I moved to Tehran from Ahvaz, my hometown in the war-torn south, in the late 1990s to study mechanical engineering in college, harboring a secret dream of becoming a writer. I made it my mission to meet prominent Iranian writers, most of whom lived in Tehran, and glean from them tips, tricks, shortcuts, anything that would help me climb the ladder of literary success. Some encouraged me to break into the pages of reformist newspapers, where all literary discussions in Iran took place before the internet. A few gave me a list of books to read, often with their titles on them. Others invited me into their circles, seeing in me the potential for a new collaborator. But almost all of them urged me to read the novel, carefully and repeatedly. Blind owl Sadeka Hedayat of 1936..
It was a surprising recommendation for a young, rising writer. Blind owl, written in Farsi, was originally published as a samizdat in Mumbai (then Bombay) in a run of just 50 copies, photocopied and stapled together. It is not exactly a masterpiece of literary craft. It has an unusual, labyrinthine structure and a series of one-dimensional characters. The book’s story, centered on the delirious monologue of an opium addict painting pencil cases, is essentially ambiguous and reads more like a long prose poem than a novel. But the writers I met probably didn’t attach importance to these details, because the importance of this short novel far exceeds the issues of craft.
No other text has provided such an incredible boost to the imagination of Iranians. Blind owl It has been the subject of countless studies, interpretations, adaptations, and controversies. Numerous notable literary theorists and critics have written about the book, and several writers have composed entire works in response to it. Reza Baraheni, probably the most prominent literary critic of the last century in Iran, bowed before Sleepy owl. “It is not a book to be reread,” he wrote, “but a book to be rewritten, for its gravity is so strong that in its orbit all our critical tools become blunt.” Despite attempts by several Iranian governments over the past century to ban and censor his work, Hedayat’s spirit continues to strongly permeate Iranian literature.
Hedayat found enthusiastic readers in France, where he lived for several years, but remained virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, especially in North America. This can be partly explained by aesthetics. Blind owl, like many of Hedayat's other works, are very European, influenced by writers he admired such as Kafka, Chekhov i Sartre.
And yet, to better understand Iran, Blind owl is exactly the book that should be read carefully. “In order to understand Putin, it is necessary to read Dostoyevsky", is a famous statement Henry Kissinger, and it is not necessary to agree with his politics to recognize the wisdom in such a conclusion. If I were to make a similar point about Iran, it would be difficult to find a better counterpart to Dostoevsky than Sadeq Hedayat. Iran has been stuck in a cycle of self-love and self-hatred for centuries, and nothing illustrates this contradiction better than Tow sleep.
Circle of destruction
The first part of the novel takes place in the fictional city of Ray. The narrator introduces himself as a mediocre painter who has spent his entire life painting the same picture, a cypress tree by a stream. An old man sits by the tree, “wrapped in a robe like an Indian yogi,” and a slender young woman offers him a lotus. It is an idyllic scene, an untouched space, an Indo-Iranian paradise: the cypress is a sacred tree in Zoroastrianism, and the felling of the Kashmir cypress by Muslim conquerors symbolically marks the end of ancient Persia. Lotuses refer to Anahita, the goddess of water in Persian mythology; this flower enjoyed a special status in ancient Persia, judging by its abundance on the walls of Persepolis.
One day, a hunched old man, resembling the figure in the painting, appears on the narrator's doorstep, claiming to be his uncle. To serve him, the narrator climbs a ladder to retrieve a jug of wine that has been on the top shelf since the day he was born. Behind the jug is a hole in the wall; through it, he secretly sees a young, angelic woman holding out a lotus, just like in the painting he has been painting his whole life.
And a cursory glance at her was enough for the painter to fall in love. He then wanders around for months, like a madman, searching for any trace of the woman, but in the end he realizes that he will never find her. And just when the narrator has lost all hope, on his way home one rainy evening he finds her sitting on the stairs. She follows him inside. She seems ill, on the verge of death. To bring her back to life, the painter removes the jug and pours some wine into her mouth. The wine, we will later learn, is poisoned. The woman's body is cooling.
The painter spends hours and hours sketching the corpse, then cuts the body into pieces, puts the pieces in a suitcase, and buries it with the help of an old man sitting under a cypress tree. While digging, they find a painted earthenware jar the exact size of the suitcase. When the painter dusts the jar at home, an image appears: a painted face of a young woman. He then smokes all the remaining opium and loses consciousness. He wakes up in a different world.
In the second half of the book, the first part is distorted. The characters and the setting are the same, except that they are much uglier and more poignant. The painter is now “a hunched old man with gray hair, a vacant gaze, and sweet lips.” We are still in the city of Ray, but in its Islamized version, with mosques all around. In front of the butcher’s shop near where the painter lives, a street vendor, bent and wrinkled, sets up a stall. He sells decorative trinkets, among them a “glazed, earthenware jug,” and on Friday nights he recites the Koran. The painter now has a wife who resembles an ethereal woman in appearance, but is her complete opposite in every other respect. She cheats on the old painter with everyone in the neighborhood; the painter calls his wife a “slut.”
