Iranian Women in the Memoir

Comparing Reading Lolita in Tehran

and Persepolis 1 and 2 1st Edition
Emira Derbel
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmeta.com/product/iranian-women-in-the-memoir-comparing-reading-lolit
a-in-tehran-and-persepolis-1-and-2-1st-edition-emira-derbel/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Reading Iraqi Women s Novels in English Translation

Iraqi Women s Stories 1st Edition Ruth Abou Rached

https://ebookmeta.com/product/reading-iraqi-women-s-novels-in-
english-translation-iraqi-women-s-stories-1st-edition-ruth-abou-
rached/

Populism and Collective Memory Comparing Fascist

Legacies in Western Europe 1st Edition Luca Manucci

https://ebookmeta.com/product/populism-and-collective-memory-
comparing-fascist-legacies-in-western-europe-1st-edition-luca-
manucci/

Laggards and Leaders in Labour Market Reform Comparing

Japan and Australia 1st Edition Jenny Corbett (Ed.)

https://ebookmeta.com/product/laggards-and-leaders-in-labour-
market-reform-comparing-japan-and-australia-1st-edition-jenny-
corbett-ed/

Iranian Tigers at War Northrop F 5A B F 5E F and Sub

Variants in Iranian Service Since 1966 1st Edition
Babak Taghvaee

https://ebookmeta.com/product/iranian-tigers-at-war-
northrop-f-5a-b-f-5e-f-and-sub-variants-in-iranian-service-
since-1966-1st-edition-babak-taghvaee/
Midnight in Tehran Operation Long Jump the Nazi Plot to
Assassinate Roosevelt Churchill and Stalin 1st Edition
Christopher Sandford

https://ebookmeta.com/product/midnight-in-tehran-operation-long-
jump-the-nazi-plot-to-assassinate-roosevelt-churchill-and-
stalin-1st-edition-christopher-sandford/

The Future of Global Competition Ontological Security

and Narratives in Chinese Iranian Russian and
Venezuelan Media 1st Edition Robert Hinck

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-future-of-global-competition-
ontological-security-and-narratives-in-chinese-iranian-russian-
and-venezuelan-media-1st-edition-robert-hinck/

The Iran Nuclear Deal Non proliferation and US Iran

Conflict Resolution Studies in Iranian Politics 1st
Edition Khan

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-iran-nuclear-deal-non-
proliferation-and-us-iran-conflict-resolution-studies-in-iranian-
politics-1st-edition-khan/

Made in China: A Memoir of Marriage and Mixed Babies in

the Middle Kingdom 1st Edition Simon Gjeroe

https://ebookmeta.com/product/made-in-china-a-memoir-of-marriage-
and-mixed-babies-in-the-middle-kingdom-1st-edition-simon-gjeroe/

Diagnosis Fault Detection Tolerant Control Studies in

Systems Decision and Control Book 269 Nabil Derbel
Jawhar Ghommam Quanmin Zhu

https://ebookmeta.com/product/diagnosis-fault-detection-tolerant-
control-studies-in-systems-decision-and-control-book-269-nabil-
derbel-jawhar-ghommam-quanmin-zhu/
Iranian Women
in the Memoir
Iranian Women
in the Memoir:

Comparing Reading Lolita

in Tehran and Persepolis (1)
and (2)

By

Emira Derbel
Iranian Women in the Memoir:
Comparing Reading Lolita in Tehran and Persepolis (1) and (2)

By Emira Derbel

This book first published 2017

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2017 by Emira Derbel

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-8276-3

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-8276-7
To my family for their love and encouragement.

To my husband for his unlimited support.

To the soul of my grandmother who accompanied all my steps in

writing this project without witnessing it’s coming to light.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1

Chapter One ............................................................................................... 23

Theoretical and Historical Background

Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 63

Mechanisms of Transgression in Reading Lolita in Tehran and Persepolis

Chapter Three .......................................................................................... 105

Dialectics of Exile in Reading Lolita in Tehran and Persepolis

Chapter Four ............................................................................................ 149

Mechanisms of Resisting Islamic Extremism in Reading Lolita in Tehran
and Persepolis

Conclusion ............................................................................................... 197

Bibliography ............................................................................................ 203

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book could never have been published to its fullest without the
support and the enlightening guidance of Dr. Chaker Mhamdi whose
support and valuable pieces of advice smoothed my way through and
through. I would like to extend my deepest appreciation and respect to
Professor Nejet Machala for teaching me how to stand on firm ground as a
young Tunisian researcher and for her efforts to shape my research skills. I
also highly value the artistic touch of my students Fatma and Maryam for
designing the book cover image. I would, additionally, express my thanks
to the Cambridge Scholars Publishing team for their patience, help and
support.
 INTRODUCTION

The writing of autobiography by women has grown remarkably into a

territory distinct from male autobiographers. Women’s autobiographical
writing, rarely taken seriously as Buss puts it in Repossessing the World:
Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women, has garnered an avalanche of
criticism, wavering from discontent to bewilderment, to challenge the
courage of its authors (2002, 6). Following the same line of thought, Leigh
Gilmore in Autographics stresses the exclusionary tendency of traditional
autobiographical studies that renders the discussion of gender a mere
supplement (1994, 21). However, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue
that “women’s autobiography is a privileged site for thinking about issues
of writing at the intersection of feminist, post-colonial, and postmodern
critical theories” (2002, 5). Women’s life narratives are symbolic endeavors
to break the wall of silence imposed on them by their historical and cultural
heritage.
However, autobiographical theorists such as George Gusdorf identified
autobiography as essentially a Western male narrative representative of
great men, and there was little interest in women’s autobiographies until
the end of the seventies (1980, 32). Around the 1980s, however, many
critics brought the significance of women’s autobiographies to light. For
instance, Estelle C. Jelinek stresses the need to explore women’s
autobiographies via, “historical, social psychological and ethnic analysis,”
which requires a “gendered reading” of the genre as a reaction against the
exclusionary Western androcentric conceptualization of autobiography
(Miller 2015, 259).
The subject/self in autobiographical writing is no longer removed from
the historical, social, and political context. Instead, it gained flexibility and
space at the foreground of literary criticism. The autobiographical “I”
ceased to hide itself behind a masculine linguistic and social curtain. The
construction of their own space within feminist criticism as active women
subjects marked a turning point in feminist studies and autobiography.
Women autobiographers, as Smith and Watson argue, “had challenged the
gender ideologies surrounding them in order to script their life narratives”
(2010, 12).
The focus has thus shifted to embrace a relational multi-voiced narrative
instead of a solitary male self. The story is not of a single subject, but
2 Introduction

representative of a collectivity of women’s stories through the voice of the

female narrator. It is this collectivity, or what Bakhtin terms the
“heteroglossic” aspect of women’s autobiography, that was a source of
empowerment for women autobiographers (1981, 352). In the wake of
post-colonialism and postmodernism, many scholars have diverted their
attention toward non-Western women’s autobiographies. This newly
liberated approach paved the way toward the emergence of ethnic
women’s autobiographies, including African- and Iranian-Americans
using various forms, such as memoirs, testimonies, diaries, or even graphic
memoirs. This boom in life narratives led Paul Eakin in How Our Lives
Become Stories to state, “[The] serious and sustained study of women’s
autobiography . . . is the single most important achievement of
autobiography studies in the last decade” (1999, 65).
Autobiographical writing marked a tremendous outburst of activity,
mainly because of the positive reception of memoirs by a large readership.
As part of this literary phenomenon, despite its long history of
marginalization, the memoir form regained its place in autobiographical
writing because it provided, “immediacy and more authentic truth into life
narrative” (2007, 133). Memoirs by Iranian women in the diaspora have
become particularly popular because they contextualize the personal with
the historical. The memoir form offers accessibility to a prohibited space
in Iranian culture. As a symbolic form of unveiling the self, the Iranian
memoir offers its women writers the potential to transgress and transcend
forbidden ground.
Prior to the Iranian Revolution, the Iranian artistic field was dominated
by an inclination to protect and hide the private life of women from the
public. As Farzaneh Milani contends, Iranian culture, “creates, expects and
even values a sharply defined separation between the inner and the outer,
the private and the public” (1990, 2). Patriarchy, or the law of the father, is
also one of the reasons that burdens Iranian women writers enmeshed in an
ongoing war against silence, subservience, public humiliation, and the
media, because they stepped across the threshold of artistic production by
writing memoirs.
The writing of memoirs by Iranian women comprises a personal and
historical dynamic. On one hand, they represent Iran at a crucial historical
juncture as the country transitions from a monarchy to an Islamic
government. On the other hand, the memoir historicizes the personal
experiences of Iranian women torn between a yearned-for freedom and an
Islamic life imposed by the new regime. The memoirs create narratives of
trauma and courage, and invent new female subjectivities. In fact, “they
open up a space for a gendered discourse about Iran and the Islamic
 Iranian Women in the Memoir 3

