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Hedayat, The Blind Owl and the City

Chapter · October 2020

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_279-1

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Metadata of the chapter that will be visualized online
Chapter Title Hedayat, The Blind Owl and the City
Copyright Year 2020
Copyright Holder The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Corresponding Author Family Name Bidgoli
Particle
Given Name Mehrdad
Suffix
Organization/University University of Isfahan
City Isfahan
Country Iran
Abstract In this entry, I will focus on Hedayat’s The Blind Owl and consider its few
urban descriptions and treatments of Rayy (ancient Tehran). It turns out
that as a modern novella, it is not separated from urbanity and the city, but
the way it is connected with urban spaces is minimally and peculiarly
untypical and in line with Hedayat’s “psycho-fictions.” The city and its
treatment thus become crooked and dark, in line with its perceiver (the
narrator), and sometimes peculiarly/bitterly dignified.
Keywords Hedayat - Iran - Nostalgia - Rayy - Tehran - The Blind Owl - The city -
(separated by “-”) Flaneur
H

Hedayat, The Blind Owl and psychoanalysis which were prevalent topics in
the City Hedayat’s time. He had read Freud, Sartre, and
Camus widely among others. Hedayat’s master-
Mehrdad Bidgoli piece is also mainly under this influence much
University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran more than culture and the city. Even so, there are
a few descriptions of and musings on culture, the
city and city roaming in The Blind Owl (1936–7)
Introduction which merit a brief rethinking. As a typical mod-
ern text, it also depicts man and space as entangled
A few days after Hedayat’s suicide in his apart- and interdependent.
ment in France in 1951, Ruznameh-ye Iran (Iran
Newspaper), while lamenting this great loss,
wrote: Summary of the Novella
It was Hedayat who pioneered “literature at the
service and for the use of people” . . . His writings The first-person narrative of this novella is
are usually criticized for talking immorally and divided into two parts. Part One is narrated by
accounting for the miseries of people in the most the broken tone of a lovelorn, solitary pen-case
beautiful and versatile method, but we forget that
the real writer is the one who offers the most vivid painter who, out of pure accident, sees for a
and transparent pictures of his society and sur- moment an ethereal and magical girl while resid-
roundings; it is in the writings of [such] a writer ing in his room. After seeing that rather static and
that the spiritual, economic and even political mood evanescent image, he almost goes mad with love
and externality of different classes of a certain
period of a country is glanced at and understood. and cannot think about anything but the girl. He
(Hedayat 1967: 6) begins to roam around the city trying to find a
trace of her and one night, when he returns home,
This is a correct view of most of Hedayat’s social
he mysteriously finds the girl behind his door. He
and satirical works, while his “psycho-fictions”
opens the door and the girl, somehow spontane-
(such as Buried Alive, Three Drops of Blood,
ously and mechanically, goes in and finds his
“David the Hunchback”) are mainly stories of
room. She lies on his bed and when the man tries
self-exploration, existential angst, and death,
to give her a drink, he finds that she is already
often filled with philosophical depictions of the
dead, “as though she had died several days ago”
abyss of self and the darkness of solitude (see my
(Hedayat 2013: 23).
entry “Hedayat, Sadegh”). These can obliquely or
The man, as if trying to revive her, lies beside
directly be traced to existentialism and
her to give her warmth and breath, but she is
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
J. Tambling (ed.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_279-1
2 Hedayat, The Blind Owl and the City

