The Blind Owl: The Wound of Shadow on the Soul
The Blind Owl is not one of those books that can be read and then closed and set aside. Some novels stay in the mind after they end, because they tell a good story or create an unforgettable character. The Blind Owl stays in another way. This book leaves something lodged in the reader, something of the nature of air, taste, darkness, and a vague familiarity with a wound that may have been in a person before, but had no name.
Iran's Sefir Arjan Literature Service (Sefir Arjan) - Dawood Khani Khalifamohle, literary critic: "Blind Owl" is not one of those books that can be read only and then closed and put aside; Some novels stay in the mind after they are finished because they told a good story or created a memorable character, but Blind Owl stays in a different way. This book settles something in the reader, something like air, taste, darkness and a kind of vague familiarity with a wound that may have been in the person before, but did not have a name. When you come out of reading it, you don't feel that you have just finished a story, you feel that you have lived for a while in a closed and poisoned space whose particles are still stuck to your clothes, skin and look. This is where the durability of the blind owl comes from: because it doesn't just give meaning, it creates a present. It doesn't just narrate, it creates an atmosphere.
From the very first line, Sadegh Hedayat clarifies the task of everything: "In life, there are wounds that slowly eat away at the soul in isolation, like a gnat in isolation." This sentence has been quoted many times, to the extent that someone may be unaware of its initial sharpness due to repetition. But the truth is that this line is still one of the most accurate entrances to the world of blind owls. Here we are not dealing with a novel that wants to talk about suffering, explain its cause, or draw moral and social conclusions from it. We are dealing with a text that speaks from the inside of suffering. This is not a small difference. In many works, pain is the subject; In the blind owl, pain is a quality of perception. The narrator sees the world from the back of a wound that is neither fresh, nor superficial, nor curable. This wound settled in his eyes and now it has distorted everything.
That is why the world of this novel is not a world of balance from the very beginning. Everything about it is a bit too much. Things are heavier than they should be. Shadows seem more alive than people. Desire smells like corruption. Loneliness is not just solitude; It is a kind of expulsion from the common world. The narrator trusts neither the outside nor the inside. He can neither dwell in reality nor rest in fantasy. Everything is either too far or too close for him. Either charming or disgusting. In the blind owl, something called a healthy and balanced relationship with the world is lost. This is where the novel goes beyond a simple melancholic narrative and becomes a deeper experience: the experience of reality falling apart.
One of the most terrifying and brilliant confessions in the book is where the narrator says: "It's just to introduce myself to my shadow" and then he continues more clearly: "I'm only writing for my shadow, which is lying on the wall in front of the lamp, I have to introduce myself to it." In these few lines, loneliness reaches its peak, but not the usual loneliness. Here, it is no longer just a matter of staying away from others. A person who has to introduce himself to his own shadow is torn from the inside. He is still alive, he still has language, he still writes, but there is a distance between him and himself. As if that bright and everyday part of his existence is no longer enough to explain himself. It should also answer that silent, bent, dark, and patient half; To something that is separate from him and at the same time is closer to him than anyone.
The shadow in this novel is not just a poetic image, not just an array, not just a sign of illusion. The shadow in The Blind Owl is both the audience, the witness, the judge, and the hidden part of the being that the narrator is afraid of and at the same time cannot take refuge in. When a person is so distant from himself, the outside world also loses its previous stability. This is where the border between reality and illusion keeps slipping in the blind owl. Not because of the game of form, not because the author wants to make a riddle with the reader, but because this is the experience of the narrator. A mind that is cracked from within also sees the world as cracked. That's why when the narrator asks about people if they are not created to deceive him, and if they are not "a bunch of shadows", we are not dealing with simple skepticism; We are on the side of falling fundamental trust in reality. Others are no longer strong and independent people. They approach a ghost, a substitute, a slippery and threatening presence.