Republic” (Whitlock 2008, 8). In post-revolutionary Iran, Iranian memoirs

produce a discursivity that documents historical changes and sheds light
on the intractable issues of identity, sexuality, ethnicity, and class—both in
Iran and in exile.
Described by Gillian Whitlock as “Soft Weapons,” Iranian memoirs
have attracted an antagonistic reception (2007, 3). Being literary weapons
for divulging the social, cultural, and political contradictions haunting the
lives of the Iranian women, Iranian life narratives could not escape
categorization as an exotic secondary version of colonialism. Thus, Iranian
women face a double challenge; their role transcends the simple cadre of
diasporic literary production. They seek to excavate the hidden voices of
Iranian women and resist an inherited patriarchal heritage via the
reconstruction of a new model of womanhood, and exhibit an urge to abate
the widespread association of Islam with terror, and Muslims with
extremists.
The two best-selling Iranian memoirs, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in
Tehran (hereafter RLT) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (1) and (2),
(hereafter Persepolis) have garnered unprecedented fame for their capacity
to offer daring glimpses into the Iranian female and unravel contradictory
discourses invading women’s lives in post-revolutionary Iran. Nafisi’s
narrative memoir and Satrapi’s graphic oeuvre are generically different
forms of writing the female self and re-inscribing her voice into the
discourses of history, politics, religion, and culture. This study of the
memoirs, which will compare and contrast the authors’ respective uses of
the genre, will shed light on the originality of narrating women’s stories
through Western literature in RLT, and the originality of Persepolis, which
uses the previously marginalized medium of comics to graphically depict
female subjectivity at the intersection of history and religion.
Iranian diasporic memoirs, mainly those written in the US, have been
subject to an avalanche of criticism for various reasons. RLT is considered
the most controversial Iranian-American memoir, which is both shocking
and fascinating. On one hand, Nafisi’s memoir awakens in Hamid Dabashi
and Fatemeh Keshavarz wariness for its alliance with colonial tropes that
dispossess Iranian women of their agency (2006, 2-3). On the other hand,
it garners the praise and fascination of some critics who perceive Nafisi’s
engagement with the private side of women, or even her obsession with
the veil, as an attempt to “show something real by lifting the veil off
Iranian women’s lives” (Darznik 2008, 57).
In Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, Keshavarz
categorizes Nafisi’s memoir as an “example of the New Orientalist
narrative” (2007, 2). Keshavarz criticizes RLT for its tendency to serve the
4 Introduction

Orientalist duality of an American civilized “us” trying to help weak and

humble oppressed Iranian women that belong to the backward realm of
“them.” In an interview at the University of North Carolina in spring 2007,
Keshavarz claims, “the greatest omission in the content of Nafisi’s book is
that it overlooks the agency and presence of Iranian women in the social
and intellectual domain” (Motlagh 2011, 415). Keshavarz’s criticism of
RLT is ironic because the book’s main claim is to tell the untold story of
women in post-revolutionary Iran.
Dabashi, another well-known critic of RLT, ferociously condemned
the memoir in his article “Native Informers and the Making of the
American Empire” in the AL-Harem Weekly reducing it to “a colonial
project” driven by a “colonial agent” (2006, 3). As far as Nafisi’s
representation of the female body in RLT is concerned, Dabashi adds that
“[the female body is used as] a site of political contestation between two
modes of ideological fanaticism by Islamists and anti-Islamists alike, one
insisting on veiling and the other on unveiling it” (2006, 4).
In “Why Americans Love Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran,”
Peter Kramer comments on the stereotypical Western equation between
the veil and women’s oppression as follows, “A glimmer of hope attaches
to the way bright clothing emerges in a private room, once the prescribed
robes and scarves are removed. The regime maintains its hegemony first
through the repression of women” (2003, 22-52). Anne Donadey and
Ahmed-Gosh critically point to Nafisi’s silence “about the advances
women and women’s group have made in Iran since the 1980s” (2008,
629). By ignoring this historical detail, Nafisi indirectly supports,
“Western stereotypes of Iranian women as passive and helpless” (Donadey
and Ahmed-Gosh 2008, 629). Furthermore, the way RLT celebrates the US
fashion of the social book club further situates the memoir as appealing to
a strictly Western readership. However, Cassius Peck, remarks:

none of the women in Nafisi’s class fits the American stereotype of

Iranians as being either religious zealots wholly committed to the regime
or irreligious hedonists aping pious behaviors because the mullahs force
them to. Nafisi’s students represent seven different attitudes toward Islam,
toward the regime, and toward the future (59).

In this context, Robert Birnbaum notes, “Nafisi’s memoir does break

some stereotypes of Muslim women” (Identity Theory.com). In fact, the
memoir disengages Iranian women from the traditional Eastern stereotype
of subservience and passivity. Moreover, it symbolically unveils their
private lives and motivates each of the girls to voice their stories. Nafisi
focuses on the uniqueness and the centrality of Iranian women’s
 Iranian Women in the Memoir 5

independent subjectivities, which explains her repetitive statement “that

she values rebellion over revolution [for its transgressive aspect] in a
context of a totalitarian revolutionary regime” (Donadey and Ahmed-Gosh
2008, 636).
Many reviewers praised Nafisi as a writer and lover of books. For
example, Cheryl Miller of the Policy Review claims, “Nafisi is one of the
most eloquent advocates of the written word to date. Every page of
Nafisi’s memoir is informed by her passion for literature and for teaching”
(2003, 94). Daniel Grassian criticized Dabashi and Keshavarz’s attacks
against Nafisi by arguing they “can end up further silencing women who
are already being silenced by the regime, and inadvertently defend
problematic politics of the regime that can often and do infringe on basic
human rights, especially for women” (2013, 97). Furthermore, it is only
through criticizing existent patterns of oppression that the silenced other
can free herself from muteness.
Other critics consider Persepolis a successful graphic novel for its
choice of a medium that illustrates traumatic experience through a comic
and humoristic style, thus making it a distinguished memoir. For instance,
in “An Iranian Girlhood,” Andrew Arnold states:
Persepolis provides a unique glimpse into a nearly unknown and
unreachable way of life. It has the strange quality of a note in a bottle
written by a shipwrecked islander. That Satrapi chose to tell her
remarkable story as a gorgeous comic book makes Persepolis unique and
indispensable. The humor of the characters’ comments strengthens the
political dimension that looms large in the (memoir). Both the visual and
the narrative spaces combine the comic dimension with a serious traumatic
tone. (2012)
In fact, Debbie Notkin in “Growing Up Graphic,” says, “Satrapi’s
humor pervades her memoir just as it might pervade a prose work on a
similar subject. None of the humor is without its pointed commentary,
which often only makes it funnier” (2003, 8). Notkin also comments on
the empowering format of the graphic novel because it is visually revelatory
of the memoirist’s feelings and experiences. In addition, the comic
dimension frames women’s representation by subverting the common
duality that posits the superior male gaze (2003, 10). In “Kaleidoscope
Eyes: Geography, Gender, and the Media,” Christina E. Dando claims,
“Satrapi’s foray into graphic novels represents one way women shift from
the object of the gaze to creators of the gaze, creating works that
communicate their view” (2007, 18).
Persepolis, therefore, communicates the view of the female protagonist
to the outside world and focuses on issues related to the female body, life,
6 Introduction

and marriage in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. According to

Nima Naghibi and Andrew O’Malley, the memoir has “…force[d] the
Western reader to work hard to understand the complexities of
contemporary Iranian politics and social dynamics” (2005, 225).
Furthermore, Persepolis exemplifies Iran’s historical and social reality and
condemns the harsh reality of the treatment of its women.
Many studies accompanied the proliferation of Iranian memoirs and
analyze numerous issues such as female agency through the recovery of
the past or even criticize the theological dogmatism of the Islamic
Revolution. However, they tackled these issues through narrative or
selected memoirs such as Persepolis. For this reason, conducting a
comparative study between RLT and Persepolis will be useful. It is worth
pointing out that despite many critical acclaims that found the comparison
between Nafisi’s RLT and Satrapi’s Persepolis a favorable one, the field
did not witness the emergence of a study that clearly and directly
compares both memoirs. Hence, this book comes to fill in the gap. This
comparative investigation will reveal how two Iranian memoirs, different
in form, create a common platform to break through imposed mechanisms
of power, make women’s voices heard, free their bodies from holy
sanctions, and empower their identities as a process of renewal and
becoming.
In 1979, The Iranian Revolution constituted a traumatic break in the
national imagination, a break that paradoxically engendered productive
possibilities for women’s subjectivities, which have manifested themselves
through the explosion of diasporic Iranian women’s memoirs since 1999.
This study seeks to explore the various reasons behind the elevation of the
memoir, previously considered a trivial form of life writing, to what is
now the most elevated form that reflects women’s lives.
This flourishing trend in women’s writing tends to portray the
revolution as an individual and collective trauma, colored by powerful
nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary era. Through the comparative
investigation of Nafisi’s RLT and Satrapi’s Persepolis, the book aims to
examine how narrative and graphic memoirs open the way for Iranian
women to reclaim new territory through various mechanisms of
transgressions that evade social, religious, and political trauma in post-
revolutionary Iran. Furthermore, the study seeks to turn territorial and
psychological exile into an empowering space whereby Iranian women
memoirists indulge in a journey to recover the past, not as a weakening
process, but as a therapeutically healing stratagem.
Additionally, generic differences between RLT and Persepolis offer a
fertile ground for exploring how both women memoirists tackled feminist
 Iranian Women in the Memoir 7

issues via narrative and graphic techniques. The book also intends to
dispute the New Orientalist vision within which Nafisi’s RLT has been
misread as a memoir that enforces stereotypes of Iranian women as
“passive, masochistic victims” (Keshavarz 2007, 9). In order to dispute
these misreadings, this book seeks to foreground Nafisi’s representation of
Iranian women in the memoir not as merely victims of a new theological
order, but as active participants in creating a means to evade and subvert
the Islamic Republic’s oppressive policies. Hence, this study intends to
illustrate the capacity of both memoirs to reconstruct a new model of
Iranian womanhood that collapses the widespread depiction of Eastern
women as passive and oppressed.
In addition, the study explores the liberating power of literature
because it offers female writers and protagonists an additional space from
which to criticize various modes of control and transcend them. This
liberating power is attained through the memoir form as a bearer of
women’s empowerment, and, in particular, through the authorial
deployment of two main literary devices: the comic medium of Persepolis
and the intertextuality of RLT.
Azar Nafisi’s RLT and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis will be the focus
of this comparative study as they exemplify narrative and graphic
memoirs, respectively. The choice of comparing two generically and
stylistically different memoirs stems from a lack of critical attention in the
literature. In fact, RLT has been categorized by Naghibi and O’Malley as
“the antithesis of Persepolis” (2005, 224). In “From Tehran to
Tehrangeles: The Generic Fix of Iranian Exilic Memoirs,” Gillian
Whitlock describes Persepolis and RLT as “very different bestsellers”
(2006, 11). However, Whitlock suggests the possibility of obtaining a
fruitful comparison between RLT and Satrapi’s Embroideries as the critic
considers it as a “supplement” to the Persepolis duet (2008, 19). This
possible comparative ground, according to Whitlock, stems from both
memoirs opening with a “women’s room” in Tehran in the early 1990s and
their exploration of relationships among women (2008, 19). Whitlock,
however, fails to perceive that though the events in Persepolis do not
initiate in a closed space as in RLT, they still share with the latter a
common historical and thematic dimension interestingly disturbed by a
generic difference that further stimulates extra platforms for comparison.
In “Autographics,” however, Whitlock underlines the possibility of
comparing the way both memoirs represent the identity of Iranian women
(2006, 973). This book seeks to explore both similarities and differences
while shedding light on the empowering form of the memoir as it grants
voice and visibility to Iranian women.
8 Introduction

