Iis Sugiyanti praises ←13 | 14→A Thousand Splendid Suns for being “honest enough to give a more informed and rounded appreciation of the life of Afghan women” (48). But there is another angle of attack: strangely equating Pashtun people as a whole with Pashtun men, ones especially having “the responsibility of shielding honor of their women” (421), Khan and Afsar on this basis contend that Hosseini “disorientates readers by distorting real picture of Pashtun people” in that his “representation of Pashtun characters is not based on the traits for which they are known,” so that he “pleases Westerners by devaluing cultural values of Pashtuns/Muslims” and justifies U.S. intrusion into Afghanistan (426). Evidently literature can become a weapon not only of political conflict but of warfare. When another team of critics faults Hosseini’s work for being narrated from a female perspective (Khan and Qureshi 397), we can see how consistently masculinist criticism, with its allies, seeks to safeguard its cultural priorities in nosing out ideological concerns in its study object – but only there. It may need to consider Edmund Husserl’s warning that scientific questioning requires an “inhibiting” or “putting out of play” all “positions taken toward the already-given Objective world” (epoché or parenthesizing, in Cartesian 20). Moreover, whereas Mader condemns Hosseini’s novel for depicting Pashtun men as either brutish or effeminate (88), Khan and Qureshi find them portrayed as “matchlessly helpful to the needy” (392). Does the novel show a different face to different critics?
Another of the authors we will mention, Kader Abdolah, has been analyzed with similar categories:22 he “regularly employs old, orientalist stereotypes: ‘West’ is rational, straightforward and active; ‘East’ is irrational, traditional and passive” (Moenandar 61).23 As for Iran, when Parinoush Saniee’s Book of Fate was banned, she reports about the question of its depiction of realities: “Even when I asked what subject matter in the book was far-fetched, and where had I possibly exceeded realities at the time, the ministry’s response was that it was not a question of the subject matter being untrue ←14 | 15→or unrealistic, but that [the book] was bitter and would negatively impact perceptions” (Al Bustani). It is noteworthy how the whole issue of representative or distorted depiction can thus be neatly sidestepped. The realities are, in Saniee’s summary: “Indeed, there is no shortage of suicide, long family feuds and even honour killing. Societal expectations are more vital to people than life and death” (Al Bustani).
In the Chinese context there is a recent and heated debate, which is also significant for understanding the global dimension of the question of representation. It concerns Mo Yan, who has been severely criticized for not depicting “typical characters in typical environments”: has he not “distorted the Chinese history and reality” with a “wild and exaggerating” fictional discourse (Song 3, 4)? Song Binghui cites a critical stance that resembles charges brought against Middle Eastern authors: “though not intentionally bowing to Orientalism, Mo Yan has in effect confirmed the Occidental imagination of a backward and filthy East” (4). We need to be aware that his translator produces “marketable English books” and sees a “primary obligation” to the Western reader rather than the author (see “Howard” and also Lingenfelter). The debate about distorting reality, too, is instructive. In Hegel’s sense (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences 1: The Logic 2.8.112), it is not advisable to “look upon the world before us in its immediacy as something permanent and positive,” since what we can regard as Being is “the superseding of all that is immediate”; owing to the principle of negativity, immediate reality or the given carries the seeds of its dissolution, as the forms of phenomenal reality are contingent (see Zhang Shiying, and also for instance Button 192, 219–20). This is also a vital way to think of the query about representativity, or a notion of mainstream reality. Song Binghui vindicates Mo Yan’s creation of “a symbolic mixture rich in meaning” which features a “genuine concern for human nature as engrossed in the specially Chinese social-historical reality” (9); “existents and events of Mo Yan’s narratives do have their reference in the real world” (10).24 We would agree that fetters of “conventional realism” would not allow the writer to address significant real-world concerns.
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Our topic leads straight into the dispute about “skewing” the culture of one’s country. Such a practice would amount to a failure to give access to significant realities, to authentic or typical conditions. The accusation can bring about an impasse in representation as well as personal trouble. It is a form of “crisis in the correspondence between the representing discourse and the represented world” (with a suspicion that the writer is rendering little more than his/her own “aim and agenda,” as voiced by Khan and Qureshi), technically speaking a “shift from alloreferential to self-referential semiosis” (Nöth 10, 14). Further above, we have warned against treating a fictional work of art as an ethnographical document essentializing a culture. Yet the accusations against authors (in the previous section) show that non-ethnographical aesthetical representation is sometimes taken as if it was merely an opposite extreme, and is accordingly accepted only within narrow limits. Beyond what Winfried Nöth accounts for, there is a risk of losing the referent in such altercation when the depicted conditions’ reality is disputed and/or attention shifts away from them and toward the manner of representation. The Maghreb Page Editors, indeed, confidently proclaim that Daoud constructs “a non-existent space as the object of analysis.”
We have heard, in the context of our first response, that literature represents “typical deficits, blind spots” within “dominant systems of civilizatory power” (Zapf). Yet critical assessments of the kind we refer to suggest it is mainly the writers themselves who reveal “blind spots,” whether or not they appear to be co-opted in a commodification culture. Adjudicating the dispute adequately would involve extensive, neopositivistic field research in each target country. A number of social research projects have been carried out (see for instance Churchill 118 and 244 for Afghanistan), so that we can and will compare their results with the fictional works and sometimes with legal culture to provide a more comprehensive picture of this complex topic. We can and will also compare the fictionally depicted conditions between works, for an assessment whether any of them are isolated cases. We do remain aware that social science studies as such can be equally liable to the charge of “blind spots”; for major research methods of intercultural and intergroup communication, for instance, it is well said that “each paradigm has its own meaning and rhythm much as is the case with different genres of music” (Ting-Toomey and Dorjee 49). Yet this does not mean that each is, accordingly, more concerned with its internal harmony than with its study objects. Formulating necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, as in a coherence theory of justification, is a challenging requirement both for social and literary inquiries.
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Marginal or representative conditions? (III)
So far we have offered two approaches, the second with a fairly strong political component, to the query about marginality. We can attempt a third, possibly less controversial way of answering it. We should be aware that what we have referred to as dominant systems are intricately related to conditions prevailing for large segments or even a majority of a population and especially its subalterns. If one follows Robert Paul Churchill’s sociocultural account as well as the solidly based research on face cultures, the conditions shown in the fictional works we are studying here do affect the lives of numerous people.25 Notable critical voices underscore this. Zabihzadeh et al. not without justice declare that fictional works like Atiq Rahimi’s novel Syngué Sabour “play an integral role in addressing the plight of Afghan women” as “a persistent
