal feelings specific to a novel or story.
Finally, in the last section, which begins on page 241 and goes to page 271, the end of the work, the narrative truly transforms into a novel. Two parallel narratives, one by an Israeli narrator named Meir and the other by an Iranian, Haj Qassem Soleimani, are the narrators of this section, presented entirely as a novelistic narrative. This shows that the author could have narrated the work as a novel, but by choosing what I believe is a wrong strategy, he repeatedly beat the drum of fictionalized biography and documentary biography.
Long paragraphs without grammatical and stylistic logic, lack of proper white space, disrupted termination of two narratives in the “final” section, and a stylistic error (pronoun omission on page 257, line 23) are among the structural factors of improper pagination and publication preparation that make this usually smoothly narrated work difficult to read. Of course, if we set aside the author’s strategy of obfuscation and mystery, in the rest of the narrative, the author has a fluid writing style. This feature could have positively impacted the readability of the work, but unfortunately, the final outcome is the opposite.
Personally, I set aside all my preconceptions and knowledge about the subject, the martyr of resistance, Imad Mughniyeh, to obtain everything I needed to know about the character through the text of the work – which should have been a coherent and expressive text. After finishing the work, by comparing it with a simple search on Wikipedia and other readily available news sources, I realized that the narrative available on Wikipedia is more successful in providing a better understanding of Martyr Imad Mughniyeh. Although it may not have provided specific details of the character’s life, it presented the overall picture without ambiguity and mystery, unlike this work “He.” It seems that a short news article could provide more information and a better understanding of the character to the reader than reading a 271-page text-heavy book, each page of which is equivalent to a A4 page of text, and which, with proper white space, correct paragraphing, and systematic pagination, should have been at least a 400-page book of standard octavo size.
The fact that the author, speaking through the planner of Martyr Mughniyeh’s assassination, names the character Maurice is one of the points that needs attention. It’s a strategic point. Maurice should have other meanings. A brief examination reveals that Maurice is both a man’s name and the name of an island in Africa that was formerly a French colony, and also from the name of the Eastern Roman Emperor from 582 to 602 AD, an empire that ended the Roman-Persian Wars in 591 AD. In Hebrew texts, it first appears as the name of a major frankincense merchant. Of course, it is familiar to us Iranians because it is the island to which Reza Shah Pahlavi was exiled. But there is no sign of this in the text, nor outside the text, so what? In choosing this name for a subject that the CIA and Mossad have been pursuing for several years, no symbolic or mythical point can be found or, unfortunately, it is not clear that its selection for a person (from their perspective, an enemy) and their years-long target is very unreasonable, given the understanding of the Jewish people and the reader’s knowledge of intelligence organizations. The choice of the name Maurice for a character they call an active terrorist should be symbolic and a clever choice, which is not how it is perceived. It seems like an ordinary person, contrary to all the book’s efforts to prove the opposite.
My final conclusion as a reader is that the author’s inappropriate strategy, his self-mockery of it, and the instability and excessive mysteriousness of the narrators in a visible matter have weakened the work. I wish the author, like in the last section of his book, had chosen a slice of the hero’s life that represents his entire life, or several slices, and not alienated the reader from himself and the hero character with all this fruitless and confusing data! Of course, a character portrait novel is nothing but this.