The entwining of private and public memory through revolutionary

trauma frames Nafisi and Satrapi’s nostalgic recollections of Iran.
According to Smith and Watson, both memoirs capture a dynamic
postmodernism in their movement between “the private and the public,
subject and object” (2010, 220). RLT and Persepolis are not “self-
referential narratives” because they foreground the personal and include
the social and political dimensions (2010, 216). Hence, “relationality” is
one of the main techniques employed in this study that frames the relations
between all Iranian women using narrative and graphic mediums, and
attributes strength and agency over passivity and subservience (Friedman,
1989, 72).
The study draws its originality from exploring the shared thematic
dimension of both memoirs despite their generic differences. In addition,
this investigation disputes the claim that Nafisi’s RLT is “only a half-
hearted attempt to produce a study of women’s history in Iran” or a
propagator of the American interference policy (Naghibi and O’Malley
2005, 225). If Nafisi’s memoir was grounded on the Western book club
tradition, that claim would not necessarily diminish the memoir as a
dissident narrative on Iranian women’s oppression in the Islamic Republic.
Both memoirs’ reliance on Western mediums to tackle women’s issues in
post-revolutionary Iran, such as the graphic comic book or the book club,
renders the study more interesting. The hybrid nature of the graphic
memoir and the intertextual references to various Western novels in RLT
offer a broad scope for both authors to alleviate the somber reality of
Iranian women.

Rationale
The choice of reading RLT or Persepolis stems from various reasons. In
addition to the fertile ground offered by the narrative and graphic genre of
memoir writing, and the potential of the memoir to reveal the hypocrisy of
the male-centered interpretation of Sharia Law, the memoirs serve to
counter critics of the recent flourishing of Iranian-feminist writings. The
comparison between a narrative memoir and a graphic one is new in its
way of displaying the same experience of exile, displacement, and
characters’ alienation, but through two different mediums, one narrative
and the other graphic. Furthermore, the choice of the graphic memoir was
nourished by the strong impact that the picture tends to leave on the
reader/viewer as compared to the narrative memoir.
The second reason behind the choice of these two feminists’ memoirs
is their power to give agency and identity to the female voice, freeing it
 Iranian Women in the Memoir 9

from religious and social dogmatism. Because religious and political

oppression can only yield a handicapped society where women would be
its first victims, working on these two memoirs will unveil the hypocrisy
of the hegemonic male-centered interpretation of Sharia Law and how this
victimizes society and weakens its dynamism.
For example, the choice of the memoir aims to subvert what Farzaneh
Milani asserts in Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian
Women Writers, that the memoir is “a form of metaphysical unveiling as
indecorous as physical unveiling” (6). This assumption will only empower
patriarchal discourse by weakening the potency of feminists’ memoirs.
Contrary to this claim, RLT and Persepolis unveil the voice of women
doomed to hide behind society’s fervent obsessions and defy Iranian
culture.
Furthermore, the worldwide attention garnered by these memoirs is
another factor in the selection of these titles. RLT and Persepolis
accumulated heated debates among critics such as Hillary Chute, Naghibi,
and O’Malley and Whitlock concerning the possibility of exploring the
differences between both oeuvres. However, as revealed by the literature
review, no study has made a comparative investigation between two
generically distinct memoirs, that deal thematically with the reality facing
Iranian women in post-revolutionary Iran—an omission this book seeks to
address by exploring the generic and thematic differences and similarities
between a narrative and a graphic memoir.
Through its four chapters, this book studies the potential of narrative
and graphic memoirs to invent new territories for Iranian women writers to
map a different model of womanhood. The comparative study between
RLT and Persepolis points to the various mechanisms both memoirs rely
upon to challenge the existing curtailment of women in post-revolutionary
Iran.
The first chapter deals with delineating the difference between memoir
and autobiography. The role of memoir as a flourishing genre among
exiled Iranian women writers has reinvented and reworked the traditional
nature of autobiography that privileged a universal Western subjectivity,
usually male. Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith have argued that in
“traditional Western autobiography, the subject of autobiography the ‘I’
becomes ‘Man,’ putatively a marker of the universal human subject whose
essence remains outside the vagaries of history” (1992, xvii). In the case of
Persepolis and RLT, both female writers transgress the boundaries of the
male-centered “I.” Instead, they relocate the female voice as the only
recognizable source of cultural, historical, and political knowledge.
10 Introduction

The first chapter of the book also sheds light on the reasons for my
choice of the term “memoir” instead of “autobiography.” Contrary to the
tendency in autobiographical writing to privilege “the self [or] individual
as autonomous sovereign self” entrenched within the socio-political
dimension, “memoir,” as a term, tends, in the new postmodern/post-
colonial context, to examine socio-political contexts (Buss 2002, 32). In
Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Smith
and Watson argue, “Many post-modern and post-colonial theorists contend
that the term autobiography is inadequate to describe the extensive
historical range and the diverse genres and practices of life writing not
only in the West but around the globe” (2010, 3). Hence, the memoir has
gained currency with the public and in critical discourse.
As Nancy Miller argues, “memoir is the record of an experience in
search of a community, of a collective framework in which to protect the
fragility of singularity in the Postmodern world” (1994, 14). Satrapi and
Nafisi’s memoirs reflect a plurality of selves through the creative inclusion
of other Iranian women in telling their stories. As a genre in vogue,
memoirs trespass on other genres of life narrative because what was
deemed personal in the style of Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own is
now public (Buss 2002, 64). For Nafisi, the motif of a room is not just a
place for herself, but a secure échappatoire for seven of her successful
female students. It is the space where the personal collides with public,
religious, and political dimensions. Therefore, Miller argues that the
memoir captures a dynamic postmodernism in its movement between the
“private and the public, subject and object” (1994, 12).
As noted, the chapter also seeks to delineate the characteristic features
and generic differences between narrative and graphic memoirs. A
groundbreaking difference, for instance, between the graphic and traditional
memoir lies in the degree of a reader’s involvement during the process of
meaning resolution and historical analysis. Critics of comics affirm that
the reader/viewer plays a greater role in interpreting the graphic form as
opposed to the narrative. While Charles Hatfield and Will Eisner stress the
independency of the image as an indicator of meaning and a controller of
the reader’s imagination (2005, 29), Scott McCloud and Thierry Groensteen
argue that comics require more interpretation than prose (1994, 28).
In fact, the reader plays an essential role in reading beyond the panels,
in the gutters where meaning awaits further exploration to seek “closure”
(McCloud 1994, 90). Following the same line of thought, scholars of
autobiography, such as Chute and Whitlock, respectively point to the
hybridity of the graphic memoir that obliges the reader to play an effective
role (2010, 27; 2006, 976). The reader is not only a meaning finder, but
 Iranian Women in the Memoir 11

also a witness to the traumatic events. The degree of the writer/narrator’s

dynamism is also one of the central differences (Groensteen 2007, 21).
While Marji inscribes performance, dynamism, and directness because of
the additional power of the comic strip, Nafisi remains restricted to the
telling and the description of the room, the photos, and the female
characters that form the backbone of the narrative.
Despite the generic gap between traditional and graphic memoirs, both
autobiographical forms allocate “a distinctive space for autobiographical
writing. As a meta-textual account, [memoir is] a reflection on the self in
process and in history” (Buss 2002, 133). Consequently, the final part of
the first chapter will concentrate on the issue of witnessing the past as the
main trajectory toward the recalling of trauma and the transgression of
such events.
The second chapter investigates and analyzes the mechanisms of
female transgressions in both memoirs. This seeks to explore the
importance of reinterpreting the past as an empowering act reflecting
Iranian women’s struggle against imposed silence and invisibility. The
retrieval of trauma differs according to the form of the memoir. The
analysis will also shed light on techniques deployed by both narrators to
recall traumatic incidents, such as the burning of the Rex Cinema or
bombing and executions. In RLT and Persepolis, the act of telling
inevitably implies, in Daniel Schacter’s view, a remembering or recording
of “how we experienced events, not replicas of the events themselves”
(1996, 9). The chapter dwells on the graphic and narrative methods
deployed by both narrators in the process of recalling the past, such as
flashbacks and panel backgrounds.
The transcendence of trauma is achievable due to the important role
literature plays in the act of expressing past events. Literature, therefore,
enables us to bear witness to events that cannot be completely known, and
opens us to experiences that might have otherwise been silenced.
According to Dominick LaCapra, “many commentators would agree with
Caruth in thinking that the literary (or even art in general) is a prime, if not
the privileged, place for giving voice to trauma” (2004, 190). The chapter
will also demonstrate how literature has a crucial role to play in the age of
historical traumas, as Felman puts it, to bring “literary justice” (2002, 8).
Transcending a traumatic event necessitates the study of space as both
the locus of oppression and liberation. While the lived or the public social
space remains subjected to power and ideology, the private space creates
modes of transgression. As opposed to the narrative text, the comic becomes
a third space where the narrator/illustrator visualizes the transcendence of
the female subject to dismantle mechanisms of oppression imposed on
12 Introduction

