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Eternal Recurrence in The Blind Owl

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Michael Cisco
Michael Cisco*
Affiliation:
CUNY Hostos, USA
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Abstract

This article analyzes the surprisingly consistent way in which Sadeq Hedayat's novella, The Blind Owl, represents the concept of eternal recurrence. Hedayat employs repetition in a unique manner. Neither narrator ever remarks upon or seems to notice that events, motifs, and similar or identical epithets and phrasings which arise in their own thoughts and utterances are repeating, but they rather encounter every repeated event or thought as if it had only just occurred for the first time. While I do not claim that Hedayat was in any meaningful way a ‘Nietzschean’ thinker, philosophical ideas from Nietzsche's works and those of the French thinkers who came after, most notably Klossowski and Deleuze, interact strikingly with The Blind Owl and seem to bring hitherto unnoticed dimensions of this important work to our attention. Notably, Hedayat depicts a struggle with nihilism that is informed by the philosophical questions surrounding what came to be known as existentialism, but in a manner that is not merely derivative of European models.

Type
Research Article
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , September 2010 , pp. 471 - 488
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2010

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References

1 Hedayat, Sadeq, The Blind Owl, trans. by Costello, D. P. (New York, 1957), 41–42Google Scholar.

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16 Costello, The Blind Owl, 74–75.

17 http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/BlindOwl/blindowl.html, Iraj Bashiri translation (emphasis added).

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20 Ibid., 2.

21 Ibid., 90.

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26 Ibid., 64.

27 Ibid., 98–99.

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44 Costello, The Blind Owl, 114.

45 Ibid., 116.

46 His superhuman feeling, see ibid., 123.