The city in man: foregrounding psychogeography in The Blind Owl and City of Glass
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 met...
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2016
|
| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/10154/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/10154/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/10154/1/10589-38510-1-PB.pdf |
| Summary: | 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 Tötösy 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. |
|---|