Iranian women. The space of the comic offers the avatar Marji, and the
other Iranian women characters, the opportunity to visualize a reinvention
of female identity. The narrative space, however, relies on imagination to
construct alternative spaces. Nevertheless, in both memoirs, the public
domain remains a site of possible transgression that paves the way toward
the reinvention of an alternative model of Iranian womanhood.
Amidst this limiting atmosphere, the narrators do not refrain from
inventing various methods of transgression, where irony proves highly
subversive. This aspect will concentrate on the gap between the “said” and
the “unsaid,” not merely as a semantic tool, because it also proves to be, as
Haraway explains, “a rhetorical strategy and a political method” that
deconstructs and decenters patriarchal discourses (Hutcheon 1994, 30).
Therefore, a close study of irony in RLT and Persepolis is enlightening in
the way it functions in parallel with humor as a counter-discourse that
revisits and transgresses existent discourses of power as imposed on
Iranian women in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution. Hutcheon
affirms that irony happens within discourse; therefore, it cannot be
separated from “the social, historical and cultural aspects of its contexts of
deployment and attribution” (1994, 17).
Nafisi and Satrapi resort to humorous irony to draw a bearable picture
of an unbearable experience, and both would not deny the importance of
“social interaction.” In RLT and Persepolis, Satrapi and Nafisi construct
two parallel worlds: the macro space of the Islamic Republic and its social
and ideological aftermath on the female narrators, and the micro space of
family and friends with whom the burden of change has become bearable.
In order to make sense of the changes brought to their public and private
spaces, Nafisi and Satrapi recreate their own models to make the newly
imposed order a livable space. Their newly created world is shaped by
their stories and the stories of other women who played a crucial role in
communicating textual and visual depictions of female oppression in Iran.
Autobiographical narrative is not a solitary story, but relational; it
proposes, according to Eakin, not only “the autobiography of the self but
the biography and the autobiography of the other” (1992, 58).
Accordingly, the narrator self in memoir, or other forms of life writing,
cannot make the story in isolation from the stories of others. In fact, all the
characters’ stories together with the narrator’s are what constitute the
narrative. Relationality in life writing is “narratively incorporated” through
what Bakhtin terms “heteroglossic dialogism,”1 that is, the multiplicity of

1. In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept points to the

importance of language registers and how language is dialogic because it implies
 Iranian Women in the Memoir 13

“tongues” or the polyvocality through which subjectivity is enunciated

(1986, 392).
Accordingly, the second chapter pinpoints the multiplicity of female
voices or storytellers as revelators of Iranian women’s experiences in
revolutionary Iran. It focuses on the dialogic aspect of both memoirs in the
way they construct female communities through storytelling and
relationality. In both memoirs, storytelling proves to be empowering and
liberating since it gave Marji in Persepolis, and the narrator and her
female students in RLT, the courage to manipulate the rules of the Islamic
government. The dialogic aspect of both memoirs is strengthened via
relational selves who create a bond of sisterhood, an “imagined
community” in Benedict Anderson’s terminology (1983, 48), that was
eager to break the shackles imposed on them by the state.
The first part of the third chapter examines the dual meaning of exile
as an alienating experience and a process of becoming. Iranian women
memoirists share a common exilic experience that I consider both
alienating and fulfilling. Despite its crippling aspect, exile creates
territories for artistic achievement. Exile becomes, as Said puts it in
“Reflections on Exile”, a “potent and enriching motif in modern culture”
(2000, 142). The exilic experience is indeed inspirational for the vast
majority of Iranian women writers, whose memoirs have recently attracted
significant critical attention.
In this chapter, I seek to configure a positive notion of exile that
transcends the crippling nature of displacement to embrace exile as a
source of “euphoric possibilities driven by a desire for liberation and
freedom” (Naficy 2004, 6). Therefore, the study illustrates, as opposed to
Edward Said in his essay “Reflections on Exile”, “the capacity of exile to
serve ‘notions of humanism’” (2000, 138). In the same essay, Said
contends that exilic writers should map “territories of experience” beyond
those mapped by the literature of exile (2000, 139). Accordingly, the exilic
writer should prioritize the concrete and tangible human experience of
exile. As Said states in “Reflections on Exile”, the literary work of the
exilic writer should explore the miseries of the refugee and the masses
whose “undocumented” suffering deepens their loss (2000, 139). Fictional
territories need substitution by reality to alleviate the plight of the exile.
The writing of memoirs by Iranian women imitates the quotidian
experiences of women who suffer internal exile and psychological
displacement under the totalitarian umbrella of a theological regime.

interaction between many individuals or social groups. Hence, it is inevitably

heteroglossic because it combines various discourses (292).
14 Introduction

Furthermore, Nafisi and Satrapi allocate space to depict their exilic

conditions in Austria and the US respectively. Both memoirs are therefore,
prominent exemplifications of human experience as “unproblematically
real and readable captured transparently in language expressing the truth
of experience” (Smith and Watson 1998, 9). Hence, exile is a potent and
enriching experience that allows Nafisi and Satrapi to tackle humane
issues related to the curtailment of women’s rights in post-revolutionary
Iran. Literature, then, becomes an empowering medium and not merely a
fictional territory.
Focus will also be directed to the concept of “liminality” or “in-
betweenness” as pioneered by Victor Turner (The Ritual) and later
revisited by Hamid Naficy (Exile Culture) and Homi Bhabha (The
Location), not as an end in itself, but rather as a process and becoming of
an identity that transcends a single context. The issue of the exile’s
identity is crucial in this chapter since I oppose Naficy’s view that the
subject “lives a period of in-betweenness that can be temporary or
permanent crowned by a final incorporation into the dominant host
country” (1993, xvi).
Naficy holds a utopian image of the exile’s condition, since
assimilation within an alien culture is never complete or finalized (1993,
xvi). Additionally, Naficy’s vision tries to dismantle the idea of multiple
positioning that an exilic subject is likely to occupy in a foreign culture.
However, liminality, as Hall (“Cultural Identity”) and Bhabha (The
Location) argue, necessitates the continuous crossing of two culturally
divergent landscapes, because this crossing is instrumental in constructing
the exile’s cultural identity. The sense of living in at least two cultures
remains the essence of life for people who have experienced forced or
voluntary displacement. Multiple positioning, therefore, is a permanent
part of exilic life because, as demonstrated in this part of the chapter,
identity is not a closed form, but resists fixity.
The question of home is also central in the writing of memoirs.
Therefore, chapter three also explores the different relations between the
exilic subject and home, firstly as a myth—an imaginary ground
constructed through memory—then as a physically tangible space. In RLT
and Persepolis, home is a place from which the authors physically depart,
yet mentally return to in their creative work. The notion of home wavers
between feelings of phobia and nostalgia. Fear is motivated by the
regime’s harassment and the restrictions imposed on the narrators and all
Iranian women in the Islamic Republic. Hence, exile is represented in my
work as both internal and external, and voluntary and involuntary. These
occurrences of exile explain my usage of Bhabha’s concept of the
 Iranian Women in the Memoir 15

“unhomely” in dealing with the issue of home (2004, 13). This contrast of
several “homes,” the real home as remembered, and the physical one now
inhabited, exhibits notions of memory by exiled writers.
The construction of an Iranian hybrid identity is a central part of the
third chapter as a result of the multiple processes of “deterritorialization”
performed by the exiled subject inside and outside her home country
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 36). Since the context of these memoirs
forcibly conveys the experience of a female subject characterized by a
continuous wavering back and forth to different territories, home and
exile, the private and the public, identity is thought of as “multiple and as
contextual, contested, and contingent” (Scott 1992, 36). The chapter
argues that identity, as subjectivity, is an unstable entity, at least partly
determined through cultural norms and discourses. Identity is, therefore,
the product of the subject’s performance both in exile and in her home
country.
The chapter draws on Judith Butler’s concept of performativity to
argue this, reinforcing the liminal status of the subject who oscillates
between imposed social norms and imported cultural traits (1993, 68).
However, performativity also pushes the female subject into hybridity and
the construction of a third space that allows Iranian women transgression
and liberation from restrictive theological rules. Hence, RLT and
Persepolis (1) and (2), as two examples of cultural production, offer a
third space in the form of the narrative and the graphic. Here, Nafisi and
Satrapi construct a hybrid form that represents, provides commentary on,
and challenges life in Iran. As George Steiner observes, the text has
become “a home and an instrument of exilic survival” (Milani 2003, 1).
The fourth chapter elucidates the conflicting relations between the
discourse of power propagated by the religious and political institutions of
the Islamic Republic and the construction of the female body and sexuality
in RLT and Persepolis. It also seeks to foreground mechanisms of
resistance deployed by Nafisi and to subvert the monolithic essentialist
identity imposed on Iranian women in post-revolutionary Iran by
attributing an ironic significance to veiling, not as a means of suffocation,
but a symbol of transgression. Thus, transcendence occurs through the act
of writing, which transforms itself into a form of social and personal
unveiling.
The discrepancy between pre-revolutionary promises and the Islamic
government’s betrayal of its exemplary model of life engendered a
demeaning gender discourse. Islamization resulted in the veiling of its
women’s bodies. Therefore, this chapter seeks to highlight the propagation
of Islamic discourse through the deployment of power, surveillance, and
16 Introduction

