Abstract
New York City in Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Ray in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl testify to the presence of a wasteland, setting in motion an unavoidable sense of nostalgia, confusion and fragmentation upon the protagonists. The present article argues that the pictures painted of the two metropolises with their specific cramped urban spaces function as culpable agents influencing Quinn as a New Yorker and Hedayat’s narrator as a resident of Ray. The paper builds its argument upon Merlin Coverley’s concept of psychogeography which supports transformation of the city as an integral part of the main characters’ fates. Further, the article illustrates how in Hedayat and Auster’s pieces the city reigns triumphant as the main characters fall victim to hallucination and isolation, or are left with desperate choices: in Hedayat’s novella murder or acceptance of misery and in Auster’s the sudden disappearance from the city and the plot horizons. To further support the argument advanced in this research, we take into account Totosy de Zepetnek’s method of comparative literature and culture and its idea of parallelization that emphasizes the existence of similar social evolutions represented through the literature of various nations and carried out through the use of comparable literary conventions and symbols to stress their concerns. DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2016-1602-09
Highlights
Literary perception of a landscape works as an alternative means to present the experiences and tendencies of writers in different periods whose subjective perceptions and motives seem markedly different from those of objective geographers
This paper, attempts to demonstrate that these specific cramped urban spaces with their unique twentieth-century settings function as culpable agents forming the behavior of Quinn as a New Yorker and the Blind Owl’s narrator as a resident of Ray
The narrative in The Blind Owl is comprised of fragmented descriptions at times touched by the effects of drugs and hallucinations, picturing an urban space much akin to that of Quinn’s ever-enclosing setting walled with grimy streets of New York through the same lens of hallucination, sheer isolation and loss of consciousness
Summary
Literary perception of a landscape works as an alternative means to present the experiences and tendencies of writers in different periods whose subjective perceptions and motives seem markedly different from those of objective geographers. One recent research reviewed The Blind Owl using Henri Bergson’s notions of durée and simultaneity It argues that certain features in the narrative structure of the text “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” This paper, attempts to demonstrate that these specific cramped urban spaces with their unique twentieth-century settings function as culpable agents forming the behavior of Quinn as a New Yorker and the Blind Owl’s narrator as a resident of Ray. As its building blocks, this research presents an analysis of the texts based on Merlin Coverley’s concept of psychogeography which supports the transformation of the city as an integral part of the novellas’ main characters’ fates and how the characters’ mind and body eventually fall apart under the sway of the city space. This explains how the two pieces of fiction under study, though from far east and the west of the world, can be parts of literary communities that follow similar interests and share related themes and sociological affinities
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