The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  Taken together, the mythical, heroic, and historical components of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh constitute and sustain a poetic pararealism that suspends history from all its undelivered promises, where the historical still remembers the heroic and the heroic invokes the mythical. The mythical malleability of the real casts a long and lasting shadow over the heroic energy that animates the hidden promises of the historical world. The three phases are thus always simultaneous, informed by a polychronic conception of time and space. Through the poetic language, the immediately political becomes categorically historical, while the specifically personal becomes narratively universal. Outside the poetic act, the political and the historical are ordinarily the evident markers of the real in such metaphysical discourses of power that demarcate reality. Outside the political act, the poetic and the universal are ordinarily the markers of the ideal in such aesthetic moments that seek to subvert reality. But when in the disguise of delivering the real the poet sustains the ideal, pretending to relay history as he tells a story, then the poetic word is ipso facto posited against the political world. The poetic word in fact goes against the political world. In between the poetic word and the political world, the readers of the epic, its historical audience, we, are saved from narrative fears and delivered to sustained hopes, as the people that are thus formed are saved from their history and delivered to the stories that storytellers tell them—and thus is saved a whole culture for the promise it holds against the failures it has endured. Ferdowsi’s inimitable poetry is in the language that it is because it is not, nor should it ever be, attainable. The attained is always already corrupt, but the attainable must always already be only one step ahead of the always-already attained. The ideal should always remain the twin tumble of the real, the other side of its coin; it must be looked at with the poet’s forgiving eyes. How does Ferdowsi do it? With his eyes set on the details, the details that do not much matter to the actual story but that are the principal point of his poetry. It is as if the rest of the story is just an excuse, and that the real point is telling of these details. The teller of details, Ferdowsi can scarcely bring himself to tell a story without the manner of telling it taking over its matter. It is the detection, discovery, and theorization of that inner world that restores the Shahnameh to its worldly character, marks its claim to world literature, entirely independent of a theory of world literature outside its towering gates.

  MIMESIS, VISUALITY, SEMIOSIS

  The polychronic time zone of the Shahnameh brings its three temporal components together and gives the whole epic an entirely poetic rather than historical character. This dovetails with the three worlds of the Shahnameh I have outlined—the world in which it was created, the world in which we now read it, and the internal textual world of the Persian epic itself. The fact of this sculpted composure of the text is the pedestal upon which stands the poetic power of the text. Let me now add a semiotics to this poetics.

  If poetry is the manner of this delivery paramount in the Shahnameh, visuality is its dramatic mechanism. What in effect I am proposing here is a theory of poetic visuality as definitive to our reading of the Persian epic. Let me explain. The poet sees things that are not part of the story that he is telling. He is seeing scenes while telling stories. Ferdowsi storyboards his stories. What the poet actually sees and shows is far more important than what he hears and says, for they constitute the emotive universe of the stories. This makes the application of extraneous ideas such as “oral-formulaic” theory to Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh quite outlandish. What I am proposing here is a theory of Ferdowsi’s visual “cinematography,” decidedly to use an anachronistic and yet poignant term. There can very well be visual “cinematography” centuries before the mechanical invention of the cinematograph. Cinematography did not have to wait for the invention of the camera, the way I mean it here. Ferdowsi has a cinematographic mind. His mind works like a camera, his poetry reads like a script, his hemistichs and lines cut, frame by frame, edit, sequence by sequence, with the most impeccable precision and flow. The result is the primacy of the visual over the verbal. The verbal narrative yields to the poetic in the same manner that the poetic embraces the visual texture and contemplative disposition of Ferdowsi’s poetry.7

