Genre-mixing in memoir can undermine rather than fortify its ideological message

Evidence

Thus, we can understand the memoir form, utilized by Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran, as performing a task that is concerned to shape a recognizable reality using those linguistic forms, techniques, and tropes that the reader will identify both as appropriate to a genre that claims authenticity for itself and as guaranteeing truth vis-à-vis their reference to the real world beyond them. Yet the “purity” of the memoir form and thus its relationship to truth is inevitably compromised in Reading Lolita in Tehran because genre boundaries are never firm and because Nafisi’s own register—as we will see—wobbles markedly between the modalities of autobiography and fiction. Women’s life writing often transgresses generic boundaries, resulting in the kind of “inter-generic ‘contaminations’’’ that Bart Moore-Gilbert sees as common to all genres. As a form of narrative, autobiography, Moore-Gilbert says, relies on “such ‘fictive’ devices as the ‘emplotment’ of the protagonist’s trajectory in relation to particular moments of crisis … figurative language and self-conscious manipulation of ‘narrative voice.’ ” All of these features are evident in Nafisi’s memoir. The tension between novelistic techniques and memoir results in a kind of “shape-shifting” between fact and fiction. Keshavarz argues that, “as a memoir, the book borrows first and foremost the authority of the author’s personal voice.… Yet the book also ventriloquises other (often extreme) positions through characters.” I would argue yet another level of complication is introduced into Nafisi’s text by the canonical English and American novels it interpolates and comments upon. While lending a further aura of authority, these borrowings point up shortcomings in the rather narrow, judgmental perspective the narrator-teacher displays. In the end, it is not so much a case of generic ambiguity or transgression as of generic incompatibility, where contending elements in the narrative undermine and pull away from the central ideological message. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 217

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Reading Lolita in Tehran and to the contest-vs-reinforce question the reader is pursuing with Hamid and Naqvi — genre incompatibility as a mechanism by which a text undercuts its own politics. — connects to: Fabricated interviews smuggled fiction’s techniques into journalism’s commonsense — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1567
• QUESTION: Does changez’s confession frame in The Reluctant Fundamentalist similarly wobble between authenticity and fiction, and does it similarly pull away from a single ideological message?