"Wandering on the peripheries": Turkish novelistic hero as "Beautiful Soul"

“Wandering on the peripheries”: The Turkish novelistic hero as “Beautiful Soul”

F. Meltem GürleBoğaziçi University, Turkey

The Turkish formation story does not follow the pattern of the classical Bildungsroman. Neither does its protagonist. As opposed to his Western counterpart, who usually ends up as a “reformed idealist,” the Turkish novelistic hero, failing to overcome the dichotomy of tradition and modernity, sets on a journey in search of authenticity and gets stuck at the end. His “becoming,” if there is any, is not reminiscent of Hegelian Bildung. Being trapped in a schizoid dividedness of interiority and outside reality, the Turkish Bil-dungsheld becomes a purist obsessed with the idea of an “ immediate meaning,” which he cannot get hold of. Instead of “actively” taking part in social reality and going through a process of maturation, he steps back and seeks transcendence in pure contemplation, which turns him into a spiritual dandy, i.e. “the Beautiful Soul.”

Keywords: Bildungsroman / Beautiful Soul / Turkish novel / modernity / collectivity

THE TURKISH BILDUNGSROMAN

What lies at the heart of Bildungsroman, according to Franco Moretti, is “the idea of normality.” One of the crucial aspects of the genre is how novelistic youth becomes tamed and moderated in order to fit into the

norms of a given society. The plotline revolves around the idea that youth comes to an end by being transposed into a higher reality, which involves the youth’s subordination to the idea of maturity. This usually translates as normality (Moretti 9–11). It is possible to read the word “normality” as equivalent to losing one’s rough edges and becoming ordinary or average. Yet, the key to understand the dynamics of Bildungsroman is to realize that the novelistic hero is not an “obedi-ent vassal” who follows the code of the society out of a sense of fear, but a free individual who internalizes this code and comes to perceive the social order as his own. Drawing attention to this point, Georg Lukács writes that Wilhelm Meister is distinguished from other types of eighteenth century novel by its theme based on the reconciliation of the problematic individual with concrete social reality. The structure of the plot, he suggests, is “determined by the necessary condition

The Turkish novelistic hero as “Beautiful Soul” 97

that reconciliation between interiority and reality, although problematic, is nevertheless possible” (57).

It is precisely because of this ambitious prospect that the Bildungsroman has often been regarded as the narrative equivalent of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Goethe’s novel and Hegel’s work have been repeatedly compared in their attempt to bring together the two conflicting themes of modernity: individuality and socialization. Setting itself similar tasks to those of the Bildungsroman, Hegel’s Phenomenology envisions a journey that is specifically pedagogical and biographical: individual consciousness is involved in a process of Bildung (formation/education) with the goal of attaining knowledge of itself, not as an “I” but as a “we”, that is to say, as part of a collective entity.1

One of the difficulties about collective entity in Turkey is the Janus-faced nature of the country’s project of modernization. At the heart of this project lies the twofold assumption that the country could become Western and national at the same time. The early Republic faced the challenge of building a nation out of a variety of ethnic and confessional communities who had lived under Ottoman rule. What is more, it had also borrowed the method from the West. Having its points of departure in positivism and secularism, Turkey’s modernization project envisioned a unified nation on its way of gradual progress toward a better future.2

While implementing this project, however, this newly formed nation-state positioned itself against the deeply rooted Ottoman tradition, and the strongest component of this tradition, Islam. This required reshaping the country’s memory and imagination: in an effort to transform people from subjects to citizens, the political elite in Turkey waged a war against tradition. The young Republic wanted modern and “civilized” individuals, and any form of spirituality was regarded not only as a threat to the rationale of the new regime, but also as a sign of simple-mindedness, superstition and above all, backwardness.