mechanisms to regulate women’s most private domains—their bodies and

their sexuality. RLT and Persepolis offer critical insight into the daily
reality of Iranian women whose lives are characterized by institutionalized
domination. Both memoirs share a common thirst for unveiling the socio-
political power and religious ideologies that pervade and regulate gender
identity. Therefore, I consider Michel Foucault’s connection between
gender and power highly relevant as it holds the body as the primary site
of “very strict powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions, or
obligations,” a transformation Foucault calls “docile bodies” (Foucault
1984, 182).
The representation of Iranian women’s bodies and sexuality in recent
memoirs further strengthens the link between regimes of power, such as
the politico-historical discourse of the Islamic Republic, and the female
body as a visible target of this discourse. Both the graphic and narrative
media represent how an Iranian woman’s identity is subjected to
repressive effects of regulatory force. This “regulatory ideal” in Foucault’s
terminology (Foucault 1984), serves to control the body it produces, and
as Judith Butler observes, “works in a performative fashion to constitute
the materiality of bodies” (1993, 2). The category of male or female is
produced via a repeated or reiterative act, what Butler calls
“performativity” (1993, 2). Both memoirs illustrate gender identity as
constructed through imposed sets of behavior dictated by the new
theological order.
This representation of Iranian women, however, is not devoid of
mechanisms for resistance to disciplinary practices or regulatory forces.
Chapter four will therefore demonstrate that Iranian women’s bodies are
not captive to the docility engendered by various mechanisms of control.
On the contrary, both memoirs include a wide array of strategies of
resistance that dismantle the pervasive discourses of manipulation that
impinge on women a monolithic model of womanhood based on the
performance of a fixed gender identity. Nafisi and Satrapi introduce tactics
that disturb the set routine of daily female behavior.
The chapter also foregrounds mechanisms of resistance deployed by
Nafisi and Satrapi to subvert the monolithic essentialist identity imposed
on Iranian women in post-revolutionary Iran by attributing a different
significance to veiling, not as a means of suffocation, but as a symbol of
transgression. As noted, transcendence occurs through the act of writing,
which turns itself into a form of social and personal unveiling. The
compulsory veiling of heads is opposed by an unveiling of minds via the
act of life narrative. The chapter exposes the multiple significance of the
veil as a religious and political concept. As Nafisi observes, it has turned
 Iranian Women in the Memoir 17

women who wear the veil into “political signs and symbols” (2004, 165).
The chapter also sheds light on the intricate relation between identity and
veiling. At this level, the comic resonates more than the narrative script for
its ability to unsettle stereotypes through a rebellious self already unveiled
through the act of putting the body on the page. Graphic representation
transgresses the written text.
In the final part of the fourth chapter, I demonstrate that both memoirs
portray a different model of womanhood. Satrapi and Nafisi transform the
image of victimhood and the entrapment of Iranian women to justify the
spread of what Milani calls “hostage narratives” (2013, 130). Despite the
avalanche of criticism of Nafisi’s RLT, the memoir offers an alternative
image of Iranian woman. I conclude by opposing the Orientalist or neo-
conservative school by which Nafisi has been accused by critics including
Hamid Dabashi (Al-Ahram Weekly) of demonstrating that Iranian scholars
should not replicate norms of restrictions on Iranian women memoirists.
Furthermore, I conclude that the literary field, whether narrative or
graphic, remains an open territory for the contestation of newer models of
womanhood.

Theoretical Framework
Autobiographical writing witnessed a vibrant resurgence of interest in the
lives of women. Although women have written autobiographies, diaries,
and memoirs for many centuries, critics such as Georges Gusdorf, Georg
Misch and William Spengemann2 limited their focus to male subjects.
Many critics now consider women’s autobiography a fruitful ground of
study because it fosters an interest in women’s life stories and excavates
hidden voices. The theoretical framework of this work makes use of
autobiographical theorists such as Nancy K. Miller, Paul Eakin, Susanna
Egan, Sidonie Smith, and Julia Watson3 who developed an interest in the
self as relational, and not merely the solitary narrator. Satrapi’s story is
intrinsically related to her family, including her executed uncle Anoosh,
her friend Niloufar, and the Iranian women she encounters at university.

2. George Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography”; Georg Misch, A

History of Autobiography in Antiquity; William C. Spengemann, The Forms of
Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre.
3. Nancy K. Miller, “Representing Others: Gender and the Subjects of
Autobiography”; John Paul Eakin, Relational Selves, Relational Lives: The Story
of a Story; Susanna Egan, Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary
Autobiography; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Introduction: “Situating
Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices.”
18 Introduction

The importance of Nafisi’s memoir, and its literary achievement, is

dependent on her students’ stories.
Accordingly, as noted, I draw on the concept of “relationality” as
deployed by Friedman since it has become increasingly important in the
critical discourse of life writing—it dismantles the previously held view of
the Western autonomous self (1998, 72). The study also highlights the
central aspect of experience as constitutive of the subject’s identity in
terms of social and historical processes, and experience as discursive. In
the light of an ongoing dichotomy between fiction or hoax and truth, I
make use of Philippe Lejeune’s theory of the “Autobiographical Pact”
(1973, 3). The aim behind establishing a tangible connection between the
author’s name, the narrator, and that of the protagonist, stems from the
importance of demonstrating the aim of the memoir, as a flourishing
genre, to offer its readers historically accurate experiences from territories
previously inaccessible.
The book draws upon Lejeune’s later development of his theory. The
study does affirm the veracity of ascribing the identity of the author, the
narrator, and the protagonist in RLT and Persepolis (1) and (2), and sheds
light on the discursive construction of the self. However, both memoirs
manifest this process of construction differently. Therefore, the study also
aims at demonstrating the construction of a multiplicity of selves in
Persepolis as opposed to RLT within the genre of the comic. Hence, a
definition of the genre will depend on such comic theorists as Scott
McCloud, Thierry Groensteen, Charles Hatfield, and Will Eisner.4 My
approach to Persepolis will consider the comic as a distinctive language, a
common approach in comic studies (Groensteen 2007, 19). A close
examination of the main components of the graphic space, such as gutters,
panels, boxes, page layout, border strips, comic styles, word balloons,
narrative repetition, and closure, is necessary for interpreting the
experiences of both the avatar Marji and the writer Satrapi. This method of
approaching the graphic memoir is advocated by what Groensteen calls
“pertinent contextual rapports” (The System of Comics), and by what
Eisner (Comics and Sequential Art) and McCloud (Understanding
Comics) refer to as creating a “grammar of comics” (2008, 19; 1994, 5).
The spatio-topical apparatus of the comic impinges on the reader a
dynamic participation in meaning creation. In fact, this study is deeply
concerned with the active role of the reader as an important component of

4. Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art; Thierry Groensteen,

The System of Comics; Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging
Literature; Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from
The Legendary Cartoonist.
 Iranian Women in the Memoir 19

the interpretive process in both graphic and narrative memoirs. The

reader’s interpretation is determined by the historical context of the writing
and the distribution of both memoirs. Here, Reader Reception Theory proves
to be a necessary theoretical tool through which the research draws on the
role of the reader as a participant in meaning creation. The analysis is
primarily directed via Hans Robert Jauss’s5 concept of “horizons of
expectations” and Hans-Georg Gadmer’s “historical situatedness” (Selden
1989, 95). The choice of both terms stems from the inclusion of the
reader’s experience and world-view within the act of interpretation.
Therefore, time and historical determinants are of crucial importance in
the interpretive process, especially the fact that the release of both
memoirs occurred during a boom in Iranian women’s life narratives that
share a critical stance toward the treatment of women in post-revolutionary
Iran. Additionally, the circulation of these memoirs takes place within a
historical time frame, characterized by a Western demonization of Iran and
Islam. Hence, the reader’s historical knowledge is significant in filling in
the gaps to question and analyze the writer’s purported intentions.
If the narrative memoir demands the active participation of the reader,
the graphic memoir as comic, categorizes the reader as the author’s active
“accomplice” in constructing the meaning of the comic text (Eisner 2008,
40). The reader of the comic is an interpreter of the visual and textual
space. In both memoirs, though, the cultural and historical contexts partly
determine the interpretation, which is ultimately constructed by the reader.
Because the aim of the book is to excavate the voices of previously
silenced Iranian women through the study of the memoir and to reveal
social realities in post-revolutionary Iran, a New-Historicist approach
proves to be a necessary theoretical platform.
In his comment on “the textuality of history and the historicity of
texts,” Louise Montrose reveals the interplay between the literary text and
history (1989, 20). In other words, a New-Historicist approach to the
literary text cannot examine the embodiment of the narrative and graphic
dimension except within the historical contours of the era. The New-
Historicist approach examines the reconstruction of the past in both
memoirs as revelators of political and social realities and as fertile grounds
for the circulation of various ideological discourses. The most attractive
aspect of the New-Historicist practice is its commitment to what Clifford
Geertz calls “thick description in which an event or an anecdote is ‘re-
read’ in such a way as to reveal through the analysis of tiny particulars the

5. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception.

Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
"Now, if I hadn't showed up here just now, what did you intend to do?"
"I intended to stop the machine, of course," Trelawney said. His
expression hadn't changed while Dowland was talking. "Preferably
without involving the Solar Police Authority in our activities. But since
you've now involved yourself, I urgently suggest that we go to the
laboratory immediately and take care of the matter together."

