Marūfī's Paykar-e Farhād [Farhād's Corpse]: A Neo-Baroque Reading

By Baroque, the “general attitude” and “the formal quality” of a work of art is implied which is trans-historical and “radiates through” histories, cultures, and works of art. In that way, just a seventeenth-century work of art cannot be considered Baroque; on the other hand, even a postmodern work can display Baroque features. However, bound to its era, the Baroque of 20th and 21st centuries is not exactly the same as that of 17th century. Called Neo-Baroque, hence, the postmodern Baroque reflects not only features like intertextuality, polycentrism, seriality, instability and the fluidity of boundaries, and a sense of movement but also a postmodern Baudrillardian chaotic, schizophrenic world ridden with non-originality, simulation, and “repetition with variation”. To-be-both-but-none feature, i.e. fluidity, is also a distinguishing characteristic of Abbas Marūfī’s Paykar-e Farhād [Farhād''s Corpse]. As a sequel to Hedayat’s Būf kūr [The Blind Owl], Marufī’s story tells us another story as well: a tale, told by a schizophrenic female narrator, full of fragments and digressions which signifies multiple worlds within the single world of the narrative, in whose labyrinthine structure the reader gets lost. To dig this other story out, the article first focuses on the potentialities with which neo-Baroque style can generally endow a text. Then, in the last part, it focuses on the major potentiality this neo-Baroque style has provided Marūfī with: the potentiality of resistance, of viewing the world from a feministic point of view or from the position of the abject.