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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
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.
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.
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.