Dowland nodded. "That's what I had in mind, Trelawney. Technically

you're under arrest, of course, and you'll do whatever has to be done
in there at gun point. Are we likely to run into any difficulties in the
operation?"
"We very probably will," Trelawney said thoughtfully, "and it's just as
probable that we won't know what they are before we encounter
them."
Dowland stood up. "All right," he said, "let's go. We'll stop off at the
house on the way. I want to be sure that Miss Trelawney isn't in a
position to do something thoughtless."
He emptied the magazine of Trelawney's rifle before giving it to him.
They started down to the house, Trelawney in the lead, the IPA gun in
Dowland's hand.
The house door was closed. Trelawney glanced back questioningly.
Dowland said in a low voice, "It isn't locked. Open it, go on in, and
stop two steps inside the hallway. I'll be behind you. They're both in
the living room."
He followed Trelawney in, reaching back to draw the door shut again.
There was a whisper of sound. Dowland half turned, incredulously felt
something hard jab painfully against his backbone. He stood still.
"Drop your gun, Dowland," Jill Trelawney said behind him. Her voice
was as clear and unslurred as if she had been awake for hours.
Dowland cursed himself silently. She must have come around the
corner of the house the instant they went in.
"My gun's pointing at your uncle's back," he said. "Don't do anything
that might make me nervous, Miss Trelawney."
"Don't try to bluff Jill, friend," Paul Trelawney advised him without
turning his head. There was dry amusement in the man's voice. "No
one's ever been able to do it. And she's quite capable of concluding
that trading an uncle for an SPA spy would still leave Terra ahead at
this stage. But that shouldn't be necessary. Jill?"
"Yes, Paul?"
"Give our policeman a moment to collect his wits. This does put him
in a very embarrassing position, after all. And I can use his help in the
lab."
"I'll give you exactly three seconds, Dowland," Jill said. "And you'd
better believe that is not a bluff. One...."
Dowland dropped his gun.

The two Trelawneys held a brief, whispered conversation in the living

room. Dowland, across the room from them, and under cover of two
guns now, couldn't catch much of it. Jill was in one of the radiation
suits he'd brought in from the storeroom. Miguel was dead. He had
still been unconscious when she woke up, and had stopped breathing
minutes afterwards. Medic had done what it could; in this case it
simply hadn't been enough. Jill, however, had found another use for
it. Dowland thought the possibility mightn't have occurred to anyone
else in similar circumstances; but he still should have thought of it
when he left the house. As she began to struggle up from sleep, she
remembered what Dowland had told her about medic, and somehow
she had managed to inject a full ampule of it into her arm. It had
brought her completely awake within minutes.
The murmured talk ended. The girl looked rather white and frightened
now. Paul Trelawney's face was expressionless as he came over to
Dowland. Jill shoved the gun she had put on Dowland into her belt,
picked up Paul's hunting rifle, held it in her hands, and stood waiting.
"Here's the procedure, Dowland," Trelawney said. "Jill will go over to
the lab with us, but stay outside on guard. She'll watch...."
"Did you tell her," Dowland interrupted, "to keep an eye out for
something that stands twice as high as this house?"
Trelawney looked at him a moment. "So you ran into it," he said. "I
was wondering. It's very curious that ... well, one thing at a time. I
cautioned her about it, as it happens. Now come over to the table."
Dowland remained standing beside the table, while across from him
Trelawney rapidly sketched out two diagrams on a piece of paper.
The IPA gun lay on the table near Trelawney's right hand. There
might have been an outside chance of reaching it if one could have
discounted Jill's watchfulness. Which, Dowland decided, one couldn't.
And he'd seen her reload the rifle she was holding. He stayed where
he was.
Trelawney shoved the paper across to him.
"Both diagrams represent our machine," he said, "and they should
give you a general idea of what you'll see. This wheel here is at the
far side of the console when we come in the door. The wheel is the
flow regulator—the thing you have to keep in mind. There are scale
markings on it. The major markings have the numbers one to five.
Yesterday morning the regulator was set at five—full flow. Spin the
wheel back to one, and the Ym-400 that's been producing the flow
goes inert. Is that clear?"
Dowland nodded. "Clear enough."
"After that," Trelawney remarked, "we may be able to take things a
little easier."
"What's the quantity you're using in there?"
"No real reason I should tell you that, is there? But I will. The sixty-
eight kilograms the Overgovernment's been grieving about are under
the machine platform. We're using all of it." He grinned briefly,
perhaps at Dowland's expression. "The type of job we had in mind
required quantities in that class. Now, about yourself. We're not
murderers. Jill tells me you can't be bribed—all right. What will
happen, when this thing's settled, is that you'll have an attack of
amnesia. Several months of your life will be permanently lost from
your memory, including, of course, everything connected with this
operation. Otherwise you won't be harmed. Understand?"
"I've heard of such things," Dowland said drily.
It wouldn't, however, be done that way. It was the kind of thing told a
man already as good as dead, to keep him from making a desperate
attempt to save himself. The Freeholders really wouldn't have much
choice. Something had loused up their plans here, and if Dowland
either disappeared or was found suffering from a sudden bout of
amnesia, the IPA would turn its full attention on Terra at once. If he
died, his death could be plausibly arranged to look like an accident or
a killing for personal motives. These people were quite capable of
sacrificing one of their group to back such a story up. And it would
pass. Terra was under no more immediate suspicion than any other
world. Dowland had been on a routine assignment.

There were a few brief preparations. Paul Trelawney checked the

batteries in the radiation suits he and Jill were wearing, then
exchanged his set for that of the spare suit. Dowland left his own AR
field off for the moment. It was at least as adequate as the one
developed by the Trelawneys' suits, and in some respects a much
more practical device. But the suit batteries had an effective life of
twenty-four hours, expending them automatically while the suits were
worn. His field would maintain itself for a minimum of an hour and a
half, a maximum of two hours. In this situation, Dowland wasn't sure
how long he would have to depend on the field. A few more minutes
of assured protection might make a difference.
He saw Trelawney studying the mountaineering rig on the floor; then
he picked up the harness and brought it over to him.
"Here, put it on," he said.
"What for?" Dowland asked, surprised.
Trelawney grinned. "We may have a use for it. You'll find out in a
minute or two."
They left the house by a back entrance. Clouds were banked low on
the eastern horizon now; the first sunlight gleamed pale gold beneath
them. In the west the sky was brown with swirling dust. Jill stopped
twenty yards from the laboratory building and stood on the slope, rifle
in hand, watching the men go on. At the door, Dowland switched on
his AR field. Trelawney tossed the disk-shaped key over to him.
"Know how to use it?"
Dowland nodded.
"All right. After you've snapped it in and it releases again, throw it
back to me. It may be the last one around, and we're not taking it into
the laboratory this time. When the door starts moving down, step
back to the right of it. We'll see what the lab is like before we go in."
Trelawney indicated a thimble-sized instrument on his suit. "This'll tell
whether the place is hot at the moment, and approximately how hot."
He waved the IPA gun in Dowland's direction. "All right, go ahead."
Dowland fitted the key into the central depression in the door,
pressed down, felt the key snap into position with a sharp twisting
motion of its own, released his pressure on it. An instant later, the key
popped back out into his hand. He tossed it back to Trelawney, who
caught it left-handed and threw it over his head in Jill's direction. The
disk thudded heavily into the grass ten feet from her. The girl walked
over, picked it up, and slid it into one of her suit pockets.
The slab of metasteel which made up the laboratory door began
moving vertically downward. The motion stopped when the door's top
rim was still several inches above the level of the sill.
A low droning came from the little instrument on Trelawney's suit. It
rose and fell irregularly like the buzz of a circling wasp. Mingled with it
was something that might have been the hiss of escaping steam.
That was Dowland's detector confirming. The lab reeked with
radiation.
He glanced over at Trelawney.
"Hot enough," the Freeholder said. "We'll go inside. But stay near the
door for a moment. There's something else I want to find out
about...."

Inside, the laboratory was unpartitioned and largely empty, a great

shell of a building. Only the section to the left of the entrance
appeared to have been used. That section was lighted. The light
arose evenly from the surfaces of the raised machine platform
halfway over to the opposite wall. The platform was square, perhaps
twenty feet along its sides. Dowland recognized the apparatus on it
from Trelawney's diagrams. The central piece was an egg-shaped
casing which appeared to be metasteel. Near its blunt end, partly
concealed, stood the long, narrow instrument console. Behind the
other end of the casing, an extension ramp jutted out above the
platform. At the end of the ramp was a six-foot disk that might have
been quartz, rimless, brightly iridescent. It was tilted to the left, facing
the bank of instruments.
"A rather expensive bit of equipment over there, Dowland," Trelawney
said. "My brother developed the concept, very nearly in complete
detail, almost twenty-five years ago. But a great deal of time and
thought and work came then before the concept turned into the
operating reality on that platform."
He nodded to the left. "That's Miguel's coat on the floor. I wasn't sure
it would still be here. The atomic key you were searching for so
industriously last night is in one of its pockets. Miguel was standing
just there, with the coat folded over his arm, when I saw him last—
perhaps two or three seconds before I was surprised to discover I
was no longer looking at the instrument controls in our laboratory."
"Where were you?" Dowland asked. "Six hundred thousand years in
the past?"
"The instruments showed a fix on that point in time," Trelawney said.
"But this was, you understand, a preliminary operation. We intended
to make a number of observations. We had not planned a personal
transfer for several more weeks. But in case the test turned out to be
successful beyond our expectations, I was equipped to make the
transfer. That bit of optimistic foresight is why I'm still alive."
What was the man waiting for? Dowland asked, "What actually
happened?"
"A good question, I'd like to know the whole answer myself. What
happened in part was that I suddenly found myself in the air, falling
toward a river. It was night and cloudy, but there was light enough to
show it was a thoroughly inhospitable river.... And now I believe"—his
voice slowed thoughtfully—"I believe I understand why my brother
was found outside the closed door of this building. Over there,
Dowland. What does that look like to you?"
Near the far left of the building, beyond the immediate range of the
light that streamed from the machine stand, a big packing crate
appeared to have been violently—and rather oddly—torn apart. The
larger section of the crate lay near the wall, the smaller one
approximately twenty feet closer to the machine platform. Assorted
items with which it had been packed had spilled out from either
section. But the floor between the two points of wreckage was bare
and unlittered. Except for that, one might have thought the crate had
exploded.

