ABSTRACT
Sadeq Hedayat and his generation of intellectuals lived in an age marked by fundamental changes in almost all aspects of life. The Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911), the rise to power of Reza Shah (r. 1925-1941), and the ensuing industrialization, modernization, and Westernization of Iran were among some of the major currents that propelled Iran’s social, political, and cultural spheres away from its past at a speed unprecedented in the preceding centuries of the country’s history. In the wake of this break from the past, many in Hedayat’s generation of intellectuals developed a critical approach toward the history and culture into which they were born, forcing upon themselves the task of reinvestigating the very foundations upon which their identity and self-conception traditionally rested.1 Their initial encounter with modernity – one of the earliest such encounters outside Western Europe – launched them on a cataract of conceptual oppositions: East vs. West; old vs. new; regressive vs. progressive; traditional vs. modern. Far from seeing these concepts as continuous rather than distinct, dialectically related rather than diametrically opposed, these turn-ofthe-century Iranian thinkers internalized the incongruity between their inherited local realities and the appropriated Western models as a structural deficiency. Traces of such a problematic and conflicted encounter between inherited history and infiltrated culture are widely visible in the literary production of this period; one marked by a novel awareness of its own present-ness and singularity. Past and present, culture and history, inherited ideals and adopted values merged in the narratives of the period, all refunctionalized to serve an anxiety-driven quest for the reconstruction of a newly fragmented collective identity caught in a search for a meaningful reply to the question: “Who am I?” or rather “Who are we?” In Foucauldien terminology, the period pronounced for the Iranian intellectual of Hedayat’s time a “discursive present-ness: a present-ness which [he] interrogates as an event, an event whose meaning, value and philosophical singularity [he] is required to state, and in which [he] is to elicit at once [his] own raison d’être and the foundation of what [he] has to say.”2
