Plot summary

The question of history in The Blind Owl arises primarily from its split structure, which consists of two main parts separated by nearly a millennium. The text is divided into five chapters, in which “three brief commentaries frame two major narratives.”Footnote ¹⁷ However, the two major narratives, which we refer to as part 1 and part 2, are distinguished primarily by their temporal distance.

Part 1, which opens and closes the novel, is narrated by an anonymous artist who lives in a secluded area on the outskirts of Tehran. He makes a living out of painting on pencases; repeatedly depicting a scene: a bent old man in a turban sitting under a cypress tree, while a girl in a long black dress leans over a stream from the opposite bank, offering him a lily. The narrator recounts an incident that “shattered [his] entire being.” Upon the unexpected visit of his uncle, a bent old man with an Indian turban, whom he has never met before, the artist/narrator reaches the top shelf for a bottle of old wine left by his parents. However, while standing on the stool, he glimpses through the ventilation hole the very scene for his paintings. Mesmerized by the woman's frightening, magic eyes, he spends the next two months and four days wandering the open fields around his house, desperately hoping to find the cypress tree, the stream, and the ethereal woman. His intense longing for the eyes leads him further into wine and opium. On the last night, returning from his futile wandering, he finds the ethereal woman sitting on a stone bench beside his door. He opens the door, and she walks into the artist's chamber like a sleepwalker and lies on his bed. Once again, the protagonist reaches for his ancestral wine bottle to offer to his guest. As the woman's eyes are shut, he pours a glassful of wine into her mouth. Then he crawls up the bed and lies down beside the woman's dead body. The artist/narrator then attempts to draw the eyes on paper before they decompose. Thereupon, he dismembers the body with a bone-handled knife, puts it in a suitcase, and with the aid of a mysterious hearse driver—a bent old man he finds seated under a cypress tree—takes the suitcase to a desolate open field and buries it. As the old man digs the grave, he excavates an antique vase from the ancient city of Ray, wraps it in a dirty handkerchief, and takes it as pay. Later, when the narrator is lost on his way home, the old man gives him a ride and hands him the vase. In his chamber, the artist is shocked to find the face of the ethereal woman with the same frightening, magic eyes painted on the vase. Vexed by contradictory feelings, the artist smokes his whole stock of opium until he feels that the pressure over his chest is removed. He goes into a profound sense of tranquility and detachment from his own body. He is submerged in a deep dream and wakes up in another world.

Part 2 takes place roughly a thousand years earlier, in the old city of Ray (Rhages) during its medieval Islamic heyday. The narrator begins by vaguely confessing a crime he has recently committed. He anticipates the arrival of the police to arrest him and plans to commit suicide by drinking a glass from the bottle of poisonous wine he keeps on the top shelf. However, an irresistible urge brings him to write down everything.

The rest of the narrative serves to unveil this perplexing paragraph and how this metamorphosis has occurred. The narrator of part 2 grew up in his aunt's house, raised by a nanny who suckled him and the aunt's daughter, the girl he later married. The two make love, for the first and only time, beside the aunt's deathbed and, having been caught, are forced to marry each other. But ever since their marriage, the wife, whom the narrator calls “the harlot” (Lakkāteh), refuses to sleep with him. Instead, she hooks up with all “the rabble” (rajjāleh-hā), all the mundane men who seem to pique her interest, including the butcher and the old odds-and-ends man he frequently watches from his window. Although he despises his wife, he paradoxically desires her, or that bygone, innocent memory of her. The desire is so intense that it eventually sickens him, making him stay in his chamber, wholly detached from the world of the rabble. However, as the story unfolds, he finds himself extremely empathic to both the butcher and the old odds-and-ends man. Eventually, he climbs onto his wife's bed when the room is completely dark, and the woman takes him as her lover—the odds-and-ends man. He creeps into her bed, holding a bone-handled knife that his nanny has bought from the odds-and-ends man. They passionately make love. The woman bites the narrator so savagely that the bite goes through his lip. To break free from her, the narrator stabs her with the knife in his hand. Thereupon, he hurries back to his room, where he finds the woman's eye, drenched in blood, in the palm of his hand. A moment later, when he stands in front of the mirror, he is stunned to see the exact image of the old odds-and-ends man.

The novel ends with a short episode of the artist/narrator from the first part waking up from his dream. He then watches the old, bent man take the vase he had been given, bursting into horrifying laughter and running away. He turns to himself and sees that his clothes are torn and soiled from top to bottom with congealed blood. Two blister-flies fly around him, and tiny white maggots are wriggling on his body. He feels the weight of a woman's dead body on his chest.

A review of previous research

The temporal distance between part 1 and part 2 is addressed by Hedayat himself in his correspondence with the literary scholar and his companion, Mojtaba Minovi (1903–77).Footnote ¹⁹ The correspondence also reveals that “part 2 is a past ‘remembered’ as present in a state beyond normal consciousness.”Footnote ²⁰ Crucially, in response to a few cases of anachronisms that Minovi spots in this part, Hedayat argues that the whole of part 2 is a historical fantasy:

Even without this intertextual piece of evidence, that the whole of part 2 is “dreamed” by the artist/narrator of part 1 is made explicit in the text. The narrator specifically mentions that after smoking his whole batch of opium, he goes into a dream and wakes up in “a world which was ancient but which at the same time was closer and more natural to me than the other.”Footnote ²²

As Arta Khakpour has observed, The Blind Owl constantly blurs the boundaries between reality and dream, challenging any hierarchical relationship between levels of reality.Footnote ²³ This has led many critics to examine part 2 in parallel with part 1, focusing on interrelated scenes and repetition of details and leitmotifs that create symmetries and asymmetries. However, I would like to argue that the role of part 2 as a historical fantasy situated within the overarching narrative of part 1 is just as essential, for two main reasons.

First, in a narrative rich in psychoanalytical allusions, the function of dreams as potential conveyors of repressed and unconscious desires becomes particularly significant.Footnote ²⁴ A fantasy can reveal the concealed desires that motivate the character and push the narrative forward. In this article, I will demonstrate that the narrator's fantasy aligns with the same wish he pursues throughout the novel. He fantasizes a tale about “an ancient partner-in-sorrow” who, unlike him, possesses the magical ability to capture the transcendental essence of the past in symbolic objects.Footnote ²⁵ This partner manages to escape the polluted and horrifying reality, choosing instead to live with a cherished, idealized vision of the past.