The strong opposition of the Kemalist reforms to religion (1925–1934) cre-ated a serious fracture in social life. The detachment from the Ottoman “ethos” meant erasing many significant cognitive, social and cultural points of reference from the collective memory. As the most important component of identity, Islam was at the crossroads of these points of reference. Following its removal from the public sphere, it had to be replaced with an equally powerful constituent: national identity. This resulted not only in the profanation of the sacred, but also worked the other way, giving rise to a sanctified image of the State. Ironically, the Republic adopted authoritarian elements characteristic of the Ottoman tradition it was trying to cast aside. In short, Turkey’s modernization project resulted in an awkward picture: hovering over the lives of its citizens and leaving little room for civil liberties (such as freedom of speech and religious freedom), the state took control of the public space and condemned individuals “forever to a state of puberty” (Kurtoğlu 629–630).

The “modern Turk” was born into these circumstances: he lived under a state that he could not “belong to” but was “possessed by.” Loyalty to the regime was fundamental. Young people were expected to internalize the ideals of the

98 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 4

Republic, lead a modern life, and become part of the newly rising nation that aspired to elevate the country “to the level of contemporary civilizations.” How-ever, there has always been a discrepancy between how the Turkish Republic envisions itself and how its inner dynamics actually manifest themselves. Being castrated by an overbearing “father State,” the Turkish individual came to display all the symptoms of adolescence: depression, anger and denial. Finally in the double bind of diffidence and angularity, he stepped back from social reality and withdrew to a world of inner truth where he can manifest his subjectivity.

We observe a similar pattern in the Turkish Bildungsroman, which usually ends as the protagonist, typically characterized by emotional aloofness and soli-tary habits, slowly drifts away from society. This withdrawal indicates a peculiar quality of the Turkish novelistic hero, who, being trapped in a state of adolescence, fails to learn the “ways of the world.”3 The recurrent motive of this infantile, dysfunctional, and neurotic character forms a pattern in the Turkish novel from the 1950s until the present day.

The Turkish Bildungsroman voices the confusion that spreads from a double-identity.4 From Mümtaz in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace, to Turgut and Selim in Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar [The Disconnected] and Kemal in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, we observe continuity in a long line of characters who cannot situate themselves in the project of modernism. Neither can they totally reject the regime. On the one hand, they “try to construct their identity according to their reflection in a fancy mirror made in the West” (Meriç 68–69). On the other hand, they know that they will always remain a reflection, and hate both the mirror and the image. The outside world, therefore, becomes not only hostile but also equally desirable.

The Turkish Bildungsheld finds himself in this complex regime of conflict-ing claims. Not only does he have to overcome the dichotomy of tradition and modernity, but he also has to define these influences in the first place. As Meltem Ahıska reminds us, once it found itself in the wake of Western modernity, Tur-key has been engaged in a constant reconstruction of the image of the “West” as well as an effort to regenerate the long lost “East” (“Garbiyatçılık” 1055), which confuses one’s perception of normality. Hence, the Hegelian Aufhebung (upheaval and transformation) that lies at the heart of Bildungsroman rarely takes place: the Turkish formation story almost never closes with a transformation that offers reconciliation between the individual and society. The protagonist usually remains as pure subjectivity, mainly because he cannot locate “normality” or find a telos he can evolve towards and thereby transcend his particularity.

However, though it rarely displays a dialectical structure, where the char-acter’s formation is based on the intervention of a medium or agent, the Turkish Bildungsroman usually manifests a yearning for an immediate meaning. Most of the time we are encountered with characters in search of the spirituality they have been denied with the advent of modernity, a quiet and simple “being together” they associate with Ottoman culture and Islamic social practices. What follows is that the formation novel in Turkey emerges as an interesting variation of the


genre that does not situate itself within the cult of success and achievement, one of the telltales of Western modernity.

