A Study of the Semantic Layers in Rumi’s Story of ‘the King and the Maid’ based on ‎Roland Barthes’ Code System

The narration of ‘the King and the Maid’ as the first anecdote of Rumi's Masnavi after the section of Ney Name is one of the most serious stories of this poem and the most basic ideas of the poet are included in it. The high importance of this anecdote has caused many Masnavi scholars to interpret the meanings and explain its symbols. This issue leads to the emergence of multiple and often conflicting views. A group of commentators have considered the story of ‘the king and the maid’ as a symbolic story focusing on its symbols while another group, though emphasizing the importance of the anecdote, considered this kind of symbolism inappropriate to Rumi's taste and ingenuity. Having a correct judgment about such different views requires the use of framed methods of reading literary and artistic texts.  Using Roland Barthes's method, thus, can be helpful. While distinguishing between a ‘readable text’ and ‘written text’, Barthes considered a written text to be a system of different codes that, in conjunction with each other, give rise to multiple meanings. Accordingly, he suggests  analyzing the meaning in the text using the five hermeneutic, action, semantic, symbolic, and cultural codes. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the main discourses reinforced by different semantic levels of the text using a descriptive-analytical method. In this way, a scientific position was reached on resolving conflicts between commentators over the meaning of the symbols and the basic concepts of this story. The results of the study of text cryptography show that the three discourses of ‘sheikh, seeker’, ‘top side, bottom side’ and ‘trust, pride’ are the main discourses of the text and all cryptographies and semantic levels reinforce these discourses. In the context of the meaning of the symbols of the story, the focus on the main dualities of the text shows that this story symbolically represents the connection between the dimensions of human existence. According to Ibn Sina's views on how the soul belongs to the earthly body, the symbols of the anecdote can be interpreted as follows: the king is the symbol of the soul, the maid is the symbol of the body, and the goldsmith is the symbol of the world.