  Consider the scene where Seyavash is about to perform the test of fire to prove his innocence against his stepmother’s false accusations and look closely at the manner in which Ferdowsi “cuts” his scenes, edits them one after the other—close-up, medium shot, long shot, interior and exterior shots—to generate a dramatic sense of the scene entirely independent of the narrative. In a particularly critical sequence first we have a long shot of the field where the fire is set for Seyavash’s trial, next to which stands the Persian army and the general public, thus visually suggesting the political implications of the incident without ever uttering a word to that effect. Once this master shot is established, we have two consecutive fast close-up cuts of Seyavash’s smiling face, kind and confident of his innocence, juxtaposed with his supporters’ sad faces, an indication of the army’s dissatisfaction with the king. Through an emotional register, rising to the political, the story starts to transcend itself. Then Ferdowsi cuts from this exterior shot to an interior dolly shot as Seyavash in full army regalia walks toward his royal father, which Ferdowsi’s “camera” makes sure is detailed regarding the prince’s clothing items, and he reminds us that Seyavash is still smiling for the sense of continuity from the exterior to the interior shot. Seyavash then dismounts, comes to his father, and expresses his obedience. We have a close-up of Key Kavous’s face, ashamed and gentle. They have a short dialogue in which Seyavash assures his father all will be well, just before Ferdowsi shifts into an exterior long parallel cut between the army and the city, followed by another interior dolly shot of Sudabeh coming to her balcony when she hears the uproar from the city. By now all the principal actors are gathered in the sequence. From Sudabeh’s POV Ferdowsi now shows us the fire through which Seyavash has to pass. Sudabeh looks worried. From this interior shot we again cut into an exterior shot of people in the street and soldiers angry and cursing the king. The political implication of these shots is not to be missed. From here Ferdowsi’s camera now cuts to Seyavash via a crane shot as he gallops toward the fire and shows him and his horse disappear into the fire. A reverse shot now looks back at the field where the army is worried about Seyavash. We then see and notice that Seyavash has come out safely via the camera focusing on the expression in their faces. Here Ferdowsi pauses the scene for his own moment of “poetic implosion,” wondering how—if Seyavash had gone through water he would have been wet—but nothing of the sort has happened. After this moment of pause, Ferdowsi goes back to crafting the sequence to show us how the army is delighted to see him alive and innocent. From here he cuts to Sudabeh, who is frightened by the fact that Seyavash is proved innocent, and she is scandalized.8

  What we are witnessing here is the operation of an evident visuality lifting up that of poetic verbality, where the visual parallels and punctuates the verbal to the higher point of suspending its authority, a narrative dexterity that gives Ferdowsi’s poetics a sense of pararealism, a mode of poetic realism that begins with the fact of reality but remains deliberately peripheral to it: it is real and unreal at one and the same time. At his best, Ferdowsi’s uses of his eyes reflect perceptively the uses of his ears. The visual narrative then transfuses itself into a reality sui generis, irreducible to merely serving the verbal—and in fact transcending it in important ways. The dramaturgical operation of Ferdowsi’s epic is as much contingent on his and our eyes as on his and our ears. The tight and seamless texture that holds the mythical, heroic, and historical layers of the Shahnameh together always suspends the signifying claims of the real on the suggestive signs of other than the real. This gives his sense of reality an unreal texture, his realism a parareal pliability to change, modify, and reconstitute itself. This in turn gives the Persian poetic mimesis evident in the Shahnameh an entirely different char
acter from the Aristotelian mimesis. Ferdowsi’s mimesis, predicated on his pararealism, contingent on his seamless sublation of history to heroism, and of heroism to mythology, is decidedly polylocal. It can modulate itself to a succession of sites and sights, poetic contingencies and narrative emergencies.

  Ferdowsi’s poetic narrative is verbally heteroglossic and polyvocal, which in turn translates and corresponds to a heterovisual and polyfocal pictorial imagination. What Bakhtin had detected in Dostoyevsky—namely, the heteroglossia of characters—is already evident in Ferdowsi’s characterization, where his dramatis personae act, speak, and behave from the depth of their characters and convictions. The historical roots and textual sources of Ferdowsi’s composition are what hold the Shahnameh together for Ferdowsi to have the necessary but limited poetic license yielding to unlimited dramatic leverage. To test this theory, we need both performative and visual support as corroborative evidence. The best performative evidence of this peculiar mode of mimesis is today evident in the Persian passion play, or ta’ziyeh, which though Shi’i in its immediate narrative disposition is in fact a heavily Persianized mode of epic poetry. It is crucial to keep in mind that what today we call ta’ziyeh might very well be considered an Islamic adaptation of the Persian epic narrative, with Imam Hossein and Hazrat-e Abbas as the moral equivalents of the Shahnameh heroes. With all its more recent gestations, ta’ziyeh itself is most probably rooted in the ritual practice of Seyavashan, where the sacrificial death of the hero is ritually remembered and mourned. What therefore we witness in the Shi’i passion play, or ta’ziyeh, could very well be the dramaturgical extensions of the Shahnameh stories into performative forms of public piety.

