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Haunting Language-Game: Baudrillardian Metamorphoses in Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Sina Mansouri-Zeyni*
Affiliation:
Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran

Abstract

As an acclaimed work of twentieth-century Persian fiction, Sadeq Hedayat's The Blind Owl has stirred much scholarly contemplation. Identical characters obscure the work; the resemblance amongst them seemingly originates in some mysterious old man. The paper first demonstrates how every male character resembles this old man. Thereafter, he is argued to be non-existent; all the characters, therefore, become Baudrillardian simulacra bound together through family resemblances. A language-game is then fashioned to represent the family. The metamorphosis of the narrator is followed to manifest how this language-game haunts the characters—other language-games. The paper hopefully sheds some light on an ambiguous aspect of the work and provides a model as to how one language-game takes over another.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 The International Society for Iranian Studies

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Footnotes

The author is greatly indebted to Dr Farideh Pourgiv for reviewing this paper and suggesting some important points, and to Sepideh Sami for her intellectual support. Farideh Pourgiv and Sepideh Sami are, respectively, Professor of English and student of English Literature at Shiraz University.

References

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5 Ibid., 16.

6 Ibid., 38.

7 Ibid., 47. It is important to note that both muffled and wrapped are translations for the same Persian infinitive pichidan. The importance will be related under The Family of the Bent Old Man.

8 Ibid., 69.

9 Ibid., 78.

10 Saqqai, Bahman, “Taqaddos zodai-ye Buf-e Kur” [Desanctification of The Blind Owl], in Ru-ye jaddeh-ye namnak: Darbareh-ye Sadeq Hedayat [On the damp road: about Sadeq Hedayat], ed. Qasemzadeh, Mohammad (Tehran, 2003), 187.Google Scholar

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16 Jalal Āl-e Aḥmad, “The Hedayat of The Blind Owl,” trans. Ali A. Eftekhari, in Hedayat's “The Blind Owl” Forty Years After (see note 13), 37–8.

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31 Nietzsche and his inverted Platonism also celebrate this affirmative power; in his critique of morality, Nietzsche contrasts “slave morality” with “master morality,” asserting that only the latter has the power to affirm its own values. See Nietzsche, F., Human, All too Human, trans. Feber, Marion and Lehmann, Stephen (Harmondsworth, 1984)Google Scholar, and Nietzsche, F., On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, trans. Diethe, Carol (Cambridge, 2000).Google Scholar

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34 Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 33–6. Spirit is a translation for the Persian ruḥ. Essence, perhaps, would have done more justice to the original text in this case since it would have better rendered the mystical connotation.

35 Ibid., 50–51.

36 Ibid., 102.

37 Ibid., 113.

38 Ibid., 154 (emphasis added).

39 Baudrillard, Simulations, 11.

40 Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 128.

41 Cisco, “Eternal Occurrence in The Blind Owl,” 475.

42 Ibid., 484. “The circulating thing is not a simple, singular object, but a complex, consisting of the narrator's attention, which involves discernment, the determination of and naming of objects and events; and also action, as each transposition seems to set up the next in a sequence that superficially resembles a chain of cause and effect, but could just be an endless succession of equivalent symbolizations.”

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46 Cisco, “Eternal Occurrence in The Blind Owl,” 473.

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51 Ibid., 44.

52 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 20.

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58 Hedayat, The Blind Owl, 128.

59 Ibid., 142.

60 Ibid., 148–9.

61 Ibid., 151.

62 Ibid., 153.

63 Ibid., 154 (emphasis added).