The Shahnameh

by Hamid Dabashi

  He who now tells stories—from inside the magic box—

  The souvenir of the West:

  Is a wolf-fox thieving trickster of a novelty—

  Its seed is European its mother American,

  The most pernicious enchanting thief—

  Though the crowd knows this,

  They still gather with commotion around that magic box,

  The thief of their world and thief of their faith,

  As if this cunning stranger were that precious master naqqal of yore.

  Akhavan then turns his camera to a corner of the coffeehouse where we see the old master naqqal sitting in solitude, his heart full of anger and watching from a distance the European magic box. Times have changed, and Akhavan has a painful sarcastic message for the children of his time:

  Sweet dear children, very good children,

  Let’s celebrate the living heroes,

  Listen to us, the past is dead,

  Long live the present and the future,

  As for you who love the dead heroes,

  Now it is our turn to live, we the living,

  You see and you know us,

  We whom they talk about and you know well,

  As for you the lovers of dead heroes,

  We are now Sam of Nariman, the Ancient Zal,

  We are the legendary Rostam and the brave Sohrab,

  We are Faramarz, we are Borzu.24

  Delivering this bitter sarcastic farewell, declaring the death of old heroism in the face of the changing machinery of modernity, the master naqqal gets up and leaves the coffeehouse, and before he exists he goes to the window and upon its steamed glass plate with his thumb draws the shape of a little man, which as soon as it is shaped starts melting into a little apparition … of Rostam.

  Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales’s “The Eighth Trial” and “The Little Man” are the extended logic and rhetoric of the Shahnameh into the postcolonial modernity of Iran as the site of a now politically poignant reading of the Persian epic. These poems are by no means the only ones. They are two among many others, though Akhavan Sales had a particular penchant for such politically charged renewed epic narratives in his poetic redisposition. In these and similar poems the heroes and epic narrative they occasion are foreign, but the scenes they provoke are decidedly familiar and contemporary. Akhavan Sales assumes the heroic voice of Ferdowsi, an incarnation of the Persian poet, underlined by the fact that he too comes from Khorasan. He turns the Persian Book of Kings decidedly against the atrocities of his time, marks his nostalgic yearning for bygone ages, rehistoricizes the Persian epic, and places it on the map of a postcolonial nation. Poems like these by Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales mark the living organicity of an epic like the Shahnameh, pushing forward its stories, heroes, and dramatic forces into uncharted contemporary territories. Ferdowsi in effect lives in Akhavan as his Shahnameh does in much of his nostalgic poetry. The Persian epic becomes a living, breathing text in the poetry of Akhavan, its unresolved dramatic tensions retrieved for contemporary history. There is no “translating” this organicity of the text and its “supplements” into any other language or any conception of “World Literature” as we understand it. The task at hand is categorically to abandon the failed but still poignant project of “World Literature” and to try to understand the living worldliness of texts such as the Shahnameh beyond any straitjacket admission into the vacuous pantheon of a Euro-universalist “World Literature.” The discursive formation of “World Literature,” its “dispositive” (apparatus), is self-referential and any and all its encounters with “other literatures” by definition cannibalistic and anthropological.

  Such poetic supplements to the Shahnameh as Mehdi Akhavan-e Sales’s are not fortuitous but in fact integral to its narrative and temporal logic. What has textually sustained the enduring significance of the Shahnameh for generations past, present, and yet to come is its poetic fusion of three interrelated narrative modes: mythic, heroic, and historical, working together in the inner dynamics of an imperial world in and of itself. That is the reason there has never been any Persianate empire without first and foremost appealing to the archetypal power of the Shahnameh, the commissioning of its glorious production in the royal ateliers. The result is a triangulated poetic narrative that underlies all those segments and sustains a sculpted tragic subject at the heart of the epic narrative. It is right here that we need to posit and postulate the position of the Shahnameh as worldly literature. From Goethe to Damrosch, Moretti, Said, Spivak, Apter, and others, all think and operate within a known or contested world, all, without a single exception, Euro-universalist even (or particularly) when they contest it. Oblivious therefore they all remain to the forgotten worlds, invisible worlds, the hidden worlds, and the possible and impossible worlds, and all their innate worldliness.

