The Evental Dialectics of the Subject-Artist and Art in Julian Barnes’ “The Noise of Time” and Bozorge Alavai’s “Cheshmhayash (Her Eyes)”

The present research seeks to demonstrate that Julian Barnes in his “The Noise of Time” (2016) and Bozorge Alavi in “Her Eyes” (1998) have devoted meticulous attention to the emancipatory function of art as a truth generator. Both novelists, obsessed with the socio-political concerns in their writings, represent the confrontation between the subject and subjugation. The key claim is that these novelists deem militant art as one of the pivotal modes of disagreement with power wherein the subject-artist recognises the evental significance of art via a rupture and in his dialectics of subjectivisation manifests fidelity to this event through and through. Dimitri Shostakovich, the protagonist of “The Noise of Time”, preserves his personal and artistic integrity in struggle with Stalinist power despite the fact that some label him as a traitor. The master painter Makan, the hero of the novel “Her Eyes”, portrays the sufferings of the afflicted peasants oppressed by tyranny and injustice in his art gallery, and ultimately death terminates his militant life in exile. The theoretical basis of this comparative research is interdisciplinary, within a post-Marxist reading, and employs Alain Badiou’s core concepts including conditions, art as truth generator, dialectics, rupture, subject and subjectivisation, and the event.