Second, as a historical fantasy, the dream intersects with the biographical and cultural past. Set in the ancient and historical city of Ray, where the contemporary narrator resides atop its ruins, the dream transgresses the narrator's biographical lifespan, bridging the personal and collective experiences. I will further depict analogies and symmetries between part 1 and part 2 that map the personal domain of sexual fetishism and the cultural domain of nostalgia to one another. As a result, the whole narrative turns into an ironic critique of nostalgia; an immanent cultural attitude; and a rather conservative response to the rapid modernization of Iran in the early twentieth century.

A nostalgic and romanticized picture of the past was at the heart of the Iranians’ encounter with modernity and the shaping of a modern national identity as far back as the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11).Footnote ²⁶ In the early twentieth century, Persian nostalgic sentiments were fostered by the promodernization intelligentsia and were primarily rooted in glorifying the achievements of pre-Islamic Persian emperors, contrasted with what was perceived as the nation's decline following the Arab invasion in the seventh century CE.

The Persian historical novel, arguably the first novelistic genre that appeared in Persian, was the most prolific form of fictional prose until the end of the first Pahlavi period (1941). It featured patriarchal sentiments, nostalgia for the glorious age of Great Persia, and historical data about Persian antiquity recently discovered by European Orientalists.Footnote ²⁷ At the same time, a significant revival of Persian textual heritage was carried out by both domestic scholars and Western Orientalists. A notable group of Iranian intellectuals, often referred to as “Sabʾe” (the Seven), played a pivotal role in this cultural renaissance. The group comprised seven prominent Iranian scholars dedicated to the study and preservation of Persian literature, history, and culture. Their work involved critical editing of classical texts, conducting historical research, and fostering a renewed appreciation for Iran's pre-Islamic and Islamic heritage. This scholarly endeavor was part of a broader movement to reclaim and celebrate Iran's national identity during a period of modernization and Western influence.Footnote ²⁸

In its various forms and manifestations, nostalgic nationalism sought to foster national pride through a romanticized appreciation of its illustrious past. At the same time, it cultivated a sense of unity with the past during a period when rapid modernization drastically transformed the shape of Iranian cities and urban societies over roughly two decades.

In this cultural movement, Hedayat's role as a modernist intellectual remains ambivalent and controversial. He is renowned for his anti-Arab sentiments, a legacy of Iranian nationalism from the constitutional period, and his reproduction of an idealized vision of pre-Islamic Persia in his nationalist dramas.Footnote ²⁹ Yet his engagement with history reveals a complex and evolving perspective.

Drawing a comparison between his nationalist dramas, Azadibougar has observed a shift in Hedayat’s historical thinking.Footnote ³⁰ Initially treating history as a source of validation for his fiction, Hedayat later challenged the reliability of historical narratives by juxtaposing historical events with their narrated forms.Footnote ³¹ This trajectory culminates in The Pearl Cannon (1947), in which Hedayat recounts a parodic antihistory of the world, filled with fabricated stories of conquests and colonizations, narrated in an amalgamated and parodic style. The work masterfully employs a diverse range of textual genres, creating a layered and ironic critique of historical narration. This was received as “a radically secular moment in Hedayat's work, when he deconstructs his nationalistic ideas.”Footnote ³²

Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi has identified a growing skepticism toward Hedayat's earlier nationalist project in his later writings. In his psycho-fictions, particularly The Blind Owl, Hedayat narrates what Tavakoli-Targhi calls a “retrospective self”—a fractured and “schizochronic” subject who is simultaneously ancient and contemporary, Zoroastrian and Muslim, Aryan and Arab. This self, Tavakoli-Targhi observes, is haunted by “memory and forgetting, the past and the future, retrospection and prospection,” and bears a striking resemblance to “the historical lamentations on the desperate conditions of contemporary Iran.” Rather than presenting the subject as a heroic heir to a glorious Persian past, Hedayat renders it a repository of contradictions—symbolically staging the collapse of nostalgic nationalism under the weight of its own internal divisions.Footnote ³³

Within this intellectual project, centered on the conceptualization of history, The Blind Owl assumes an even more striking position, especially when we consider its multiple overt intertextual links to Parvin, Sasan's Daughter, Hedayat's inaugural nationalist drama. Mashallah Ajoudani first highlighted the common motifs and themes shared between these two works: Ray, the Suran, and a painter who depicts the portrait of an astonishingly beautiful woman.Footnote ³⁴He interprets the novel in light of Hedayat's nationalistic thought, nostalgia for the pre-Islamic period, and detestation of Islamic-Arabic culture. He argues that The Blind Owl rearticulates similar nationalistic, anti-Arab, and anti-Islamic sentiments in a much more complex system of signification, avoiding explicitness. According to Ajoudani, the novel serves as an allegory attesting to the transformation from the brilliant Iranian culture to the Islamic-Arabic culture that the author so much detested.

In contrast, Houra Yavari has argued that the reuse of similar clusters of motifs and symbols in differing systems of signification destabilizes rather than reaffirms the dichotomous idealization/demonization evident in Hedayat’s earlier historical drama.Footnote ³⁵

Yavari concludes that The Blind Owl is less about the past itself and more about nostalgia and the processes of reconstructing the past in the present. She argues that the novel critiques nostalgia as a failed strategy for identity construction in the contemporary Iranian individual.

The present article aligns in part with Yavari's conclusion, interpreting The Blind Owl as a satire of nostalgia, which had become the ideological backbone of national identity in early twentieth-century Iran. It further argues that the novel sharpens its critique by targeting a specific type of character—an individual consumed by cultural inheritance, yet paralyzed in the face of modernity's demands.

Hedayat is known for openly mocking the traditionalist scholar or historian who re-edited manuscripts, such as Divān-e Hafiz, for the hundredth time.Footnote ³⁷ Together with three other like-minded companions, he formed a group called Rabʾe (literally “the Four”), a title that ironically parodied the more established group of Sabʾe. Within this circle, they disparaged the endeavors of traditionalists, referring to their work as “grave digging” and dismissing it as “the science of fossils.”Footnote ³⁸

Here, the narratological distinction between the narrator and the (implied) author becomes crucial to detecting the text’s satirical tone.Footnote ³⁹ This distinction is traditionally overlooked in critical engagements with The Blind Owl. Unlike critics who interpret the work as autobiographical, this article argues that the author portrays his character with contempt rather than sympathy.Footnote ⁴⁰ I try to identify the implicit irony communicated by the implied author, pointing to the narrator's unreliability. Instead of viewing the novel as a representation of Hedayat's pantheistic worldview, I seek to approach it with caution, as one would listen to the words of a psychotic patient on a psychoanalytic couch.