One day, to relieve his misery, the narrator goes for a walk outside the city. He sits down by a stream, under a cypress tree. A young girl, very similar to a youthful version of his wife, jumps out of the bushes, walks by, and asks. Then, as his health deteriorates, he spends all his time in a darkened room, surrounded by shadows, undergoing a transformation. “At that moment I looked like an owl, but the hoots were clumping in my throat and I was spitting them out like blood-filled spittle… My shadow on the wall looked exactly like an owl, as it leaned over me and carefully read everything I wrote.”
In Persian culture, the owl does not represent wisdom, but rather its presence portends disaster. Seeing his shadow transformed into an owl, the painter decides to kill the “slut.” He dresses as an old street vendor, grabs an axe, enters his wife’s room, and hits her with it. When she exhales, he bursts into a roar of laughter. “It was a hollow laugh, stuck in my throat, and it came from some abyss—I became that strange old man, the trinket seller.”
The circle of destruction is closed. In the first part, the painter fails to preserve the fleeting scene of paradise, a cypress tree, a stream, and a young woman. He drugs himself into oblivion and wakes up in what is practically a graveyard surrounding a butcher's shop. In his attempts to escape such a life, he becomes an old man who studies the Koran, the man he despises the most.
From self-love to self-hatred
When I was a teenager in Iran, Blind owl was an indisputably banned book, one of the few novels banned both before and after the revolution, although it was available in illegally printed copies. The best places to hunt for banned books were other people's shelves, but this one was hard to find even there. It was often tucked away on the highest shelves, hidden behind other volumes, especially in the homes of families where children were considered old enough to read but not yet old enough to grasp the meaning of the book.
Secret owl It also had a terrifying reputation: it was a book that was ready to drive the reader to suicide. Urban legends circulated about this or that young man or woman who read it, fell into unbearable existential terror, and then took their own lives. Another reputation that accompanied it was that it was pornographic, like, it's a story in which a woman cheats on her husband and sleeps with every man in town.
I finally got my hands on a copy in my senior year of high school. I must have bought it from a street bookseller on Naderi Boulevard in Ahvaz, from a man who knew me as a kid willing to pay good money for banned books. He later took quite a risk by selling it to me. Midnight's children Salman Rushdie which, after the fatwa, was one of the most dangerous literary products in Iran.
When I first read Secret owl I was completely disappointed. I couldn't get my head around her or her tail. She was too confusing to even be suicidal. Just some guy who complains endlessly about his wife being a whore.
I believe that even older, more sophisticated readers reacted similarly. Blind owl is an extremely dense read, full of metaphors, codes and symbols. It covers a wide range of Hedayat's interests, including ancient Persia, the first religions in Iran, Iranian folklore, magic and the occult, as well as William Faulkner i Virginia Woolf, Carl Jung i Oto Rank, horror literature and expressionist film. Some passages seem like dreams, some like delirium. “Perhaps, since I have cut all ties with the world of the living,” says the narrator, “old memories reappear before my eyes - the past, the future, the hour, the day, the month, the year, they are all one and the same to me.” He is deprived of both the company of the living and the tranquility of death, he is a lost, delirious soul who fails to find a foothold anywhere.
When he photocopied the manuscript Tow sleep and published the first 50 copies in 1936 in India. He was so disgusted by his homeland and literary circles that he repeatedly wrote on the inside cover: "Not for sale or distribution in Iran."
But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who loved Iran, or even a certain version of it, more than Hedayat. In the same collection of letters and other writings that record his hatred, there is also a wealth of tender commentary on his homeland. "This little country is all we have in the world," he writes in one letter. He spent years studying pahlavi, the language of pre-Islamic Iran, and translated several key texts from Pahlavi into modern Farsi. He collected folk songs for sōkan, an Iranian literary magazine, and collaborated closely with the French orientalist Henri Massé, specializing in Iranian literature and history.
"I don't know what kind of tasteless idiot, and in what prehistoric era, built this house," writes the narrator in Blind owl"When I close my eyes, not only can I still see all its nooks and crannies, but I can also feel its weight on my shoulders."
According to Hedayat, two great historical periods are constantly intertwined: the pre-Islamic world, which he worshipped, and Iran after the Arabs took over, which he despised. This sentiment is common in Iran, and Blind owl is a text that perfectly captures this, not only in its themes and historical references, but also in its structure. The book is a journey from self-love to self-hatred.
“There are wounds in life,” he says at the beginning of the book, “that slowly, like termites, crawl into a lonely soul and eat it away.” He dwells in that wound, digging into the festering, infected tissue, examining its inflamed edges, and calmly reporting to us about it. As the book progresses, it becomes clear that that wound is one of our identities, part of self-knowledge. Hedayat was ready to formulate the question that had tormented him his entire life: what does it mean to be born and mature in this particular time and geographical space, when all glory is lost and nothing remains but darkness and hopelessness? In other words, what did it mean to be Iranian in the 20th century?
