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The Fatal Rage: Heroic Anger in Modern Iranian Fiction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

D.A. Shojai
D.A. Shojai*
Affiliation:
Comparative Literature Graduate Program at San Diego State University
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Extract

When anger becomes the dominant mode of expression in a narrative context—and this to such a heightened degree that its release determines a whole series of actions—then it becomes necessary to evaluate not only its effect but also its purpose. In epic literatures dealing with heroic warfare, when a hero gets mad, a whole community suffers: castastrophes occur on a broad scale. These catastrophes, Gertrude Levy points out in her Sword From the Rock, “are always brought about by excess of pride arising from [the hero's] special gift of mana, or manas or menos”: which she defines as “the heroic energy which is a sign of [the hero's] divine ancestry and upon which [his] leadership depends; now brought into conflict with the accepted loyalties of organized warfare.”

The hero, in conflict with his society, then, comes to express not just an inner resentment, but a quality of divine origin, which enables history to work itself out.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1975 , pp. 216 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1975

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Footnotes

This paper was presented at a joint meeting of the Society for Iranian Studies and the Middle East Studies Association held in Boston on November 7, 1974.

References

Notes

1. Levy, G. R. The Sword From the Rock: An Investigation into the Origins of Epic Literature and the Development of the Hero (London: Faber and Faber, 1953), p. 9.Google Scholar

2. Bowra, C. M. Homer (London: Duckworth, 1972), p. 98.Google Scholar

3. For an examination of anger as a dominant mode of expression in a literary movement in the two cases mentioned, I recommend Alsop's, Kenneth The Angry Decade: a survey of the cultural revolt of the nineteenfifties (London: Peter Owen, Ltd., 1964)Google Scholar and Anger, and Beyond: the negro writer in the United States, edited by Hill, Herbert (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).Google Scholar

4. Esfandiary, Fereidoun The Day of Sacrifice (New York: McDowell, Oblensky, 1957), p. 5.Google Scholar

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Hedayat, Sadegh The Blind Owl, trans. Costello, D. P. (London: John Calder, 1957), p. 6.Google Scholar

9. Esfandiary, p. 67.

10. Esfandiary, p. 7.

11. Esfandiary, p. 67.

12. Esfandiary, p. 240.

13. Chūbak, Ṣādiq Tangsīr (Tehran: Javidan, 1968), p. 58.Google Scholar

14. Chūbak, p. 55.

15. Kamshad, H. Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 31.Google Scholar

16. For a provocative treatment of the subject see Meskub's, Shahrokh Muqaddimah'ī bar Rustam va Isfandiyār (Tehran, 1348).Google Scholar Unfortunately, the book has not yet been translated into English.

18. Chūbak makes a number of references to the Shāhnāmah. The incident with the cow, for example, ends with a reference, significantly, to Rakhsh--the name of rustam's horse; and the boy who goes after the animal and is injured in the process before Mohammad arrives is called Luhrāsp--the name of the king who attempted to usurp the pahlavān's rights and engineered his downfall.