The Blind Owl (2 page)

Everything else, we could say, is a fiction, rooted in sources so entirely mysterious that indeed
The Blind Owl,
while feeling “real,” seems to be born of a world all its own, a tale far beyond the experience of its author, any author—certainly, luckily.

Hedayat was thirty-three when the work was first self-published in India, its initial incarnation being fifty copies of handwritten text distributed for circulation among friends with a “not for sale in Iran” note on it, due to Hedayat's initial discouraging encounters with Iranian censors. Iran, two and a half decades after its Constitutional Revolution, and a decade after the tail-end of the Qajar dynasty and the beginning of the Pahlavi dynasty with the establishment of Reza Shah's reign, had experienced rapid authoritarian modernization and secularization with the British and the Russians salivating over the prospect of Iranian oil, while the Shah's regime created invisible shackles over the masses
through propaganda and censorship. This was how Iran turned Western and fast, a place where Islamic traditionalism and Western modernization were at a tug-of-war. This era of cultural crossroads heralded many decades of such awkward seesawing of old and new, tradition and progress, crises of identity of which Iran still, clearly, is deeply embroiled. For Hedayat, neither the clergy nor the monarchy held the answers, neither the common man nor the elite intelligentsia; he was at once at odds with not just his country, as many have been quick to conclude, but his era. Sadly, one could assume he'd be no better off in this era, as he would, no doubt, like myself, be an immigrant in an exile of no foreseeable end.

After serialization in the journal
Iran
in 1941–1942, the history of
The Blind Owl
has been largely a hide and seek with authority. It was published again in 1993 but censored, banned from the 18th Tehran International Book Fair in 2005, and publication rights were withdrawn as a part of a 2006 sweeping purge. But it's a testament to the text that it has never come close to a circulation hiatus among the people.

Was it simply the gore that made it unacceptable to the establishment? I think it was its intertwining of cultural dualities, which was quintessentially more Hedayat than any other aspect of the work. Novelistic prose did not really exist in Persian before the twentieth century, and whereas the early Iranian novels were historical novels written by
academics and intellectuals, this was something altogether different from even its different status as a novel. Hedayat was, after all, pretty much bicultural, and
The Blind Owl,
as many have declared, is in certain ways a Western novel following and even making indentations in the European tradition. Hedayat was in many ways partially French: he attended a French school, the St. Louis missionary school in Tehran; he had a state grant to study in France, and he himself claimed he was a lifelong student of French literature; he died in Paris and was buried in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery. He was as Western as he was Eastern and the same could be said for the novel—it's truly Middle Eastern or West Asian, one could say. And this is arguably the Iranian condition or at least its modern condition, that the left and right of Iran always feared to face—a nation of constant conquest, perpetual displacement, and exile, a country of homeland seekers with a destination only in their ancient past. Hedayat could not find solace in Tehran society and yet in Paris he could not find peace either. He was the Iranian nationalist who, fed up with the corruptions of church and state alike, was perpetually looking westward; he was also the foreigner in Europe, whose daily life was endless Visa applications and intense economic hardship, whose eyes were cast to the comforts of his mother country where he was of the aristocracy. And like these contradictions, so existed
The Blind Owl,
whose biggest challenge, one could assume, was that of audience—many Western literary references
were lost on Iranian audiences and many Iranian folkloric descriptions were alien to Western readers, and yet the book held its place among both readerships. Influence spotting has led scholars all over the place, from the implausible to the certain, academics claiming Buddhist doctrine, Jung, Rilke, Poe, Sartre, and Kafka in its pages—but no matter what, no one denies the book is as Eastern and Western as it rejects both as well. One of the aspects of
The Blind Owl
that kept it alive for me while working on my own novel—a truly hyphenate work in that it is equally Iranian and American—was that it felt like our first truly hyphenate work, Hedayat embodying the
first
true Iranian immigrant, a both reluctant and ecstatic pioneer of the West.