already gone. Then he tries to immortalize her by various disguises, his wife’s lovers. He finally
painting her face. With an emphasis (or fixation) decides to kill the woman herself and end this
on her eyes, the man begins to paint her face but is agony.
unable to finish the eyes. Through some sort of He disguises himself as the old man and, fail-
magic, the girl opens her eyes for some moments ing once, finally goes in to finish her with a knife.
and then closes them, and we cannot be sure if she He finds that the woman welcomes him in her
was revived for a moment or if it was the man’s room. They violently embrace and the woman
imagination. Only then he succeeds in drawing bites the man’s lip. With his eyes closed and
the pair of her magical eyes. Then he dismembers suffering immense pain, the man pierces the
her body and puts the parts in a suit case and goes girl’s eye with his knife and kills her. When he
out to the cemetery to bury her. A mysterious old horridly returns to his room, he finds the eye of the
man (the same old figure continually recurs, woman in his hand but he sees in a mirror that he
almost traumatically, throughout the novella) now looks exactly like the old rag-and-bone man,
accosts him and takes him there with his carriage. with swollen, red eyes, a leprous lip, covered in
In the cemetery, the old man helps the narrator blood. There is a return to the present time at the
to dig a grave. The man takes one final look at the end of the novella which connects the two parts
girl’s eyes and then buries the suit case. While together.
burying her, they find an old jar in the grave. The
old man gives it to the narrator and they return
home. When the man goes in to give something to Reading the Novella
the old man in return of his favor, the old man
disappears. Then the man mysteriously notices a It is suggested by some critics that the Owl is
pair of eyes on the jar like the one he had already somehow concerned with romantic nationalism
painted. Now he feels broken and deeply lost. to which Hedayat adhered until at least the early
Then he drinks and uses opium and then is 1940s. We know that this masterpiece was written
plunged to the far past in a trance, most probably in the middle of his writing career (published in
to the Rayy of the middle ages. 1315 in the Islamic calendar [i.e., 1937], but writ-
The man now feels like “a stooped old man ten and revised at least a few years or so before
with white hair, sore eyes and a leprous lip” this date) when he still had a romantic/nationalis-
(Hedayat 2013: 33). The second longer part nar- tic tendency and praise for the ancient Iranian
rates a similar love story but much more bluntly, civilization; the pinnacle of these tendencies can
with numerous sexual innuendoes. Many Freud- be seen in his historical plays Parvin, the Sasanid
ian ideas can be traced especially in this second Girl (1930–1) and Maziar (1934). Though The
part: his uncle’s incestuous desire for his mother, Blind Owl contains few descriptions of urban
the man’s Oedipal desires, his hatred for his father spaces and studies on this topic are scarce (see
and love for his mother, his love for a “whore” Lalbakhsh and Torkamaneh 2016), there are still
(36) who looks like the ethereal girl of the first part words to say on Tehran and Rayy (ancient Tehran)
and is seemingly his (half?) sister, a desire which constituting the background of the novella. In this
is incestuous as well. He marries the woman, but entry, I discuss the way the dim urban pictures
she does not allow him to consummate the mar- scattered in the text are intertwined with the nar-
riage. She also appears to have other lovers, all of rator’s wounded and surreal internality and per-
whom look like the old man of the first part (they ception, sometimes purposefully blurring the
are perhaps one and the same). The man wanders distinction between delusion and reality.
throughout the old city and looks for the lovers, The first short part of the novella (Hedayat
but is unable to find and kill them (or him); he only 2013: 16–32) takes place in an unspecified and
repeatedly sees an old man with a leprous lip and unknown suburb of Tehran during the first quarter
disgusting laughs, a butcher, a “rag-and-bone of the 1300s (1920s–1940s; see Katouzian 1993:
dealer” (46), all of whom seem to be one in 146–8), while the second longer part (Hedayat
Hedayat, The Blind Owl and the City 3