  It is equally crucial to remember that soon after the active Islamization of Persian culture, the Persian epic narrative began to assimilate Muslim saints and characters into its repertoire. The earliest known epic poem, in the meter of the Shahnameh, and about the adventures of Imam Ali, is Ali-nameh, composed by a poet called Rabi’ in 1089, which is only sixty or so years after Ferdowsi’s death.9 In Khavaran-nameh of Maulana Muhammad ibn Hisam al-Din, known as Ibn Hisam (d. 1470), we read the epic adventures of the first Shi’i Imam, Ali ibn abi Taleb, in the eastern lands of Khavaran, a narrative poem that incorporates the first Shi’i Imam into the ranks of Persian heroes. In Sahebqiran-nameh (composed in 1662), by an anonymous poet, we read of the heroic deed of Seyyed al-Shohada Hamzeh, the uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, who in this epic resuscitation appears in the court of the Sassanid king Anushirvan the Just, marries his daughter, and then goes to fight for the glory of the Persian king in Turan, India, and Asia Minor. Hamleh-ye Haidari, which was started by Mirza Muhammad Rafi’ Khan Bazil’s (d. 1712) and completed after his death by Mirza Abu Taleb Mir Fendereski, known as Abu Taleb Isfahani, is entirely devoted to the heroic adventures of the Prophet Muhammad and Hazrat-e Amir, Ali ibn abi Taleb. This genre continues with an astonishing rapidity in such other works as Mokhtar-nameh of Abd al-Razzaq Beik ibn Najafqoli Khan Donbali, known as Maftun, about the heroic deeds of Mukhtar ibn abi Ubaydah al-Saqafi’s Shahnameh-ye Heyrati, composed by a poet known as Heyrati during the reign of Shah Tahmasp the First on the battles of the Prophet. Another poet, by the name of Asiri, again during the reign of Shah Tahmasp the First, composed yet another epic poem on the Prophet’s battles. Another Hamleh-ye Haidari by a certain Mulla Beman Ali, known as Raji, a Kermani poet, is in the same genre. To all of these can also be added Khudavand-nameh of Malik al-Shu’ara Fath Ali Khan Saba Kashani, Ordibehesht-nameh of Sorush Isfahani (d. 1868), Delgosha-nameh of Mirza Qolam Ali Azad Belgrami (d. 1785), Jang-nameh of Atashi, and Dastan Ali Akbar of Muhammad Taher ibn Abu Taleb.10 In this genre of epic narrative, the Persian poetic imagination actively incorporates Muslim saintly hagiography into literary and performing arts.

  As for the visual register, Ferdowsi’s polyfocality is coterminous with his verbal polyvocality, a multiplicity of sights corresponding to a multiplicity of sounds, coming together in a heteroglossia of sights and sounds. To test this idea of the polylocality of Shahnameh mimesis, and the multiplicity of the visually seen over the verbal narration of the said in Ferdowsi’s poetics, we need to look at some of the illustrations that have historically accompanied the text of the Shahnameh, and where Ferdowsi’s visual pluralism is best evident. Verbally polyvocal, visually polyfocal, the Shahnameh is read and seen like a movie, as it were. Ferdowsi’s verbal polyvocalism sublates into his visual polyfocalism, which has in turn found its way into Shahnameh illustrations of both courtly and popular types. The defining feature of Persian painting is the categorical absence of one dominant unifocal perspective in them, as is evident in post-Renaissance European painting, for example. Let’s begin by dismissing the possibility that we have an absence of a dominant unifocal perspective in Persian painting because those who were illustrating these manuscripts were congenitally cross-eyed, myopic, astigmatic, or suffered from any number of similar optical ailments and thus could not see properly. Bracketing that possibility, we can consider the sublation of Ferdowsi’s heteroglossic poetic polyvocalism into heterovisual polyfocalism, which in turn in visual renditions of his epic result in the absence of a single, dominant, monofocal perspective. By way of a contrast, if we were to look at an Orientalist painting in the tradition of European paintings, for example, we would see how a European painter looks at precisely the same site that an Iranian painter looks at but comes with a dominant monofocal perspective that determines and dictates every minutia of his painting proportionate to the precision of that point.

