The easiest and standard way of reading through this fusion of linearity and episodic epic is to consider Ferdowsi’s composition of the Shahnameh as an expression of Iranian imperial consciousness at a time that these legacies were in fact threatened and compromised by the Arab conquest of Iran—part and parcel, in fact, of the Shu’ubiyyah movement, a literary movement associated mostly with non-Arab communities of the Arab empires. This reading, which dovetails with the coincidence of the composition of the Shahnameh with the Shu’ubiyyah movement, is not altogether false, although it does tend to overdetermine the text at the expense of its poetic and literary open-endedness. Even in its historical context one must think of the Shahnameh in the imperial occasion of the emerging eastern dynasties of the Samanids and the Ghaznavids rather than in the anachronistic “national” context of our current history—the way that it has been framed within the postcolonial nation-state formation, particularly during the Pahlavi dynasty. But more important, this reading subjects the poetic proclivity of the epic to its imperial context, while I wish to argue the exact opposite of that assumption.
Turning more toward the poetic presence of the text itself rather than its imperial context, my overriding argument is that Ferdowsi’s sense of tragedy dwells in a staged drama that is embedded in an ultimately tragic sense of history—remembering the past in the heat of an urgent present. The tragic sense of the Shahnameh, I wish to argue, resides in the paradox of telling an epic of the world conquerors in the language of doomed heroism, at the time of imperial victory remembering the fate of doomed defeat, and as such its tragic trauma is founded on a fundamental Shi’i sense of history, perhaps by virtue of its Shi’i poet, and which in turn makes of Shi’ism a tragedy rooted in a Shahnameh leitmotif. This fractured narrative fissure, we might therefore suggest, betrays the traumatic unconscious of the text and is what ultimately holds the Shahnameh poetically together as a singularly creative work of art, the product of one creatively conscious poetic act. This traumatic unconscious and the fractured narrative fissure that betrays it I place somewhere near Freud’s psychoanalytic unconscious, Jung’s collective unconscious, and a fortiori and in particular Lacan’s linguistic unconscious, by which he suggests that the unconscious is structured like a language. If I were to appropriate the inner working of this Lacanian linguistic unconscious—its fractured narrative fissure—I could see how it corresponds to the traumatic unconscious of the Shahnameh.
How could the Shahnameh, as a literary text, you may wonder, have any kind of unconscious—even linguistic? If, as Umberto Eco suggests, a text (like the Shahnameh) has an intention (Latin intentio)—just like its author (Ferdowsi) and its varied readers (us), then just like its author and readers, the intention of the text has an unconscious too, and that traumatic unconscious, conditioned by recollecting the moment of moral defeat at the time of political triumph, is definitive to the enduring significance of the Persian epic. The triumphant rise of Persianate empires with the Persian language as the lingua franca of these empires all the way from the Saffarids and the Samanids in Central Asia to the Mughals in India renders that traumatic unconscious entirely paradoxical and yet definitive to the decentered subject formation at the heart of Persian literary humanism.6 Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh partakes in and contributes to that defining force field of Persian literary humanism and thereby places the poetic disposition of the text itself over and above any empire that may use or abuse it. I therefore propose a categorical distinction between the symbolic significance of the Shahnameh as an epic lending empires the legitimacy they seek and its substantive content that effectively questions and dismantles that very legitimacy. The result is a superior poetic consciousness to the text that is upstream from any and all its political abuses, whether imperial or dynastic, classical or contemporary. The Shahnameh is a living organism. It lacks any and all dead certainties. It teaches uncertainty, fragility, vulnerability. Everything and anything that an empire projects and quintessentially lacks, the Shahnameh celebrates.
