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The Blind Owl: Tracking time

From where should I begin? All these thoughts that right now simmer through my head belong to this very moment. They know no hour, minute or date. For me, something that happened yesterday might be more ancient, or less effectual, than an event which took place a thousand years ago. (Buf-e Kur, p. 53.)

Introduction

Reading Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods and following the recurring references to Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie, it brought to mind the critical practice surrounding the novella The Blind Owl (1937) written by the Iranian author Sadeq Hedayat. Similar discussions, as those concerning the novel Sylvie, are to be found within the context of The Blind Owl, and especially discussions related to the topographical and chronological constitution of the text. Although this novella does not have any relation with my thesis project, which entails contemporary Pashto short stories in Afghanistan, it is of great concern for my “private” reading being one of the books I have spent the most time with (next to The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell). Though, many times after reading this novella, I have ended up with the question: What happened, really?

Eco says that the topography in Sylvie is “of a neoclassical clarity”[1] (though remarks have been made as to whether it can be reconciled with factual geography or not)[2] but also that what “readers cannot grasp is where they are in time”. A similar description may be attributed to The Blind Owl, though in this particular case we are faced with both a vague topographical description, and very subtle, often confusing, time shifts; flashbacks, flashforwards, embedded flashbacks, dreams and hallucinations. Thus, the focus in this paper will be to analyse the discourse time in The Blind Owl and to see if the temporal sequences are “possible”, or if they are incompatible with factual chronology. As means for this analyse I will use a modified version of Eco’s diagram of the plot and story of Sylvie[3] applied upon The Blind Owl. Speaking of The Blind Owl in more general terms, it is the work that marks the break with traditional literary patterns and introduces modern literature in Iran. The fact that The Blind Owl often is referred to as a short story and a novella, as well as a novelette and a novel is not that surprising. It is a product of something “in between”, i.e. of something between tradition and modernity, at a time when modern genres had not yet received their generic characteristics (at least not in Iran). In this paper I will refer to The Blind Owl as a novella (i.e. a long short story) since its generic features are clearly closer to those constituting the short story genre than the ones characterising the novel. However, this definition is contested by many.

The Narrative Structure: Story and Plot

Eco writes that a “narrative text may conceivably lack a plot, but it cannot possibly do without story or discourse.”[4] As for The Blind Owl, it appears on the one hand to possess a weak or perhaps subordinate story, and on the other hand to have a strong and intricate plot. Nevertheless, The Blind Owl has been transferred into other media several times, e.g. into film by Kiumars Derambakhsh in 1975, by Reza Abdoh in 1992, and by the Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz as La Chouette Aveugle in 1987. In order to help the reader his way through the analysis, a simplified outline of the story of The Blind Owl will be given.

The novella consists of two interrelated sections. In the first part, the narrator, a painter of pen-cases, retells his experiences after having witness the scene of a beautiful woman from his room. After having searched for this woman during two months and four days, she suddenly appears in front of his home. She dies in his room and the main character, i.e. the narrator, cuts up her body and places her remains in a suitcase. Assisted by an old man, he digs down the suitcase outside of the city. Later arriving at home, he begins smoking opium and ends up in coma-like state of mind. In the second part the narrator awakes in another time and place. We are told about the history of his parents, and later on about him marrying his cousin, a woman who is referred to as the “whore” by the narrator. Towards the end of the novella the “whore” is killed by the narrator. By the force of anguish over his misdeed he is brought back to the existence of part one.[5]

Voices

The story of The Blind Owl is conveyed by a nameless narrator in the first person point of view, as a ‘narrator-focaliser’ through external focalisation (with some exceptions, see: Analysis). It is only at a couple of instances that we may interpret the text as being narrated by a model author. The introduction, i.e. the temporal space between T10 and T20 in the illustration below, may be interpreted as a statement, or a strategy imposed upon the reader, by our model author. It begins with the tone setting sentence: “There are certain sores in life that, like leprosy, gradually tear and lacerate the soul in solitude.” As concerns dialogues, they are of very sparse occurrence and only conveyed in a couple of sentences. The focalisation is still external in these dialogues since the narrator “has at his disposal all the temporal dimensions of the story.”[6]

