Abstract
The immortal subterranean of chaos literature is what invokes the betrayal of language, what breaks infinity from within the steel enclosures of expression and conveys the writing-act to shadow and disquiet. When confronted with such an emergent textuality, one that implicitly and explicitly exalts its own refusal to be justified—each passage an apotheosis of strident fragmentation—one might nevertheless venture to carve out an entryway to this literary nowhere zone. Thus one embarks, through an acute sensitivity to its variations, its belt of torn moments, shard-like instances that at times (though always in opposition to time) condense long enough to form an array of thematic axes, often converging with each other, just as often in rampant collision, counterpoint, and rivalry, and out of which a chaotic imaginary might then be vaguely sketched. It is by virtue of a strange desequentialization of the instant, a nonlinear wading through matrices in unpredictable displacement, treated as self-consuming valences in and of themselves, that such a work, ever decrying unity without close or definition, clashing statements without origin or destination, can be affirmed as a movement unforeseen.1
It was a dark, silent night like the night which had enveloped all my being, a night peopled with fearful shapes which grimaced at me from door and wall and curtain.
—Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl
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Notes
Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Complete Short Stories (Schocken Books, 1995). Kafka provides a fitting literary analogue in “The Savages” to Hedayat’s own annihilative pathway in The Blind Owl, from the first cited line: “Those savages of whom it is recounted that they have no other longing than to die; or rather, they no longer even have that longing, but death has a longing for them, and they abandon themselves to it, or rather, they do not even abandon themselves, but fall into the sand on the shore and never get up again—those savages I much resemble” (1). With this illustration looming, one might then be prompted to ask what happens next, or, even more precisely, what is achieved under the auspices of an annihilative becoming? What newfound rights are secured, what new powers bestowed, what new experiential potentialities freed to a consciousness or body that dared to will its own encounter with finality? The ambition of chaos inherent to this project, though ever allocating irresolution and the unanswered, will address such an inquest, attending to the intricacies of the aftermath.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). Although Nietzsche’s own close association with the annihilative impulse has been discussed at length earlier, already lain forth in the self-evicting comments that “desire—this means to me to have lost myself” and that “all of us bleed at secret sacrificial altars … but thus our kind wants it; and I love those who do not want to preserve themselves,” nowhere does he more obviously parallel the blood lust of Hedayat’s blind owl than in Zara-thustra’s own pronouncement that “deep yellow and hot red: thus my taste wants it; it mixes blood into all colors” (274, 312, 306). Chaos from within the unbridled blood-letting of annihilation.
Sadeq Hedayat, “The Doll Behind the Curtain,” in Sadeq Hedayat: An Anthology, ed. Ehsan Yarshater (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1979); Arthur Schopenhauer, quoted in A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 161. This collapsing of annihilative desire into an ascendant unreality is also present in an earlier work (“The Doll Behind the Curtain”), whereby he writes that “life itself began to appear artificial, illusory and senseless … Everything seemed a mockery” (132). This bears some tacit philosophical connection with Schopenhauer’s commentary on suicide as a recognition of life-as-dream: “When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of the greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream: when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens” (161). Here, however, annihilation triumphs over suicide, taking up the horror rather than denying it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974); Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1982). The two following quotations by Nietzsche and Rilke converge with Hedayat s own framing of impossibility as a becoming into all-possibility: “We incomprehensible ones … We arc misidentified—because we ourselves keep growing, keep changing … we are no longer free to do only one particular thing, to be only one particular thing” (331). “And suddenly in this laborious nowhere, suddenly / the unsayable spot where the pure Too-little is transformed / incomprehensibly-, leaps around and changes / into that empty Too-much; / where the difficult calculation / becomes numberless and resolved” (179). Such incomprehensibility, where thought stops suddenly, is itself the marker of an entrance into the unreal.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967). Again, this twisted trajectory locates a philosophical counterpart in Nietzsche, for whom the artist must always ignore the natural, manifest best in the following explication: “There is only One world and it is false, cruel, contradictory, seductive, meaningless … A world so constituted is the real world … We need lies in order to conquer this reality, this ‘truth,’ that means in order to live … In order to solve it, man must naturally be a liar” (VIII, 10[168]) Chaos as endless deceit, the unnatural captivation that tears apart.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Notes (1888),” trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1982). The following note by Nietzsche reinforces Hedayat’s own critique of artistic representation as a nihilistic denial of life and refusal of becoming: “Artists are not the men of great passion … With a talent, one is also the victim of that talent: one lives under the vampirism of one’s talent. One is not finished with one’s passion because one represents it; rather, one is finished when one represents it” (458). In light of this, chaos must devise an aesthetics that does not reduce its frozen passion to the limitations of a single interiority, nor to the deadened framing of an artwork, but rather that sustains itself as an outpouring, an existential craft without parameters.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1979). It is through this commentary on Hedayat’s complicated orchestration of the other that one might then approach the somewhat confusing and disconcerting conclusion to Nietzsche’s own Ecce Homo; “Have I been understood?” (104). For, if it is such that Nietzsche rightly profiles himself as the quintessential slayer of all pity and compassion—the fiercest in his assailments against subjectivity’s drowning in the crowd, the first of all nemeses to the pseudoharmonic trappings of the ascetic ideal, transcendental hope, and unanimity with the other, and the most insistent in washing away the stains of metaphysics from man’s tattered consciousness—then who is this “I” that remains embedded and pulsating within the last scrawling of the text, the catastrophic memoir of a man no longer human, and to whom is it speaking? Who is it that inquires of the world and what does this mean at a stage when there is no subjectivity left to speak of? Beyond this, what is being asked to be understood when understanding itself has been forsaken as an undeserved delusion of truth telling? What future does it hearken toward when history itself has been abolished through the interlacing of timelessness, emergence, eternity, and the aftermath? And as for the other, the one to whom the utterance is presumably addressed, therein lies the most hopeless prospect of all, a wasted breath, reaching toward a wind-seller not yet having earned the right to exist. So then what does he mean in leaving this as his epithet, the last resonance of his requiem? To whom does he bequeath this legacy? Who could “understand” well enough to win entitlement as heir to the wanderer? To whom does the Dionysian inheritance fall? Is this indeed an invitation, or a declaration of war?
Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). One can call upon the unparalleled work of Antonin Artaud here as a fitting counterpart to this idea of a writing act that would induce transparent inflictions against the reader, for in his own exploration of cruelty, he once mused, “I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go” (59). This obligatory movement, then, where the word becomes an ill-born incantation and a tearing away, brings literature to the apex of its insane liberation.
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© 2010 Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh
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Mohaghegh, J.B. (2010). Chaos-Consciousness. In: New Literature and Philosophy of the Middle East. Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230114418_4
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