The Shahnameh
Page 17
In the tragedy of Rostam and Esfandiar, as a paramount example of such social formation of the structure of desire, we encounter the Shahnameh trope of how a son wants to succeed his royal father, but the father sends him on an impossible mission to get him killed, this time around though through his vulnerable eyes. The narrative proximity to Oedipus Rex is of course striking, but it should not distract from something perhaps entirely different. This is a case of parricide as well as filicide although by proxy. As it often happens in the Shahnameh, fathers deny, sons desire, while mothers conspire, as fathers either kill their sons directly (as Rostam does Sohrab) or send them to be killed (as Goshtasp does Esfandiar), or they plot to cast them out and get them killed (as Key Kavous does Seyavash). The exception is of course Zahhak, who in effect preempts this filicidal probability by conspiring with the devil and through him kills his father. Zahhak did what Seyavash, Sohrab, and Esfandiar wished but did not dare do. Similar to the Oedipal case of coveting the mother and killing the father, the plot of the Shahnameh approximates Esfandiar to the tragic indecisions of the frustrated Hamlet.
In my previous work on the fate of the tragic hero in Shi’ism I have found it useful to reverse the insights of Freud articulated in his Judeo-Christian reading of the archetypal psychoanalytic. Here in a similar move if we part ways with Freud and move toward Deleuze by opening the familial to the societal, we might see the tragic hero, the father, and the mother much more effectively into the epic cycle. The result opens the dynamic of the Persian epic onto an entirely different cast: neither conquest nor defeat but defiance, and in fact consistently a deferred defiance, now defines the Persian epic, so that Shi’ism (in which we have a paramount case of the murder of the son and thus of deferred defiance) can be read as a version of the paradigmatic pattern of the Shahnameh and as such a metaphysically sublimated epic.14 I originally developed that idea of “deferred defiance” in juxtaposition to and reversal of the Freudian notion of “deferred obedience” that he considered contingent on the murder of the primordial father. The father, I proposed in my book on Shi’ism, was not the figure who was killed but the son, the primordial son, Hossein in that case, and Sohrab or Seyavash or Esfandiar in this case. If we place Hossein, Sohrab, Seyavash, and Esfandiar next to one another, the whole historical case of Shi’ism becomes a textual commentary on this central trauma of the Shahnameh. That proposition opens the case of Shi’ism to the mythic panorama of the Persian epic, as it will lend the Shahnameh also an extended historical case beyond its textual referents. The move from Freud to Deleuze, with the particular twist I propose here, becomes even more important at this point.
In Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1967), Gilles Deleuze begins with the Freudian point, in “The Passing of the Oedipus Complex,” either in an active-sadistic direction, where the child identifies with the father, or in a passive-masochistic direction, where the child identifies with the mother. In trying to separate these two directions, Deleuze then maps out a critical point where the son replaces his own body with the body of his father.
