A novel concept: stylistics and evolution combined
Bahar’s Stylistics or the History of the Evolution of Persian Prose is a comprehensive history of Iranian languages, scripts, and prose literature from pre-Islamic times up to the nineteenth century. The study divides the long history of writing in (Greater) Iran into periods according to consecutive stylistic variations. Bahar had already promoted stylistics and categories of style as a learned discourse in the literary community of Tehran during the early 1930s. These were the years when the classification into the consecutive poetic styles of Persian literature took roots. Bahar had first dealt with poetry when he proposed the classification system composed of Sabk-e Khorasani, Sabk-e ‘Eraqi, Sabk-e Hendi, and Bazgasht, presented as a significant movement of rise, decline, and return [to earlier modes of writing]. Although his history of Persian poetry has come down to us only as a fragment,22 his paradigm has been firmly implemented in the minds of the majority of educated Iranian people.
Bahar himself contends that following several lectures on stylistics which he gave at the Anjoman-e adabi in Tehran, “the discourse concerning the Khorasani, ‘Eraqi, Indian style and Bazgasht emerged within the circles of connoisseurs and young people, who had not appreciated the old masters before.”23 In Sabk-shenasi, Bahar transfers the model of periodization onto the history of prose literature. In the first volume, he proposes four stylistic periods of literary prose: 1) a period of simple, straightforward prose in the 4th-5th/10th-11th centuries; 2) an era of adorned prose in the 6th-7th/12th-13th centuries; followed by 3) the period of decadent Persian prose (8th—13th/14th—19th centuries); and 4) the “Return” movement (Bazgasht), which started later in prose than in poetry. In the second volume the pattern is subdivided into two further periods: a period of heightened influence of Arabic prose in the Ghaznavid and Saljuq eras (450-550/ca. 1060-1150) is inserted between the first and second periods; and a period of simple prose (sadeh-nevisi) is attached to the end, from the 13th/end of the 19th century onwards.
Of the two theoretical concepts combined in Stylistics, namely style and evolution, the notion of style seems to have been more important to Bahar. The discipline of style has an indigenous tradition in Persian rhetorics and diplomatics: a number of features of what Bahar presents as stylistics are reminiscent of traditional tazkerehs (poetic anthologies) and ensha’ works (epistolographic handbooks) which, with their inherent evaluation of certain modes of writing,24 may be described as stylistics avant la lettre. What is new, however, is the extra-linguistic notion of style, the long-term aspect in the analysis of stylistic changes and its combination with the theory of evolution.
In the introduction to the first volume, Bahar explains the etymologies both of the Arabic-Persian word sabk and the Greek-rooted “style.” Furthermore, he dwells on the definition of sabk alongside related terms such as “genre” (now') and “form” (surat).25 Stylistics is regarded as a well defined but transdisciplinary concept which combines philosophy and natural sciences on the one hand and the literary arts, i.e. rhetoric, prosody, and literary history, on the other. Style, in Bahar’s view, is the “mirror of the personality”:26
It has become clear from the foregoing that the style of each author or speaker reflects his view and perception of the outside world. And since “everybody sees the world through the window of his own eyes,” we have to create the same intellectual milieu (mohit-e ma ‘navi) for ourselves when we study his [a specific author’s] style.27
Through his broad conception of the notion of style, Bahar attempts to reconstruct the intellectual breeding ground of the writing mode of any individual author: “For example, in order to comprehend Anvari’s style one must familiarize oneself with the sciences of medicine, astronomy and arithmetic as they were common in the sixth century.”28 It is this mimetic reasoning that opens up stylistics to a vast range of non-literary disciplines. It also allows Bahar to include virtually all Persian prose literature without distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction. With this inclusive approach, Stylistics resembles conventional anthologies (tazkerehs), which also transgress genre delimitations or rather do not operate in terms of modern genre concepts.
The second keyword, introduced in the subtitle of Sabk-shenasi, is evolution (tatavvor). By the time Sabk-shenasi was published, tatavvor had replaced takamol, a term which connotes perfection rather than diversity and which Bahar had employed in an early article from 1918.29 In this article, he defends his ideas against the critical remarks from the modernist camp, and the rough outline of what later would become the full version of Sabk-shenasi can already be perceived here. His adversaries call for a “literary revolution,” but in Bahar’s opinion literary change can only be brought about by evolution and put into effect when the need and the opportunity (ehteyaj va emkan) for a change arise. This article also contains in nucleo his later discussions of stylistic change: Sa‘di’s followers, he argues, are guilty of having changed simple, intelligible prose into the adorned style that dominated Persian literature in the 7th—13th/13th—19th centuries.30
Although Bahar’s conception of literary history relies entirely on the theory of evolution, he refers only to a single textual source besides Charles Darwin: a certain “Luis Buknir [BWKNR]”, by which name he is probably referring to Ludwig Bhchner (1824-99), a Darwinist physician whose works had reached the Middle East in Arabic via the French translation.31 In Sabk-shenasi, Bahar presents Darwin’s theory in brief terms, maintaining a simple analogy of nature and language.
The actual factors effecting the alteration of words, are exactly the same as those that bring about different species (in nature), namely development (tahavvol), natural selection (entekhab-e tabiy‘i), struggle (tanazo‘) and the survival of the fittest (baqa-ye ansab).32
Bahar does not reveal what made him strike on the idea of transferring the evolutionary concept onto literary history. It had become a commonplace by the period of the First Iranian Congress of Writers in 1946, when “[e]ven the most traditionalist participants in the congress spoke of ‘the evolution of literature’ and the ‘advances’ made in ‘the Soviet culture’.”33 We cannot assume that this discourse had already taken hold in the 1930s. It is more likely that Bahar played a pivotal role in spreading it through his academic lectures and Sabk-shenasi. His Soviet contemporary Jurij Tynianov (d. 1943) had touched on the idea of literary evolution within the framework of Russian formalist theory34 in the 1920s, but it is more than doubtful that Bahar knew his work. Moreover, Tynianov’s study discussing the problem of historical change in the synchronic approach of Russian formalism is rooted in the strict framework of literary theory. By drawing on evolutionary theory Bahar, however, tries to bring together all kinds of individual, social, historical, cultural, linguistic, or literary influences on literature.
Bahar’s literary history Sabk-shenasi combines stylistics as an instrument of synchronic analysis on the microtextual level of lexis and syntax with the theory of evolution which merges the micro- and the macrotextual levels and provides the diachronic quality. By bringing the two together, Bahar creates a dynamic analytic framework for literary history and formulates a metatext which for the first time drafts a logic for long-term developments in language and literature.
