Shakespeare in the Monkey's Paw

Mahdi Shafieyan

Assistant Professor of English Literature

Imam Sadiq University, Tehran, Iran

On Azar 5, 1393 (Nov. 26, 2014), I was sent a notification of or invitation to University of

Tehran's First International Conference on Shakespeare Studies in Iran. The keynote speaker

seemed alluring, Stephen Greenblatt, with whose edition of The Norton Anthology of English

Literature for the course "A Survey of English Literature History" I had some pleasurable

times at the B.A.. My much interest in the book led me to devour it, so being nicknamed as

"Walking Norton" by my peers. Despite those delightful experiences, in my Ph.D. courses, I

found Greenblatt's writings simply as some other-disciplinary adventures containing nothing

about the joy of literature. I assumed that probably the pen of those passages in the Norton

was mostly influenced by M. H. Abrams, with whose A Glossary of Literary Terms I also had

some valuable experience in the same trajectory. I decided, nonetheless, to attend the session.

As the CMC (Criticism and Metacriticism Conference) organizing chair, I guessed

this conference would be a chance to see how my friends at University of Tehran handle the

affairs, to meet my colleagues from different universities around Iran, and to enjoy the beauty

of the bard's corpus and the scholarly works around. In the conference, finally, Greenblatt

appeared, walking down the aisle of the hall to the podium, ushered or accompanied by some

local and foreign academicians. The clamor of claps for his arrival loudly talked of Iranians'

hospitality and honor. After some preliminary programs, he ultimately stepped up to start his

speech, so unsurprisingly everyone expected an "event," a "happening," or something with

huge "contribution to human knowledge."

Describing Iran as a country that is neither Eastern nor Western, somewhere in the

middle of the world's map—hence, attributing the sense of the golden mean—we thought he

truly has "perceived the message of the [last presidential] elections," a phrase implying the

present president's motto which echoes one of Imam Ali's aphorisms, "moderation is the best

course of action." Complimenting our country complemented the previous prepossessing

picture.

Seeing different excerpts from various works by Shakespeare, most were impressed

by his good command of the bard's scholarship and hoped to sip by sip drink from the Pierian

Spring. All were confronted, however, with a hodgepodge of "discourses" from many

"human" sources and fields of "knowledge," say, from the similarities between human and

orangutans' pregnancy, between the growth time of children's molars and numerous genera of

apes', to his personal experience as a grandfather's sense compared with King Lear's toward

his daughters, from his studies in the archives somewhere in England to the "universal"

shares of the mankind in some given behavior.

From time to time, looking at their watches and seeing unfortunately only half of the

determined time (90 minutes) has yet passed, yawning at the ancient archeological affairs no

one in the session interested in, and baffled by his talks asking themselves where he actually

on the earth was going to drive, the students murmured "uh-huh, this is new historicism"!

Treating of monkeys and their family features lasted so long that he finally, as if getting how

the listeners felt, said, "now you wonder if I get back to Shakespeare" that everyone laughing

subscribed to this suggestion.

But, suddenly in the middle of the speaker's "address," Professor Hussein Elahi

Qumshei emerged, reminiscing the years we relished his literature lectures and never got tired

of quaffing from his memorial treasury abundant with poems we always felt envy to know.

Teaching for decades at University of Tehran, Dr. Qumshei humbly sat down. I thought, he

as one of the emblems of the university was going just to be present as a sign of reverence to

the participants in the Iranian culture, yet fortunately, all found that he was there due to the

conference chair's phone invitation to quench the audience's tantalized thirst for literature. So,

after Greenblatt, he took the floor and surprised his American counterpart—who was just

staring at him—by reciting Shakespeare's poems by heart and their poetic translations by

himself in the same meter.

His speech of brevity finished, and he quietly left the dais; I pioneered to stand up to

respect and clapped for him—not to be blamed of xenophilia, to welcome someone as a guest

and not seeing the host—so did, fortunately, the hall. The table turned; he was much more

welcomed and applauded, as if our fellow academics just understood the difference between

literature proper and a doubtful narrative of the past from unknown sources, passed off as

critical knowledge. After the session, unsatisfied with the first lecture, a row of colleagues, I

included, did not like to take photos—after all, as university professors—with someone who

did his ultimate to make students hate literature! As a matter of fact, we asked our professor

for some photos.

Mention should made, however, since we did not learn anything from Harvard's

lecturer, we instead enjoyed his joking notes or memories on return. A text full of disrespect

to the people who appreciated him through his description of the Iranian beliefs; or, his "new

historical", out-of-date knowledge of Iran ("Iranian exiles have detailed entirely credible

horror stories of their treatment—pressure, intimidation, imprisonment, and in some cases

torture—at the hands of the Islamic Republic" [emphasis added]), the same as his studies

from shaky, unnamed sources; or, his paranoiac, conspiracy-illusion-derived sentences ("I

also noticed among the men a few who stood apart and did not seem to be either students or

faculty. It was not difficult to imagine who these might be"); or, his grandiosity-complex-

based narrative ("I did not want to stage a provocation: I was less concerned for myself than I

was for the organizing committee and the students, since I presumed it would be they who

would bear the consequences."). Undoubtedly, with his new historical views, one can neglect

the difference between Israelis and Jews (please read his "Shakespeare in Tehran") for the

sake of another questionable incident they narrate from the Second World War as a cause of

colonization. Astonishingly, such statements are released by one who introduces himself in

the piece as a supporter of "basic civil liberties" as well as "interest[ed] in free expression,"

while no one in his country is allowed to ask some questions about the unnamable historical

"happening"!

I was actually regretting how a teacher can sacrifice his academic reputation for

political purposes that I remembered Lee Bollinger.

April 20, 2015