  Fully conscious of the rise and fall of empires, the Shahnameh is the product of an imperial world and as such it becomes integral to all the subsequent imperial worlds it narratively inhabits and politically informs. It becomes poetically iconic to those worlds and definitive to the spirit of those ages and eventually stays afoot until the twists and turns of history lead to the collapse of all those empires and witness the rise of postcolonial nation-states. What has sustained the Shahnameh as a prototype of worldly literature is not just the multiple and successive world empires that have given rise and then arisen by it to the point of informing postimperial nation-states that have a claim on the Persian text. But the fact that the text itself is made of a triangulated narrative of mythic, heroic, and historical moments, which the poet places within a singular poetic event, allowing for each to animate the others. This in turn sustains a triangulated, sculpted, and ultimately tragic subject best evident in its central heroic figure Rostam (excluding the mythic and the historical parts), who is born to an unwanted and outcast child, fathers a son whom he inadvertently kills, and his own final demise is in the hands of his treacherous brother. Though engulfed by tragedy, Rostam is not a tragic hero. Quite to the contrary: he is a worldly hero, embedded in a world of triumphant battles, erotic encounters, and festive celebrations of life.

  Because of such fresh and unexamined domains of an enduring epic, I offer the Shahnameh as a prototype of a worldly literature precisely because contrary to Homer’s Odyssey or Virgil’s Aeneid it has not yet been worlded into the overriding fiction of “the West” and thus remains a fertile ground to the unfolding worlds way beyond the charted territories of the “world” we know as the ideological forestructure of Eurocentric imperium. The Shahnameh is a worldly epic because it does not belong exclusively to any given postcolonial state but remains entirely animated within multiple nations that could justly claim it. Its fusion of mythic, heroic, and historical moments gives it a miasmic and amorphous temporal character true to that transnational public sphere upon which it continues to thrive.

  WORLD AS THE SITE AND THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY

  Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh speaks of both thriving nations and of bygone empires, of expansive and enabling myths and of tragic and debilitating history, and it speaks of noble heroes and corrupt kings. Its narrative was and has remained dialogical; no monarchy or empire could ever claim one triumphant side without embracing the other judgment, appropriate its politics without subjecting itself to its ethics. The psychological disposition of the epic subject is always contingent on the narrative site of the unfolding drama in combined forces of mythic, heroic, and historical fusion of the narrative. This epic subject becomes fatherless (with Sohrab as the epitome of Shahnameh heroes) and suspends the “mommy-baby-daddy” triumvirate, while history is absorbed into the heroic and the mythic in order to alter the matrix of time and narrative upon which the patriarchal father is posited and empowered. This subject and site of history posit a different world we need to discover in which the Shahnameh becomes a piece of “worldly” literature.

  To come to terms with the worldly disposition of the Shahnameh as an epic, we need to understand the epic subject it posits
through its mythic, heroic, and historical phases as, respectively, solitary, tragic, and omniscient. The epic subject is the creature of a time and timeliness decidedly different from those in which it has been successively received through its subsequent political histories. The epic subject of the Shahnameh is inaugural. That epic subject was an allegorical microcosm of the empires it had informed and that had informed its knowing possibilities the instant Ferdowsi puts pen to paper and starts writing the Shahnameh. Today, how can a postcolonial subject relate to or be rooted in an epic subject thus framed? This question must be answered thematically in terms domestic to the poetic idiomaticity of the Shahnameh. The mythic subject (Jamshid, for example) is all knowing, cosmic, present at the moment when the world was conceived, articulated, and delivered. The epic subject is primary like Kiumars, all powerful like Jamshid, omnipresent like the poetic voice of Ferdowsi himself. Ferdowsi as omniscient narrator of the drama of existence is the prototype of the epic subject in its opening mythic moment. Ferdowsi’s voice is the paramount parameter of assurance in constituting the epic subject as coconscious of the authorship of the text. We recite with Ferdowsi when he says solemnly, “In the Name of the God of Soul and Reason.” We effectively cocompose that inaugural benediction of the epic. The very utterance of the phrase “In the Name of the God …” is a declaration of intention and purpose, a beginning anticipating a delivery and moving toward a conclusion and an end. A totality is therefore announced at the very beginning of the text as a text—and the epic subject at the moment of its mythic initiation casts a long and lasting shadow over the world the Persian epic posits and inhabits.

