Fri 20 Feb 2009
The Turk in the Mirror: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s “Huzur” and the search for the ‘modern’ and ‘unique’ Turkish subjectivity
Author: K. Murat Güney | Category: Academic , Article , Literature1 Comment
in the middle of the street, dusty girls played a game. Mumtaz listened to their folk song:
“Open the gate, toll keeper, toll keeper
How much will you cough up to pass on through?”
The girls were hale and hearty, but their clothes were in tatters. In a neighborhood where Hekimoglu Ali Pasha’s manor stood at one time, these homes, which were the remnants of life, these poor clothes, and this song, brought strange thoughts to mind. It is certain that Nuran had played the same game in her childhood. Before that, her mother and before that the mother of her mother sang the same ballad and played the same game. This ballad is what has to continue… Everything can change; even we can change everything by our own will. Yet, what will not change and what gives a shape to life is that on which our own mark appears.
(Huzur, 20-21)
To love Debussy, to love Wagner, and to live the song in Mahur : This is our fate.
(Huzur, 140)
1) Introduction-Intentions:
What is the role of narratives of continuity as well of disjuncture in the formation of modern subjectivities? How is the loss of the past as well as anxiety towards the future perceived, understood and narrativized by modern subjects? Why does our lost and forgotten past appear as an object of desire as well as a source of frustration? Are the ghosts of the past still haunting us?
Throughout this essay I will try to answer these questions while critically analyzing one of the prominent concerns of the modern Turkish literature, namely the attempt to distinguish the ‘original’ Turkish work of art through the search for the ‘true essence’ of the modern Turkish subject. While pursuing this question I will especially focus on Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s novel Huzur (Peace of Mind), which was written and published in 1949. According to many literary critics the novel Huzur is dedicated to explore the origins and the essence of Turkish subjects and the uniqueness of the Turkish novel as well as the source of the internal order and the permanent state of peace of mind. However, the narrative of the novel is significant not because of what it seeks to find out but what it fails to find out. The long story of Huzur is briefly about the loss of ‘peace of mind’ while compulsively pursuing peace of mind and a balance in life.
Tanpinar, in his essay ‘Bizde Roman’ (‘Our Novel’), asks the question “Why don’t we have a novel that is specifically ours?” His answer to this question reflects evidently his main concerns as a man of literature of that period: “In order to create a literature organically ours, we have to go back to us ourselves, go back to our own past, and go back to our own cultural wealth” (Tanpinar, 1936: 90). Tanpinar’s aspiration is the return to the ‘realities proper to the Turkish’, which for him were ignored and erased by the westernizing elites of the newly formed Turkish Republic. Thus, he argues, we can find out the continuity in the history of Turkey. The search for the authentic Turkish self, or as some others call the search for ‘the original Turkish spirit’, is the main point of departure in Tanpinar’s novels.
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Our compilation of science-fiction reviews and critiques “Other Worlds Are Possible” (Baska Dunyalar Mumkun) was evaluated by the Turkish Literature Review magazine as the best of Turkish Literature in 2007.