The city in man: foregrounding psychogeography in The Blind Owl and City of Glass

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 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.