  As we move from the mythic toward the heroic the epic subject becomes self-conscious, deliberate, self-referential, now fully aware of the longevity of its own subjectivity. Rostam here is the combative consciousness of the epic, totally aware of himself, and in every heroic move he and his friends and foes make he is as much conscious of his mortality as he is of the immortality of the time that frames him. The sense of the tragic here makes the epic subject fragile, fragmentary, and therefore allegorical. The heroic brings the world closer to the historical while still seamlessly rooted in the mythic. By the time we move from the heroic to the historical, say from Alexander to Anushirvan, history is already pregnant with its own alterity and as such can never be allowed a metaphysics of its own certainties. Such certainties are offered vertically via the rootedness of the historical consciousness in the heroic and the mystic, and not teleologically by virtue of a self-unfolding Hegelian Geist. The time of the Persian epic is therefore decidedly, consciously, and purposefully un-Hegelian. This non-Hegelian world cannot be subjected to a “World Literature” rooted in Goethe’s Hegelian consciousness.

  In the term “World Literature” we must dwell first and foremost on “World” and then on “Literature”—for as we see them today both these terms are loaded with their Euro-universalist history. European imperialism divided the world to rule it better with little to no regard for the worlds that existed before or that could emerge within or adjacent to or could come after it. “Literature,” too, has a generic European ring to it. For my purpose here I take the word adab (which I have translated as “literary humanism”) more seriously.25 The world of the Shahnameh occurs in the world of adab, as Persian literary humanism, and in that world it expands from the mythic through the heroic down to the historical, and the tragic hero who dwells upon the ever-widening spectrum of this time immemorial dies to be born a fatherless child. Ferdowsi is the first and foremost hero of his own epic, born to a drama out of a poetic wedlock an outsider to his own profession. The apocryphal anecdote about Ferdowsi barging in on three court poets (Farrokhi, Onsori, and Asjadi) is the symbolic indication that he is an entirely alien figure in his own literary homeland. He does not belong. The three court poets, according to this hagiographic account, were having a picnic, and Ferdowsi asks to join them. They look at his ruffian appearance and do not wish him to join their august gathering, so they tell him they are three prominent court poets and he can join them only if he can complete a quatrain of which they will compose three hemistichs. They then deliberately chose a rhyming word of which they are certain there are only three words in the Persian language. Ferdowsi surprises and outshines them and comes up with the name of a Shahnameh hero that rhymes with those three words and of whom the court poets were ignorant. The folkloric stories about him and Sultan Mahmoud are all an indication of a defiant poet son contentious with his patron father. Mahmoud here is a fictive character, so is Ferdowsi. Mahmoud has always been a poetic trope—as in the stories of Mahmoud and Ayaz, his favorite slave with whom he had a homoerotic relationship that eventually crossed the boundaries of history and entered mystic dimensions. Stories of a thankless Mahmoud and a dutiful Ferdowsi all point to the inaugural mythic moment of the Persian epic being predicated on a moment of paternal betrayal. That inaugural moment suspends the entirety of The Book of Kings on a moral predicament in which no ruling monarch can ever be completely morally victorious (there is always “a dram of evil” in the very best of them), no world can be eternal, no power legitimate, and nothing but the poetic sokhan (logos) be the ethical logic and rhetoric of history. That world is worldly and can never yield to the authority of an imperially postulated “World” in “World Literature.”

  In any reading of the Persian epic, we must keep in mind how Ferdowsi keeps the mythic, the heroic, and historical moments together and, just like Ibn Khaldun or Giambattista Vico, sustains a theory of history predicated on his fusion of these three instances seamlessly interwoven to posit an alternative temporal space. We also need to recall how the Persian poet himself, Abolqasem Ferdowsi, has lived his mortal life through the three components of the mythic, heroic, and historical, having come together in his own lifetime, his epic poetry and the structure of his narrative fusion of the three into one, and lived that world in person. Ferdowsi narrates these three phases into one another, weaves them into each other, whereby the stories that are not his are recalled through a formal structure that is indeed his, whereby the Shahnameh becomes the narrative testament of this fusion of the three temporal moments. Time, narrative, subjectivity, and worldliness are therefore held tightly together in the course of a single epic text that crafts its own world and worldliness. Subsequent empires and their history are therefore instantly assimilated into a transhistorical frame of reference beyond their political control. Theorizing that worldliness, predicated on that particular fusion of times and narratives, demands its own logic and rhetoric.