So when we are told that the character who does the beating in masochism is the father, we are entitled to ask: Who in reality is being beaten? Where is the father hidden? Could it not be in the person who is being beaten? The masochist feels guilty, he asks to be beaten, he expiates, but why and for what crime? Is it not precisely the father-image in him that is thus miniaturized, beaten, ridiculed, and humiliated? What the subject atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father’s likeness in him: the formula of masochism is the humiliated father. Hence the father is not so much the beater as the beaten.15
This insight has serious implications for all the critical Shahnameh stories, such as those of Rostam and Esfandiar or Seyavash and Sudabeh, and therefore for the entirety of the Persian epic. While for Freud the father’s power makes him the primary figure of potential violence and domination for the child, for Deleuze it is the mother who is the critical figure in the child’s world. Mother here is both the love object and the controlling agent, an ambivalent figure whose power of bodily proximity and comfort (which includes but is not limited to breastfeeding) both comforts and threatens the child. Recall the crucial moment when Esfandiar goes to his mother, Katayoun, drunk, asks for more wine, and then embraces her and starts complaining about his father. From here onward it is easy to see how the fusion of both the mother and the father are the perpetual source of anxiety for the son/prince in the Persian epic cycles. If the fear of the father is one of castration/denial of succession, the fear of the mother is one of denial of the womb/erotic proximity, most palpable in Seyavash’s case but also evident in Esfandiar’s drunkard encounter with his mother at the commencement of the story. The son/prince desires and fears losing the mother as much as he fears and covets the throne of the father. In effect he wants the throne to have the mother, for he identifies the throne with the power to possess and command the mother’s love and affection. The fear of losing the mother is as compelling as desiring her, with the figure of the father sitting on his throne as an obstacle embedded in the persona of the son as the future king, the father. The play between seduction and rejection (Seyavash and Sudabeh or Esfandiar and Katayoun, or even Sohrab and Tahmineh) is the primary space where the son fears and desires the mother. To succeed the father as the king is to eliminate and replace him as the source of power and barrier between the son and the mother. Possession of the mother the prince identifies with absolute and permanent power over the throne and vice versa.
If we follow this Deleuzian psychoanalytic trope, then the moment of the physical death of Sohrab, Seyavash, and Esfandiar is in fact the moment of the symbolic death of their respective fathers Rostam, Key Kavous, and Goshtasp—namely, the moment when the son has substituted his body for the body of the father in revenge, and by directly or indirectly killing his son the king in effect commits regicidal homicide. This reading of the Shahnameh brings the central leitmotif of Shi’ism and the Persian epic together. The fact that Ferdowsi was a Shi’a might in fact be considered a deep subconscious condition of the plot narratives of his masterpiece having been plotted on the central trauma of Shi’ism. The analogy could work both ways, both the Shahnameh replotting Shi’ism or Shi’ism foregrounding the Shahnameh. Either way, what we have here is the central epic narrative of the Persianate empires replicating themselves at the heart of Islamic empires, which makes the Persian epic neither an epic of conquest nor an epic of defeat but an epic of perpetual, historical defiance. Neither Freud nor Deleuze could see the full historic proportions of their respective psychoanalytic conclusions, trapped as they both were in their blindingly European limitations. Nevertheless, their limitations are precisely what enable critical inroads into literary and societal domains beyond their Eurocentrism.
This dialectic of father-son relationship in the Persian epic sustains its traumatic course all the way to present-day history. We must first remember that Esfandiar is the epiphany of the tragic hero in the Shahnameh. He has to do the impossible, knowing full well his father, Goshtasp’s, command to arrest Rostam and bring him to his court bound is an impossibility, a mission impossible, effectively a suicidal mission banking on the young prince’s natural hubris and the old Rostam’s pride. The encounter gives Ferdowsi the opportunity to show his love for both his heroes, without preference for one or the other. This is the battle between two good men caught in a bad encounter, conspired by a treacherous father reluctant to give up his throne. Goshtasp had repeatedly reneged on his promise to give up his throne for his son. First, he sends him off to fight Arjasp, the Turanian monarch, then he sends him off to spread Zoroastrianism around the world, just before he is asked to rescue his sisters from the Ru’in Fortress. Esfandiar does everything he is asked to do and overcomes his Seven Trials too. Goshtasp finally discovers through his court astrologers and prognosticators that Esfandiar is destined to be killed in Zabolestan by Rostam. So he dispatches his son to arrest Rostam, knowing only too well he s
hall not return from this task alive.