Uncompromising pessimism
Blind owl is the best example of what Roland Barthes calls it an open text: an unconventional, experimental narrative that engages the reader as a co-author, actively involving them in the search for meaning. The book has been read equally as a celebration of death and an affirmation of life, as a meditation on modern Iran and ancient Persia, as an empowerment of sexism and as an example of queer literature. The text is flexible enough to accommodate these seemingly contradictory interpretations.
And yet, no analytical framework provides a fully satisfactory result. Regardless of the angle, the novel resists and always breaks through the imposed limitations. In this respect, Hedayat's work resembles the works of one of his favorite writers, Franz Kafka: an apparent simplicity that stubbornly refuses to be reduced to a single, coherent interpretation.
It is also fair to say that no book has been more intensely interpreted or criticized in Iran than Tow sleep. Its essentially ambivalent narrative, with its strange characters undergoing dramatic transformations, coupled with its vivid and poetic prose, has made the book a particularly fertile ground for literary analysis. Critical approaches have ranged widely. One critic has applied a Jungian framework, offering a mythological reading of the novel as an examination of the structure of the collective unconscious. Another has adopted a symbolist approach, dissecting the novel into its constituent elements, tracing each of them back to the signs and symbols of Iranian culture and history. Reza Baraheni has Rewriting Blind Owl focuses on the name of the narrator's mother, Bugam Dasi, and extensively dissects the word to argue that this character is a hermaphrodite and that, therefore, so are all the other characters in the novel, thereby Blind owl becomes more queer and discovers that sexual politics are far more fluid than they first appear.
The longing for pre-Islamic Iran existed long before Hedayat, and it remains strong today. Bestselling writers of popular sociology in Iran are obsessed with understanding what has happened to the country, how it has fallen behind. They are mostly quasi-academic, quixotic quests for a lost identity that may never have existed. But where others have seen potential solutions, in calls for the adoption of a political system inspired by ancient times, in proposals for the country to lean more heavily on the West, or simply in optimistic invocations of the greatness of the Iranian nation and its people, Hedayat has remained steadfast in his pessimism. His account of this breakdown of civilization ends in a complete dead end.
There is no glimmer of hope; the darkness in Hedayat's work and thought is frighteningly limitless. He saw no way to bring back the past, and despite his deep admiration for European culture, and perhaps because of it, he harbored no illusions about the West as a savior. As a thinker, he was at his peak in the period between the two world wars and closely followed the rise of Nazism.
Hedayat wrote one of his best essays as a long preface to his translation of Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” published in 1919. In that essay, he lamented and mocked Europeans for ignoring the most astute observer of their sleepwalking into disaster. His view, which he articulated through fiction, was that salvation was impossible. The West, the East, and the past were equally damned, and the only realistic view of the world was uncompromising pessimism.
In a small, modest room in Paris in 1951, he plugged all the holes in the walls with cotton, turned on the gas supply, and lay down on the floor next to the torn manuscripts of his two last novels. Apparently, Hedayat killed himself because he could not stand his daily life. He constantly complained about the jobs he had to do, the fact that he never earned enough, and that he had to live in a small room in his parents' house. Every time he went out into the street, he was disgusted. When he killed himself, it was as if society had committed a crime. There he was, an undoubted literary genius, the first Iranian writer to make a name for himself on an international scale and attract a multitude of admirers, including celebrities, and he killed himself because he could not even pay his bills. His suicide was a collective murder in which the Iranian public was a silent accomplice.
The people who found him noticed a vague smile on his lips. In his pocket was the money needed for his funeral and a short message: "See you on the other side," he wrote.
Over time, Hedayet became a kind of deity. Some writers went so far as to build entire novels under the vaults of the architecture of his soul. Murderous love (1999) Mohamed Baharlu, for example, tells the story of a writer who falls, breaks his arm, and, in a haze of pain and painkillers, passes into the world Tow sleepIn the novel Covered mirrors (1992) Houshanga Golshiri A middle-aged writer on a European tour receives anonymous letters mentioning personal episodes from his childhood. The messages turn out to be from Sanam, his unrequited first love, who follows him from city to city. Just as Hedayat's narrator seeks to maintain the fleeting presence of an ethereal woman through her image. Packaging u Faraday's body (1998) is more daring. He questions the absolute, Platonic world Tow sleep with its stark binary and preordained curse by allowing the silenced woman to speak. Marouf lets her tell her story, from her childhood to her encounter with the painter, re-writing her into the world from which Hedayet erased her.
First sentence Tow sleep - "In life there are wounds that, like termites, slowly crawl into a lonely soul and eat it away" - became a meme on social media, and the characters from the novel entered everyday conversations in contemporary Iran.
Blind owl It casts a long shadow. And as long as Iranian society remains trapped in its countless unresolved historical contradictions, that shadow will continue to be there.
(Glif editorial team; Source: The Dial; Translated by: Matija Jovandić)
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