This also reveals my implicit intention—to approach The Blind Owl as a “story” with a character who has particular desires, and a “plot”—however fragmented—that traces the sequence of events through which that character attempts to fulfill them. Although it may seem like a straightforward or even conventional narrative reading, this approach has been surprisingly rare in critical engagements with the novel. Yet it proves useful, especially because it foregrounds the narrator as a fictional construct, distinct from the author. Furthermore, if Yavari's conclusion relies primarily on the interpretation of isolated metaphors—such as the narrator's nightmare of hanging the odds-and-ends man—the present article shifts focus to the broader question of how the narrative generates meaning through plot and character, and how it constructs overlapping semantic domains through analogies, symmetries, and asymmetries to produce a distinctive allegorical form.

This perspective highlights the significance of the narrator's fantastic dream and its role within the broader narrative structure, offering an ideal point of departure for this analysis. As a fantasy, the dream potentially reveals the concealed desires that serve as the driving force behind the narrative's momentum. Identifying the constituent parts of this driving force is the prerequisite for understanding how the implied social criticism of nostalgic nationalism emerges from a psychoanalytic couch tale.

Allegory and politicizing the personal

In “The Doll behind the Curtain,” Mehrdad, a young and naive Iranian student in Paris, falls in love with a window mannequin and later attempts to murder it! Mehrdad is a timid, fearful, sexually inexperienced, and depressed young man brought up on moral advice, with upbringing methods “suitable for only a thousand years ago.”Footnote ⁴¹ Just before he leaves Iran, his parents arrange his engagement to his cousin, Derakhshandeh. Intimidated by stories about his classmates’ romantic adventures, he finally makes up his mind to take all his stipend and savings and visit a casino. On his way, he sees a mannequin behind the display window of a clothing shop, falls in love with it, and spends all his money to buy it. Five years later, Mehrdad returns to his homeland. Everybody soon notices his indifference toward his fiancée and his peculiar relationship with a doll that he keeps behind a curtain.

Driven by jealousy and determined to win back his fiancée's love, Derakhshandeh begins to imitate the mannequin. She dresses like it, applies makeup to resemble it, and even tries to move and walk like a doll. This fills Mehrdad with mixed feelings, admiring her insistence but also holding a grudge against her. In the competition between the woman and the mannequin, Mehrdad gradually persuades himself that he must let go of the doll. Yet, he cannot convince himself to simply get rid of it and decides to shoot her with a revolver, as if killing a real human being. On the last night, Mehrdad moves aside the curtain, plays the gramophone, and drinks two consecutive glasses of wine. He sits on his chair, gazing at the mannequin for a long time. Then he gets up and moves toward it. But as soon as he touches her he feels “like he has touched red-hot iron.”Footnote ⁴³ In a moment of horrifying suspense, the mannequin begins to move toward him, laughing. Terrified and shocked, Mehrdad goes backward, reaches for the revolver in his pocket, and shoots three bullets, only to find out that he has shot Derakhshandeh dead!

Homa Katouzian has pointed to the striking similarity between descriptions of the doll in “The Doll behind the Curtain” and The Blind Owl's ethereal woman.

Searching for roots or precedents of The Blind Owl in the author's earlier work, Katouzian recognizes a recurrent dichotomy between the ideal, the transcendental, and the inapproachable on one side, and the mundane, polluted, and unbearably real on the other. The comparison aims to support Katouzian's proposal that a paradox is embedded in the novel—one that also reflects Hedayat's broader worldview: “Imperfect life is not worth living and there is no road to attain perfection.”Footnote ⁴⁵

To draw such a conclusion from “The Doll behind the Curtain” risks neglecting the omniscient narrator's overt commentaries, which consistently undermine Mehrdad's value system. Mehrdad falls in love with the mannequin not because of a profound idealism but because he is timid, spoiled, and incapable of forming a relationship with a real woman. It is because “his parents raised him, so they believed, to be chaste and virtuous, cultivating an embodiment of morals suited only for life two thousand years ago.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Such overt commentaries give the narrative a distinct satirical voice, seperating the authorial narrator's value system from that of his character. The narrator clearly states that, despite being twenty-four, Mehrdad “lacked the courtesy, experience, education, shrewdness, and bravery of a fourteen-year-old Western boy.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Mehrdad's inability to adapt to the modern ways of Parisian life is precisely what drives him toward the mannequin. It is no coincidence that he encounters the mannequin on his way to a casino, seeking the pleasure his classmates frequently boast about. On a symbolic level, possessing the doll represents gaining control over those aspects of Western life that remain beyond his grasp. The doll serves as a fetish, not only in a sexual sense but also as a means for Mehrdad to overcome the anxiety from such unknown and unattainable elements of a culture in which he feels like an outsider. Elements like the sound of the gramophone, which first attracts him on the street just before he makes up his mind to buy the mannequin, and then plays every time he is having an intimate moment with it, reinforce the link between sexual and nonsexual desires. In other words, the sexual or libidinal drives of fetishism are sharpened into a cultural critique, giving the story an allegorical undertone.

Through the character of Mehrdad, Hedayat criticizes the backwardness of his contemporary Iranian culture and its inadequacy in facing the challenges of the modern world. Mehrdad's obsession with the mannequin becomes a reflection of his inner conflict, symbolizing both his failure to integrate into a modern, Westernized world and the inability of his cultural upbringing to prepare him for it. The mannequin becomes a surrogate for his unfulfilled desires, a static, controllable stand-in for an unattainable reality. Here, the allegory unfolds as Mehrdad's personal dysfunction is mapped onto a larger critique of Iranian society's struggle to reconcile traditional values with modern influences.

Frequent commentaries of the third-person omniscient narrator in “The Doll behind the Curtain,” who openly judges and mocks Mehrdad, amplify the text's satirical tone. In contrast, The Blind Owl is narrated in the unreliable voice of a hallucinating and forgetful narrator. However, the thematic parallels between the two texts suggest another layer of irony in the latter. The similarity between Mehrdad and the painter's descriptions of their objects of desire suggests that the artist/narrator's transcendental love also might signify a deeper dysfunctionality—a fetishistic desire.Footnote ⁴⁹

Once again, although in The Blind Owl the narrator's obsession with the image he draws on pen cases might appear to be a form of fetishism, it transcends a purely sexual context. The image's ties to classical Persian literature and culture suggest a kind of cultural fetish or fetishistic nostalgia. The narrator's fixation on the image and its mysterious origins reflects a longing for something lost, situated at the intersection of personal and cultural memory.