2013: 32–66) takes us back in time, presumably to (Hedayat 2013: 17). The description of the narra-
the middle ages and the city of Rayy. Iraj Bashiri tor’s residence in the second part becomes more
(the second translator of the novella, after D. P. vivid and typical of medieval times, but its quality
Costello) describes Rayy in a footnote on the first somehow embitters and worsens: “Like all other
mention of its name: rooms, my room, made of sun-dried and baked
The ancient city of Rayy (also referred to as bricks, is built on the ruins of thousands of ancient
Rhages) was Iran’s capital under the Seljuqs (11th houses. . . It is exactly like a grave. The smallest
and 12th centuries [CE calendar]). As a Silk Road details of my room, like the spider in the corner,
city, Rayy was host to both merchants and invaders. are sufficient to occupy my thoughts for many
It was sacked and razed by the Mongols in 1220.
Attempts at its restoration were not successful. (28) long hours” (34). This description becomes more
ambivalent, mixed with more bitterness and irony:
The city of Rayy is mentioned several times dur-
My room has a dark closet and two windows to the
ing this novella (see Hedayat 2013: 26, 28–9, outside – to the world of the rabble. One of the
35–6, 38, 45, 51, 57, 61, 64). In the first part, it windows opens onto our own courtyard, the other
is twice referred to directly by the old man who onto the street. Through this window, and that
takes the narrator to the cemetery. This coincides street, I am connected with the city of Rayy, the
so-called “bride of the world,” with thousands of
with the burial of the mutilated body of the narra- streets, alleys, unpretentious houses, madrasahs
tor’s beloved and unearthing an ancient jar [a theological school, like a mosque], and caravan-
belonging to Rayy (28–9). The closest thing that saries [a resting place for travelers, like an inn]. This
comes to mind in this regard is the sense of per- biggest city of the world lives and breathes behind
my room. Here, when I close my eyes, the scram-
sonal loss which is somehow mingled with a bled shadows of the city, those that affect me –
generational and national lament and loss (the mansions, mosques and gardens – all materialize
narrator’s personal unconscious, if we can say in the corner of my room before my eyes. (35)
this, might somehow come to grips with the col-
On the one hand, the “bride of the world” and
lective national unconscious). My general reading
“biggest city of the world” are highly ironic
of the significance of the city of Rayy (present in
phrases that only cast a shadowy weight over the
the unconscious of the man and somehow acti-
narrator’s shoulder and on his mind, highlighting
vated in the cemetery) is that the setting and
his restlessness and sense of loss; later on, the man
incidents of the first part presumably sets the
even feels “thick, yellow and deathly clouds”
scene for the narrator’s ecstatic, hallucinatory
weighing “heavily on the city” (53).
remembrance of the second part and acts as its
On the other hand, perhaps it is partly due to
background to highlight the narrator’s loss. This
the wounded, abnormal, and surreal perception of
might lie behind the fact that reading the second
the man that the few descriptions of the neighbor-
part first, as Hassan Kamshad famously suggested
hood, houses, alleys, streets, city outskirts, and the
(1966: 176), can be a good strategy to understand
cemetery to south of the city (“Shah Abdul Azim”
the novella better. But still, we should keep in
[26], in the first part) are mostly dark (even
mind that with the progression of this complex
“black”), broken, “crooked,” ugly, and unsettling
narrative, one can observe that the urban pictures
ones (27). As the narrator says toward the end of
fluctuate and become more/less strange, irrational,
the first part, he sees “strange houses with
and frightening.
distorted geometrical shapes and a few black win-
This background is not a normal one and gets
dows. An evil, dull radiance, like the light from a
worse as the novella progresses. For one thing,
glowworm, emanated from the walls of these
the narrator initially feels lucky to live “outside
houses” (30) which, according to Katouzian,
the city, in a quiet and restful spot, away from the
“are deformed, cut into pieces, inhuman”
hustle and bustle of people’s lives. Its boundaries
(Katouzian 1993: 147), quite unlike the regular
are well defined and ruins surround it. Between
“geometry of the city” and the city as “a living
here and the ditch there are some low mudbrick
thing” that Don Martindale is concern with
houses; the city begins beyond the ditch”
4 Hedayat, The Blind Owl and the City