The Turkish Bildungsheld is not possessed with Wilhelm Meister’s desire to go out into the world. Neither does he nurture “great expectations” like the characters of Dickens or Balzac, who seek to avail themselves of newfound social mobility. While the classical Bildungsheld is ambitious and bent on achievement, its Turkish equivalent does not strike us as a man of action. Lethargic and melancholic even when in transformation and spiritual growth, he is usually portrayed as doomed to a self-imposed confinement. His Bildung, therefore, should not be understood as integration to civilization, but as an effort to reconnect to the culture he once belonged to. This is not a formation acquired through education. Nor does it result in the assimilation of an individual into society. On the contrary, it is the individual’s attempt to claim his ground in the metaphysics he sees embedded in tradition.

The Turkish novelistic hero, therefore, typically yearns for a time when the split between public and private spheres was not so sharp, and when the bourgeois ego had not established itself as the sole truth. He hopes to define himself in ref-erence to the aesthetics of such a time, from which he is abruptly and tragically disconnected.

A MIND AT PEACE: MÜMTAZ’S (AN)ESTHETIC WORLD

Saturated with melancholy and grief, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s highly acclaimed novel A Mind at Peace (1949) opens with the acknowledgment that the unity of the society is disrupted and harmony is lost forever: “the East was the place to sit and wait,” the narrator reminds us, “with a modicum of patience everything arrived at one’s feet” (10).

Obviously times have changed. The hectic pace of modernity threatens the temperate and quiet life of the Istanbulites, which is also reflected in the plot of A Mind at Peace. Tanpınar’s novel takes place in Istanbul in 1938–39, when Turkey’s modernization project had already penetrated every single aspect of daily life, resulting in rapid changes to social structures. The story opens with the main character Mümtaz rushing out in the hope of finding a nurse to care for his sick cousin İhsan. We are told that Mümtaz has spent the whole week running similar errands: summoning the doctor or taking prescriptions to the pharma-cist. The storyline follows his wanderings and ruminations, supported with long flashbacks, and ends when he finally returns home, only to find his cousin dying of pneumonia. Confusion and anxiety dominate the novel, which, as it is widely agreed, is about a rupture that has irreversibly destroyed the order of things and resulted in a permanent loss. What is lost, we are reminded through the novel’s title, is collective peace of mind.

In the novel’s opening section, we learn about Mümtaz’s childhood and youth, and the dramatic events that shaped his personality, such as his father’s death in the vast upheavals following World War I. Orphaned at an early age,


Mümtaz goes to live with his paternal cousin İhsan, who guides him towards French literature in particular and European culture in general. İhsan is a man of Enlightenment. He is the strongest influence on Mümtaz, morally as well as intellectually. Mümtaz confesses that since he started living on what he calls “the island of İhsan” (12), he has been in good hands. His cousin has been both a father and a mentor who saved him from certain “inaugural experiences of decadence” (24). Yet they differ in how they perceive the changing world around them. Mümtaz suspects that his Western schooling may fall short of explaining his particular experience, while İhsan believes that one should cut useless ties with the past and move on.

In Part II, during a gathering with friends, İhsan puts it in a nutshell:

The things we read don’t lead us anywhere. When we read what’s written about Turks, we realize that we’re wandering on the peripheries of life. A Westerner only satisfies us when he happens to remind us that we’re citizens of the world. In short, most of us read as if embarking on a voyage, as if escaping our own identities. Herein rests the problem. (105)

Wandering on the peripheries of life. Never being able to be at the center. Or never being able to be “centered.” This feeling of dislocation or misplacement probably best summarizes the experience of Turkish intellectuals at the begin-ning of the century. Yet, İhsan has faith in progress. He believes that one has to say goodbye to the old and embrace the new. This is how history moves forward, he insists. İhsan believes in the possibility of translating Turkey’s particular experience into a new reality, as their friend Suad puts it, the opportunity of establishing “the myth of a new world, as in America and Soviet Russia” (106). He has faith that the country is in the process of “creating a new social expression particular to us” (105).