Part of the agreement in setting on the journey of a truly hybridized work is accepting its polarities. With
The Blind Owl,
we are taught to read a novel all over again—in its pages there exists a collection of codes, variants, repetitions, cycles . . . and there is no index, glossary, footnoting, or critical-analysis consensus even. We are left alone, very alone, to read unlike we have ever read before.

We have on one hand a Gothic romance narrative and on the other hand an expressionist whodunit allegory, both equally problematized by the innovative structure: a novel in two novellas, its twin narrative sections playing for
and against each other. In Part I, our narrator is a painter whose vocation is to paint a single picture on pen cases. In Part II, there is no mention of him being an artist and instead he is the confessor, a writer telling his story to, we can assume, save whatever is left of his sanity. Interestingly, the pen case holds the tools of a writer, while the first part exists as a distorted dream recollection of the second's summarized confession of the past. In other words, the first part is the present in the form of a dream, while the second is the past in the form of a confession—and already, the algorithm is a precarious one, no doubt.

But the dualities continue. The artist of the first part, Beard notes, is immersed in a platonic love state, given the task of representing his muse, the beautiful young woman who, like an angel, appears at his door only to die in his bed. She opens her eyes for a moment within the clasp of death, apparently so our artist can render them in his art, and then she is nothing but fodder for an exhausting burial that involves one of the novel's many old men, a sinister hearse driver. In Part II, everything is the first part's negative: the writer is feverish from carnal love for his cheating whore-like wife who is just a door over, holding court in her bedroom, which he, the husband, banishes himself from in favor of his tomb-like room. But what is ingenious about this simple set-up is all the multiples and recyclings and variations on not just a few finite themes but a few finite images. Beard notes the novel features the same actors playing
different characters over and over. We have several old men: uncle, gravedigger, odds-and-ends man, the narrator; we have several young women as well: the woman on the pen case, the woman he spies outside the ventilation hole of his home, the angel at his door, the wife, the wife's brother, his mother. Scenes also mirror one another, just as action and art imitate each other; the scene on the pen case reflects the scene outside the ventilation hole, which mirrors the scene on an ancient jar unearthed at the girl's burial in the first part, which mirrors his mother's final dance. Not only is this style simply dazzling in its innovation, it points to an opposite effect—recycled communal imagery that implies a certain paucity of the imagination or miserly economy of action or, just simply, tiring reworkings of a scenario for it's own sake. Such rearranging, scrambling, and skewing of an already sleek novel's minimalist furnishings is just not done in fiction, then or now or ever, we can assume. It requires, at its very least, the closest of multiple readings and, at its very most, conscientious code-breaking dissection.

In referencing Michael Beard so many times, I think it's important to point out he wrote perhaps the greatest study of the novel,
Hedayat's
Blind Owl
as a Western Novel
. It inspired me to write to him and ask how he came about discovering this book. It was apparently while he was in Peace Corps training in Iran. “I had a fever the evening I read it. I had
recently picked it up in the reading room and figured it might be a good companion. It was a perfect companion. Alone, late at night in an unfamiliar place I felt in tune with it. It was a seductive book even before I understood it. The memory of it lingered after we went to our sites (I was teaching high school in Rafsanjan, then a small town). In Peace Corps pedagogy you speak before you can read, and as I was slowly becoming literate in Persian, it was one of my textbooks. I began to read it slowly, with a dictionary at hand, and it became one more teacher.” Beard went on to write that when working on his dissertation on it, many years later, he “became very interested in the elegant way Hedayat rethought European traditions.”

What he concluded our exchange with interested me most, a sentiment absent from his seminal book: “Later I began to think about Hedayat in biographical terms. I have no doubt that melancholy ingrained in his character led to his suicide, but I also believe that there is an exuberance in his writing that counteracts it. The expression of melancholy is not the same thing as melancholy. It may hold melancholy at arm's length.”

