The Logic of Digression in Mathnavi: Explanatory Style and the Authority of the Narrator/Author

In Rumi’s Mathnavi, the author-narrator has created levels of digression via continuous deployment of meta-language. Compared to other classical Persian texts, Mathnavi’s digressions are outstanding in terms of quantity, quality and variety. Mathnavi's digressions largely serve the purpose of explanation, but the didactic-deterrent function of explanations has led to the assumption that Mathnavi is an authoritarian text and the interaction of its author-narrator with the reader is one-sided. This assumption is the result of a cursory examination of the function of these digressions in Mathnavi as well as a disregard for their constitutive factors. In this descriptive-analytical research, after classifying instances of digression in Mathnavi, their authoritarian or anti-authoritarian aspects were formulated and interpreted. The results show that Mathnavi’s explanatory style enjoys two different authoritarian and anti-authoritarian levels. At the first level, the narrator uses preludes, axioms, reportage of the production, continuation and the ending of the stories, answers to the intended questions, interpretations of the symbols and expressions, conclusions and the like—all derived from the educational determinism and juristic education system of Maktabs—to express the meaning in a definitive and one-sided manner. On another level, via various kinds of quoting and references to different texts and individuals, and by embracing the notion of “acquisition” (kasb) as the epistemological backbone of fana—accompanied with decentralizing subject-agency—the narrator/author suspends his authority. Thus, one can draw two first, not all of Mathnavi’s digressions and explanatory style are authoritarian; second, not all of Mathnavi’s authoritarian digressions are the result of mystical epistemology.