Khavarannama Actantial Narrative Structure A Greimasian Study on “The Conquest of Khaybar Fort by Imam Ali”

 One of the most significant contributions of structuralism is narratology.  The composition forms the narration in the image, the relation between pictorial elements, and their hidden static and dynamic interactions.  Narrative phenomena are not investigated separately and independently, but their relations are. Persian paintings are full of undiscovered hidden meanings. Literary methods are used to analyse the semantic structure of them.
Semiotics, provides various tools for reading the structure of visual and literary texts. The "Paris school" of semiotics, which is based on "the study of the relationships between signs and how they express meaning in the text", has several structuralist models for analysing and describing the meaning of the text, and the " actantial model" of Greimas is one of these deductive structuralist methods.
Algirdas Julien Greimas, the most famous theorist of narratology, went beyond Propp’s studies with his actantial model to reach the grammar of narration. His flexible narratology model is adaptable to literary and non-literal texts. So, the main structure of the narration could be analysed. The main characteristic of narration is having a beginning and end.   Each story is a collection of plots that could be formed of several principal and sub-narratives. The plot is the sequential unit of time that is made of literal, behavioral, and thoughtful acts.
The linguistic, especially the phonemic progress of the child obey the same laws of implication. The human mind is formed of the oppositions which organises the perception of nature on the basis of the outside world. If the child's acquisition of distinction B implies is the acquisition of distinction A, the loss of A in aphasia implies the absence of B, and the rehabilitation of the aphasic follows the same order as the child's phonemic development. The same laws of implication under the languages of the world both in their static and dynamic aspects. The presence of B implies the presence of A and, correspondingly, B cannot emerge in the phonemic pattern of a language unless A is there. Likewise, A cannot disappear from a language as long as B exists. Therefore, his “Elementary structure of signification” is explained using the oppositions, consisting of a four-membered device A:B::-A:-B that works in every sign system. The members of this opposing system are A, and its opposite B. The negation of A means - A, the negation of B means -B. He believes that each narration includes two representation levels: immanent which holds the semantic and structural characteristics and manifestation level. The actantial model is laid at the immanent level by which the narration structure is analyzed. So according to him, the underlying level of narratives is significant. Therefore, the narration chain allows the presence of oppositions by confrontations of actants with principal acts.
Like the language, the grammar of narration is limited. He develops his “actantial model” relying on Propp’s narratological experiences on fairy tales which is used for the interpretation of texts and images‌. The “actantial model” consists of six components on three axes: the axis of desire consists of the Subject/Object, the axis of power includes Helper/Opponent, and finally the axis of transmission whit the opponents of Sender/Receiver.
                                                                                                
 
The subject is what is directed toward an object. The relationship established between the subject and the object is called a junction. Depending on whether the object is conjoined with the subject or disjoined it is called a conjunction or a disjunction. The helper assists in achieving the desired junction between the subject and object; the opponent hinders the same. The sender is the element requesting the establishment of the junction between subject and object. The receiver is the element for which the quest is being undertaken. To simplify, the receiver is as that which benefits from achieving the junction between subject and object. Sender elements are often receiver elements as well. The mythical structure of text is formed based on the most dominant pair: Subject/Object. Greimas believes that the basic structure of meaning in all the texts is made of the pair of desire and the pair of power. They make the “elementary structure of signification”; A:B::-A:-B. These three groups of actants perform three types of narrative coexistence structures.
From the standpoint of natural ontology (which defines what kinds of beings, broadly speaking, make up reality), an actant may correspond to: (1) an anthropomorphic being (2) a concrete, inanimate element, including things, although not limited to the concrete, (3) a concept. An actant may be individual or collective. In theory, the six actants may belong to any of the three ontological categories. In actual application, there are some common exclusions: subjects, senders and receivers tend to belong to the category of anthropomorphic beings. However, if one defines the sender as the element that acts, voluntarily or not, to elicit either wanting-to-do or having-to-do the action, then it can belong to any of the three ontological categories.
Since one of the prominent characteristics of Persian Painting is its dependence on literary texts and the narration of these texts, it has been tried to investigate the narrative syntactic structure in the painting by relying on the characteristics of the narrative provided by Greimas’ actantial model while explaining this model. “The Conquest of Khaybar Fort by Imam Ali” is discussed from Khavarannama of Ibn Hossam Khusfi Birjandi. The research is of a descriptive-analytical type, the analysis tool of Greimas’ actantial model and the method of collecting documentary information using written and sources. The research tries to answer the main question: what is the relationship between the dual confrontations in the narrative chain of conquering Khaybar fort? Based on this, the problem of the research is to know the impact of the relationship between the dual confrontations on the visual structure of the painting of the conquest of Khaybar Castle.
While describing the structural elements of the narrative, the temporal relations governing the picture are extracted and analyzed. The analysis of narrative is done by reducing the actants into three axes of opposing couples. Then, by identifying and comparing the three categories of opposite pairs in the picture, their action subcategories are checked to identify the certainty and probability, active or passive performance of the action. The result of this investigation along with the proof of the establishment of time succession relationships; inclusive simultaneity, strict simultaneity and simultaneity- succession, immediate and mediate simultaneity reveals the transformation of time relations into space and shows the visual and action compatibility of the image with new narrative patterns and finally the compatibility of the narrative in the image with the syntactic structure.
The “Actantial Model” helped to investigate the immanent and manifestation levels of the structure in both literary and pictorial texts and the findings prove the narrative structure of them. Accompanying the text, the painter has tried to use a reductionist approach by depicting the concepts in the opponents of up/down, left/right, and big/small as the characteristics of the image.   According to the actantial model, the compliance of the image and poetry can be seen in the form of the reduction of the characters in the image into three opposing pairs, at the basic level of the text. On the other hand, it was observed that all the characters of the painting have the ability to be analyzed by sub-categories of actants. The painter has used the visual opponents artistically to demonstrate the semantic concepts of power/weakness, good/evil, and victory/defeat, which places the most important actants of the narration into the model and forms the main narrative structure of the narration: the victory of good over evil.
In alignment of text and image, the temporal sequence in the literary narrative is preserved in some parts of the image and is transformed into a spatial placement which is the artist's skill to preserve the narration's temporal sequence. This is the expression of simultaneity in Persian painting. At the superstructure level of the text, the syntagmatic relations of components in the form of performancial, contractual, and disjunctional of various components in connection with the basic level are seen to complete the narration structure.
Finally, the verbal signs of the literary text are not used as an ornamental component, but as a part that completes the narration with other signs, and has an active presence in the occurrence of the event.
Therefore, it could be said, in actantial analysing a text it is possible to reach its essence by sub-narrative and metanarrative analysis, hence considering the validity of “The Khaybar Fort is Conquered by Imam Ali” narrative and the narrative chain which governs the texts it could be possible to generalise the results to other narratives of the manuscript.