Mümtaz, on the other hand, feels that the refutation of the past could only result in the denial of one’s self. This new world does not promise him the home he always yearned for. Neither does it offer a cure for his bitter feeling of belatedness. His hesitant, nervous encounter with the world results in withdrawal and defeat. There is a new and alien reality outside. This new world flows with dazzling speed, leaving no room for the placid climate of the old times. Mümtaz feels helpless, because unlike his reformist cousin İhsan, he feels trapped in history rather than being able to shape it. İhsan tells him that the world expects from him “ideas and struggle,” but Mümtaz knows that his struggle will be an inner one. He has no intention of going out into the world. In fact, he seems to be intimidated by the idea of progress and the cult of success. When asked whether he has any aspirations to accomplish anything grand, he responds, “there is nothing grand or trivial” in the world, this is just our projection (148).

Tanpınar’s novel traces how Mümtaz, in search of his identity, eventually seeks refuge in the tranquil aesthetics of a dying tradition: the mystical music of the Sufis. This transformation is the turning point of the narrative and takes place in the second part of the novel, when Mümtaz becomes involved with a


young divorcée. With a long line of Sufi musicians in her family, Nuran repre-sents everything desirable Mümtaz can imagine. She seems to be the synthesis of the Ottoman elite’s whole array of virtues: she is quiet but firm, opinionated but not loud, well bred but not arrogant. She is also extremely perceptive. Mümtaz is drawn to her immediately. Watching her handsome but sad face, he “through a compassion that rose up within him, promised to bring her happiness, for as long as he lived” (106).

Mümtaz later comes to see his attraction to Nuran as the outcome of their shared enjoyment of a dying tradition, Ottoman music. As they talk about their love of Istanbul and its music, Mümtaz realizes that Nuran is in fact the person who will connect everything lying loose in his soul. At last everything chimes together in harmony: a peaceful moment that can put an end to the tormented dividedness of his world. As the measure of Mümtaz’s “aesthetic flight” into the past, Nuran becomes “ . . . an enigmatic being returning to live as the mortal substantiation of the historical, the sublime, and the vital: she became a spec-tacular presence vanquishing Time through urge and beauty; and through her, he deciphered the logic of his aesthetic and emotional realms” (239).

In Part III, however, we enter Suad’s realm, a much darker world. A textbook nihilist (Tural 1489), a typical Dostoevsky character (Gürbilek, Kötü Çocuk Türk 67–68), Suad seems to be Mümtaz’s foil. A former lover of Nuran’s, he resurfaces in the third movement of the novel and disrupts Mümtaz’s idyllic dream like a disease that has been dormant for a while but eventually returns much stronger. While suffering from tuberculosis in a sanatorium on the island, Suad sends a love letter to Nuran. In a moment of despair, Nuran shows this letter to Mümtaz, who recognizes in Suad’s meanderings and endless complaints his own pride and delusion. In Suad, he sees his madness mirrored: “Fate directed Suad’s afflicted mind to believe that Nuran represented everything he pined for while recuperat-ing in the sanatorium” (255). Mümtaz realizes that his own world has been no different from a sanatorium. Like Suad, who sought refuge in the clinic to try to recover from the disease eating his body, Mümtaz attempted to find a cure for his tormented soul in the company of Nuran and the Sufi musicians. Mümtaz understands that it is all in vain. As Suad plunges into depression and commits suicide, Mümtaz comes to terms with the illusion that he himself has created. His infatuation with Nuran is replaced with despair, his newly found enthusiasm for life with a disbelief in humanity.

Mümtaz realizes what he took to be real has been a fantasy. In fact, this is what we expect to happen to a Bildungsheld. Mümtaz is no different from Goethe’s Wilhelm, who completely gives himself over to a conviction, and through a series of events, finally comes to abandon it. However, while Wilhelm learns about his limitations and discovers himself to be identical with the process he goes through (a path necessarily marked by error), Mümtaz resists dialectics and the knowledge derived from it. Now that he has seen the world as it is — that is to say, a place of uncertainty and anxiety — he comes to the conclusion that there is nothing beyond it: no unifying force to keep things together. And unlike Wilhelm, he


refuses to seek knowledge in a world disrupted by constant change, where truth is replaced with simple contingencies of life.