Critics have acknowledged the association of the ethereal woman with a collective or cultural past. She is rooted in Persian miniature art; her “Turkoman eyes” recall descriptions found in Persian lyrical poetry; and the same eyes later appear on an antique jar from the ancient city of Ray.Footnote ⁵⁰ The analogy between the suitcase containing her dismembered body and the jar, as noted by Ajoudani, reinforces this association.Footnote ⁵¹ The narrator, lying in the coffin space of the hearse while the suitcase rests on his chest, experiences “a profound sensation of comfort,” disturbed only by the weight of the suitcase.Footnote ⁵² Later, after burying the body, he again lies in the coffin space, feeling the same comfort, but this time with the weight of the jar pressing against him. This parallel strengthens the connection between the ethereal woman and the national heritage.

Throughout The Blind Owl, humanist love (and fetishism) is intertwined with nostalgia—for an unknown spiritual origin, a lost childhood, or a cultural heritage. The text resists clear distinctions between these various forms of nostalgia.Footnote ⁵³For instance, in part 2, the narrator's memory of a childhood game of hide-and-seek is triggered by the phantom of a little girl, described in terms reminiscent of the ethereal woman. He initially believes her to be “one of the old-time inhabitants of the ancient city of Ray, forging a strong intertextual link with Hedayat’s earlier nationalist drama Parvin, Sasan’s Daughter.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Such analogies, alongside the broader analogy between the two parts, intertwine various permutations of personal and collective nostalgia, paving the way for further association of nostalgia and fetishism, as will be discussed in the next section.

The association of nostalgia and erotism is commonplace in European romantic texts.Footnote ⁵⁵ In The Blind Owl, however, such an association is initially evoked but immediately subverted when the ethereal woman appears on the porch of the narrator's house and soon afterward meets a violent end—her body dismembered in a grotesque and unsettling sequence. In the absence of an omniscient narrator's voice here, the narrator's subsequent actions establish a satirical voice that ironically undermines Iranian society's nostalgia for a past that feels increasingly distant yet disruptively present.

(Re-)killing an anthropomorphized fetish

A striking similarity between The Blind Owl and “The Doll behind the Curtain” lies in their shared uncanny moment when a fetish seemingly comes to life, prompting the protagonist's attempt to destroy it. The suspicion that the fetish might be alive saturates both the character and the narrative with the anxiety of the return of the repressed. Consequently, the protagonist's act of violence becomes an attempt to suppress the revoked fetish and alleviate the resulting anxiety.

In Freudian psychoanalytical terms, the sense of uncanniness has a close relationship with psychological defense mechanisms and the return of the repressed. In his 1919 article “The Uncanny,” Freud renders a careful psychoanalytical reading of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fantastic story, “The Sandman,” suggesting that the uncanny effect of the story can partly be ascribed to anxiety resulting from a castration complex.Footnote ⁵⁶ Freud defines the uncanny as “that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.”Footnote ⁵⁷ He identifies that which gives rise to feelings of uncanniness in different objects, themes, situations, and experiences, both in real life and literature, often tracing them back to infantile sources. He then proposes a definition of the uncanny as “something which is secretly familiar [heimlich—heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Among numerous sources of uncanniness in literature is a fetish that comes to life. A fetish works similar to a defense mechanism, helping overcome the anxiety of the castration complex. It is, after all, “a substitute for the woman's penis.”Footnote ⁵⁹

This pathological process, explains Freud, fits well into the category of repression. The fetish becomes a substitute for the woman's phallus, allowing the child both to retain his belief that a woman has a phallus and to give it up. Fetishism is a mechanism of resolving a paradox and overcoming the anxiety of the castration complex.

The uncanny would be the revival of what has been repressed through fetishization. A text, therefore, may produce an uncanny feeling by a process of “defetishization,” when, for instance, an inanimate object, a fetish indeed, comes back to life, pointing mercilessly to its repressed referent.Footnote ⁶¹

Constructed dolls have the potential for causing an uncanny effect because of their ability to raise intellectual uncertainty over whether they are inanimate or alive, or if one is in reality or a fantasy.Footnote ⁶² Hedayat's short story presents this moment of doubt when the mannequin suddenly begins to walk. The equivalent scene in The Blind Owl, and the most pivotal uncanny moment of the whole narrative, is the narrator's encounter with the live version of the subject of his painting, viewed through the ventilation hole. This event is crucial not only because it triggers the narrator's psychological collapse, but also because it disrupts the narrative's equilibrium, marking a descent into chaos. In this moment, we witness the return of the repressed alongside a surge of anxiety.

Similar to the way in which the moving and laughing mannequin frightens Mehrdad, for the narrator of The Blind Owl, the effect of the ethereal woman coming out of his imaginary paintings is so huge that it shatters his entire being.Footnote ⁶³ Once he sees them through the ventilation hole, the ethereal woman's eyes, so lavishly described, become the source of his misfortunes. He, simply put, cannot live without the eyes, but also cannot live with them. “So long as she lived, so long as her eyes overflowed with life, I had been tortured by the mere memory of her eyes.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Not surprisingly, his subsequent conduct should be to repress the waking anxiety by putting out the flame of life in the eyes and substituting them with another lifeless fetish.

The parallel murder of part 2, in which the ill writer kills “the harlot,” raises the suspicion that what the artist/narrator does to the ethereal woman after she enters his chamber also may be an act of murder. There is even a warning hint just before the murder episode; the narrator, wandering around his house searching for any trace of the scene he witnessed through the ventilation hole, compares himself to “the murderer who returns to the scene of his crime.”Footnote ⁶⁵ He hosts his guest with a glass of the poisonous wine that he inherited from his father. He pours the wine between her locked teeth.