Reflecting this traumatic unconscious, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh works through the inner paradox of a self-referential epic, where every political triumph is ipso facto a moral defeat—the triumph of Rostam over Sohrab, the triumph of Rostam over Esfandiar, the triumph of Seyavash over the false accusations of Sudabeh. There is quite obviously something also Shi’i about this sense of tragic paradox, as indeed there is something of the inner sense of paradox of the Shahnameh evident in Shi’ism. There is thus something intimate connecting the Shi’i author to the epic texture of his Shahnameh. In reflecting this traumatic unconscious, the Shahnameh can ultimately be read as a Shi’i epic by virtue of its Shi’i author, or, conversely, Shi’ism in its entirety might be considered a story of the Shahnameh run historically wide into a world religion, by virtue of the antiquity of the origin of the Shahnameh over the more recent historicity of Shi’ism. These questions become even more compelling if we were to add such epics as Ali-nameh and Khavaran-nameh to the Shahnameh and wonder if these are all variations on the theme of Shi’i traumatic origin, or are these epic narratives of the first Shi’i Imam, and along with them Shi’ism itself, a narrative take on the Shahnameh that historically took flight and went its own way? Ultimately we will have to abandon these open-ended questions for the simple conclusion that the worldliness of the Shahnameh text has had more than just one narrative take. The point here is the coincidence, however we may opt to read that coincidence, between the Shahnameh and Shi’ism as two symmetrical modes of operation on the theme of a traumatic unconscious that triumphs at the moment of its defeat and is defeated at the moment of its triumph.
Ferdowsi’s sense of epic—challenging the imperial triumphalism of any dynasty that seeks its endorsement by anticipating its poetic demise—is also evident in his cinematic techniques, if we were to use this anachronistic term and read the Shahnameh as if we were watching a film. While Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky should be placed next to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) as a myth of national origin, Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is more comparable to the triad of Ford, Lean, and Kurosawa as three modern epic filmmakers. What we witness in the Shahnameh is an ocularcentric intelligence and narrative technique that in cinematic terms mixes Ford’s triumphant narrative with Lean’s defeatist nostalgia in order to reach for the closest Iranian epic similitude to Kurosawa’s archetypal epic narrative—because, one is now in a position to speculate, the centrality of the trauma of Hiroshima for Kurosawa is the sense of tragic futility at the heart of Ferdowsi’s epic.
To demonstrate this point, we can compare two exemplary scenes from Ferdowsi’s story of “Rostam and Sohrab” and Kurosawa’s film Ran (1985). In this example we might compare the function of the (five-minutes, forty-second) melodic implosion in the central scene of Ran when the warlord Hidetora Ichimonji’s children are murdering their father with the almost identical function of the (eight hemistich) poetic implosion in the central traumatic scene of “Rostam and Sohrab” when Rostam is about to kill his own son.
Jahana shegefti zeh kerdar tost …
Oh world your deeds are indeed strange,
Crooked and correct are both your ways.
In neither the father nor in the son did kindness rise,
Reason was absent, kindness concealed.
Even animals recognize their own children,
Whether the fish in the sea or onager in the field.
But from arrogance and ambition
Man cannot tell foe from a son.7
The central narrative trauma of the Shahnameh is its moral memory of a tragic end to any imperial act of triumphalism—just before the text itself is appropriated as the insignia of imperial triumphalism of a new dynasty. This act of remembrance, at once triumphant and defeatist, exuberant and tragic, eventually becomes the most cogent constitution of the very subtext of the Shahnameh as an epic. That destiny is made precisely at the moment when it is interrupted. That central sense of tragedy becomes definitive to the archetypa
l modus operandi of the Shahnameh as a self-conscious epic, precisely the same way that Kurosawa’s cinema thrives on the traumatic birth of a nation at the moment of its near annihilation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
EPICS OVER EMPIRES
The Shahnameh as an epic has historically expanded in meaning and gained renewed significance as empires that had sought its power of persuasion have fallen and faded from historical memory. Who today other than erudite historians know or care to remember the Samanids, the Ghaznavids, the Mongols, or any other empire? But we keep reading the Shahnameh with newfound awe, inspiration, and delight. The entire logic and rhetoric of the Shahnameh are in fact predicated on the primacy of epic narrative overcoming the imperial power it once lent a helping hand locating in history. The Shahnameh tells the story of the mythic origin of humanity, of bygone heroic ages, and of the historical rise and fall of empires. It celebrates their rise, it mourns their fall, it reads and teaches their history—as it all the while enriches its own poetics of epic narrative. As the Shahnameh was used and abused to justify Persianate empires, Ferdowsi was building a dramatic bridge with his readers across time and space. I believe precisely the opposite view of David Quint in his Epic and Empire to be true: epics are not at the service of empires, celebrating or mourning them. Empires are at the service of epics, offering them dramatic events in myth and history to better tell their stories. The same I would propose about Franco Moretti: modern epics are not an expression of “the world system”; quite to the contrary they are the literary signs of resisting and dismantling it. The Shahnameh is the living testimony of both cases, an epic of multivalent perspectives contingent on the narrative angle it enables and overcomes. It is, as such, a living vindication of how epic narratives trump and triumph over the vacuous theorization of “the West” as imperially triumphant.
