ABSTRACT
Hedayat’s Hajji Aqa appeared in 1945 with a small circulation of only sixty copies. The immediate public reaction is not known, but the fact that by 1964 the book had gone through its sixth edition ought to demonstrate that it had a wide readership. However, it took some more years and the benefit of hindsight for the Iranian literary critics of all kinds to comment on the value of the work and its position in Hedayat’s oeuvres. The bulk of those critics were left-leaning intellectuals who proclaimed the work as “the summit of Hedayat’s optimistic period”,1 and applauded him “in the trenches of struggle” against imperialism and capitalism.2 The remaining critics very soon followed suit and portrayed Hedayat as a campaigner for the lower classes and the uneducated poor in his realistic stories and satires such as Hajji Aqa.3 Even later critics were not immune to these interpretations and succumbed to the same conventional views of Hajji Aqa as “the best example of Hedayat’s unbending critical views of the administration of the time”.4 All these interpretations might prove valid to some degree but I believe they have hindered any in-depth engagement with the text of Hajji Aqa. Even though many of these critics considered the work to be a realistic masterpiece in satiric form, none of them set out to do justice to this piece, which is “Hedayat’s longest fiction and the most celebrated after The Blind Owl”.5 Could a cultural prohibition be at work on part of the literary critics warding off serious approaches to works labeled “satire”?6