  The monofocality of the spatial perspective in turn translates into a monochronic conception of time, when and where everything in the painting points to not only a single dominant focal point but also a single dominant time, when everything in the painting points to one instance, one singular moment, 3:48 P.M., for example, when the sun was shining from that particular angle from that particular window. The Shahnameh illustrations, on the other hand, and by extension Persian paintings influenced by Ferdowsi’s verbal polyvocalism and visual polyfocalism, entirely defy such a tyrannically monofocal perspective and opt for a polyfocal constellation of perspectives, as they in fact implicate a polychronic conception of time and narrative, when and where a multiplicity of instances is simultaneously depicted. The monofocal perspective in European painting implicates a monolocal spatial control that corresponds to a monochronic control of time and narrative. Ferdowsi’s poetry is polyphonic and thus results in a polysonic narrative, which is in turn sublated into a polyfocal perspective in its visual illustrations—implicating a spatial freedom that corresponds to a polychronic freedom in its conception of time. This, I believe, is what Hossein Aqa Arab, an exceptionally gifted coffeehouse painter, meant when he said, “If we were to imitate the European painters and take the space of our work too seriously, half of our art and endeavor would be wasted. Because then we would have to sacrifice fifty live faces for four; and this, in my judgment, is wrong.”11

  The polyfocal space and polychronic time in the Shahnameh narrative, performance, and illustrations all point to a mode of pararealism that finds its astonishing way centuries later into Iranian cinema. What is happening today in Iranian cinema is in fact as much indebted to the wide spectrum of world cinema to which Iranian filmmakers have been exposed as it is subconsciously indebted to the classical modes of Persian storytelling, that of Ferdowsi in particular. Not only the works of Bahram Beiza’i, who is visually the most learned Iranian filmmaker, but also the entire cast of Iranian pararealism is rooted in the aesthetics and semiotics of the Shahnameh, in its verbal polyvocalism, visual polyfocalism, which is narratively polychronic, as historically sustained in naqqali and ta’ziyeh performances as well as in illustrated manuscripts and coffeehouse paintings.

  My principal argument here dwells on those occasions when the poetics and semiotics of the Shahnameh override its ostensible historical roots and narrative derives. That poetics and that semiotics, intertwined, sustain but
overcome the Shahnameh narratives. The Persian epic has been the subject of intense scholarship, beginning with the critical edition of the text and continuing with the minutest examination of its stories, but its poetics and aesthetics have been by and large overshadowed by its iconic confiscation for forced and manufactured ethnic nationalism as state ideology. This is what has most violated the text, and next to it has been its equally if not even more violent transmutation into an “oral formulaic” performance entirely at odds with its poetic and aesthetic foregrounding. Upon these predicates then arises this false pleading to “World Literature” to kindly consider Ferdowsi’s masterpiece into the august gathering of its canons. The Shahnameh is integral to any definition and understanding of world literature not by any such pleading but by allowing the inner worldliness of the text itself to lay its claims to that standing.

  TOWARD A THEORY OF NARRATIVE SUSPENSION

  I have already argued how the three components of the Shahnameh (the mythical, heroic, and historical) are structurally interrelated, and once read together they point to a radically different narrative texture in tune with an aesthetic theory of the Shahnameh I have suggested as polychronic. I have also mapped out in some detail how the polyphonic and polysonic poetics and semiotics of the text override its historical narrative urges. Let me now map out that theory in more detail. The mythical beginning of the Shahnameh, the shortest of the three, begins with a praise of God and his creation, of the beauty of the spoken word, an account of the first human being, Kiyumars, who was also the first king, and his descendants. The heroic age makes up the bulk of the poem, which begins with Kaveh’s uprising and the reign of Fereydun until the conquest of Alexander the Great, which links the heroic to the historical. Most of the towering Shahnameh heroes and their stories are in this second part of the epic. The historical age begins with a detailed account of Alexander the Great, followed by a brief allusion to the Arsacid dynasty, and concludes with a full account of the Sassanid Empire and its demise following the Arab invasion of Iran. The three phases are held seamlessly, narratively, structurally, thematically, and poetically together with an overarching dramatic potency, thus generating a unique polychronic time frame.