One must struggle in this cataract of shit until disgust with living suffocates us. In Paradise Lost, Reverend Father Gabriel tells Adam “Despair and die”, or words to that effect. I am too disgusted with everything to make any effort; one must remain in the shit until the end.
Ultimately, what he called “the cataract of shit” proved too unbearable for him to remain in it till the end.
Hedayat’s fiction, including novels, short stories, drama and satire, written between 1930 and 1946, comprises Parvin Dokhtar-e Sasan (Parvin the Sasanian Girl), Afsaneh-ye Afarinesh (The Legend of Creation), ‘Al-bi’tha(t) al-Islamiya ila’l-Bilad al- Afranjiya’ (Islamic Mission to European Cities), Zendeh beh Gur, (Buried Alive), Aniran (Non-Iranian), Maziyar, Seh Qatreh Khun (Three Drops of Blood), Alaviyeh Khanom (Mistress Alaviyeh), Sayeh Roshan (Chiaroscuro) Vagh-vagh Sahab (Mr Bow-Vow), Buf-e Kur (The Blind Owl), ‘Sampingé’ and ‘Lunatique’ (both in French), Sag-e Velgard (The Stray Dog), Hajji Aqa, Velengari (Mucking About), and Tup-e Morvari (The Morvari Cannon).
I have classified Hedayat’s fiction into four analytically distinct categories, although there is some inevitable overlapping between them: romantic nationalist fiction, critical realist stories, satire and psycho-fiction.
First, the romantic nationalist fiction. The historical dramas – Parvin and Maziyar, and the short stories ‘The Shadow of the Mongol’ (Sayeh-ye Moghol), and ‘The Last Smile’ (Akharin Labkhand) – are on the whole simple in sentiment and raw in technique. They reflect sentiments arising from the Pan-Persianist ideology and cult which swept over the Iranian modernist elite after the First World War. ‘The Last Smile’ is the most mature work of this kind. Hedayat’s explicit drama is not highly developed, and he quickly abandoned the genre along with nationalist fiction. But many of his critical realist short stories could easily be adapted for the stage with good effect.
The second category of Hedayat’s fictions, his critical realist works, are numerous and often excellent, the best examples being ‘Alaviyeh Khanom’ (Mistress Alaviyeh) which is a comedy in the classical sense of the term, ‘Talab-e Amorzesh’ (Seeking Absolution), ‘Mohallel’ (The Legalizer), and ‘Mordeh-khor-ha’ (The Ghouls). To varying degrees, both satire and irony are used in these stories, though few of them could be accurately described as satirical fiction.
They tend to reflect aspects of the lives and traditional beliefs of the contemporary urban lower-middle classes with ease and accuracy. But contrary to views long held, they are neither “about the poor or downtrodden”, nor do they display sympathy for their types and characters. Wretchedness and superstition are combined with sadness, joy, hypocrisy and occasionally criminal behaviour. This was in the tradition set by Jamalzadeh (though he had more sympathy for his characters), enhanced by Hedayat and passed on to Chubak and Al-e Ahmad in their earlier works.
Coming to the third category, Hedayat’s satirical fiction is rich and often highly effective. He was a master of wit, and wrote both verbal and dramatic satire. It takes the form of short stories, novels, as well as short and long anecdotes. They hit hard at their subjects, usually with effective subtlety, though sometimes outright lampooning, denunciation and invective reveal the depth of the author’s personal involvement in his fictional satire.
Hajji Aqa is the longest and most explicit of Hedayat’s satires on the political establishment. Superficial appearances and critical propaganda notwithstanding, it is much less a satire on the ways of the people of the bazaar and much more of a merciless attack on leading conservative politicians. Indeed, the real-life models for the Hajji of the title were supplied by two important old-school (and, as it happens, by no means the worst) politicians.
Hedayat would have had a lasting and prominent position in the annals of Persian literature on account of what I have so far mentioned. What has given him his unique place, nevertheless, is his psycho-fiction, of which The Blind Owl is the best and purest example. This work and the short story ‘Three Drops of Blood’ are modernist in style, using techniques of French symbolism and surrealism in literature, of surrealism in modern European art and of expressionism in the contemporary European films, including the deliberate confusion of time and space. But most of the other psycho-fictional stories – e.g. ‘Zendeh beh Gur’ (‘Buried Alive’), ‘Arusak-e Posht-e Pardeh’ (‘Puppet behind the Curtain’), ‘Bon-bast’ (‘Dead End’), ‘Tarik-khaneh’ (‘Dark Room’), ‘Davud-e Guzhposht’ (‘Davud the Hunchback’) and ‘The Stray Dog’ – use realistic techniques in presenting psycho-fictional stories.
The appellation “psycho-fictional”, coined by myself in the mid-1970s to describe this particular genre in Hedayat’s literature, does not render the same sense as is usually conveyed by the well-worn concept and category of “the psychological novel”. Rather, it reflects the essentially subjective nature of the stories, which brings together the psychological, the ontological and the metaphysical in an indivisible whole.
Hedayat’s psycho-fictional stories, such as ‘Three Drops of Blood’ and ‘Buried Alive’, which are published together in this volume, are macabre and, at their conclusions, feature the deaths of both humans and animals. Most human beings are no better than rajjaleh (rabble), and the very few who are better fail miserably to rise up to reach perfection or redemption. 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, as he did, 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
June 2008
Bibliography
Michael Beard, The Blind Owl as a Western Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)
Nasser Pakdaman, ed., Sadeq Hedyat, 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.
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