The novel ends on a sad note. Following Suad’s suicide, Nuran breaks up with Mümtaz. She has grown tired of his obsession with the past, the fact that “he’d been confined to an absolute idea, to an orbit of sterility that . . . gnawed at him like a worm” (226). In Part IV, we realize that Suad’s death has cast a dark shadow over Mümtaz as well. We see him wandering aimlessly, trying to attach some meaning to what he has experienced. In this state of emotional devastation, he returns home, only to be told his beloved cousin is dying. By story’s end, we are left with images of decay, disease, and death: ominous signs of the approaching world war.

Being a memorable instance of the modernist Bildungsroman, The Magic Moun-tain presents an interesting pattern that might be useful in understanding A Mind at Peace. One remarkable similarity is that both novels end in the same way: with a descent into the world following the outbreak of war. Like Thomas Mann’s Hans Castorp, who finds shelter in a sanatorium where the dazzling time of the modern world is suspended, Mümtaz hopes to reside (even if temporarily) in the tranquil universe of the Ottoman mystics. Their resignation, however, is interrupted by the declaration of a war.5 Tanpınar puts his young, confused character in a situation similar to that of Castorp: a situation begging for dialectics. However, while we can detect some Castorp in Mümtaz (with his deep-seated pride, hidden passions, and endless ruminations), we cannot claim that Tanpınar’s character goes through a dialectical formation that we observe in Mann’s protagonist, who is open to the world and the discourse of the other characters in the novel. In the course of seven years he spends in Berghof, Castorp is subjected to views and opinions as diverse and controversial as Settembrini’s humanism and Naphta’s nihilism. In Tanpınar’s novel, İhsan and Suad may represent these two poles respectively, but their influence is not strong enough to shape Mümtaz’s consciousness.

Similarly, although we might be tempted to such a comparison, Mümtaz’s isolation is unlike that of the artist in a Künstlerroman. In fact, his artistic practice remains highly questionable, even to Tanpınar, who tells us early in the novel that his character is working on a book about the life of Sheikh Galip, a late eighteenth-century Ottoman poet, but later makes sure that we understand there is no progress in Mümtaz’s work, what sounds like a biography meets mystical romance. Tanpınar’s novel ends before Mümtaz completes his. Mümtaz’s literary ambition, therefore, remains vague. It seems his literary endeavor is not the reason for his detachment from the society. It is rather the outcome. Besides, this would not be sufficient evidence to categorize his identity problem as an “artistic crisis.” In A Mind at Peace, the true artist is not cut off from society. As Mümtaz himself recognizes and appreciates, the Sufi musician leads an ordinary life. His art com-mands him to practice modesty, the most widely cherished virtue of Islam. In the humble acknowledgment that his existence as perishable as everybody else’s, he performs his music and lives his simple life: “Ottoman music was not an art form that dispensed with humanity or depleted it by imparting a sense of devotional


awe. All of those saintly souled and humble virtuosi, no matter how lofty the pinnacle of their art might be, were pleased to remain amongst the people and to live communally with others” (239).

This collectivity cannot be explained away as the end product of the clash between the individual and society. This is rather the way of life of a community versus that of the society: a “Miteinandersein” [being-amongst-others] rather than a functional and goal-oriented “Nebeneinandersein”[being-alongside-with-others].6 As opposed to the disorder of the outside world roaring with wars and revolutions, the Sufi musicians’ universe is filled with the quiet, everyday courage of just being here. Mümtaz longs for this collectivity, but falls away from it. He is tragically belated. While witnessing the last moments of a dying tradition, he simultaneously realizes that he cannot become a part of it. He admires the Sufis’ authenticity, their respect for life. The musicians belong to the world precisely because they do not hang onto anything temporal. Mümtaz is too worldly for that. His heart sinks as he realizes that he will never be at home in the world as the Sufis are.