Rostam is initially defeated until his father, Zal, solicits the help of Simorgh, who teaches Rostam how to make an arrow from a special wood and target Esfandiar eyes, which are the only vulnerable parts of his otherwise invulnerable body. Ferdowsi’s dramatic storytelling at this moment excels as it never has so powerfully before. His description of the heart-wrenching moment when Esfandiar’s eyes are hit by Rostam’s arrow is among the most astonishingly beautiful passages in the Persian epic. More than a thousand years after Ferdowsi’s description of Esfandiar’s demise, the towering modern-day Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) picks up where the master Khorasani poet had left off and retrieves the painful memory of Esfandiar closing his eyes forever in one of his own most iconic poems, mourning the death of revolutionary heroes of his own time in his “Abraham in Fire,” in which he brings together biblical, classical Greek, and Shahnameh tragic themes for a renewed rendezvous. Describing one such revolutionary hero, we read in Shamlou’s poem,
… and a lion-iron-mountain kind of a man
Like this
Traversed upon the bloody
Battlefield of fate
With his Achilles’ heels.
An immortal body,
The secret of whose death
Was the sorrow of love
And the sadness of solitude—
Oh you sad Esfandiar:
You are better off
With your eyes closed!16
The trauma of Rostam thus killing Esfandiar remains archetypally definitive to an epic culture from the height of its imperial history to the depth of its postcolonial fate.
FOUR
EPICS AND EMPIRES
Shabi chon shabah ruy-shosteh beh ghir,
Nah Bahram Peyda nah Keyvan Nah Tir.
A night jet-black dark with its face covered in tar
Neither Saturn was visible, nor Mercury nor Mars—
The moon had so differently adorned its sight
Passing upon its forehead a streak of light.
The subjects of Key Khosrow, the royal king of Iran in the Erman region, report to their sovereign lord that their fields and crops are under attack by wild boars. Bizhan, the Persian warrior, is dispatched to force the wild animals out of these fields and restore peace. Happy with his victory, Bizhan ventures into the northern frontiers of the Iranian realm and crosses the border into Turan, the archenemy of Iran, where in an enchanted orchard the young Persian warrior meets Manizheh, the beautiful daughter of Afrasiab, the Turanian king. The handsome warrior and the beautiful princess fall madly in love. Manizheh smuggles Bizhan into her private quarters, where the two young lovers spend their days and nights singing and dancing their desires, far from the vindictive eyes and ears of Afrasiab. The fear of a forbidden love makes their union even more fervently passionate.
EPICS RISE, EMPIRES FALL
The story of Bizhan and Manizheh in the Shahnameh is an allegory for the triumph of passionate eros of epics over the political ethos of empires. Iran and Turan are mortal enemies—two warring empires at each other’s throats throughout the course of the epic. Bizhan crosses the border between the two empires, as had Seyavash before him. Bizhan and Manizheh meet, and their happy, healthy, and passionate love for each other triumphs over their political divides. The Shahnameh is therefore the epic of two not one empire: Iran and Turan. Ferdowsi writes his epic sitting on the Iranian side, no doubt, but his story of Bizhan and Manizheh, among many other indications, is a clear sign that he is the simultaneous chronicler of a Self and an Other facing each other. He sees and shows Iran in the face of Turan, and he reflects Turan on the face of Iran. That innate dialectic constitutionally differentiates the Shahnameh from any assumption that epics are either one of triumph or one of defeat. The Shahnameh is the dialectical account of both. Before Bizhan, Seyavash, too, crosses the border of the two empires, falls in love, and marries Farigis, another daughter of Afrasiab, the emperor of Turan. From this marriage Key Khosrow is born, who will eventually become the next emperor of Iran, thus in effect uniting the two empires. Rostam, the principal hero of the Shahnameh, is also born of a mixed marriage between his father, Zal, who was a Persian warrior, and his mother, Rudabeh, who was the daughter of Mehrab Kaboli and the granddaughter of the Arab usurper king Zahhak. Most of the passionate love stories of the Shahnameh (Zal and Rudabeh, Seyavash and Farigis, Bizhan and Manizheh, and even Rostam and Tahmineh) are between an Iranian prince or warrior and a non-Iranian princess who has become a familiar foreigner in the course of Ferdowsi’s narrative. Ferdowsi narrates the Iranian and Turanian victories and defeats in equal measure passionately and convincingly. The entire Shahnameh, one might thus say, works toward this passionate love affair between an Iranian warrior and a Turanian princess—their deep affections for each other the syncretic universe in which the emotive cosmogony of the Shahnameh works. The history of the Shahnameh throughout the ages will have to be read in the context of this paramount momentum at the heart of the Persian epic, where the prototypical heroic narrative in which one of the parents of the hero is either a supernatural being or a foreign woman assumes far more mortal, worldly, and human proportions.
Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh has had a long and consistent history in the tumultuous course of the rise and fall of multiple empires, from its immediate context in the course of the Samanid (819–999) and Ghaznavid (977–1186), all the way to all the subsequent Muslim and Persianate empires up to and including the Mughals (1526–1857), the Safavids (1501–1736), and the Ottomans (1299–1923). Even before the rise of these later, almost simultaneous, Muslim empires, the Shahnameh was equally significant during the Seljuqid (1037–1194), the Mongol (1206–1368), and the Timurid (1370–1507) Empires, judged by the many illustrated manuscripts of the epic from these various periods. The text of the Persian epic has offered political legitimacy and narrative authority to these Persianate or proto-Persianate empires, enabled them to partake in the mythic, heroic, and historical pedigree of Persian monarchy. The key question for us is, what is the relationship between the ritual commissioning of the illustrated manuscripts in the royal atelier of these courts and the evident legitimacy that this gesture has historically offered them?
What does the central role of the Persian epic in the course of successive dynasties tell us about the link between epics and empires, when at the most triumphant point of their ascendency these royal families are drawn toward Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, commissioning its beautiful production, celebrating its content, claiming its blessings, naming their children after its heroes? What can the fascinating story of the torn-up and dismembered Shah Tahmasp (aka Houghton) Shahnameh tell us about the vagaries of Muslim empires, European colonialism, and art collection? This particularly luxurious Shahnameh was produced during the Safavid period and given as a gift to the Ottoman sultan Selim II (r. 1566–1574). It eventually reached the American collector Arthur Houghton Jr., who in turn tore this Shahnameh to pieces and sold each folio for an exorbitant amount of money. It was fortunately studied and published in two large-scale facsimiles in a limited and expensive edition by the distinguished Harvard curator Cary Welch and Martin B. Dickson of Princeton before its destruction. More recently Sheila Canby of the Metropolitan Museum has painstakingly traced all the pages of that Shahnameh and published a complete copy of it in a handsome edition.1
The fate of this particular text of the Shahnameh is emblematic of a larger context in which the symbolic significance of the Persian epic eventually loses its imperial habitat and in its dismembered fragments finds its way into European and U.S. museums and private collections.2 This journey from Persianate royal courts to European bourgeois private and public spheres marks a key transitional stage of not just the text of the Persian epic but also in fact its poetic destiny. If as the prominent literary critic Franco Moretti proposes we are to read texts such as Goethe’s Faust (1829), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), or James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as examples of modern ep
ic or “sacred texts” in what he proposes be called Western literary culture, then how are we to read the Persian epic in its colonial and postcolonial context?3 In what way do classical texts like the Shahnameh carry the imperial memories of their past into the postcolonial history of their future? The Shahnameh is not a “modern” text. The very temporal or spatial or ideological designation “modernity” does not apply and is in fact entirely irrelevant to the Persian epic. But how does the fate of a literary masterpiece of a once imperial pedigree reflect on the aggressive theorization of “modern epic” as “the form that represents the European domination of the planet”? Suppose we were to disagree that there is a “solid consent around” that European domination. Suppose that European domination was and has been and continues to be boldly contested. Then what would be the receptive fate of classical epics like the Shahnameh in the postcolonial context of their continued significance?
AN EPIC OF DEFIANCE
Before we answer such questions we first need to know how we are to understand the place of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh as an epic and its relations to various Persianate empires it has historically sustained, informed, and legitimized, and do so in the context of other studies of epic and empires.