Discourse of Nationalism in Saeed Nafisi's Dar Nim-e Rāh-e Behesht (Midway to Paradise)

After the occupation of Iran by the Allies in 1941, the Shāh of Iran was forced to renounce the crown in favor of his young son, and from then until the CIA-backed Coup of August 1953, the Iranian society experienced a period of relative cultural freedom, and particularly the press enjoyed an unprecedented liberty. One fruitful outcome of such freedom was the publication of serial novels with sociopolitical themes. One remarkable example is Dar Nim-e Rāh-e Behesht (Midway to Paradise) by Saeed Nafisi, which was published, in forty installments, in one of the most influential periodicals of that time, Kāviyan. Since serialized novels are reader-centered and their publication depends on how the readers receive them, Laclau and Mouffe’s qualitative method of discourse analysis has been used to analyze the political sphere of the time as well as the discursive sphere of the novel. Analysis of Nafisi’s novel Midway to Paradise shows that amongst the four major sociopolitical discourses of the period between 1941 and 1953—namely, Marxism, nationalism, Islamism and monarchism—the aforementioned novel supports the discourse of nationalism, which is revealed and represented by the narrator. This discursive position is also articulated by a critique of the ruling political discourse and its ‘Westoxified’ agents. The novel also debunks the myth of Communism as defined by the Soviet Union and argues that the Communist paradise is nothing but a sham delusion.