Linguistic Realism or Literary ‘Modernity’? The Ontology of the Poetic from Sohravardî to Ṣâ’eb

Neither temporally nor spatially specific, the formal consistency of literary “Modernity” consists in what I will call “linguistic realism.” This “realism” entails a second-order perception of language as truth-producing event, one conscious of “la langue comme puissance infinie ordonnée à la présence” and “comme aptitude à présentifier la notion pure du ‘il y a’” (Badiou). Persian letters and philosophy, I will show, possess a rich history of precisely such a “Modern” realism.

My analysis turns on three moments—each wholly independent of European “Modernity”—of precisely such linguistic realism in Persian literary and intellectual history. First, I examine Sohravardî’s transformation of the peripatetic and neo-Platonic apparatus into one where language emerges as the key to turning “az ẓolomât-i jahl beh nûr-i ma‘âref va ḥaqâ’iq.” Against the Platonic resistance to poetic discourse—one continued in Aristotle’s refusal of (poetic) “πλεονασμάς” and (poetic) tropes that do not “ποιεῖ πως γνώριμον τὸ σημαινόμενον διὰ τὴν ὁμοιότητα”—Sohravardî makes “al-mutakhayyila,” “al-kalâm al-ʻaẕb,” and “al-lisân” the bridge between “al-nufs wa-‘âliman qâdran.” I turn, secondly, to Mollâ Ṣadrâ’s "Kitâb al-mashâ‘ir" and "Al-Ḥikma al-muta‘ālīy," both of which present us with a picture of “al-wujûd” as necessarily delimited by linguistic predication—or “‘ufuq al-bayyân.” Ṣadrâ points the way for a poetics exceeding the “shawb tarkîb” of naïve (apophantic) predication, bringing us nearer “shams al-ḥaqiqa min maṭla‘ al-‘irfân.” Turning finally to the Ṣafavid lyricists and focusing especially on Ṣâ’eb’s dîvân, I demonstrate that the “sabk-i hendî,” especially in exploiting "ḥosn-e ta‘lîl" and the poetic syllogism, is the legatee of precisely the “realist” and “Modern” conscience of language found also in Sohravardî and Mollâ Ṣadrâ.