In the Beginning, Middle, and End There Was a Garden: Bahram Sadeqi’s Malakut

It seems impossible to think of the persian art without mentioning the significantpresence of gardens. they are present in miniature painting, architecture, andliterature. one of the modern works of persian fiction in which gardens play asignificant role is malakut (1961), a novella by the modern iranian fiction writerbahram sadeqi (1936-1984). the story of this novella begins in a “green garden” in“that pleasant moonlit night,” and moves through seductions in a garden of sin anddeath; it ends abruptly around dawn the next morning on the outskirts of the firstgarden with most of the characters either dead or dying. moreover, there is a thirdgarden which forces its presence upon the consciousness of the text wheneverpossible. under the influence of his studies in freudian psychoanalysis in writingmalakut, sadeqi (1961) seems to have given gardens new meanings. in the presentstudy, thus, the significance of the gardens in malakut is studied in the light ofbrooks’s rereading of freud’s beyond the pleasure principle (1961) as a textconcerning textuality in which instead of studying the author’s, reader’s, orcharacter’s unconsciousness, brooks considers narrative as an organism which, likehuman life, is shaped and governed by the drives. accordingly, we argue that the 3gardens which make up the setting of the plot of the novella, indeed, represent,respectively, life and death drives, and the return of the repressed garden.