The Esoteric, the Islamicate, and 20th Century World Literature

By exploring the intersections of the esoteric and the islamicate in a series of 20th century literary works from disparate global locations, this dissertation maps out a constellation of countercultural world literature as a model for further advancing the study of literature and esotericism in a planetary context. Chapters are focused on literary works of Iranian Sādeq Hedāyat (1903-1951), Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), and the cut-up collaborations of American William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and British-Canadian Brion Gysin (1916-1986). Using the statement 'writing is magic and labour,' I argue that these four authors yearned to attain ‘magic’ in their creative writing, while each had their own distinct definition and understanding of what this ‘magic’ would be. These definitions and understandings have been largely shaped by each author’s particular encounters with esoteric and islamicate discourses; they are also products of their ‘labour’—practices and strategies of writing and research affected by the social and political power dynamics of the fields of global cultural production and circulation. Hedāyat’s conception of magic, formed through encounters with European, Islamic, and Zoroastrian esoteric discourses, chiefly refers to practices and texts associated with the ancient magus (Zoroastrian priestly class) that through centuries of religious conflict have transfigured into something distant and incomprehensible. This magic becomes the subject of extensive folklore research for Hedāyat, and is further used and invoked in his works of fiction. For Borges, magic refers to the unexplainable quality of the aesthetic events that flees rational justification. His explorations in pantheism that expand to a range of esoteric currents such as Kabbalah and Gnosticism, find in the islamicate a culture that has grappled with questions on the nature of divinity and on writing being sacred and magical. In the cut-up collaborations of Burroughs-Gysin, the magic of writing is in the randomness of the process as well as the speech act of language, while its labour is primarily dependent on using scissors instead of conventional instruments of writing. Inspired by the islamicate milieu of post-war Tangier, Burroughs-Gysin opened up new possibilities for writing and for human-machine collaborations that are still influencing the electronic literature of the 21st century.