This, I think, is the key to appreciating the nightmare-scape of
The Blind Owl,
once you piece its puzzles, catch on to its games, and read by its rules. The prose contains an energy that reminds one that even though Hedayat was quite depressed for much of his life, he was also the man spotted holding court in various cafés in Paris and Tehran alike, always
entertaining huge groups of friends and followers and everything in between. We can see in this book, as well as in all his writing, not what might be implicated in his untimely death, but what prevented it for so long. And this is why I believe no reader could, as the myth went, contemplate death at their own hands after reading it—
The Blind Owl
is not a triumph of story, it's a triumph of art. It doesn't tell you how to live or die, but it does teach you a few things about how to create. And what is more life-affirming than that?

Only years and years after my father forbade me to read it and eventually gave in, did I understand that all the fuss might have been a personal one as well. After all, I came to see myself as not a successor or descendent even, but as a child of Hedayat—and almost literally, as my father had more than a few similarities with Hedayat. He too was an adamant Middle Persian hobbyist and Zoroastrianism enthusiast who endlessly romanticized pre-Islamic Persia to the point where the walls of our living room were entirely plastered with color-copied clippings out of
Smithsonian
magazine, featuring Sasanian plates and Achaemenid relief images. Plus, it was his vegetarian tendencies that made a vegetarian out of me. He was not a writer, of course, but he made one out of me. Not to mention he raised a pensive, brooding, loner kid who never felt quite at home in her
imagined there or her literal here. And so, of course, it had to be him who kept me from reading it for so long.

Given the usefulness of his tactics with respect to that, I'll then pass on what got me to these pages: refrain, reader, from reading this book, whatever you do.

You've been warned.

THERE ARE SORES WHICH SLOWLY ERODE THE MIND IN
solitude like a kind of canker.

It is impossible to convey a just idea of the agony which this disease can inflict. In general, people are apt to relegate such inconceivable sufferings to the category of the incredible. Any mention of them in conversation or in writing is considered in the light of current beliefs, the individual's personal beliefs in particular, and tends to provoke a smile of incredulity and derision. The reason for this incomprehension is that mankind has not yet discovered a cure for this disease. Relief from it is to be found only in the oblivion brought about by wine and in the artificial sleep induced by opium and similar narcotics. Alas, the effects of such medicines are only temporary. After a certain point, instead of alleviating the pain, they only intensify it.

Will anyone ever penetrate the secret of this disease which transcends ordinary experience, this reverberation of the shadow of the mind, which manifests itself in a state of
coma like that between death and resurrection, when one is neither asleep nor awake?

I propose to deal with only one case of this disease. It concerned me personally and it so shattered my entire being that I shall never be able to drive the thought of it out of my mind. The evil impression which it left has, to a degree that surpasses human understanding, poisoned my life for all time to come. I said ‘poisoned'; I should have said that I have ever since borne, and will bear for ever, the brand-mark of that cautery.

I shall try to set down what I can remember, what has remained in my mind of the sequence of events. I may perhaps be able to draw a general conclusion from it all—but no, that is too much to expect. I may hope to be believed by others or at least to convince myself; for, after all, it does not matter to me whether others believe me or not. My one fear is that tomorrow I may die without having come to know myself. In the course of my life I have discovered that a fearful abyss lies between me and other people and have realised that my best course is to remain silent and keep my thoughts to myself for as long as I can. If I have now made up my mind to write it is only in order to reveal myself to my shadow, that shadow which at this moment is stretched across the wall in the attitude of one devouring with insatiable appetite each word I write. It is for his sake that I wish to make the attempt. Who knows? We may perhaps come to know each other better. Ever since I broke the last ties
which held me to the rest of mankind my one desire has been to attain a better knowledge of myself.

Idle thoughts! Perhaps. Yet they torment me more savagely than any reality could do. Do not the rest of mankind who look like me, who appear to have the same needs and the same passions as I, exist only in order to cheat me? Are they not a mere handful of shadows which have come into existence only that they may mock and cheat me? Is not everything that I feel, see and think something entirely imaginary, something utterly different from reality?