Novel Folklore: On Sadegh Hedayat's the Blind Owl

by Jason Reza Jorjani

Sadegh Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl is widely considered to be the greatest work of modern Persian literature. Often compared to the classics of Existentialism and Gothic horror, The Blind Owl is widely believed to be cursed, so that anyone who reads it seriously is driven to suicide. This belief is no doubt influenced by Hedayat’s own suicide in Paris in 1951.

In Novel Folklore, Jason Reza Jorjani, whose grandfather was best friends with Hedayat, offers a revolutionary interpretation of The Blind Owl. Jorjani reveals Hedayat’s complex appropriation and adaptation of libertine Gnostic and antinomian Tantric ideas and argues that he aimed to reestablish Iran’s perennial role as the cultural crossroads of the Western world and the Indo-Buddhist East.

On Jorjani’s reading, The Blind Owl is ultimately about the “Imaginal” metamorphosis of humans into higher beings. These beings are addressing us from our own future. We think of them as “aliens” because we are alienated from our own future possibilities. Their business here is to re-write their past by re-engineering the folkloric substratum of human consciousness and identity.

Jason Jorjani’s Novel Folklore is a stunningly original interpretation of The Blind Owl and an original philosophical work in its own right.

Genres: Philosophy

166 pages, Hardcover

First published May 22, 2018

Reviews

[Kaya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've written and rewritten an opening sentence to this review a few times but am so shocked at the poor academic and discursive quality of Jorjani's writing that nothing quite captures how absurdly offensive this book is. Starting with the limited positive points, the book is useful in highlighting particular areas of cross-fertilisation in Hedayat's rich world-building and restructuring of modern day folklore. Unfortunately, this sole quality of the book is marred by constant racist comments towards Arabs and the 'Semitic' element in Iranian culture, dismissing them as ignorant at best and at other times 'savage' or 'catastrophic' peoples - to use such language in academic discourse really beggars belief. As someone with Iranian heritage I am ashamed to see this kind of racism being deployed in the name of Persian nationalism (often a merely thinly-veiled hatred of any reminder that Iranians are indeed not white Europeans). After finishing the book I went to check what institution Jorjani is affiliated with, and was unsurprised to find out he is an alt-right neo-fascist who rubs shoulders with Trumpians and violent, terroristic racists like Richard Spencer. Let me save you time and point out everything you need to research to understand Hedayat a little better, without needing to trudge through this morass of racism and appallingly poor turns of phrase.

- Zoroastrianism, Zurvanite ideas, and Suhrawardian gnosticism
- Shivaite Hindu symbolism and doctrines
- Nietzsche and Heidegger
- Persian fairy tales and folklore

[no.stache.nietzsche · Rating 5 out of 5]

A crucial case for a particular way of intentionally inflecting the developmental trajectory of a folk, using an exposition of an Iranian existential novel, as well as touching on Strieber's Communion, as concrete examples of the craft. Jorjani's own novels (published after this work) are also likely candidates for this way of writing, though only time will tell if Faustian Futurist and Uber Man will have the requisite impact for them to be said to be genuinely folkloric- though they obviously count as attempts.

This work definitely made The Blind Owl itself an accessible work for us; we likely wouldn't have really had a clue what was going on in that novel without the context Jorjani offers here, and the general information about Zoroastrianism and Mithra was delightful on its own merits as well.

[Kiarash Geraeli · Rating 3 out of 5]

all the time I was reading I was filling sad not sure why

[Kit · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess Charles Kinbote did write a second book...

[Sam Rosendahl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great