Polyphony and Poly-Subjectivity in Iranian Postmodern Novel; A Study of Asfar-e Kateban by Abutorab-e Khosravi

Asfar-e Kaateban by Aboutorab Khosravi is a polyphonic text in the light of the presence of associated and amalgamated various voices. Polyphony is a term that Mikhail Bakhtin used to refer to Dostoyevsky's works, in which characters have dialogue in some manner. By means of dialogue, characters renounce the dominance of author and they can illustrate their individuality.
In Pre-Modern works, narrator was the dominant recite in the whole text which did not authorize characters to express their impressions. In Modern era, this complete dominance of narrator is suppressing and we can identify the equality of characters' authority and narrator's authority in expressing the impressions. Nowadays in Post-Modern world, this equality converts to the complete independence of characters and even they disobey narrator. Consequently, text exemplifies the presence of numerous voices, and by means of polyphony, the polarity nature of postmodern atmosphere is illustrated. Here, a question arises that how polyphony is personified, or in other words, how polyphony is textualized. The focus of this paper is on the reflex of characters' psyche in their language. Therefore, the formation of embedded focalization and its affect on making polyphony is shown through the analysis of combination and competition of different characters and the presence of other characters in the mind of a character. The analysis of selected texts demonstrates that Khosravi managed to create polyphony and poly subjectivity, and consequently, the place and role of characters in the postmodern text is indicated. And it is multi-focalizer that collects other focalized in itself. Then, focalized are sometimes other person and other self of focalizer itself. In this situation, we have first person pronoun and third person pronoun that are used by focalizer to refer to it, to its subjective and objective self; me and him / her.  Therefore, different voices embody their effects in text, and the text, also manifests its polyphonic characteristic by means of poly-subjectivity, that is the resultant of these different self.