(Weber 1958: 10); the city, if anything, is mostly and windows are personified with dark and
(if not wholly) a dead thing in the Owl (see, for deathly imageries. Soon the narrator buries his
instance, Hedayat 2013: 52). But it is difficult to beloved and finds the jar of Rayy which is remi-
say which one weighs heavier: the man himself niscent of the old city. There is a recurrent song
and his wounded perception or his (urban) sur- which, during the second part of the novella and
roundings. The relation seems mutual: the man is most probably not unrelated to the sentiments of
of course deeply and internally troubled and the first part, continually throbs inside the skull of
cracked, yet there is not enough vitality in his the narrator, reminding him of Rayy and/or of a
surroundings to cheer him up either. great (emotional) loss: “let us go and drink mey – /
The wine of the kingdom of Rayy;/If not today,
then what day?” (repeated on pages 51, 57, 61, 64;
Alienation and Nostalgia “mey” in Persian is a formal, literary word for
wine). Recurrences and repetitions are common
For the critic Jamshid Mesbahipoor-Iranian, in the Owl, actually constituting one of its
Hedayat’s descriptions are usually filled with (absurdist and/or psychological) elements. The
regret and nostalgia, and therefore give not a way this piece of song is repeated is, however,
direct, realist picture but an idealist one, the way aligned with bitterness and mental unsettlement;
he likes his surroundings to be, and the way he there is a “carpe diem” sentiment as well as com-
tries to connect the Iran of his own time to that of fort or greatness, but these are not actualized in the
ancient Persia (Mesbahipoor-Iranian 1980: course of the novella and this seems both a
117–120). In this sense, perhaps Hedayat tries to distressing and ironic recurrence for the reader
connect Tehran with its original identity (Rayy), as well.
preventing its gradual transformation into a non- In fact, Hedayat uses this background – even
place which has no history, background, and iden- though vaguely and obscurely, with little direct
tity (see Augé 1995: 77–78). It is an attempt to treatment – probably for the romantic and nation-
turn a modern city into a City-of-Old, which is alist undertones, both of which can be mysteri-
almost an impossibility (see the entry Heurtebise, ously related to his narrator’s emotional loss. The
▶ “City-Without-Any-Quality (CWAQ) and Its city, its surroundings and towns are there, some-
Counterparts” in this encyclopedia). how untouched, but with their essentially dead
A vivid, but strange and dark urban (or rural?) and deathly inhabitants. There is no distinction
picture comes earlier, when the narrator is being at times between the man’s imaginations
taken by the old man to the cemetery located in the (or projections) and reality: at one point, with the
far south of Tehran: closing of his eyes, the man sees “a vague world
A thick fog covered the scenery on both sides of the materialized before me, a world wholly of my
road. The hearse was passing mountains, plains, own making, compatible with my thoughts and
and rivers with a special speed and comfort. Around observations. Anyway, it was a world of wakeful-
me now a new and unique scene, one that I had seen ness in which no obstacles or impasses barred my
neither in a dream nor in wakefulness, came to view.
On both sides of the road there were mountains with thoughts and imagination” (52). Following this
serrated, jagged tops and strange, suppressed, equivocal description, the narrator goes on with
cursed trees. From among the trees grey, triangular, the dark urban picture and a flaneur-like
cubic and prismatic houses with dark, low windows description:
without panes, were visible. These windows resem-
bled the giddy eyes of one who is experiencing a I found myself walking and breathing freely in the
delirious fever. There was something in those walls streets of an unknown city. The houses in this city
that transferred their coldness and chill into a man’s were built in strange geometrical shapes: prismatic,
heart. It looked as if no living being could dwell in conic and cubic; they had dark, low windows with
these houses. (27) lily plants clinging to the doors and windows. The
inhabitants of the city had died a strange death; they
This description brings to mind some of Edgar were all petrified in their places and two drops of
Allan Poe’s stories in which mansions, houses, blood had run from their mouths to their clothes.
Hedayat, The Blind Owl and the City 5