  The Shahnameh has been used and abused, exoticized or neglected, and like all other classics it has been more cited than read. In a successive conflation of epic and empires, multiple empires have lived mythic, heroic, and historical lives and are thereby verified or dismantled by the fusion of those three. The Persian epic is therefore tragically triumphalist, as Quint would say, and triumphantly tragic, at one and the same time. Empires have fallen, upon their ruins nations arisen, as colonialism has severed the mythic and the heroic from the historical and therefore dismantled the possibility of meaning to history within the Persian epic narrative, but instead the art (mythic) and politics (heroic) of anticolonial struggle have replaced them to give meaning to a hapless history. The postcolonial person is therefore bereft of the three temporal moments held together and under the false consciousness of any colonized mind the integral agency of the postcolonial person must be restored. The imperial, colonial, and the national come together to form a defiant subject through false consciousness and the tragic loss at the heart of all triumphalist vainglories. The Shahnameh will give you an entirely different perspective on Iranian (or any other postcolonial) cultural identity and history. It is decidedly non-Islamic (not anti-Islamic) evidence of Iran that cannot be reduced to its Islamic identity. The Pahlavis abused it for their own dynastic reasons, while the Islamic Republic by and large ignores it, for it can see no legitimizing reason in it. But both that abuse and this ne
glect are the political indexes of the literary significance of the Shahnameh that has survived and will survive both the Pahlavi dynasty and the Islamic Republic in order to reach a much wider postcolonial world and worldliness.

  THE WORLDLY INTERIORITY OF THE PERSIAN EPIC

  How is that worldliness to be assayed? The Shahnameh is the textual epiphany of the Persian epic and its winding encounters with multiple world empires, from the Samanids and the Ghaznavids in the tenth and eleventh centuries to the Safavids in the sixteenth century and finally the Qajars in the nineteenth century. In the age of its postcolonial predicament with the Pahlavis and the Islamic Republic, the Persian epic finally, and for good, parted ways with its historical abuses. It has now finally lost its political usefulness and is poised to safeguard its poetic power. The Persian epic can no longer support or sustain any imperial or dynastic designs on it. It can only historicize, humble, and dismantle any state that comes near it. Over the past two centuries it has in effect become a deeply subversive text because of its extraordinary adventurers having served and subverted multiple empires in its long and illustrious history. With all its imperial pretensions now historically overcome, the Shahnameh is here to stand on its own narrative devices, poetic prowess, political innuendos, textual unpredictabilities. Here the Shahnameh stands, like all other world masterpieces, in and out of itself provincializing any and all theories of “World Literature” that have failed to come to terms with its varied and multiple worlds, the world in which it was created, the world it poetically posits, and the multiple worlds in which it has been received and read.

  Much of the artistry of the Shahnameh was lost to the empires that sought to abuse it—for they had no use for it. What has, for example, the story of Zal have to do with any empire? Not just the story of Zal, every other story of the Persian epic is the whole of the Shahnameh in a miniature painting. Zal is born to a beautiful mother and a noble father. Zal is albino, born with white hair and a white complexion. The father is ashamed of his son’s appearance. The newborn boy is left out in the wilderness to fend for himself—an infant, defenseless, vulnerable, lonesome. A magnificent bird, Simorgh, comes down to him from his mountain high. God in his majestic mercy had planted the love of this boy in the heart of the mighty bird, and the bird saves the child and raises him as if his own child. The boy grows up and becomes a valiant hero. It was destined that the boy would grow and prosper. He would soon father the hero of all other heroes of the Shahnameh, the one and only Rostam. But the pain of being abandoned by his father upon his birth will always remain with him, and with us. What’s wrong with having white hair? Why was he left to be raised by animals, however kind and generous like Simurgh, and then how can we explain the love, kindness, and parental generosity with which Simurgh raises this child? Khodavand mehri beh Simurgh dad—“God planted love in Simurgh’s heart!”