Intertextual study of Mantiq-ot-Teir's seven valleys of love in "The man-trunk and his traveler" of Andrée Chédid

The search of love and perfection is one of the main topics of cultural and artistic heritage of the world. The cosmopolitan aspect of this issue justifies its influence on the works of several writers. Mantiq-ot-Teir of Attar illustrates this subject in the form of “seven valleys of love”. Andrée Chédid, the french language writer, has also demonstrated this process in one of her short stories named “The man-trunk and his traveler”. She represents in this story the life of two characters who complete each other, and at last they become unified. In fact, we can distinguish implicitly the seven valleys of love in this story as the same order mentioned in Mantiq-ot-Teir. Therefore, a comparative study of these texts, by profiting from the theoretical bases of Riffaterre’s intertextuality, lets us finding the similarities between the viewpoints of Attar and Chédid concerning seven valleys of love and verifying the why and wherefore of resemblances and commun features of this subject.