Sadeq Hedayat

Despite previous references to the themes of disability and bodily nonnormativity in Sadeq Hedayat’s fiction, it has yet to be extensively re-read from this viewpoint. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, and particularly by employing thoughts and concepts from the developing areas of critical masculinity studies and disability studies, I read two understudied short stories by Hedayat: “Abji Khanom” and “Davood the Hunchback.” Both stories foreground the crucial intersection of gender and bodily nonnormativity as manifested in the social embodiments of the stories’ titular characters. While also intending the essay to serve as a very brief introduction to the above critical areas, I seek to answer the following questions about the stories: What has excluded the main characters from meaningful social interactions in their societies? What is the significance of Hedayat’s foregrounding the junction of gender and bodily nonnormativity in both stories? What might have caused each character’s highly pessimistic view toward his or her embodiment? I argue that the nonnormative bodies of both characters—whose societies legitimize a certain hierarchy of bodies—have afflicted them with stigmatized and hence socially devalued embodiments that render as liable both characters’ gender performances. This has brought about the characters’ social exclusion. Also, despite their difference in sex, both characters appear to be victims of similar hegemonic masculine ideals in their patriarchal ableist societies, which have internalized in our characters a pessimistic personal-tragedy view toward disability and bodily nonnormativity.

Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) is one of Iran's preeminent writers of short works of fiction. This article is about the role that subtext plays in his works, in general, and in his Blind Owl, in particular. The main reasons for writing the article are: to highlight subtext as a literary device; to apply subtext to such Hedayat short stories as "Dāsh  kol" (Dash Akol), "Sag-i Velgard” (the stray dog), " b-i Zendegī” (the water of life), and other short stories; and to illustrate how mourning rituals that Hedayat might have observed in India, serve as a subtext for his Būf-i Kūr (the blind owl). In the case of The Blind Owl, we shall first study the storyline that is used as subtext and follow that with corresponding events from the novella. The article ends with an investigation into whether The Blind Owl is a novel, why is it that we have difficulty understanding it, and the meaning of the novella to the extent that it can be extracted from the subtext. An understanding of the full meaning of the novella belongs to a separate study.

Sadeq Hedayat is widely known for his harsh criticism of societal norms he regarded as inappropriate, and objection to problems of women and the view of society toward them. Abji Khanom is not exempted from this generalization. It is a story published in one of his best-known short story collections Buried Alive. Hedayat in this story protests against objectification of women, and condemns the view that regards women no more than a doll which is appreciated only for its beauty. In this paper we aim to give a brief explanation about this beauty-appreciative culture, and how advertisements and even our childhood fairytales push us to the belief that beautiful is good. The subsequent parts analyze the psychological effects of the beauty standards on women, along with the role played by family in construction of these ideals in the mind of little girls. The last part looks at beauty from a different angle and deals with its pitfalls.

If we interpret The Blind Owl according to its Buddhist subtext, we can summarize the storyline therein as follows. In India, before the Mongol invasion, one of two identical twin brothers, who had converted to the religion of the Linga, sleeps with a Bugam Dasi temple dancer. The Bugam Dasi bears a child. When the other brother, too, sleeps with the same dancer, it becomes difficult to know which young man is the father of the child. To determine the identity of the father, the brothers are put in a dungeon in which a nag-serpent is let loose. The nag-serpent bites one of the brothers and gives him a slit lip. A scream amid hysterical laughter is heard. Following that, the brother with the slit lip, walks out of the dungeon. He is deranged. The other brother leaves the dungeon unharmed. Although the determination regarding the identity of the father of the child remains uncertain, the child is given to the brother who was not harmed by the nag-serpent.

This book explores Henri Bergson's notions of Simultaneity and Duree in Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl and William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, two prominent modernist narratives in contemporary Iranian and American literature. This book demonstrates how Bergsonian interpretation of temporality (duree), manifests itself in Hedayat's The Blind Owl and Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury which incorporates all the standard features of stream of consciousness and monologue writing and which deliberately defy the traditional temporal division through analysis of similarities and differences in structure, techniques and entity of the two texts. It examines the narratological qualities of stream of consciousness  on the level of language-speech and pre-speech level in both texts, to argue the nature  of memory images.