Whichever I touched, his head broke off and fell In this regard, Lalbakhsh and Torkamaneh are
down. (52) correct to write that “the ethereal girl of The
Though Lalbakhsh and Torkamaneh who, empha- Blind Owl represents a fading picture of Ray
sizing the descriptions such as those of the first [y] and its long gone residents” (2016: 148). The
part (see, for instance, Hedayat 2013: 20), firmly way the narrator tries to immortalize her and her
believe that the narrator is “by no means. . . a elaborate, mysterious, and glorious gaze through
flaneur” (2016: 147), I think Hedayat’s treatments his art (he is a pen case painter) is a trial that is also
mostly blur any distinction between purposeful tied to the lost glory of her city.
and purposeless ramblings, and prevent any firm Similarly, Hedayat’s Owl as a work of art does
decisions on this issue. The uncanny excerpt is the same in depicting a bleak and broken outskirt
typical of the atmosphere of The Blind Owl. To of Tehran – with no direct mention of the name –
call it a lament or a result of the narrator’s mental and ideally connecting it with Rayy in order to
woundedness and/or psychosis is not easy: both redeem and recapture its lost glory. But it is almost
seem arguable. There are also critics who believe a fateful and tragic trial which at least in reality
that the novella narrates both realities and ideali- cannot attain its goal (to what extent does this
zations with little reference to the historical reality matter to the narrator or Hedayat himself?). In
of its time (see Katouzian 1993: 147–8) and there the second part, the girl as an emblem or symbol
are others who think that there are oblique refer- of the glory of his past and Rayy becomes a
ences to the bleak Tehran of its time, the general haunting memory (described as a whore
zeitgeist, the rise of bourgeoisie, God and every- [“lakkāteh”) sticking to him and tormenting him.
thing as money (similar to Agamben’s idea about Finally, the man finds the girl in line with the
today’s world), as well as preoccupations with the wretchedness of his time and murders her in the
ancient Persia (see Mesbahipoor-Iranian 1980: hopes of freeing himself from the suffocating
120–3). The opening pages of The Morvari Can- environment and the shadow of the whore and
non as well as some of his letters are suggestive of her lovers. But with the final paragraphs of the
the way Hedayat was highly critical of the rising novella, we see that he has strangely been turned
interest in money and materiality with no control into the old rabble he had repeatedly encountered,
over economy by the emerging capitalistic gov- and has been returned to his present, bleak time
ernments (see, for instance, Hedayat 1976: esp. with which the novella had opened (see Hedayat
14–15). 2013: 65–66).
The fact that the city is sometimes idealized
and glorified is also clear on certain occasions. At Acknowledgments I am grateful to dear Dr. Ali
Gheissari, the chief editor of Iranian Studies, for providing
one point for instance, the narrator bestows a me with a copy of Iraj Bashiri’s admirable translation of
magnificent (ethical or emotional?) otherness on The Blind Owl which was previously unavailable to me.
the girl of his dreams (the fact that he could not
call her to mind and totalize her in his memory)
and relates her to memories of distant past; here
the city of Rayy becomes Hedayat’s tool for this Works Cited
specific rendering:
Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: Introduction to an anthro-
No matter how hard I tried I could not remember pology of supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London:
whether she was real or a figment of my imagina- Verso.
tion; whether I saw her in a dream or in wakeful- Hedayat, Sadegh. 1967 (1995). Beliefs and thoughts about
ness. I felt a special tremor in the column of my Sadeq Hedayat after his death. Tehran: Bahr-e Khazar.
spine and it seemed to me that all the shadows in the Hedayat, Sadegh. 1976. The Morvari Cannon. Tehran:
fort on the mountain came to life and that that girl Tose’e-ye Edālat Ins.
was one of the ancient citizens of the city of Rayy. Hedayat, Sadegh. 2013 (1974, 1984). The blind owl
(Hedayat 2013: 45) (1936–7). Trans. Iraj Bashiri. Available on http://
w w w. a n g e l fi r e . c o m / r n b / b a s h i r i / B l i n d O w l /
blindowl2013.pdf
6 Hedayat, The Blind Owl and the City

Kamshad, Hassan. 1966. Modern Persian prose literature. blind owl and city of glass. GEMA Online ® Journal of
Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Language Studies 16 (2): 141–153.
Katouzian, Homa. 1993. Sādeq Hedāyat: Az Afsaneh ta Mesbahipoor-Iranian, Jamshid. 1980. Social reality and
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