"It wasn't an explosion," Trelawney agreed when Dowland said as

much. He was silent a moment, went on, "In this immediate area, two
space-time frames have become very nearly superimposed. There is
a constant play of stresses now as the two frames attempt to adjust
their dissimilarities. Surrounding our machine we have a spherical
concentration of those stresses, and there are moments when space
here is literally wrenched apart. If one were caught at such an instant
—ah!"
To Dowland it seemed that a crack of bright color had showed briefly
in the floor of the building, between the door and the machine
platform. It flickered, vanished, reappeared at another angle before
his ears had fully registered the fact that it was accompanied by a
curiously chopped-off roar of sound. Like a play of lightning. But this
was....
The air opened out before him, raggedly framing a bright-lit three-
dimensional picture. He was staring down across a foaming river to
the rim of a towering green and yellow forest. The crash of the river
filled the building. Something bulky and black at the far left ... but the
scene was gone—
The interior of the laboratory building lay quiet and unchanged before
them again. Dowland said hoarsely, "How did you know what was
going to happen?"
"I was in a position to spend several hours observing it," Trelawney
said, "from the other side. You see now, I think, that we can put your
mountaineer's kit to some very practical use here."
Dowland glanced across the building. "The walls...."
"Metasteel," Trelawney said, "and thank God for that. The building's
sound; the stresses haven't affected it. We'll have some anchor
points. A clamp piton against that wall, six feet above the console
walk and in line with it, another one against the doorframe here, and
we can rope across."
Dowland saw it, unsnapped his harness, fed the end of the
magnerope through the eye of a piton, and twisted it tight. "Are we
going together?" he asked.
Trelawney shook his head. "You're going, Dowland. Sorry about that,
but this is no time for sporting gestures. The rope doesn't eliminate
the danger. But if you find your feet suddenly dangling over the air of
a very old time, you'll still stay here—I hope. If you don't make it
across, I'll follow. We get two chances to shut Ymir down instead of
one. All right?"
"Since you have the gun, yes," Dowland said. "If I had it, it would be
the other way around."
"Of course," Trelawney agreed. He watched in silence then as
Dowland rammed the threaded piton down the muzzle of the gun,
locked it in position, took aim across the machine platform, and fired.
The piton clamp made a slapping sound against the far wall, froze
against it. Dowland gave the loose end of the rope a few tugs, said,
"Solid," cut the rope, and handed the end to Trelawney.
The Freeholder reached up to set a second piton against the
doorframe, fed a loop of the rope through it, and twisted it tight.
Dowland slipped a set of grappling gloves out of the harness, pulled
one over his right hand, tossed the other to Trelawney. "In case," he
said, "you have to follow. Magnerope gets to be wearing on bare
hands."
Trelawney looked briefly surprised, then grinned. "Thanks," he said.
"Can you do it with one glove?"
"No strain at that distance."
"Too bad you're not a Terran, Dowland. We could have used you."
"I'm satisfied," Dowland said. "Any point in waiting now for another
run of those cracks in space before making the trip?"
Trelawney shook his head. "None at all, I'm afraid. From what I saw,
there's no more regularity in those stress patterns than there is in a
riptide. You see how the rope is jerking right now—you'll get pulled
around pretty savagely, I'd say, even if you don't run into open splits
on the way across."

Dowland was fifteen feet from the door, half running with both hands
on the rope, when something plucked at him. He strained awkwardly
sideways, feet almost lifting from the floor. Abruptly he was released,
went stumbling forward a few steps before the next invisible current
tugged at him, pulling him downward now. It was a very much
stronger pull, and for endless seconds it continued to build up. His
shoulders seemed ready to snap before he suddenly came free
again.
The rest of the way to the platform remained almost undisturbed, but
Dowland was trembling with tensions before he reached it; he could
feel the drag of the AR field on his breathing. The steps to the
platform were a dozen feet to his right—too far from the rope.
Dowland put his weight on the rope, swung forward and up, let the
rope go and came down on the narrow walk between instrument
board and machine section. The panels shone with their own light; at
the far end he saw the flow-control wheel Trelawney had indicated, a
red pointer opposite the numeral "5." Dowland took two steps toward
it, grasped the wheel, and spun it down.
The pointer stopped at "1." He heard it click into position there.
Instantly, something slammed him sideways against the console, sent
him staggering along it, and over the low railing at the end of the
platform. The floor seemed to be shuddering as he struck it, and then
to tilt slowly. Dowland rolled over, came up on hands and knees,
facing back toward the platform. Daylight blazed again in the building
behind him, and the roar of a river that rolled through another time
filled his ears. He got to his feet, plunged back toward the whipping
rope above the platform. The light and the roaring cut off as he
grasped the rope, flashed back into the building, cut off again.
Somewhere somebody had screamed....
Dowland swung about on the rope, went handing himself along it,
back toward the door. His feet flopped about over the floor, unable to
get a stand there for more than an instant. It was a struggle now to
get enough air through the antiradiation field into his lungs. He saw
dust whip past the open door, momentarily obscuring it. The building
bucked with earthquake fury. And where was Trelawney?
He saw the red, wet thing then, lying by the wall just inside the door;
and sickness seized him because Trelawney's body was stretched
out too far to make it seem possible it had ever been that of a man.
Dust blasted in through the door as he reached it, and subsided,
leaving a choking residue trapped within the radiation screen. If he
could only cut off the field....
His gun lay too close to the sodden mess along the wall. Dowland
picked it up, was bending to snatch the climbing harness from the
floor when light flared behind him again. Automatically, he looked
back.
Once more the interior of the building seemed to have split apart.
Wider now. He saw the rushing white current below. To the right,
above the forest on the bank, the sun was a swollen red ball glaring
through layers of mist. And to the left, moving slowly over the river in
the blaze of long-dead daylight, was something both unmistakable
and not to be believed. But, staring at it in the instant before the
scene shivered and vanished again, Dowland suddenly thought he
knew what had happened here.
What he had seen was a spaceship.
He turned, went stumbling hurriedly out the door into the whistling
wind, saw Jill Trelawney standing there, white-faced, eyes huge,
hands to her mouth.
He caught her shoulder. "Come on! We've got to get away from here."
She gasped, "It—tore him apart!"
"We can't help him...." Dust clouds were spinning over the back of the
mesa, concealing the upper slopes. Dowland glanced to the west,
winced at the towering mountain of darkness sweeping toward them
through the sky. He plunged up the slope, hauling her along behind
him. Jill cried out incoherently once, in a choking voice, but he didn't
stop to hear what she was trying to say. He shoved her into the
house, slammed the door shut behind them, hurried her on down the
hall and into the living room. As they came in, he switched off his AR
field and felt air fill his lungs easily again. It was like surfacing out of
deep water. The detector still hissed its thin warning, but it was
almost inaudible. They would have to risk radiation now.
"Out of your suit, quick! Whatever's happening in the lab has whistled
up a dust storm here. When it hits, that radiation field will strangle you
in a minute outdoors."
She stared at him dumbly.
"Get out of your suit!" Dowland shouted, his nerves snapping. "We're
going down the eastern wall. It's our only chance. But we can't get
down alive if we can't breathe...." Then, as she began unbuckling the
suit hurriedly with shaking fingers, he turned to the pile of camping
equipment beside the fireplace and pawed through it.
He found the communicator and was snapping it to the
mountaineering harness when the front door slammed. He wheeled
about, startled. Jill's radiation suit lay on the floor near the entry hall.
She was gone.
He was tearing the door open three seconds later, shouted, and saw
her through the dust forty feet away, running up toward the forest.
He mightn't have caught her if she hadn't stumbled and gone
headlong. Dowland was on top of her before she could get up. She
fought him in savage silence like an animal, tearing and biting, her
eyes bloodshot slits. There was a mechanical fury about it that
appalled him. But at last he got his right arm free, and brought his fist
up solidly to the side of her jaw. Jill's head flew back, and her eyes
closed.

He came padding up to the eastern side of the mesa with her minutes
later. Here, beyond the ranch area, the ground was bare rock, with
occasional clusters of stunted bushes. The dust had become blinding,
though the main storm was still miles away. There was no time to
stop off at the house to look for the quiz-gun, though it would have
been better to try the descent with a dazed and half-paralyzed young
woman than with the twisting lunatic Jill might turn into again when
she recovered from his punch. At least, he'd have her tied up.
Underfoot were grinding and grumbling noises now, the ground
shaking constantly. At moments he had the feeling of plodding
through something yielding, like quicksand. Only the feeling, he told
himself; the rock was solid enough. But....
Abruptly, he was at the mesa's edge. Dowland slid the girl to the
ground, straightened up, panting, to dab at his smarting eyes. The
mesa behind them had almost vanished in swirling dust.
And through the dust Dowland saw something coming over the open
ground he had just traversed.
He stared at it, mouth open, stunned with a sense of unfairness. The
gigantic shape was still only partly visible, but it was obvious that it
was following them. It approached swiftly over the shaking ground.
Dowland took out his gun, with the oddly calm conviction that it would
be entirely useless against their pursuer. But he brought it up slowly
and leveled it, squinting with streaming eyes through the dust.
And then it happened. The pursuer appeared to falter. It moved again
in some manner; something thundered into the ground beside
Dowland. Then, writhing and twisting—slowly at first, then faster—the
dust-veiled shape seemed to be sinking downward through the rock
surface of the mesa.
In another instant, it was gone.
Seconds passed before Dowland gradually lowered the gun again.
Dazedly, he grew aware of something else that was different now. A
miniature human voice appeared to be jabbering irritably at him from
some point not far away. His eyes dropped to the little communicator
attached to his harness.
The voice came from there.
Terra's grid-power had returned to Lion Mesa.

