The Ghazals' Endings in Dīvān-e Šams: Aspects of Performing the Hozoor

Regarded as the climax of the text-narrative, the ending of a text is often seen as the resolution of the subject being represented. However, in certain ways, and depending on the dominant epistemology of the text and the status of the textual subjects, the ending can lead to special implications. Due to the mystical epistemology, the endings of some classical Persian mystical texts, including the ghazals in Dīvān-e Šams, are distinctive. In this paper, the endings of the ghazals in Dīvān-e Šams have been interpreted in a descriptive-analytic way. The result shows that the narrator-lover of the ghazals, in line with the ruling epistemology of the text and the identity or temporal subject-position which he obtains in the early and middle sections of the narrative, in the ending recourses to speech acts of silence to reject its idiomatic sense and prevent it from being consolidated. In other words, the narrator-lover in most of the ghazals, after representing the anxiety and longing for the lost presence and unity, tries to perform haal-e hozoor, according to the circular metaphor of return to the origin and the pre-linguistic world, and through performing two sets of" speech acts" of silence, including "silence as not speaking" and "silence as speaking for another one.". Due to this performance, the endings of the aforementioned ghazals do not come to closure, rather, through a circular structure, perplexes the participant-reader with an unfinished experience or allows his/her participation in that experience.