Even the man who tries to “kill” his nafs – to mortify his flesh, or destroy his ego – in the short story ‘The Man Who Killed His Ego’, ends up by killing himself; that is, not by liberating but by annihilating his soul. Women are either lakkateh (harlots), or they are Fereshteh, that is, angelic apparitions who wilt and disintegrate upon appearance, though this is only true of women in the psycho-fictions, women of similar cultural background to the author, not those of lower classes in his critical realist stories.

As a man born into an extended family of social and intellectual distinction, a modern as well as modernist intellectual, a gifted writer steeped in the most advanced Persian as well as European culture, and with a psyche which demanded the highest standards of moral and intellectual excellence, Hedayat was bound to carry, an enormous burden, which very few individuals could suffer with equanimity, especially as he bore the effects of the clash of the old and the new, and the Persian and the European, such as few Iranians have experienced. He lived an unhappy life, and died an unhappy death. It was perhaps the inevitable cost of the literature which he bequeathed to humanity.

Homa Katouzian

St Antony’s College and the Oriental Institute

University of Oxford

Bibliography

Michael Beard, The Blind Owl as a Western Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)

Nasser Pakdaman, ed., Sadeq Hedayat, Hashtad-o-daw Nameh beh Hasan Shahid-Nura’i (Sadeq Hedayat, Eighty-two Letters to Hasan Shahid-Nura’i) (Paris: Cheshmandaz, 2000)

Ehsan Yarshater, ed., Sadeq Hedayat: An Anthology (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1979)

By Homa Katouzian:

Sadeq Hedayat, His Work and His Wondrous World, ed., (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)

Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Legend of an Iranian Writer, paperback edition, (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002)

Darbareh-ye Buf-e Kur-e Hedayat (Hedayat’s The Blind Owl, a Critical Monograph) (Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz, 5th impression, 2008)

Sadeq Hedayat va Marg-e Nevisandeh (Sadeq Hedayat and the Death of the Author) (Tehran: Nashr-e Markaz, 4th impression, 2005)

Tanz va Tanzineh-ye Hedayat, (Satire and Irony in Hedayat) (Stockholm: Arash, 2003)

The Blind Owl

(translated by D.P. Costello)

1

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 realized 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 passion 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?

I am writing only for my shadow, which is now stretched across the wall in the light of the lamp. I must make myself known to him.

2

In this mean world of wretchedness and misery I thought that for once a ray of sunlight had broken upon my life. Alas, it was not sunlight but a passing gleam, a falling star, which flashed upon me, in the form of a woman – or of an angel. In its light, in the course of a second, of a single moment, I beheld all the wretchedness of my existence and apprehended the glory and splendour of the star. After, that brightness disappeared again in the whirlpool of darkness in which it was bound inevitably to disappear.