Literary Imagination of Archetype of Fire in the Story of Siavash, Based on the Views of Gaston Bachelard

Fire played an important role in the lives of Indo-Europeans in the ancient; at the time of Zarathustra, it was considered as the representation of hygiene and purity. In Mazdayasna it is the symbol of life. Strength and power, brilliance and imperishability, purity and cleansing are among other factors that would attract human attention to the fire. Gaston Bachelard (1884 to 1962) is a French epistemologist, philosopher, literary critic and an earlier structuralist who simultaneously considers the material world and the issues of the daily life and also explores the world of poetry and poetic imagination. Bachelard emphasis on analyzes of fire imagination, reminds the interpretations of Karl Gustav Yung. In his opinion, the fire in an element which can be validated in a contradictory, dual manner: it is the emblem of virtue and the embodiment of evil, it glows in heaven and burns in hell, and it is both convenience and agony. Bachelard believes that every poet pays attention to one of the four elements and, to recognize the true poet, one must consider their degree of distance and closeness to these elements. In fact, the purpose of literary criticism of Gaston Bachelard is to train the reader to better understand works of art and to find the convergences of science, psychology and literary imagination; Thus, by looking at the fire element in the story of Siavash, this article attempts to explain the earlier notions of human imagination in the magnum opus of Ferdowsi