Diagram of temporal organisation

Analysis: Deciphering the diagram

The illustration of temporal sequences above does by no means cover all shifts in time, it is only meant to serve as a map, guiding the reader through the subtle shifts between the different temporal layers. The length of the arrows presented in the diagram is not to be interpreted as duration of time, only as temporal direction; past time is in a downward direction and an upward direction is leading towards the present-future tense. So, if quoting Hedayat himself once again, “where do we begin?” We may start out by summarising previous attempts which have been made on defining this matter, i.e. the formal structure of The Blind Owl. Critics upon The Blind Owl have almost exclusively worked with multi-causal explanations from an intentionalist point of view, wherein the author’s intention often has been the main focus, rather than the work itself; the personal overshadowing the poetic. As regards the topographical constitution of the text the critics are quite consentient; one part of the story takes place in a suburb of Tehran at a time after the Safavid dynasty (-1722) and before 1930, and another part which takes place in approximately the same surroundings as above, but at another time, probably after the 8th century and before the Mongol invasion in the area around the year 1220. Discussions upon the structure, as regards the chronology of the text, do not reveal the same degree of consensus. The interpretation made by the critic Homa Katouzian is the one that corresponds most to my own explanations. His simplified diagram reads as follows:

The most hair-raising interpretation of the novella was made by Iraj Bashiri in 1984. He suggests that The Blind Owl consists in two independent parts; the first being a metaphorical representation of the author burying Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (an idea which appears to be anything but plausible), and the second part being an emulation of the Buddhacarita and The Tibetan Book of the Dead (a reasoning which also fail in verisimilitude).
In my diagram above, the T’s marked with a subscripted zero are all representing a deictic centre, a temporal deixis defined by its own context. They are all somehow markers for present time, the moment of speech, though within different levels of time.
T10—T20: The time leading up to T20 may be defined as a prelude for the story, narrated by the model author, a “genderless” voice who gives directions for the model reader, here is where the plot begins. At T20 the narrator is introduced and here is where the story begins. The narrator declares his objectives, to write down what happened to him at sunset two months and four days ago on the 13th day of the month Farvardin (i.e. thirteen days after the Persian New Year)[1], and what he experienced after that. Thus, at T2-5 an explicit time reference is given. From here, the narrator guides us through the evening and the night. This is the moment where he sees the ethereal women and is paid a visit by his uncle. “The next day (T2-4) I was still thinking of the same thing, was it possible for me to give her up entirely? The day after that (T2-3), eventually, with such fear and trepidation, I decided to put the wine flask back in its place.” Reading this, we now ought to be located in the 15th of Farvardin.
Between T2-3 and T2-2 we learn about the narrator’s whereabouts, though without giving any specific time markers referring to deixis, only temporal expressions such as: “for nights on”, or “since the time when”. Thus we may now theoretically be located anywhere after the 15th of Farvardin and before deixis. The time reference at T2-2 is even more difficult comprehend. The narrator says: “The last evening, like every other evening, that I went out for a walk”. Persian does not distinguish between “last” and “final”, i.e. this word covers both meanings, so it is therefore impossible to point out what this “last” refers to. Last night could either be the last night from the moment of speech, i.e. somewhere after the 15th of Farvardin, yesterday from the narrator’s point of view, or it could refer to the final evening within this level of narration, i.e. the night before the reversal in time. If we follow the latter interpretation (and I think we should do since yesterday evening has other forms of expression in Persian), then we need to look forward in order to see what temporal locality this last night refers to. The narrator leads us through T2-2 saying: “I had to pass an endless, long, dark and cold night beside the corpse”, and reaches at T2-1 declaring that: “It was about daybreak.” In the evening on this last day, the narrator smokes some opium and “enters into a state of half-sleep, half-coma.” This state is followed by a sensation reversing in time, and he wakes up in a new world; at T30. Thus, apparently the text does not give us enough evidence as to what T2-1 is supposed to be the last day of, and we can therefore not specify the moment T2-2. It could either suggest the final day before the reversal in time, or it may refer to the last evening within this segment of narration, i.e. anywhere in between T2-3 and T20. Concluding, the text itself does not give enough information to fixate neither T2-2 nor T2-1 in the temporal world of the novella. At T30 we may introduce an additional deictic centre. The narrator awakes to a new world, a parallel reality. In the first passage the narrator expresses awareness of his previous existence: “The environs and conditions in the new world to which I awoke were thoroughly familiar and close to me, in a way that my previous life felt more distant, as if it were a reflection of my real life.” However, in the second passage of the first introducing paragraph, a shift to internal focalisation may be detected. From this point until we return at T20≈ the narrator appears to be unaware of his previous existence, i.e. the narrator is situated inside the events. The T30 segment ends with the narrator saying: “It was this need to write that somehow had become a compulsion for me. I wanted to drag out that demon who had tortured my within for such a long time. I wanted to put my own hatred on paper. At last, after some hesitation, I pulled the tallow burner closer and began (to write) as follows.” At T40 a new deixis is established; the present moment of writing. As the illustration shows, T40 has been represented as having some duration of time. This is due to the fact that an interior monologue which takes place before the narrator begins his “general flashback without time reference”. This flashback contains several embedded flashbacks, childhood memories, dreams, other unspecified experiences of the past. At T4-4 the duration of two months and four days is once again used as a temporal limit in which the main narration is located. We are told that it was two months and four days since the wedding night of the narrator and his wife, or the “whore” as she is referred to. T4-5 in the diagram appears to be a deliberate slip in time. The narrator says that he has been trapped in his room waiting for his wife for two years and four months, but adds to this: “What are days and months? Time loses its significance for one who lives in a grave.”
At T4-3 we find specific time references relative to deixis, or perhaps better, relative to a predicted end point in time. It says: “I got up early in the morning, dressed myself, and picked up the two cookies in the niche, making sure that nobody saw me, I ran away from the house.” To know that this event occurred three days ago as is specified in the diagram, one has to finish the story and thereafter travel backwards in time, counting the days.
“This morning when I opened my eyes (i.e. the next morning), she seemed to have the same appearance, except for the wrinkles in her face which had become deeper and harder.” This sentence is the first reference to T4-2. This segment of time is of lengthy narrative time (though the discourse time only lasts for a day) and contains several flashbacks and dreams.
At T4-1 the end of the story is closing in: “Early the next morning, I awakened to the sound of my wife’s clamours.” The last evening within the T4-1 temporality ends with the narrator entering his wife’s room whereupon he kills her: “I opened my hand in the light of the tallow burner, I saw her eye in my hand and my body was soaked with blood.” What does this suggest as regards our position in time? If we revert to the second passage in T30 it is written: “Twilight was lingering. A tallow burner was burning in the niche and a quilt was spread in the corner of my room, but I was awake. I felt that my body was hot and saw that my cloak and scarf had been stained with blood.” Thus, the T4 time layer has guided us back to the moment just before the narrator begins to write.
In the final passage of the novella the narrator finds himself back in his old room, and by the evidence gathered from this last passage we may position ourselves somewhere after T20.
In conclusion, what has this rather physical elaboration of the chronology of The Blind Owl told us? It has been noticed that there are several instances in the novella where time cannot be defined since reference points are missing or due to the fact that certain temporal expressions carries dual semantic meanings. In spite of all this, the temporal sequences are in fact “possible” and are not in discord with factual time (as was my conviction it would be before I set out with this analysis).
Anyhow, could it not be possible to interpret/read the novella as one coherent temporal reality, involving a delicate web of dreams and hallucinations? I guess it could…