Love, desire, heteronormative passion, the effervescence of yearning for another body to have, to hold, and to possess: in the story of Bizhan and Manizheh and other similar Shahnameh romances we witness the eruption of the repressed sexuality and subversive eroticism of Seyavash and his stepmother, Sudabeh, or of Esfandiar and his mother, Katayoun, as these episodes lend renewed significance to the love stories of Rostam and Tahmineh, Zal and Rudabeh, and thus poetically turns to signal and unleash the imperial repression of desire into heroism. In these stories we witness the rebellious urges of desire subverting the imperial austerity of power. The more we move from the mythical to the heroic phase and approach the moment when the turn to historical is complete, history itself becomes the salvation of myth and eroticism the defining moment of heroes. History is therefore a delivery, a deliverance, a promised land, a destiny, and the Shahnameh an epic of defiance, and not of triumph or defeat. Just like Shi’ism, it is an epic of protest and defiance. It does not mourn defeat. It does not celebrate victory. It absorbs and defies empires, turns them into stories, and keeps history expectant of something else to come.
If we were to read the Shahnameh, as I suggest, as an epic of defiance then its enduring significance within and beyond multiple empires speaks of a confident truth that absorbs the political power of those empires to posit a normative epic before and beyond empires. The epic power of the Shahnameh therefore raises the political into the poetic, sublates the personal into the mythic, transforms the historic into the legendary. That narrative moment of defiance remains definitive to the Persian epic beyond the political vagaries that have laid false claims on it. As those empires, from the Ghaznavids forward, have abused the Shahnameh for their own benefit, the Shahnameh has used them to sustain its historic references to the worldly character of its aesthetic sublimity. This very defiant trajectory of the Persian epic is also the very reason for its enduring significance long after all those empires have been laid to rest and postcolonial nations have emerged on their premises to find renewed meaning in Ferdowsi’s masterpiece.
As an epic, the Shahnameh breaks through an imperial totality (a closed political system) and opens up into a poetic infinity (on an unfolding symbolic register). It has survived through the thick and thin of successive empires and then weathered the postcolonial fates of nation-states not just by helping them to declare a momentary and passing claim to the anteriority of bygone ages but also in fact guiding them to find their ways into the interiority of an emergent morality always embedded in its own poetics. The Shahnameh stories are open-ended, internally related, textually self-referential. They are not closed in the circuitous claim of any literary masterpiece that is canonized for a dubious political purpose here or an imperial lineage there. How can peace be ascertained against the certainty of wars, the poetics of living against the politics of death? Empires and the nations they hold have endured more wars than enjoyed peace. But Levinas’s warning is of a different vintage: “Such a certitude is not obtained by a simple play of antithesis. The peace of empires issued from war rests on war.” It will not last and it therefore cannot sustain any enduring sense of unfolding being, of being poetically in the world. For that unfolding being to sustain itself, the humans that epics enable must rely on the emotive interiority of the poetic event itself. “It [the peace of empires] does not restore to the alienated beings their lost identity. For that a primordial and original relation with being is needed.”8 How is that “primordial and original relation with being” possible except through the meandering wonders of a poetic text rooted in time immemorial and unfolded in all bygone ages? The Shahnameh is the poetic delivery of itself. It is an infinity placed in history, through its playful and evocative distribution of time into the mythic, the heroic, and above all the historical.