"The Necklace of the Pleiades is a volume on Persian literature, culture and religion by Persian scholars from around the world. This book reflects the state of the field of Persian literary studies and will be of substantial interest not only to scholars of Iranian culture, history and religions, but of Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, as well.

The topics of the 24 essays range from the Persian Alexander romance, to Ferdowsi’s Shahnama and other epics, the poetics and imagery of the ghazal and the qasida, Mughal court poetry, Sufism, Ismaili history, Baha’i literature, Iranian linguistics, the modern writer Sadeq Hedayat, and the reception of Salman Rushdie’s novel in Persian translation.

In Persian literature the Necklace of the Pleiades is a metaphor for the six or seven stars (Parvin, or Sorayyâ, high up in the constellation Taurus) which the heavens bestow, like precious pearls, upon a poet in gratitude and reward for composing a beautiful poem. The poem itself is compared to a string of pearls, with its carefully chosen words bored like unique pearls and strung in perfect metrical proportion. As Hafiz puts it:

You’ve sung a ghazal, pierced the pearls, come and sing it sweetly, Hafiz!
The heavens strew the very Necklace of the Pleiades upon your verse. "

This volume was presented as a Festschrift for Prof. Heshmat Moayyad of the University of Chicago on his 80th birthday.  Originally published by (Amsterdam: Rozenberg Publishers and West Lafayette, Indiana:  Purdue University Press, 2007)
Publisher's Website: https://www.lup.nl/product/the-necklace-of-the-pleiades/

اگر بوف کور را بر اساس مفھوم ضمنی بودائی آن بررسی کنیم می توانیم داستان را این
طور خلاصه کنیم: در اعصار قبل از حمله مغول، در ھندوستان، یکی از دو برادر دو قلو که
دارای یک قیافه و یک اخلاق ھستند دین لینگا را می پذیرد و با دختر رقاصه ای که در معبد
لینگا می رقصد ازدواج می کند. رقاصه باردار می شود و پسری به دنیا می آورد. کمی بعد،
برادر دو قلوی شوھر نیز با ھمان رقاصه ھم بستر می شود. از آن به بعد معلوم نیست پدر بچه
کدام یک از آن دو جوان است. برای معلوم کردن ھو یّت پدر، دو برادر را با یک مار ناگ در
سیاه چالی قرار می دھند. مار ناگ لب یکی از برادران را می گزد و پاره می کند. پس از
چندی ناله ای مخلوط با خنده ای چندش آور به گوش می رسد و یکی از برادرھا در ھیئت
پیرمردی خنزرپنزری از سیاه چال خارج می گردد. وقتی متوجه می شوند که او بچه را نمی
شناسد، بچه و مادرش را به دست برادر دیگر می سپارند.

This article aims to explore Henri Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1937), a prominent Modernist narrative in contemporary Iranian literature. Bergson refutes the logical and linear sequence of time and regards it as an indivisible whole that simultaneously posits the past, the present and the future on the same plane – the eternal present. Likewise, for Bergson, consciousness is characterized by flux and continuity as it processes all previous memories and experiences synchronously, as if they were all parts of a unified and organic whole. This article argues that certain features of the narrative structure of The Blind Owl, in particular the relativity and subjectivity of time and place and the constant intersection of memories and experiences, can be aligned with Bergson’s interpretation of temporality and consciousness. In the nameless narrator’s stream of consciousness and interrelated visions and reminiscences, characters, settings and incidents – which drive the narrative into a timeless and placeless context – constantly melt into and echo one another and ultimately become irreducible and radically interrelated constituents of an organic totality that resists temporal, spatial and cognitive divisibility.

Keywords: The Blind Owl, durée, indivisibility of time, Modernism, simultaneity, stream-of-consciousness writing

In the not so well known short story ‘Katiya’, the Austrian engineer tells the narrator:
You know, it’s always women who must approach me. I never approach a woman. Because if I did that I’d feel that she’s not accepted me for my own sake, but for money or fast-talking or something that’s outside of me. It’d look artificial, unnatural. But if a woman approaches me first I’d worship her.