In such a world, a woman cannot have a calm and unified face. The woman in The Blind Owl is more of a crisis field than a character. The narrator sees her in two poles: an ethereal woman and a lekate. One is so distant and pure and silent that it is more like an appearance than a presence; The other sinks into vulgarity, hatred, and desire so much that the narrator is both drawn and repelled by it. This division is not only about women; It is about the capacity of the narrator's mind for relationship. He cannot bear the other as a real, limited, imperfect, earthly, and independent human being. He must either raise him so high that he is beyond the reach of life, or lower him so low that he can be tolerated with contempt. That is why when he talks about Lecate, his language is full of hatred on the one hand and dependent on the other. He says: "This woman... this Lecate... this magic, I don't know what kind of poison was poured into my soul, into my being that I not only wanted her, but needed every part of my body, every part of her body." And then he comes to a sentence that shows both the extent of the narrator's wound and the ruined nature of the relationship: "It was as if this Lecate was enjoying my torture."
If we read these passages only as examples of misogyny or mental illness, we have seen part of the truth, but not the core. Of course, this layer is in the text and cannot be ignored. But more importantly, guidance in this duality shows the inability of a wounded person to face the other. The narrator cannot face the woman as an equal and real human being, nor can he experience his desire in a healthy way. For him, a woman is either a sacred ghost or a defiled body. In both cases, what remains absent is the human being. This is where The Blind Owl goes beyond a dark and symbolic novel and becomes a document of relationship failure. A relationship in which passion, hatred, shame, body, and contempt are mixed in such a way that nothing is left of affection or the possibility of seeing the other.
Hidayat does not advance this chaos with discussion and interpretation. His power in this novel is the power of the image. But the image in Buf Cor is not a decorative image; Image is a tool of perception. Objects in this book are not just objects. Each carries the burden of the narrator's psyche. Pencil case, lotus, jar, hatch, shadow, butcher, nanny, old man in a pigpen, all are more than stage props. Each of them appears at some point in the narrative as if they did not come from outside, but fell upon the world from within the narrator. When he says that he had to draw a scene on the cover of the notebooks all day long, and he describes that scene as "I always drew a cedar tree with an old man crouching under it... In front of him a girl in a long black dress was bending over to offer him a lily", this is no longer just a description of a job or a habit. This scene is the visual form of his obsession. He repeats the same image, because he did not actually come out of it.
The more important point is that later, the same image goes beyond the level of drawing and painting and seems to take place in the outside world as well. At this moment, one of the most fundamental boundaries of the novel collapses: the boundary between creation and observation, between the mind and the object. Did the narrator see something outside and then draw it, or did he draw it so much that he finally saw the world in the same form? Hedayat deliberately does not give a definite answer, because a definite answer kills the scene. The problem is not to solve the puzzle; The problem is to understand to what extent the mind of the narrator has become a prison of his image. It is as if he does not create anything, but something is already engraved in him and he is only condemned to see it many times in art, in memory, and in reality. This is the deep meaning of repetition in the blind owl. Repetition is not an industry here; It is appreciation.
The old man of Khanzarpanzeri is one of the heaviest incarnations of this destiny. From his first appearance, with that stooped posture, that worn-out face, and that old and musty smell, he is more than an ordinary person. His presence is like a stain of time, like something that has risen from the bottom of the accumulation of years and decay. He is neither fully alive, nor fully dead; It is neither purely external, nor entirely internal. It brings a kind of familiarity to the patient, as if the narrator has seen him somewhere before, or maybe he has already carried him. With trinkets, with the spread of used and low-value things, with a state that oscillates between being a clown and sinister, he turns into a face that is both fascinating and inescapable. Something of the narrator's future is hidden in him. It's as if a person who stays in his wound and doesn't find a way out, eventually turns out to be crumpled and a pig.
Next to him, the jar is perhaps the most shocking object in the novel. An object that looks normal and even mundane on the surface, but in the hands of the narrator, it becomes the meeting point of several main lines: woman, death, soil, past, and repetition. The slang saying that calls the jar "Yeh Goldon Raghe, the trowel of the old city of Ray" is simple and everyday at its level. But this simplicity makes the next appearance of the jar even more terrifying. Because something comes out of the heart of the normal thing and turns into a sinister thing. When the narrator says, "I put the jar on my chest," the object is no longer an antique; It is a burden that falls directly on the soul. And then when he sees "a woman's face" on it, whose "eyes were big black, bigger than usual, reproachful eyes", it's as if all the scattered lines of the novel come together at once.
