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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
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.
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.
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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.
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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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59 Ibid., 142.
60 Ibid., 148–9.
61 Ibid., 151.
62 Ibid., 153.
63 Ibid., 154 (emphasis added).