Stream of consciousness, first introduced by William James, is a literary technique employed to evince subjective as well as objective reality. In this process, the feelings, sensations, wishes, hopes, memories and thoughts in subconscious and conscious mind are mixed and desultory. The Narratological qualities on the level of language are categorized in speech and pre-speech level. Speech level represents logical, sequential and social connection. However, pre-speech level engages a stage which precedes the utterance; it is pure, intact and instinctual; it is disarrayed, ungoverned, unorganized and incoherent stream of thoughts, sensations and emotions These qualities are allegedly observed in Hedayat’s and Faulker’s. While, in The Sound and the Fury, both speech and pre-speech levels are employed whereas in The Blind Owl, speech level is dominant. The Sound and the Fury is disarrayed, unorganized and syntactically broken which bears nearness to stream of consciousness. Whereas The Blind Owl is in speech level, organized and arrayed, coherent in each part that the story digresses, not turbulent and anarchic in syntax and grammar and lastly, is with the audience. The existence of monologues is alternatively confused with the interior monologues and soliloquy wrongly labeling The Blind Owl as a stream of consciousness work.

This paper aims to explore an ontological and structural study of Sadeq Hedayat"s The Blind Owl through application of binary oppositions of Time/Timeless, Modern/Postmodern Narratology, Theosophical Mythology/ Historical Representation and Interior Monologue/ Stream of Consciousness. The present article argues that there are certain exclusive elements represented in the narratology of The Blind Owl which takes this text beyond the techniques of modern and postmodern into a kind of super-modern, especially through application of specific element of time, point of view and techniques of narration. Hedayat, in this text, as the author believes, masterfully presents a number of technical manipulations of narratology which counts for surpassing from some typical modern and postmodern European novels like Faulkner"s The Sound and the Fury. These breaking grounds include representation of the common elements between stream of consciousness and interior monologue, drawing a perfe...

A new antagonistic discourse has been formed among intellectuals, in the intellectual history of the world.  Some anti-British, and after September 1941 anti-American activities are evident among Iranian intellectuals under the rule of Pahlavi I. The westerns' anti-west beliefs disclose the unjust behavior of west in contrast to non-westerns, what Chamskey introduces as one of intellectualism components. As a component of intellectual discourses, anti-west activities appear in fiction works of some authors. Based on a documentary and library analytic- descriptive method, the concept of anti-west component has been reflexed in fiction works of Hedayat, Al-e-Ahmad and Sāedi in form of any xenophobia and anti- hegemonic concepts through the present paper. The humiliation feelings of Iranians against the greatness of their past history, civilization and their original culture, and their criticism and pessimistic attitude toward the West because of the disgraceful history of colonialism and despair of their intellectuals after the coup of August 1941 are the reasons can be considered for anti-west discourses in Iran. Hedayat has criticized, in some of his works, the American-propaganda and has revealed the Americans' inhumane treatments. Al-e-Ahmad's anti-west attitudes appear in his criticism to the exploitation of his country by foreigners and to the manifestation of western civilization and anti-Americanism. Sāedi's anti-west beliefs appear in form of anti-colonialism, anti-Americanism and anti-Russian attitudes.

This article examines how the desire to authenticate modernity influenced the mutual perception of religious and secular intellectuals in Egypt and Iran in the first half of the twentieth century. I shift the focus to the East – East interaction to argue that re-forming intellectuals in modern Egypt and Iran considered, impacted, and benefited from each others’ historical experiences as a source of inspiration and a model for imitation. In their endeavor to construct national identities as authentic but modern, genuinely Eastern-Muslim but “almost European”, Iranian reformists were interested in contemporary Egypt while Egyptian intellectuals were infatuated with medieval Iran. Iranians sought contemporary Egypt as a modern Middle Eastern society and Egyptians invested in medieval Iran as a source of Islamic-Eastern pride and achievement. Secular and religious intellectuals in both countries downplayed sectarian differences between Shi‘i Iranians and Sunni Egyptians and contained the centuries-long Islamic polemics and disunity to combine “Eastern spirituality” with “Western advancement”.