The murder—whether judged intentional or not—clues us in to the unreliability of the narrator. His attempt to draw the eyes on paper adds another aspect to this unreliability. Omid Azadibougar has proposed that what the narrator alleges about capturing the expression of the eyes on paper is a “transcendental bluff.” The narrator asserts having achieved the impossible. We can never trust whether or not the eyes that had been constantly evading him actually opened for a second after the woman's death. The impossibility, as Azadibougar argues, lies in the fact that the unsettling vitality of the eyes resists artistic representation altogether. No matter how technically accomplished, the artwork inevitably lacks what first inspired the desire to represent: life itself.Footnote ⁶⁷

This episode is central to the novel and will be revisited in the section immediately preceding the conclusion. The Kantian concept of the “sublime” can help deepen our understanding of the “transcendental bluff” at play. In Thomas Weiskel's account of the sublime, aesthetic transcendence begins with a rupture: a moment when representation fails and the mind confronts an object or sensation that exceeds comprehension. What follows is a semiotic crisis, when the subject must construct a new symbolic order to restore meaning. Yet, when this process of re-symbolization is aborted or displaced, the sublime collapses. Rather than culminating in transcendence, the subject becomes fixated on a substitute object—an image, fragment, or relic—that attempts to stand in for the unrepresentable whole. Such fetishistic substitution arrests symbolic movement and offers a false resolution to what remains an unresolved tension.Footnote ⁶⁸ The narrator's effort to draw the eyes can be read as precisely such a failure. He attempts to convert the sublime excess of the woman's gaze—ungraspable and irreducibly alive—into a static, beautiful image. The act of representation becomes not a means of sublimation but a way of controlling, domesticating, and ultimately denying the vitality that first overwhelmed him.

The paradox is implicit in the narrator's contemplations. Initially, he says that “a painting, even though it be summary and unpretentious, must nevertheless produce an emotional effect and possess a kind of life.”Footnote ⁶⁹ However, at last, he realizes that to draw the eyes he doesn't need them to be open, because, in the end, he had never been “anything but a painter of the dead.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Whereas true transcendence becomes possible by reorganizing a new symbolic order around an absence—what Lacan might call a constitutive “lack” or “void”—the insertion of a substitute object forecloses that process and halts sublimation. In Freudian terms, this substitution functions as a fetish: a compromise formation that disavows the traumatic recognition of the woman's anatomical “lack” (the absence of the phallus). The fetish object serves to stabilize the subject's desire and ward off castration anxiety, but it does so at the cost of symbolic reorganization. In this sense, the narrator's fixation on rendering the woman's eyes becomes a fetishistic maneuver—an attempt to neutralize the sublime rupture by replacing it with an image that falsely promises emotional resolution and symbolic mastery.

The narrator's failure becomes undeniably apparent to him after unveiling the antique vase he acquired when burying the woman with the help of a crooked old man. As soon as he sees the picture on the vase, he recognizes a quality that is missing from his own painting. Somehow, the antique jar retains the transcendental quality that is absent from his painting.

The narrator's attempt to re-fetishize his anthropomorphized fetish proves futile as soon as he finds the threatening and dreadful flame of the eyes on the antique jar. The episode reinforces the allegorical ties between the woman and the archaeologically discovered national heritage. It also adds a satirical element to the narrative, featuring a character who desperately campaigns to fulfill his wish but ultimately fails.

The master of fetishization

This brings us to a point when we can appreciate the psychological ground of the fantasy for the character. The narrator's fantastic dream is directed toward fulfilling the very same desire that the representational act fails to fulfill: to re-fetishize the animated fetish and push the repressed back to the unconscious. Through the dream, the narrator (now a writer living in the ancient city of Ray) gets to become the creator of the antique vase, who is indeed the master of fetishization.

In both parts, the narrator seeks this phenomenal ability to bestow life to inanimate, dead objects. In both parts, the object of desire maintains a transcendental quality associated, respectively, with the astonishing eyes of the ethereal woman and an innocent childhood memory in which he and his wife are playing hide-and-seek.

In both part 1 and part 2, “the reality” and “the fantasy,” there is a turning point at which the transcendental object of desire seems accessible. There are various symmetries between the two parts that provide clues. In part 1, just before the woman's eyes open up for a moment, allowing the painter to “capture their expression,” he uses a peculiar simile to describe the incident.

In part 2, this exact simile is used after the narrator's wife enters his room, and she appears to him, for the first time, as “a comfortable, solid woman with a head full of commonplace, practical ideas—a genuine woman.”Footnote ⁷³ The narrator asks himself:

The last sentence, perhaps too vulgar and overt, is absent in part 1. But both episodes function as preludes to the violent episodes of actual butchering. Both are described as sudden revelations, “a falling of a veil,” and what happens in both is that the narrator sees himself capable of getting hold of the “spirit” of a rotten, decomposing being. But what he actually does is substitute a fixed inanimate object or image for a living thing. The ill writer gets to separate the reality of his harlot wife from a nostalgic image associated with a childhood memory. He realizes that he can retain the childhood memory/fantasy of playing hide-and-seek with his former stepsister and current wife as an eternal image. The forgotten memory haunted the narrator only a night before, when he wandered near the bank of the river.

The passage is a fertile field for psychoanalytical interpretation, and it may be regarded as the narrator's trauma. Peeping from behind the tree, he sees for the first time a woman's genital organ and her lack of phallus, which in turn gives rise to his anxiety of castration. The narrator's fetishistic behavior, such as kissing his wife's brother (her substitute with a phallus) or stealing her nightdress and placing it between her legs, may be attributed to this repressed childhood memory. In Freudian psychoanalysis, this recollection and narrativization of the traumatic experience is considered a breakthrough in the therapy, taking a crucial step to reach closure. Upon the scene with “falling of the veil,” another breakthrough step seems to take place as the narrator realizes the horrible truth: that his wife is no longer the fragile and innocent girl he had known. However, things take a different turn, and instead of achieving a sort of reconciliation with reality, he totally abandons it. He realizes that he can, self-consciously, love his memory (as another fetish) and let go of the unbearable reality:

Again, in Freudian terms, this is a point of departure from neurosis into psychosis. Underlying every fetish is a “divided attitude” of both disavowal and the affirmation of castrationFootnote ⁷⁷, a side-by-side presence of paradoxical ideas that women are castrated and that they are not. Freud proposes that “the essential difference between neurosis and psychosis [is] that in the former the ego, in service of reality, suppresses a piece of the id, whereas in a psychosis it lets itself be induced by the id to detach itself from a piece of reality.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In other words, whereas in subtle cases a fetish functions as a mediator between the real and the fantastic, in psychotic cases, the real gets supplanted by the fantastic. As a result of this revelation, the ill writer replaces the unpleasant reality of his harlot wife with a fetishistic nostalgia, surrendering himself fully to psychosis.

That the narrator compares himself to a “miniature god” is crucial for our understanding of his eventual transformation into the odds-and-ends man: A few pages before, he had described the odds-and-ends man as a “miniature god” that “with his squalid collection of wares” appeared as a sample or personification of the whole of creation. His collection of objects is what makes him special to the narrator.

