Regimes of Writing: A Shift in Our Relationship with Written Words

In possibly his most famous short story, East of Violet (Šarq-e Banafše), Iranian novelist, Shahriar Mandanipour (1999) recounts a love story that takes place in Shiraz of post Iran-Iraq war when romantic relations are still deemed to be a sin that must be kept hidden from the eyes of inquisitive public and interrogating moral police. Celebrated for its remarkable prose that bears the unmistakable marks of several illustrious Persian poets and prosaists, Mandanipour’s highly intertextual story narrates the romantic pursuit of Zabih and Arghavan, two strangers, who fall in love with one another at the wrong time in history. The two primarily communicate through secret codes they place inside the borrowed books of the library housed inside the Hafeziyeh — a garden with both touristic and spiritual significance in the northern edges of Shiraz, where the tomb of Hafez, the fourteenth century legendary poet, is located. Members of the Hafeziyeh library, Zabih and Arghavan convey their romantic messages by leaving small purple dots underneath the letters printed within the borrowed books, ranging from Leyli and Majnun, a long love poem by the twelfth century poet Nezami Ganjavi, to the Persian translation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The narrator who might be the spirit of Hafez himself[1] gets to know the protagonists by putting the marked letters next to each other and deciphering the codes. The story’s language alters to reminisce the language of the books the two borrow.

East of Violet, a very well-known short story among the fans of Iran’s contemporary fictional literature, is usually construed as a tale that brings the mystical love of the classic Persian literature — a love characterized by becoming one with the beloved — to the contemporary life of the readers, the purportedly undeserving progeny of the said classic poets, who know nothing about true love. The lovers in the story, although living in the late 1980s, in fact belong with the chapters of the twelfth century prose book, Tazkirat al-Awliya, or Biographies of the Saints. It is therefore not a coincidence that Biographies of the Saints is the last book the couple shares as it implies that the lovers’ life (singular, as they are united in a death, the mystical fanā, that is much worthier than any imaginable life) must be understood in relation to those of famous Sufis and their miracles depicted in Biographies of the Saints — an indication that Zabih and Arghavan’s love which like other true loves needs no cause and reason has nothing to do with the this-worldly and calculated present-day notions of love known to the readers of the story.

It however is not simply the different meanings of love in the two periods of time that are contrasted in the short story. The story also alludes to a shift in the regimes of writing — a shift in the relations between the self and writing from material expression and mimicking to an emphasis on meaning and understanding. Contrary to us (i.e., the readers who primarily look for meaning of the short story, like what I am doing here) the meaning of the words in the library books is at best secondary in the eyes of Arghavan and Zabih. All they care is the purple dots. They may not even read the books they borrow from the library, since for example Arghavan conveys in code: “I must have studied the Conference of the Birds for my exam; but all I saw were the marked letters inside the book. I understood nothing of the book itself” (p. 23). For the couple, the books are therefore stripped of meaning and dealt with in their mere materiality as they are first and foremost a constellation of meaningless printed letters underneath some of which they put the dots. Nevertheless, the dotted books affect Zabih and Arghavan as they become the hapless heroes of the borrowed books whose words are paradoxically emptied out and whose content, meaning, and story are bypassed. The story, for example, ends with the couple dying the well-known death of the Little Prince through whose book they have exchanged a message at one point in the story: the lovers are sent home by two snakes Zabih finds at his house earlier in the story and like in The Little Prince, the narrator is unable to find the bodies. In other words, the library books are not in fact read for their meaning and content; but are unconsciously imitated by the lovers.

The common analysis of the story is therefore not wrong in discerning that Zabih and Arghavan belong to a time and age different from, and in a nostalgic way better than, that of ours — the readers who are more or less their contemporaries. However, what this common understanding gets wrong is that this asynchrony is not simply a result of the different cultural meanings of love upon which the protagonists and we, the readers, draw. It is instead a consequence of the fact that protagonists’ relation with writing is different from our (i.e., the readers’) relation with written words. Comfortably detached from it, we read East of Violet, or any other text, and analyze its discourse and cultural meaning, while Zabih and Arghavan’s life is tied in with the library books whose effect is rooted in the materiality of the written words and whose heroes are unconsciously or otherwise mimicked by the couple. Whereas those particular books in the Hafeziyeh library in their material form with dots in them are the only copies important to Zabih and Arghavan and other copies of the same books are of no value to them, to us it does not matter which copy, print, or edition of the literary works Mandanipour uses to create his intertextual story as the content, the only thing required for us to decipher the short story, is similar in all prints and editions. Finally, while our minds seek the meaning behind Mandanipour’s words, the printed letters inside the library books affect the protagonists’bodies­ and their very life and death.

Similarly, in one of his most representative pieces epitomizing the originality of thought in what later came to be known as the German media theory, Friedrich Kittler (2015) looks at a parallel shift in the relation between individuals and words by contrasting Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Wertherand the story of Francesca and Paolo in Dante’s Divana Comedia, to conclude that whereas the Francesca and Paolo’s “story speaks of bodies” and the power-effect of books on bodies, the Werther and Lotte’s story, written some 450 years later, “speaks of souls” and the reader’s incessant search for a meaning (p. 18). Following Lacan who writes “slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier […] changes the whole course of history” (cited in: Lacoue-Labarthe & Nancy, 1992, p. 104), Kittler argues that the change in the relation with written words illustrated in the contrast between Dante and Goethe, represents a shift in history.

But how well do the two — relations between the self and writing which is part of an era’s regime of writing on one hand and historical periods on the other — correlate? Have written words totally lost their “power over bodies” (Kittler, 2015, p. 17)? Do we, the so-called moderns, merely “process texts as deposits of meaning” (Winthrop-Young, 2015, p. 4)? Are written words no longer all about “power, and not knowledge or information” (Favret-Saada, 1980, p. 9)? It might be true that presently meaning, and therefore the signified, is paramount in our relation with written words; but is it also not true that our understanding of East of Violent, for instance, equally depends on the written intertextuality in the story that reshapes the already established meaning (Briggs & Bauman, 1992)? Answering a question about the story’s audience, in an interview with BBC’s Persian Service (2012), Mandanipour declares that his audience does not already exist, but he creates it with his stories. Is his response not an indication of the fact that, in spite of our focus on referential function of language, the written words have not lost all their power-effect as they are able to create people — just like the written words of the library books that created (or exterminated, depending on our view) the lovers?