FIVE
EMPIRES FALL, NATIONS RISE
Zani bud bar san-e gordi savar …
There was a chivalrous woman brave and bold,
Habitually victorious in battlefields,
Her name was Gordafarid
Fate has never seen a valiant like her,
…
She put her battlefield armor on,
For there was no time left to waste,
She hid her long hair under her cuirass,
Putting it with a Roman knot under her helmet.
As Sohrab marches toward Iran to defeat Key Kavous, find his father, Rostam, and place him on the throne, the archenemy of Iran, Afrasiab, the emperor of Turan, hears of the young hero’s approach and mobilizes an army and puts it at his disposal. Afrasiab warns his trusted generals, however, that Sohrab and Rostam must never recognize each other, otherwise his fate as the supreme Turanian monarch is doomed. As Sohrab proceeds at the head of this mighty army toward Iran he reaches the Sepid Dezh fortress. A local warlord named Gazhdaham was in charge of that fortress, and while his son Gostaham was too young to fight, his daughter Gordafarid was ready and willing. Initially a warrior named Hujir charges against Sohrab but is defeated and captured. Gordafarid, the valiant daughter of Gazhdaham, hears the news of this defeat and gets angry at Hujir, puts her armor on, and hides her hair under her helmet. Gordafarid and Sohrab engage in a fierce battle. Sohrab finally defeats Gordafarid, but she uses her charm and beauty, deceives Sohrab, and returns to the fortress. Gazhdaham writes to Key Kavous and asks for help, and the Persian monarch in turn dispatches Rostam to fight Sohrab.
REREADING THE PERSIAN EPIC
The Shahnameh has had a long and continuing history, from its very inception in an imperial age to its canonization well into our postcolonial history. In the aftermath of the collapse of the last three Muslim empires (the Mughals, the Safavids, and the Ottomans) and the rise of postcolonial nation-states it has been used and abused in the making of fragile state legitimacies. The trauma of nation building through the heat of European colonial domination could not have left the Persian epic intact. Perhaps the most blatant political use of the Shahnameh was staged when in 1934 the first Pahlavi monarch, Reza Shah (r. 1925–1941), hosted a major millennial celebration of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh soon after he ascended the throne. The Persian epic was thus put to use for the new
ly established dynasty seeking to overcome the revolutionary upheaval of the constitutional period (1906–1911), the collapse of the Qajar dynasty (1789–1924), and the chaos of the recently occupied Iran, seeking to link Reza Shah’s reign to ancient Persian empires. The Persian epic thus began its prolonged history of aggressive transformation from an epic of successive empires to the classical text of a tug-of-war between the national sovereignty of a people and their historic battles with the abusive powers of the states that laid false claim on them. As the state commenced its militant appropriation of the Persian epic so did contemporary poets and literati begin appropriating the Shahnameh and its heroes for their own oppositional and militant purposes. Ferdowsi’s text was pulled and pushed from one side to another.
Poets like Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales and Seyavash Kasra’i, novelists like Simin Daneshvar and Sadegh Chubak, and scholars like Mehrdad Bahar and Shahrokh Meskoub soon emerged as leading public intellectuals appropriating the figures of the Shahnameh for their own respective political causes. Heroes such as Kaveh the Blacksmith became proverbial to a new generation of the Iranian left appropriating his rebellion against an unjust king to their own political purposes. The accidental death of Sohrab at the hands of his father or the treacheries of Key Kavous against his son Seyavash were now read as signs of generational gaps and hostilities of the old and the new. This was all done under the pressing conditions of the fateful encounter of the Persianate world from India to Central Asia to Iran with European colonialism directly affecting the narrative cohesion of the Shahnameh from mythic to heroic to historical. It is upon that traumatic experience that we need to rethink the parameters of what it means today to place the Shahnameh in the domain of “World Literature,” as it is understood by mostly European and U.S. literary scholars. The critical task today is to defamiliarize the Shahnameh in a manner that people (Persian speaking or otherwise) will want to go back to the original and read it again as a historical document organically linked to a tumultuous history. In any such attempt we are bound to raise more questions than answers. Here I would of course try to disentangle the Persian epic from its various ideological abuses, but even beyond that I am determined to retrieve a literary inroad back to the original epic.
The Shahnameh Page 19