نوع مقاله : مقاله پژوهشی
عنوان مقاله English
نویسنده English
1. Introduction
Given Rumi’s didactic and allegorical approach to storytelling, examining this literary genre through modern theoretical frameworks can reveal many of its subtleties and latent capacities. To date, little significant research has been conducted on the way the intellectual structure of Masnavi’s narratives is processed in terms of the function of codes. Focusing on this gap, the present article pursues two main objectives:
To expand the scope of research in literary texts;
To demonstrate the impact of codes on the schematic structuring of the Masnavi’s narrative corpus and the dynamism of its meaning.
Accordingly, this study addresses the following questions: How do codes, as a mechanism, endow the narratives of the Masnavi with a schema? And how, as a result of this schematization, does meaning transcend the domain of message and linguistic authority, challenging the reader’s understanding through continual disruption and transformation?
2. Research Method
This study adopts a descriptive–analytical method and follows an approach that goes beyond structuralism and message-centered readings. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s theory of the five codes, and through a case study of the first narrative of the Masnavi (“The King’s Falling in Love with the Handmaiden”), it demonstrates how the intellectual structure of this narrative is organized around a schematic framework.
3. Discussion
Three components—suspense, ambiguity, and blockage—within the intellectual structure of “The King’s Falling in Love with the Handmaiden” compel the reader to engage with codes that, first, shape the intellectual structure of the Masnavi, and second, through their interaction and contextual interweaving, transform the narrative into a stereographic text. Each of these components contributes to sign production and creativity along the syntagmatic axis of narrative segments, directing the text toward an interpretive domain. Dreams, visions, and imagination are among the most significant signifiers that, through proximity and syntagmatic association with the subject of mysticism, become codes. Throughout the narrative, their suspense-like function distances the reader from the meaning proposed by language—that is, the explicit message. Consequently, in order to grasp meaning and understand the intellectual structure of the narrative, the reader must necessarily take these codes into account.
Moreover, the fusion of narrative with poetry and its entanglement with mysticism generate ambiguity in meaning. The presence of a poetic spirit within the narrative structure subjects the language to semantic indeterminacy and perpetual interpretation. At the same time, the prominence of mysticism in the background and intellectual structure of the narrative produces numerous enigmas, questions, and “detective patterns,” compelling the reader to analyze the codes introduced by Barthes in order to arrive at meaning. Blockage, by interrupting the process of comprehension, revitalizes reading and interpretation within the narrative. Rumi’s cryptic reference to Shams Tabrizi serves as an instance of such blockage, which the reader deciphers in the form of a code.
4. Conclusion
The findings of this study indicate that meaning and intellectual structure are encoded under the influence of mysticism and take the form of codes. In these narratives, the reader does not confront a message but rather an intellectual structure that, due to the presence of codes, loses the authority and unity of language; meaning is instead apprehended through signs and their semantic implications.
Another conclusion of this study concerns the interaction and contextual cohesion of codes in shaping the intellectual structure of the narrative. Despite the apparent discontinuities throughout the story, the reader perceives a coherent schematic intellectual and semantic structure in which each unit, like the cells of a honeycomb, is not independent but functions through the interaction between syntactic structure and semantic structure.
کلیدواژهها English