The glazed jar with the dirty handkerchief thrown over it is one of the few assortments on the old odds-and-end man's canvas sheet pointed out by the narrator. Soon after, we hear the nanny's explanation: “The old man was a potter in his younger days. After giving up that trade he kept only this one jar for himself and now he earns a living by peddling.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Once we recall that the jar possesses the transcendental quality missing from the artist/narrator's painting of the ethereal woman's eyes, we realize that the old man has a magical ability to bestow life upon inanimate objects. As soon as the ill writer acquires this ability, he is able to preserve a pleasant and desirable image of the past and let go of the mundane, polluted, and unbearable reality. This is yet another fetishistic behavior. Crucially, however, it is distinguished from the narrator's earlier fetishist behavior by being conscious and intentional.

His self-identification as a “miniature god” heralds the narrator's eventual transformation into the odds-and-ends man, but simultaneously into his dark double, the butcher. Throughout the novel, the narrator, who watches these two characters from the window, feels more and more sympathetic toward them. Of the two, the former has the ability to bestow life on dead objects, and the latter can treat real living creatures as dead meat. Unlike the narrator, they both are welcome in his wife's bed, and so he desires to resemble them. Not surprisingly, and because we are in a fantasy, he eventually gets to be not only like them but, literally, be them. He gets to retain the eternal and fixed memory of childhood as a transcendental essence and treat the actual living woman as dead meat. At the same time, he loses his former identity and becomes a new person.

The artist/narrator, who fails at his representational project and capturing the transcendental on paper, resorts to a fantasy. He projects his own story of failure onto a historical romance whose protagonist, unlike him, succeeds in supplanting the alluring but dreadful reality with a fixed, innocent, and harmless image. Interestingly enough, this dreadful reality, the ethereal woman, is the incarnation of the picture of a woman he had always painted. She is a fetish that has come to life. What we are facing, then, is a fantasy (the dream) within another fantasy (the novel itself) that takes a reverse process to turn an anthropomorphized fetish back into a lifeless object and soothe the anxiety of the ego (and the text). The ego strives to gain control, first with his representational project and then through a historical fantasy.

It is remarkable how The Blind Owl conjoins fetishism, nostalgia, and artistic representation through a complex net of analogies. On the one hand, within the fantasy itself, the ill writer's fetishist and nostalgic desires are analogized. His fetishist sexual behavior, prevalent across part 2, is parallelized to his indispensable nostalgic appeal to materialize the tenderness of a childhood memory and replace it for his polluted wife. On the other hand, parallels between parts 1 and 2 suggest that the artist/narrator's obsession with drawing the eyes is a desire of the same nature. Finally, the established association between the woman and a sort of cultural or national past amplifies the text's allegorical undertone, pointing to a dysfunctional relationship with that collective past.

Periphery, nostalgia, and the historical sublime

So far, I have approached The Blind Owl as a narrative driven by the character's desires, with the sequence of events shaping their fulfillment or frustration. This approach is particularly insightful when distinguishing the narrator as a fictional construct, enabling us to detect the irony that separates his perspective from the author's critical stance. Part of this irony directly emerges from the association of the ethereal woman with a lost collective past. Recognizing this connection highlights the role of the bent old man—the hearse driver who uncovers the antique vase and presents it to the narrator. “Dead bodies are my regular business,” says the old man. “Grave digging's my trade. Not a bad trade, eh?”Footnote ⁸¹ Notably, a few pages earlier, the narrator has described his own trade associated with the dead: “I had never been anything else than a painter of dead bodies.”Footnote ⁸²

The narrator's self-description as a painter of dead bodies establishes a link to a specific social type that emerged with the advent of Iranian modernity; the traditionalist scholars Hedayat critiques as the cultural custodians of a fossilized past. These scholars, devoted to preserving, editing, and celebrating ancient Persian texts, embodied a nostalgic relationship to history. In this final section, I argue that the narrator's repeated attempts to find symbolic substitutes for a threatening sublimity ironically reflect the predicaments of a peripheral culture striving to construct a modern identity by clinging to an idealized image of its past. In both cases, a similar dynamic of forgetting and remembrance is at work. I propose that The Blind Owl dramatizes a failure of the sublime. In its place, we encounter fetishistic substitutes that preserve the trauma of historical dislocation without enabling symbolic transformation. In this way, nostalgia becomes the degraded double of the sublime.

In a culture on the cusp of modernity, nostalgia functions much like a fetish within the individual's psyche. In the economy of ego, a fetish mediates between forgetting and remembrance of the trauma arising from witnessing the perceived “lack” in the female body. It enables repression of the trauma in the unconscious, but paradoxically commemorates it like a “trophy.” Similarly, we can argue that fetishistic nostalgia enables forgetting through an act of commemoration. It helps the culture to step out of its traditional ways of life, but it does so with the assurance that its historical and cultural heritage is preserved. It relegates the sense of guilt and represses the anxiety of being detached from roots and origins. This process, however, represents a compromise formation rather than a genuine, transformative sublimation, as the underlying trauma is merely masked, not integrated.

F. R. Ankersmit points out that transitioning into a new world always requires “forgetting a previous world and shedding a former identity.”Footnote ⁸³ This separation from one's former self is traumatic by nature, marked by “a feeling of profound and irreparable loss, of cultural despair, and of hopeless disorientation.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Being forced into modern ways of life stimulates a sense of detachment from one's former identity and being separated from one's natural habitat. In The Blind Owl, the grotesque description of houses evokes a sense of annihilation in the new urban environment:

Ankersmit emphasizes that although the content of this trauma is the loss of a past identity, it is paradoxically remembered as well—its absence becomes an integral part of shaping the new identity.

The desire to reconcile with “a past that resists reunification”—a past from which we have been “ejected, expelled, or exiled”—is as unattainable as reunification with a former self. The past remains a transcendental object of desire, like the woman's eyes, which evade truly noticing the narrator.

This yearning for unity is repeatedly thwarted in the novel, emphasized through metaphors of separation. The stream dividing the bent old man from the ethereal woman, the hollow “grating” and “sinister” laughter of the old man, and the woman's gaze—always evasive—underscore the impossibility of reunion.

Ankersmit argues that, because reunion with the past is impossible, the desire for reunion is transformed into a desire to “know” the past. History becomes an object of knowledge and research, permanently separated from the lived reality of the historian. However, historical knowledge only intensifies the sense of loss, for it foregrounds the gap between the present and the past. The desire for being is continuously betrayed by its substitute—the desire for knowledge.Footnote ⁸⁹ For a civilization on the verge of identity transformation, an already transformed society wherein the past lingers as “a mere empty shell,” the desire for knowing functions as a double-edged sword. Although rooted in a desire to retrieve a lost world, it cuts loose all the strings that have bound the self to that hollow shell, allowing a final passage to the new world and the birth of a new identity.