The urn in Buf Kur is not only a relic of history; It is the memory of the soil. It's something that's come out from under time to prove that nothing buried really goes away. The woman, with those large and reproachful eyes, is imprinted on the body of the jar, as if desire and death were carved into a single substance from the beginning. At this point, the reader senses that the narrator's obsession is not merely the product of an everyday experience or personal incident. As if this wound is older than his personal life. Time comes from the farthest and darkest layers. Directing with such scenes takes the narrator's experience out of a purely psychological state and brings it closer to something mythical and nightmarish, without leaving the tone of the work off the ground.
In this world where everything is either poisoned or on the verge of corruption, the nanny is one of the few soft and earthly presences in the novel. When the narrator says, "I was left with only my nanny and a lecate woman," the nanny brings with it a smell of home, the past, familiarity, and a kind of silent care against all that darkness. He is connected to childhood and to those basic and simple layers of life; At a time when everything had not fallen so badly. But the art of guidance is that it does not turn even this presence into a complete shelter. A nanny is kind, but not savior. It brings closeness, but it does not bring salvation. It reduces loneliness, but does not fill the original gap. In the blind owl, nothing has the power of ultimate restoration. No memory, no body, no love, no art. All are just forms of coping, not ways to escape.
The same logic can be seen in the image of the butcher. The narrator talks about a "lowly butcher's shop", but this shop is not just a part of the city's landscape. It is a thick, dense, almost symbolic presence of the quality the narrator sees in the world: killing, consumption, and the reduction of life to flesh. This view later spreads to him from the city level, where he says: "My cheeks were red and the color of meat in front of the butcher shop." This simile is not just to intensify the sense of illness. The narrator in the mirror no longer sees himself as a unified and independent human being; He sees something approaching the world of slaughter and dismemberment. Here, the human body also falls from its human dignity and resembles a consumable material. This is one of the most brutal achievements of the novel: to show that the sick world does not only injure the soul, it also disfigures the body.
But if we want to ask why The Blind Owl is still alive, why after all these years it can still haunt, disturb, and hold the reader, the answer should not be found only in its darkness or symbolism. Dark novels have not been few and many of them have been forgotten. What sets The Blind Owl apart from many works is its brutal honesty. Hedayat in this novel does not try to make pain more noble, beautiful, or instructive than it is. He does not make a moral virtue out of a wound. It does not make an intellectual gesture out of loneliness. Madness does not produce romantic charm. His narrator is sick in places, bitter, crooked, even annoying and hateful at times, but not fake. It is this idleness that keeps the book alive. The reader feels connected to an area of human experience that the author has not touched upon.
Of course, this does not mean that the blind owl should be praised unconditionally. Incidentally, one of the conditions for reading it seriously is to see its limitations alongside its greatness. In many places, the narrator's view of women is characterized by possession, humiliation, and fear. In the novel, the world of others has less opportunity to become independent from behind his eyes. The book basically takes place in the territory of a wounded and sick self and for this reason, it sometimes distances itself from human polyphony and openness. But maybe this is also part of the honesty of the work. Hedayat did not want to make everything balanced and fair. He wanted to dive into a mind that is deeply stuck in itself and sees everything from behind the same stuckness. This is also a form of realism, albeit a painful and limiting realism.
The Blind Owl is one of those works that is not easily replicated, not because of its structural complexity, but because it was written from a very specific and very wounded point of view. In this book, Hedayat does not want to teach, nor does he want to console, nor make a hero, nor even tell a coherent story. He wants to record a present, bring to life a space, honestly show a form of existence that is neither healthy nor comprehensible to the outside, but real. And maybe that's what makes the book not only dark, but honest. And it's honesty that stays, even when it's dark, even when it hurts, even when it's uncomfortable.
The Blind Owl is not a novel that wants to be loved. But it is a novel that, once read, does not come back completely. His shadow remains. And perhaps that's the best definition of permanence: not popularity, but a presence that can't be completely outdone.
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