The fusion of childhood and death or the magical narrative of time in The past of old people

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 director of international relations

2 Associate Professor of French Language and Literature, Hakim Sabzevari University

10.30465/copl.2023.45499.3999

Abstract

This article is the result of Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's collaboration with us as a literary researcher about The past of old people. The main topic is the investigation of time’s poetic in relation to space.

It rarely happens that an article criticizing a work is written with the participation of the author of the same work. If the reader of this novel is familiar with Dowlatabadi's life, he will easily understand that his book is an autofiction. The difference between autofiction and autobiography is that the author's imagination in the first type, compared to the second, more easily affects the process of defining the narrator's life. According to Freud, by using his phantasmagoric activity, a person recreates the events of his life and his relatives and in this way, he represents a reality that has been transformed. In many autobiographies, the author assumes childhood as the starting point of his story, then, he narrates events that bring him to adulthood, sometimes to old age. But in The past of old people, unlike autobiographical writing, the author refers to the early death of the main character's grandfather to show the starting point of the story. In other words, the beginning of this autofiction is the story of an unexpected death, the consequences of which will affect the lives of the descendants of the main character. The fact that the author chose death as the starting point of the story causes the entire poetic of novel changed and childhood is mixed with death. At the same time, to show this transformation and the threat of death, the author uses elements that make the novel distance itself from the realistic time and turn into autofiction. Identifying and analyzing these elements is the main foundation of our research. Consulting with Dowlatabadi and including his opinions in this article has created a good opportunity to improve the content of our research, and he can discover his work with hidden effects

Keywords

References

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Contemporary Persian Literature
Volume 13, Issue 2 - Serial Number 34
February 2024
Pages 81-110

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