In this base world, full of poverty and misery, I thought that, for the first time, a ray of sunshine shined upon my life. But unfortunately, this ray was not sunshine, it was nothing but a transient beam. It was a shooting star which revealed itself to me in the shape of a woman or an angel, and in the light of her I witnessed for a moment, lasting only but a second, all the miseries in my life, and I perceived the magnificence and splendour of these. In the next moment, this beam disappeared into the dark maelstrom, as it was destined to do—No, I could not hold on to this transient beam. (Buf-e kur, p. 11

Bibliography

Ahmadzadeh, H., 2003, Nation and Novel: A study of Persian and Kurdish Narrative Discourse, Uppsala
Eco, Umberto, 2004 [1st. ed. 1995], Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hedayat, Sadeq, 1984, The Blind Owl (Buf-e Kur), [1st publ. 1937, Bombay], translated by Bashiri, Iraj, available at: http://www.angelfire.com/rnb/bashiri/BlindOwl/blindowl.html [2008-03-10]
Hedayat, Sadeq, 1959, Buf-e Kur, [1st publ. 1937, Bombay], Tehran: Amir Kabir
Katouzian, Homa, 1991, Sadeq Hedayat: The life and literature of an Iranian writer, London
Rimmon-Kenan, S., 2002, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London: Taylor & Francis Ltd.

[1] Eco, p. 29.
[2] See for example: A. W. Raitt, ”Time and Instability in Nerval’s Sylvie”, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 83, No. 4. (Oct., 1988), pp. 843-851.
[3] Eco, p. 40.
[4] Ibid., p. 35.
[5] For a more detailed summary, see: Ahmadzadeh, pp. 181-182., or Katouzian, pp. 114-118.
[6] Rimmon-Kenan, S., Narrative Fiction, p. 81.

[7] This specific date carries cultural characteristics worthy of mentioning. The thirteenth day after the Persian New Year (Nouruz) is called Sizdah be dar meaning “thirteen to out”. This day one is supposed to pass outdoors, spending time with the family, having picnics and such. To stay at home this day is associated with bad luck. Our narrator stays inside this day.