A week later, Lieutenant Frank Dowland was shown into the office of
the chief of the Solar Police Authority. The chief introduced him to the
two other men there, who were left unidentified, and told him to be
seated.
"Lieutenant," he said, "these gentlemen have a few questions to ask
you. You can speak as openly to them as you would to me."
Dowland nodded. He had recognized one of the gentlemen
immediately—Howard Camhorn, the Coordinator of Research.
Reputedly one of the sharpest minds in the Overgovernment's top
echelons. The other one was unfamiliar. He was a few years younger
than Camhorn, around six inches shorter, chunky, with black hair,
brown eyes, an expression of owlish reflectiveness. Probably,
Dowland thought, wearing contact lenses. "Yes, sir," he said to the
chief, and looked back at the visitors.
"We've seen your report on your recent visit to Terra, Lieutenant
Dowland," Camhorn began pleasantly. "An excellent report,
incidentally—factual, detailed. What we should like to hear now are
the things that you, quite properly, omitted from it. That is, your
personal impressions and conclusions."
"For example," the other man took up, as Dowland hesitated, "Miss
Trelawney has informed us her uncles were attempting to employ the
Ym-400 they had acquired to carry out a time-shift to an earlier Earth
period—to the period known as the Pleistocene, to be somewhat
more exact. From what you saw, would you say they had succeeded
in doing it?"
"I don't know, sir," Dowland said. "I've been shown pictures
representing that period during the past few days. The scene I
described in the report probably might have existed at that time." He
smiled briefly. "However, I have the impression that the very large
flying creature I reported encountering that night is regarded as being
... well, er ... ah...."
"A product of excited nerves?" the short man said, nodding. "Under
such extraordinary circumstances, that would be quite possible, you
know."
"Yes, sir, I know."
The short man smiled. "But you don't think it was that?"
"No, sir," Dowland said. "I think that I have described exactly what I
did hear and see."
"And you feel the Trelawneys established contact with some previous
Earth period—not necessarily the Pleistocene?"
"Yes, I do."
"And you report having seen a spaceship in that prehistorical
period...."
Dowland shook his head. "No, sir. At the moment I was observing it, I
thought it was that. What I reported was having seen something that
looked like a spaceship."
"What do you think it was?"
"A timeship—if there is such a word."
"There is such a word," Camhorn interrupted lazily. "I'm curious to
hear, lieutenant, what brought you to that conclusion."
"It's a guess, sir. But the thing has to fit together somehow. A timeship
would make it fit."
"In what way?"
"I've been informed," Dowland said, "that the Overgovernment's
scientists have been unable to make a practical use of YM because
something has invariably gone wrong when they did try to use it. I
also heard that there was no way of knowing in advance what would
happen to make an experiment fail. But something always would
happen, and frequently a number of people would get killed."
Camhorn nodded. "That is quite true."
"Well, then," Dowland said, "I think there is a race of beings who
aren't quite in our time and space. They have YM and use it, and
don't want anyone else to use it. They can tell when it's activated
here, and use their own YM to interfere with it. Then another
experiment suddenly turns into a failure.

"But they don't know yet who's using it. When the Trelawneys turned
on their machine, these beings spotted the YM stress pattern back
there in time. They went to that point and reinforced the time-blending
effect with their own YM. The Trelawneys hadn't intended a complete
contact with that first test. The aliens almost succeeded in blending
the two periods completely in the area near the laboratory."
"For what purpose?" Camhorn asked.
"I think they're very anxious to get us located."
"With unfriendly intentions?"
"The ones we ran into didn't behave in a friendly manner. May I ask a
question, sir?"
"Of course," Camhorn said.
"When the Trelawneys' machine was examined, was the supply of
YM adequately shielded?"
"Quite adequately," Camhorn said.
"But when I opened the door, the laboratory was hot. And Miguel
Trelawney died of radiation burns...."
Camhorn nodded. "Those are facts that give your theory some
substance, lieutenant. No question about it. And there is the
additional fact that after you shut off the YM flow in the laboratory,
nearly ten minutes passed before the apparent contact between two
time periods was broken. Your report indicates that the phenomena
you described actually became more pronounced immediately after
the shutoff."
"Yes, sir."
"As if the aliens might have been making every effort to retain contact
with our time?"
"Yes, sir," Dowland said. "That was my impression."
"It's quite plausible. Now, the indications are that Paul Trelawney
actually spent considerable time—perhaps twelve to fourteen hours,
at any rate—in that other period. He gave no hint of what he
experienced during those hours?"
"No, sir, except to say that it was night when he appeared there. He
may have told Miss Trelawney more."
"Apparently, he didn't," Camhorn said. "Before you and he went into
the laboratory, he warned her to watch for the approach of a creature
which answers the description of the gigantic things you encountered
twice. But that was all. Now, here again you've given us your
objective observations. What can you add to them—on a perhaps
more speculative basis?"
"Well, sir," Dowland said, "my opinions on that are, as a matter of
fact, highly speculative. But I think that Paul Trelawney was captured
by the aliens as soon as he appeared in the other time period, and
was able to escape from them a number of hours later. Two of the
aliens who were attempting to recapture him eventually followed him
out on Lion Mesa through another opening the YM stresses had
produced between the time periods, not too far away from the first."
Camhorn's stout companion said thoughtfully, "You believe the
birdlike creature you saw arrived by the same route?"
"Yes, sir," Dowland said, turning to him. "I think that was simply an
accident. It may have been some kind of wild animal that blundered
into the contact area and found itself here without knowing what had
occurred."
"And you feel," the other man went on, "that you yourself were
passing near that contact point in the night at the time you seemed to
be smelling a swamp?"
Dowland nodded. "Yes, sir, I do. Those smells might have been an
illusion, but they seemed to be very distinct. And, of course, there are
no swamps on the mesa itself."

Camhorn said, "We'll assume it was no illusion. It seems to fit into the
general picture. But, lieutenant, on what are you basing your opinion
that Paul Trelawney was a captive of these beings for some time?"
"There were several things, sir," Dowland said. "One of them is that
when Miss Trelawney regained consciousness in the hospital she
didn't remember having made an attempt to get away from me."
Camhorn nodded. "That was reported."
"She made the attempt," Dowland went on, "immediately after she
had taken off her radiation suit to avoid being choked in the dust
storm on the way down from the mesa. That is one point."
"Go ahead," Camhorn said.
"Another is that when I discovered Paul Trelawney early in the
morning, he was wearing his radiation suit. Judging by his
appearance, he had been in it for hours—and a radiation suit, of
course, is a very inconvenient thing to be in when you're hiking
around in rough country."
"He might," the stout man suggested, "have been afraid of running
into a radioactive area."
Dowland shook his head. "No, sir. He had an instrument which would
have warned him if he was approaching one. It would have made
much more sense to carry the suit, and slip into it again if it became
necessary. I didn't give the matter much thought at the time. But then
the third thing happened. I did not put that in the report because it
was a completely subjective impression. I couldn't prove now that it
actually occurred."
Camhorn leaned forward. "Go ahead."
"It was just before the time periods separated and the creature that
was approaching Miss Trelawney and myself seemed to drop through
the top of the mesa—I suppose it fell back into the other period. I've
described it. It was like a fifty-foot gray slug moving along on its tail ...
and there were those two rows of something like short arms. It wasn't
at all an attractive creature. I was frightened to death. But I was
holding a gun—the same gun with which I had stopped another of
those things when it chased me during the night. And the trouble was
that this time I wasn't going to shoot."
"You weren't going to shoot?" Camhorn repeated.
"No, sir. I had every reason to try to blow it to pieces as soon as I saw
it. The other one didn't follow up its attack on me, so it probably was
pretty badly injured. But while I knew that, I was also simply
convinced that it would be useless to pull the trigger. That's as well as
I can explain what happened....
"I think these aliens can control the minds of other beings, but can't
control them through the interference set up by something like our AR
fields. Paul Trelawney appeared in the other time period almost in
their laps. He had a rifle strapped over his back, but presumably they
caught him before he had a chance to use it. They would have
examined him and the equipment he was carrying, and when they
took off his radiation suit, they would have discovered he belonged to
a race which they could control mentally. After that, there would have
been no reason for them to guard him too closely. He was helpless.
"I think Trelawney realized this, and used a moment when his actions
were not being controlled to slip back into the suit. Then he was free
to act again. When they discovered he had escaped, some of them
were detailed to search for him, and two of those pursuers came out
here in our time on the mesa.
"As for Miss Trelawney—well, obviously she wasn't trying to get away
from me. Apparently, she wasn't even aware of what she was doing.
She was simply obeying physically the orders her mind began to
receive as soon as she stepped out of the radiation suit. They would
have been to come to the thing, wherever it was at the moment—
somewhere up to the north of the ranch area, judging from the
direction in which she headed."
There was silence for some seconds. Then Camhorn's companion
observed, "There's one thing that doesn't quite fit in with your theory,
lieutenant."
"What's that, sir?"
"Your report states that you switched off your AR field at the same
time you advised Miss Trelawney to get out of her suit. You should
have been equally subject to the alien's mental instructions."
"Well," Dowland said, "I can attempt to explain that, sir, though again
there is no way to prove what I think. But it might be that these
creatures can control, only one mind at a time. The alien may not
have realized that I had ... well ... knocked Miss Trelawney
unconscious and that she was unable to obey its orders, until it came
to the spot and saw us. My assumption is that it wasn't till that
moment that it switched its mental attack to me."

The stout man—his name was Laillard White, and he was one of
Research's ace trouble-shooters in areas more or less loosely related
to psychology—appeared morosely reflective as he and Camhorn left
Solar Police Authority Headquarters, and turned toward the adjoining
Overgovernment Bureau.