ABSTRACT

Iranian literary Modernity antedates its European counterparts. This is because, as this chapter shows, the Modernity of letters stems from linguistic realism, a specific conception of the interplay between word and world - one possible no matter place and time and fully realized in post-Timurid literature. Linguistic realism, specifically, emerges where inner discourse becomes truer than a language reflecting the inhuman world. The literary result is a collapse of decorum and empirical realism before the fantastic language of mind. Focussing upon Ṣāʾib especially, this chapter argues that the avant-gardistes favoured by the Safavid and Mughal courts take linguistic realism to its limit. Nevertheless, the precondition for linguistic realism and so literary Modernity is not specifically aesthetic: inner discourse must displace divinity as soteriological force and, in so doing, take causal precedence to being itself. Only then can the verbal arts become Modern. As this chapter’s discussion of Suhrawardī and Mullā Ṣadrā reveals, this displacement is the defining moment of post-Avicennan philosophy in Iran.