Exploring Bergsonian time in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl

Abstract

This article aims to explore Henri Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl (1937), a prominent Modernist narrative in contemporary Iranian literature. Bergson refutes the logical and linear sequence of time and regards it as an indivisible whole that simultaneously posits the past, the present and the future on the same plane – the eternal present. Likewise, for Bergson, consciousness is characterized by flux and continuity as it processes all previous memories and experiences synchronously, as if they were all parts of a unified and organic whole. This article argues that certain features of the narrative structure of The Blind Owl, in particular the relativity and subjectivity of time and place and the constant intersection of memories and experiences, can be aligned with Bergson’s interpretation of temporality and consciousness. In the nameless narrator’s stream of consciousness and interrelated visions and reminiscences, characters, settings and incidents – which drive the narrative into a timeless and placeless context – constantly melt into and echo one another and ultimately become irreducible and radically interrelated constituents of an organic totality that resists temporal, spatial and cognitive divisibility.