Study of dark romanticism components in “That Perfume” by Sonallah Ibrahim

There has been a special literature in each era, which shows the beliefs, and political, social and economic conditions of that era. When a catastrophic event happens, it can damage the mental, moral and spiritual health of the society and make it disturbed. A fast transition from tradition to modernity and its exposure to social-political changes make a fundamental development in culture and ethics, which affects art, literature and philosophy. If these changes are negative and catastrophic, dark literature with negative tendencies is formed. Sonallah Ibrahim wrote some books studied, reviewed and analyzed by Arabs and Persians using modern writing techniques. “That Perfume” تلک الرائحه)) by Sonallah Ibrahim is a modern story narrated fluently and expresses the social concerns of modern humans. The story is full of ambiguity, nihilism, death thinking, tendency for inner world, emotional helplessness, and other salient features of dark romanticism. Although there exist other components and features of this type, we analyze the factors that are more frequent in this story.

With a descriptive-analytical method, this research analyzes the manifestations of the current literature in the novel, including narration, story elements, space, conversation, etc. It seeks to answer the questions ‘how can we analyze the pessimism, death think, despair, and nihilism in “That Perfume”? And ‘how can the content analysis of this story help to better understand the concept of this story according to the literary flow of dark romanticism?’

In this research, by analyzing the art of story and the way of writing, we find a tendency for black romanticism in the dialectics of the elements and structure of “That Perfume”. In this story, Sonallah Ibrahim shows the death of humanity and wants to express that others do not value life. He describes the physical and evil dimension of love in a detailed way. The main character of this novel is captivated by evil fantasies; it is a kind of reminder of erotic illusions. Components such as wandering, repetitive life, returning to the past, father and mother’s death, broken loves, pessimism, and despair from existential world show nihilism in this story. The frequent use of opium and narcotics is very evident in the story. The main character of the story just smokes, which is a sign of destruction and darkness. By criticizing the story according to the romanticism components, we can recognize Sonallah Ibrahim as an eminent writer in the Arab world. Another point of criticizing is that the reader can understand and analyze the motif, theme and main concepts of story and characters fundamentally.

Since dark romanticism is a new and special view of the broad doctrine of romanticism, there is no precise component for it in any reference book. However, with a precise analysis of this doctrine, we extract the most important features of dark romanticism such as loneliness, death thinking, despair and nihilism, using erotic themes ae well as opium and narcotics. In that story, death has a prominent manifestation in material and psychological dimensions. Sonallah Ibrahim portrays the death of the modern human, while he is alone in a crowd. Sonallah Ibrahim portrays the death of humanity and shows no one values the souls of others. The mentioned loneliness and death thinking can be the result of despair, hopelessness and nihilism and also a base for this spiritual misery. We can see the examples of hopelessness and nihilism throughout the story. When the main character of the story is freed from the prison, he seeks an inner feeling, such as happiness, but he cannot find anything. Another component of black romanticism is evil love which is contrasted with virgin love in the Arabic literature. Today, the evil love is defined as erotic literature. This feature is the most important component of dark romanticism in “That Perfume”. We can see this feature in the social life and fancies of the main character. When the main character meets Najva, the writer describes the scene precisely and approaches the border of dark romanticism. In this story, the main character just smokes, but the repetition of the same concept of opium can be a motif to show the destructiveness and darkness throughout the story. In addition to the protagonist's excessive use of cigarettes as a mental sedative, there are his judgments about the use of opium by others, who look at it in a positive light, a view that is contrary to rationality and logic. This is because we are talking about the mentality of a character who has all the components of dark romanticism.