We may extend Ankersmit's argument and propose that, in a peripheral culture, a nostalgic interrogation of the past aims to function similarly, to achieve two seemingly paradoxical desires. On the one hand, it serves to mitigate the sense of detachment from the premodern ways of life; on the other, it bears a subtle intention to achieve a total separation from that identity to align with modernity.

In societies undergoing belated modernization, forgetting and remembrance take on a particularly complex dynamic. Older traditions and social forms often persist alongside emerging modern institutions and relationships in these cultural contexts. For the promodernization elite, this uneven development engenders a profound frustration, stemming from their inability to fulfill the modernization project and “catch up” with the advanced center. It often feels as though the present and past coexist uneasily, with the past lingering, imposing its weight on the contemporary individual, or haunting them like a wandering phantom. This intricate relationship with the past is allegorically explored in The Blind Owl, first in the description of the narrator's house: Built atop the ruins of the ancient city, “by a madman or ill-disposed architect,” the narrator can see every little corner of it with his closed eyes and feel its pressure on his shoulder.Footnote ⁹⁰

Modernism reflects a deep ambivalence toward the past, perceived both as an object of longing and a source of menace, much like the ethereal woman's eyes are perceived by our hapless artist. For him, to draw the eyes on paper means a symbolic reunion, but simultaneously a license for abandonment. The painting aims to reconcile a presence and an absence. It should allow the narrator to bury the woman while convincing him that the “essence” of her existence is preserved. This act of symbolic substitution is meant to serve as a mechanism for both forgetting and remembrance, offering the narrator a way to mitigate his sense of guilt. Throughout this part, relief and guilt remain interwoven. When the woman closes her eyes in his chamber, a sensation of peace takes possession of the narrator.Footnote ⁹¹ But soon after, he realizes that he must spend “a long, dark, cold endless night in the company of a corpse.”

There is always a trade-off between two unbearable burdens: the oppressive presence of the ethereal woman and the guilt arising from her absence (the narrator's murder). Ultimately, the narrative becomes a satire of his repeated failures to reconcile these contradictory desires—to remember and to forget.

Ankersmit argues that for the past to be truly abandoned, it must first be fully presented to the self. Drawing on Hayden White, he likens the deaths of civilizations to acts of suicide, formulating it as “the association of dissociation.” In this process, the self should first integrate the lost part—through storytelling or historical writing—before dissociating it and transgressing it as the lost part of a former identity. It is a remembrance for the sake of forgetting.

This is where the concept of “sublime” comes in. For Ankersmit, the sublime would be the final, crucial step for fulfilling a complete transformation. It does not reside somewhere beyond the historical text but is a constituent part of the subject/historian's experience at the moment of historical transformation. There are significant resemblances between trauma and the sublime; they both involve dissociation, depersonalization, and numbing confrontation with overwhelming experience.

Sublime experience makes “the birth of a new self” possible, when we get to observe our former self (the self we left behind as a result of the sublime experience) from the “perspective of an outsider”; as if we are “both inside and outside the world” we are observing.Footnote ⁹⁴ It then involves a “quasi-mythical” sense of union with the world; “a fusion of the world and the self.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Despite their differences, the notion of the sublime outlined above shares close affinities with Weiskel's formulation, introduced in an earlier section. While Weiskel analyzes the sublime as a semiotic and psychological phenomenon, emphasizing the breakdown and reconstruction of meaning within aesthetic experience, Ankersmit relocates the concept to the historical and collective domain to describe moments of identity rupture and transformation at the level of culture or civilization. Nevertheless, in both frameworks, the sublime hinges on the subject's capacity to reorganize symbolic meaning following a traumatic or disruptive rupture—whether through aesthetic imagination (Weiskel) or historical realignment (Ankersmit). In approaching The Blind Owl, this article locates its analysis precisely at the intersecting boundaries of these two theories, as the subject here is at once psychological and cultural. The narrator is a politicized subject in a Jamesonian sense: one driven by both libidinal and cultural forces, in whom personal experience is saturated with collective and historical meaning. His failure, likewise, is both a collapse of symbolic reorientation and a misfire of historical transformation.

Throughout The Blind Owl, we encounter several moments that initially exhibit the qualities of a sublime experience. However, the narrator's longing for transcendence repeatedly gives way to fetishistic substitution rather than sublime renewal. One such instance occurs when the narrator begins to paint the ethereal woman's eyes. Alone in his chamber, with her corpse laid before him, he describes sensations that at first retain the hallmarks of sublimity.

Shortly after, the narrator gathers candles, paper, and other tools to portray “this form which was doomed slowly and gradually to suffer decomposition and disintegration.”Footnote ⁹⁷ As long as the representational project is incomplete, the subject of the painting retains its transcendental quality: “In the flickering candlelight her face was still more tranquil than before; in the half-dark of the room it wore an expression of mystery and immediacy.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Only with the accomplishment of this goal (at least to the artist's eye) comes the true realization of death (detecting the smell of decomposition, noticing the maggots and the pair of blister-flies).

A parallel process unforlds through the narrator's historical fantasy, in which he encounters a millennium-old decomposing identity. The new world he enters is, in fact, the old world that he has lost. It feels “perfectly familiar and near” as it is his “home,” his “natural surroundings.” The journey into history, mediated by the antique vase, should result in the birth of a new self. As a sublime experience, his confrontation with his decomposing former self should mark the transition to the new identity—but it ultimately fails. Waking up from the dream, he sees the bent old man running away with the vase, while he himself has become a decaying corpse, still bearing the weight of the woman's body on his chest.

Just like the episode with painting the eyes, the fantasy, initially showing the promising signs of a sublime experience, crumbles to dust. What appears to be a sublime turning point in the narrative is, in fact, a compulsive return to fetishistic displacement. The narrator stages a moment of supposed transformation, but this performance merely masks his enduring entanglement with the past and his failure to reckon with its unresolved burdens. Marked by two blister-flies and a tiny little worm on a decomposing corpse, he again retreats into fetishistic fixations. These fixations function as degraded versions of the sublime—artificial constructs that substitute true transcendence with a comforting illusion of control. The narrator never reaches transcendence but loops endlessly through unresolved repetition. Through his nostalgic and fetishistic engagements with the past, the narrator's journey underscores, once again, his inability to reconcile with the overwhelming realities of historical and personal trauma.

