ABSTRACT

Sadeq Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl (published 1936 in Bombay) is a modernist work, closely aligned with European avant garde literature of the early twentieth century. Hence its Western features – and the author’s indebtedness to Western influences – have long been at the center of the critical discourse about the novel. This tendency in the scholarship on Hedayat is still productive today, but it is most readily observed in literary analyses from the period between World War II and the heyday of the Islamic revolution in Iran – roughly from the mid-1940s to the end of the 1980s. This time frame is by no means definitive or clear-cut, but neither is it arbitrary. Published abroad in a very limited edition, and expressly marked “not for sale in Iran,” The Blind Owl became available domestically in 1941 to 1942, after the abdication of Reza Shah Pahlavi, when Hedayat serialized it in the journal Iran. Its impact in Iran, as Hassan Kamshad notes, “was instantaneous and forceful; and the controversy that ensued was not confined to literary circles; it embraced almost the entire reading public.”2 One of the early critical references, which linked implicitly Hedayat’s novel with French existentialism and the “decadent and defeatist ways of thinking” of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, came from the keynote speech of Ehsan Tabari at the First Congress of Iranian Writers in 1946.3 The succeeding decades, defined by the Western orientation of the Pahlavi regime under Mohammad-Reza Shah, brought mixed reactions to Hedayat’s masterpiece, determined by critics’ personal views regarding the role of art in society, and the preferred paths to modernization. The turbulent end of the 1970s – the decade of the Islamic revolution – ushered in a new dominant ideology in Iran, a declared orientation of “neither East nor West,” and a new set of cultural priorities and taboos. The Blind Owl disappeared from library stacks and bookstore shelves, and public debates about the book came to a standstill. Yet – in a tacit recognition of the novel’s place in modern Iranian literature, or perhaps as a cogent sign of changing times after the death of Ayatollah Khomeyni – it was published again in Tehran by Nashr-e Simorgh in 1993, albeit in a censored version.4