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The Serious Century and Hedayat's Grim Laughter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Omid Azadibougar
Omid Azadibougar*
Affiliation:
University of Leuven; Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at the City University of Hong Kong
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Abstract

Perhaps inspired, more than anything else, by The Blind Owl's famous opening lines, the reception of the novel has so far been dominated by a dark view of the narrative. However, subtle inter-textual links and formal patterns in the narrative could help to read a radically subversive laughter in it which targets the novel's predecessors and readers equally and concurrently. This article engages the aesthetic qualities of the novel and attempts to account for and emphasize the literariness of the text in interpretation. By singling out a few inter-textual links and elaborating upon them in detail, the narrative's parodic laughter, its significance and the way it can change our appreciation of the novel are discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 21 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2014

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Footnotes

The author sincerely thanks the editor and the reviewer of Iranian Studies for the energetic exchange of ideas, extends his warmest gratitude to Ortwin de Graef for invaluable and enlightening discussions, and thanks Franco Moretti, Theo D'Haen, David Damrosch, and Laetitia Nanquette their valuable comments on the earlier versions of this paper.

References

1 Hedayat, Sadegh, Buf-e Kur (Tehran, 1351/1973 [1341])Google Scholar. This version of the novel has been used for referencing in this paper. All translations into English are mine, unless otherwise indicated. For the most recent collection of responses to TBO, see Katouzian, Homa, ed., Sadeq Hedayat: His Work and his Wondrous World (London and New York, 2008)Google Scholar. See also Beard, Michael, Hedayat's Blind Owl as a Western Novel (Princeton, NJ, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Katouzian, Homa, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Literature of an Iranian Writer (London and New York, 2000 [1992])Google Scholar; Ahmadzadeh, Hashem, Nation and Novel, A Study of Persian and Kurdish Narrative Discourse (Uppsala, 2003)Google Scholar; Ghanoonparvar, Mohammad, “The Blind Owl,” in The Novel: History, Geography, and Culture, Vol 1, ed. Moretti, Franco (Princeton, NJ, 2006), 794Google Scholar.

2 Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl (Austin, TX, 1981 [1930s]), 42Google Scholar; 160–61.

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8 The first person to have applied this label was André Breton who praised TBO as a “classic of surrealism.” However, he was most definitely unaware of the novel's context of production and potential significations that might have energized it.

9 For a detailed theoretical investigation of problems related to the production of genuine literature, specifically the novelistic, and adequate literary criticism in modern Iran, see Azadibougar, Omid, The Persian Novel: Ideology, Fiction and Form in the Periphery (Amsterdam and New York, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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15 Katouzian, Sadeq Hedayat: The Life, 118.

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24 Ibid., 6.

25 De Graef, “The Eye of the Text,” 1100.

26 Ibid., 1100–1.

27 TBO, 8.

28 Ibid., 8.

29 Ibid., 19.

30 Ibid., 20.

31 Ibid., 20.

32 Ibid., 20.

33 De Graef, “The Eye of the Text,” 1109.

34 Ibid., 1109.

35 Ibid., 1109.

36 Ibid., 1109.

37 Ibid., 1109.

38 TBO, 6.

39 Ibid., 6.

40 Ibid., 8.

41 De Graef, “The Eye of the Text,” 1113.

42 TBO, 5.

43 Ibid., 20.

44 Ibid., 21.

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48 TBO, 1.

49 Ibid., 1.

50 Ibid., 1.

51 Ibid., 12.

52 Ibid., 5.

53 Ibid., 9.

54 Ibid., 6.

55 Ibid., 17.

56 Ibid., 58–9.

57 Ibid., 59.

58 Ibid., 59.

59 Modiri, Mehran, Mard-e Hezar Chehreh (Tehran, 1387/2008)Google Scholar, episode 9.

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62 Ibid., 74.

63 Thomas Pavel, “The Novel in Search of Itself: a Historical Morphology,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti, 29.

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65 Ibid., 67.

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68 For the self-(de)-constructiveness of the novel see also Mansouri-Zayni, “Haunting Language-Game.” The novel subjects itself to the parodic rule through characters which are all copies of each other.

69 Frederic Jameson, “A Businessman in Love,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti, 112–13.

70 Frederic Jameson, “The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes, ed. Morett, 439.

71 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “The Roads of the Novel,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti, 623.

72 Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London and New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Nancy Armstrong, “The Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and the Paradox of Individualism,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti, 349; Bruce Robbins, “The Portrait of the Artist as a Social Climber: Upward Mobility in the Novel,” in The Novel: Forms and Themes.