"The Falling of the Dusk"

The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat

Hegel's profound insight into our historical blindness has been affirmed again and again in recent decades--understanding comes too late, history preempts reflection and therefore wisdom. The Owl of Minerva flies before the falling of the dusk.

But in one respect Hegel was incorrect: some persons do see the truth, as it were in advance of its unfolding. There are false prophets to be sure, usually hawking a future that will bring them riches and power, but there are genuine prophets as well.  Hedayat was one such. Long before the fateful combination of autocratic power and fundamentalist religion (the creation, in part, of foreign meddling and Western greed) conspired to undo Iran's historical and cultural greatness, Hedayat foretold the event in his writings. Like many other prophets, Hedayat succumbed to his visionary power.

The tension between Western ideas and the cultural traditions of the rest of the world--the subject of so much great literature--manifested itself in the life and art of Hedayat,* the finest of Iranian modernist writers.  He was obsessed with the novelists and poets of his generation who were expanding the boundaries of fiction and the understanding of the psychological turmoil imposed on ordinary men and women by progress, urbanization, and war.  Hedayat read Kafka and Chekhov, Rilke and Poe, while at the same time immersing himself in Persian literature, folklore, and history.  His literary works seek a balance between tradition and the tumultuous change that was the touchstone of his age (he was born in 1900).  He believed in the power of literature to awaken his countrymen to the dangers of complacency, the risks inherent in obedience to a monarch and to a clergy that dominated intellectual and emotional life in Iran.  He felt unheeded and ignored, and was driven to despair, exile, and, in 1951, suicide.

The Blind Owl is Hedayat's only novel and a classic of modern Iranian fiction. It is a strange, hallucinatory book, overwrought and almost mystical in style and content. The story--as much a dream as a traditional plot--focuses on the obsessions of a solitary Iranian artist (he decorates pen cases) with a woman who haunts his wine- and opium-induced visions.  As I read the The Blind Owl I kept thinking of Poe's "Lenore," and finally found the lines in Hedayat's strong predecessor that I had been dimly recalling:

"Let no bell toll!--lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth, 
Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned earth."

This sentiment, and the mysterious Lenore, are typical not only of Poe but of dozens of European romantics and haunt The Blind Owl. She is the mysterious woman who dies in the artist's garret and who possesses the sublimity and inexplicable power of the tubercular Clavdia Chauchat in Mann's vision of cultural decay or of Maria Timofeevna in Demons--insubstantial (diseased!) women whose proximity to death raises their value as objects of sexless adoration. To love the dying (or dead, in the case of Poe) Feminine is to slip free of a world that is horrifying in its banality and coarseness. One can find rich studies of this construct of ideas in Leslie Fiedler or Camille Paglia.

"I often used to recall the days of my childhood in order to forget the present, in order to escape from myself."  

"Sometimes I imagined that the visions I saw were those which appeared to everyone who was at the point of death. All anxiety, awe, fear and will to live had subsided within me and my renunciation of the religious beliefs which had been inculcated into me in my childhood had given me an extraordinary inner tranquility. What comforted me was the prospect of oblivion after death.....I had never been able to adapt myself to the world in which I was now living." 

Romantic modernism. The second half of The Blind Owl--actually a novella thematically linked to the first half of the book which reprises the same themes at an even higher pitch--evokes not only Poe but T.S. Eliot, especially "The Four Quartets:"


"Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,
The silent withering of autumn flowers
Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;
Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,
The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable
Prayer at the calamitous annunciation?"  

("The Dry Salvages" II)

What is going on here?  It's facile and reductive to point to Hedayat's despair and suicide, to his inability to live in a present that mocked the things he believed in--individual autonomy, the dangers of religion, vegetarianism (yes, Hedayat is among the most ardent defenders of animals), the sanctity of art.  The weight of personal despair plays a role in Hedayat's work and gives it much of its power, but more important is the fact that he was a committed cosmopolitan, a believer in the universal value and transformative power of literature at a time when only blood and iron and money and nationalism stirred the masses of men.  The romantic modernist isn't just nostalgic for a vanished past; he has recognized that there can be no compromise with the present without losing one's soul. Better to die, or remain silent (same thing if you are a writer) than to rage against the inevitable.

Stefan Zweig, Nietzsche, Kafka, Robert Walser, and, reaching back further, Leopardi, Trakl, Novalis--Hedayat is in their company, a man out of time, in the wrong place, feeling too deeply and being too unwilling to give up the things for which he lived.  Until cynicism came along to save us from being serious, the deep thinkers and great souls had no choice but to succumb to the machines. To the "bots" as we now affectionately call them, To the Shahs and Ayatollah's, to the gruff liars and self-seekers. I'm not fond of the notion of the "rabble," but I don't know Persian so I will let Hedayat's translated words stand:

"What relationship could exist between the lives of the fools and healthy rabble who were well, who slept well, who performed the sexual act well, who had never felt the wings of death on their face every moment—what relationship could exist between them and one like me who has arrived at the end of his rope and who knows that he will pass away gradually and tragically?"

George Ovitt (3/19/18)

The Blind Owl, translated by D.P. Costello, is published by Grove Press.

*I have relied on the Encyclopedia Iranica for details of Hedayat's life and work.  There is no biography in English or French that I am aware of; I have not been able to secure a copy of On the Damp Road: A Walk With Sadegh Hedayat, by Seheyl Dahl.