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Absurdity and Creation in the Work of Sadeq Hedayat

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Deirdre Lashgari
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Extract

Two impulses, the desire to create and the desire to withdraw into oblivion and death, lie at the heart of Sadeq Hedayat's character. He was painfully sensitive to human weaknesses, loneliness, and suffering in a world that seemed all the darker through his eyes because the values against which he measured it were so demanding. He expected more of and for humanity than could be attained. A part of him sought to reject a life doomed to such imperfection, to draw back from the searing pain of a consciousness without hope.

Yet it is also through this pain of consciousness that the creative act arises. This second force, the impulse to objectify the vision of Absurdity by transforming it into art, provided for Hedayat a somewhat precarious counterbalance to the impulse of negation. For creation, however tentative, constitutes a challenge to the forces of darkness. In the very act of depicting a universe without meaning, the artist implicitly contributes meaning of his own.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 1-4: Literature and Society in Iran , 1982 , pp. 31 - 52
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1982

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Footnotes

I acknowledge my profound debt to Parviz Lashgari, who opened the door to my understanding of Hedayat's work.

References

Notes

1. Hedayat's stories are full of characters who are not sure who or what they are. The desire for self-realization appears most directly in the story “Tarikkhaneh” [The Darkroom]. In “Zendeh be-Gur” [Alive in the Grave], the narrator's desire for death is equalled by his desire to communicate his story. Hedayat, Sadeq, “Tarik-khaneh,” Sag-e Velgard [The Stray Dog] (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1963)Google Scholar; “Zendeh be-Gur,” Zendeh be-Gur [Alive in the Grave] (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1958).Google Scholar

2. Sadeq Hedayat, Buf-e Kur, 5th ed. (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1955), p. 2. (Quotation here, as elsewhere in this essay, is from The Blind Owl, translated by Costello, D. P. (New York: Grove, 1957).Google Scholar

3. Cf. Brod, Max, Franz Kafka: A Biography, tr. Humphreys Roberts, G. and Winston, Richard, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken, 1960).Google Scholar

4. Hedayat, “Payam-e Kafka” [Kafka's Message], Goruh-e Mahkumin (tr. of Kafka's In der Strafkolonie [In the Penal Colony]), ed. Qa'emiyan, Hasan (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1958), p. 22.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., p. 16. (Translations from “Payam-e Kafka” and from the stories are my own.)

6. Ibid., p. 12.

7. Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, tr. O'Brien, Justin (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 10.Google Scholar

8. Hedayat, “Gerdab” [The Abyss], Three Drops of Blood, p. 10.

9. Camus’ The Myth, as discussed by Jean-Paul Sartre in “Camus’ ‘The Outsider,’” tr. by Annette Michelson in Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays (London: Rider and Co., 1955), p. 26.Google Scholar

10. Hedayat, “Bon'bast” [Dead End], The Stray Dog, p. 66.

11. Idem, “Kafka's Message,” pp. 12-13.

12. Idem, “Farda” [Tomorrow], Neveshteh'ha-ye Parakandeh [Scattered Writings], ed. Qa'emiyan, Hasan, 2nd ed. (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1965), p. 195.Google Scholar

13. Idem, “Sag-e Velgard” [The Stray Dog], The Stray Dog.

14. Idem, “Davud-e Guzhposht” (Davud the Hunchback], Alive in the Grave.

15. Idem, “Dash Akol” [Dash Akol], Three Drops of Blood.

16. Idem, “Laleh” [Tulip], Three Drops of Blood.

17. This feeling of self-contempt or, more accurately, of worthlessness in the eyes of others, appears throughout Kafka's writings. See, for example, “The Metamorphosis” and “The Verdict,” and more directly in his “Letter to His Father.”

18. Consider, for example, Kafka's “A Dream,” in which he watches in fascination as his own grave is prepared for him; “The Verdict,” in which the condemnation of the father impels the young man to suicide; Brod's description, in the biography, of Kafka's own temptation to end his life. Hedayat, on the other hand, made a number of actual attempts at suicide, and finally did take his own life in Paris in 1951. He speaks in “Three Drops of Blood” of a man's death or, more specifically, his mode of death as something which is born with him, which is “written on his forehead.”

19. Alavi, Bozorg, Geschichte und Entwicklung der modernen persischen Literatur (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1964).Google Scholar

20. Hedayat, “Kafka's Message,” p. 27.

21. Ibid., pp. 19, 24, 26, and 32. Cf. also Brod's biography of Kafka, p. 172, where he quotes from the section “Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way,” from The Great Wall of China, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1946), pp. 289-90.

“Man cannot live without a permanent faith in something indestructible in himself. At the same time this indestructible part and his faith in it may remain permanently concealed from him. One of the forms in which this concealment may be expressed is the belief in a personal God.”

See, too, Brod on pp. 174-175 and ff.

22. Alavi, Geschichte (p. 91) cites as examples the murder of the patriotic poet ‘Eshqi in 1924 (p. 91), and the seven-year imprisonment and eventual strangling of the poet Farrokhi in 1939 (p. 97). See also Jalal Al-e Ahmad, “Hedayat-e Buf-e Kur,” in ‘Elm va Zendegi, no. 1 (1951), pp. 65-78, for a discussion of the influence of Reza Shah Pahlavi's dictatorship on the tone and imagery of The Blind Owl.

23. Reza Shah Pahlavi, ruled 1925-1941.

24. Hedayat, “Kafka's Message,” p. 16.

25. Cf. for instance the folk beliefs of Khunsar.

26. Cf. Parviz Daryush, in “Ada-ye Dayn be Sadeq-e Hedayat” [Repaying a Debt to Sadeq Hedayat], in Ketab-e Mah [Book of the Month] (Shahrivar, 1962), p. 33. (This is an especially valuable study of Hedayat's work.)

27. Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Qu'est-ce que la litterature?” [What is Literature?], Les Temps modernes, 11:18–111:22.Google Scholar Tr. as What Is Literature? (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949)Google Scholar, and as Literature and Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press, 1965).Google Scholar