As much as our reading of The Blind Owl suggests, for a peripheral culture, a genuine sublime experience, as theorized by Ankersmit, is inherently difficult, if not impossible. In Ankersmit's formulation, the sublime marks the final rupture with the past: a moment of historical transformation in which a collective subject sheds its former identity and assumes a new one. In this model, the past survives only as a hollow shell, a residual trace emptied of symbolic vitality. The sublime signals the full consummation of a modern identity—an emergence through trauma into a new symbolic order. However, in peripheral societies, in which modernity is unevenly experienced and incompletely internalized, this clean rupture rarely materializes. The cultural logic of the periphery is defined by the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, where multiple historical layers coexist in tension, with older forms persisting within the very structures meant to replace them. In such a context, identity does not transform; it fractures.

This is the case in The Blind Owl, where what we encounter is not a subject caught in the sublime reorganization of meaning, but a self torn between two irreconcilable temporalities. The narrator inhabits a “schizochronic” condition. The uncanny repetition of the crooked old man—whose presence thwarts every attempt at transcendence, whose laughter dissolves every fantasy of reunion—embodies this failure. In The Blind Owl, identity is not forged but splintered. Rather than achieving the sublime fulfillment of historical transformation, the narrator remains trapped in the cycle of a failed sublimation: unable to discard the past as a mere shell, yet incapable of reanimating it as a living symbolic order.

To capture the essence of the woman's eyes on paper; to preserve the memory of a lost innocence in the childhood game of hide-and-seek; to glimpse the life of a “partner in sorrow” from a millennium ago: the narrator's efforts all involve a fetishistic nostalgia for a more innocent and more natural past. Unlike the ill writer in the historical fantasy who fully immerses himself in the past and abandons the present, the contemporary artist/narrator fails to find resolution. Reuniting with the past remains impossible, but so does its proper burial. Even after burying the suitcase in a trench, the narrator opens the lid to find “amid a mass of coagulated blood and swarming maggots, two great black eyes gazing fixedly at [him] with no trace of expression [in] them.”Footnote ⁹⁹ These haunting eyes reappear in his chamber, replicated on the antique vase with the same devastating power. The predicament is more complex than what Ankersmit's framework allows; the narrator is trapped not only by the impossibility of reunification with a lost paradise but also by his inability to escape the hollow shell of its persistent presence.

The dichotomy of presence and absence fails to fully capture the narrator's predicament, as the past is both irretrievably lost and uncannily persistent, like a ghost. The closest allegorical picture is perhaps that of the ethereal woman whose “presence” simultaneously manifests the impossibility of reunification.

The paradoxical desire to forget (to dissociate from or destroy) and to remember (to commemorate or fetishize) is characteristic of every culture caught between traditional identities and the demands of modernity. In the absence of a genuine sublime experience or the ability to fully detach from a former self and establish a new symbolic order, fetishistic nostalgia acts as a degraded sublime, permitting an imagined return to the past for objective contemplation. In this context, fetishistic nostalgia serves two goals. First, it affirms the “present-ness” or modern-ness of the culture by objectifying the past and creating a clear divide between traditional and contemporary identity. Second, it acts as a mechanism of forgetting, mitigating the guilt of abandoning that past by promising to preserve it in cultural heritage. The narrator of The Blind Owl repeatedly resorts to such fetishes, hypocritically commemorating things he deeply wishes to forget. For Hedayat, however, this strategy is doomed to fail. The narrator's reliance on fetishes leaves him degraded, torn between a rotting carcass and a hollow shell, animated by and fleeing with the fetish—a grotesque parody of rebirth that satirizes the illusion that a new identity can emerge through nostalgic attachment to a glorified cultural past.

Concluding remarks

In this article, I have examined how The Blind Owl superimposes biographical and cultural pasts and depicts sexual fetishism and nostalgia as analogous symptoms of a toxic relationship with one's infantile and cultural histories. Through a comparison with Hedayat's earlier short story, “The Doll behind the Curtain,” I explored how Hedayat employs the dynamics of sexuality in an allegorical form to offer an ironic critique of the cultural predicaments faced by a traditional society encountering modernity. This comparison revealed a recurring narrative strategy: the animation of fetishes that evoke anxiety over the return of the repressed.

A close psychoanalytic reading of the parallels between parts 1 and 2 of The Blind Owl demonstrates that the narrator's actions following the unexpected visit of the ethereal woman, and even his fantastic dream, involve displacing his anthropomorphized complexes onto new fetishes while preserving their essence in symbolic forms. Within the narrative's underlying grid of analogies, which intertwines fetishism and nostalgia, this paradoxical desire reflects a dual impulse to remember and forget the past simultaneously.

In the final section, I borrowed Frank Ankersmit's theoretical framework to examine the contradictory processes of remembrance and forgetting within the historical transition of a culture toward a new identity. This transition, as Ankersmit theorized, is enabled by a sublime historical experience—a fleeting moment where former and new identities coincide, marking both a dissociation from the past and an association with the emerging present. The central irony of The Blind Owl, I argued, stems from the narrator's obsession with staging transformative sublime experiences that inevitably regress into fetishistic loops. In this way, the novel portrays a culture caught between mourning the loss of its traditional identity and yearning for modernity. It interrogates the role of nostalgia in these struggles, depicting it as a mechanism that traps the subject in a cycle of unresolved longings.

In the introductory section, I invoked the concept of national allegory within Fredric Jameson's theory of modernity, suggesting that The Blind Owl exemplifies a modernist novel that allegorizes cultural entanglement in the periphery. The narrator's repeated failure to achieve resolution becomes emblematic of the cultural and psychological tensions of living in a fragmented historical context, where past and present coexist uneasily—the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous.

This article contributes not by offering a definitive interpretation, but by demonstrating how allegory, far from being rigid or totalizing, becomes a dynamic structure, capable of mediating between private subjectivity and historical trauma. In doing so, it offers a vivid example of what Jameson perceived as “a radically different and objective relationship of politics to libidinal dynamics.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ From this perspective, The Blind Owl shows how stories centered on individual psychology often take on wider meaning in peripheral cultures. They become sites where personal and collective histories intersect—where inner conflicts reflect unresolved cultural struggles. The symbolic forms that emerge from this overlap are often strange, intense, and fragmented because they carry the weight of multiple, conflicting temporalities. In such a setting, even the most intimate experiences—grief, guilt, desire—become ways of grappling with uneven modernity.