The novel ends with this realization. Mümtaz’s desire to attain the aesthetic profundity of the Sufi musicians turns into a short-lived “(an)aesthetic” experi-ence: the effect is that of a powerful narcotic that temporarily cuts him off from the world, which he actually hoped to embrace — be it in art or love.

THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE: IN SEARCH OF AUTHENTICITY

Sixty years later, Orhan Pamuk seems to pick up where Tanpınar has left off. In his 2009 novel The Museum of Innocence, Pamuk depicts a character, who, in the hope of finding the center of his being, compulsively clings to an object of love, or more accurately, a love of objects.

The novel opens in 1975, when an unexpected encounter disrupts the pro-tagonist’s quiet life and knocks him off track. Kemal, the son of a wealthy Istan-bul family, is about to get engaged to the respectable Sibel, when he becomes infatuated with his distant cousin Füsun, and finds himself in a passionate love affair.

Kemal first meets Füsun while shopping for a Jenny Colon handbag for his fiancée. He draws closer to her when he returns the bag to the shop where Füsun works after Sibel realizes that the bag is a fake, a rather poor copy of “the origi-nal.” It is not a coincidence that the book opens with a discussion of “fakeness.” As the story unfolds, we realize that the problem of authenticity penetrates every corner of Pamuk’s novel. Kemal and his circle are aware of the fact that theirs is an “ersatz civilization:” a society that is doomed to compare itself with an original it always falls short of. Like one’s provincial cousins who never really blend in with others in family pictures, they look a little awkward standing beside their European counterparts.

Füsun, on the other hand, seems to be immune to this poisonous self-consciousness. She feels to Kemal like a breath of fresh air. As they start meeting


secretly in a disused apartment, he delights in her genuine enjoyment of their lovemaking: “When we made love she was able to give herself over to pleasure completely . . . with the enthusiasm of a child given a wonderful new toy” (60). Kemal notices immediately that Füsun, unlike his mother and fiancée, is able to engage in the world with no restraint. This fascinates him, because he suffers from the same trouble that has afflicted the women of his class: a denial of self, an out-of-body experience if you will, that turns even the most intimate moments into performance, and makes one the spectator of one’s own life. Kemal’s mother, for instance, condescendingly calls Füsun’s family “à la turca” [Turkish style] which is more of a sign of her own alienation than a slur on their traditional life.

Though Kemal is infatuated with Füsun, he is not brave enough to marry his déclassé cousin. The two break up quite early in the novel. For a while Kemal seeks consolation in the arms of his fiancée. But gradually he realizes that nothing can comfort him in the loss of his beloved other than the momentary relief he derives from touching and holding objects associated with her. For instance, he rubs a cigarette end she left in an ashtray “against my cheeks, my forehead, my neck and the recess under my eyes, as gently and kindly as a nurse salving a wound” (156). We find some Hans Castorp also in Kemal, as this scene has the morbid quality of Castorp’s infatuation with the glass diapositive of Clavdia Chauchat’s x-ray portrait. Like Mann’s character, Kemal clings to these “mute” objects hoping that they contain some trace of life they were once blessed with.

In the second half of the book, Kemal traces Füsun back to the impoverished neighborhood of Çukurcuma. The possibility of seeing her brings back the hope of “putting an end to pretense” (200). Even before he meets her, Kemal repeatedly says that he feels welcome in this old part of the city “with their tired aunties in headscarves, and young toughs staring at the strangers [. . .] and the unemployed idling in the coffeehouses, reading newspapers in air thick with coal smoke” (200). In these poor neighborhoods, “with their empty lots, their muddy cobblestone streets, their cars, rubbish bins, and sidewalks, and the children playing with a half-inflated football under the street lamps” (212), he senses, probably for the first time, the possibility of authenticity.

Kemal realizes that his father’s growing fortune and “the attendant obliga-tion to live the ‘elegant European life’ that befits this wealth” have deprived him of “simple essences” (212). When he is admitted to the Keskin household, he feels that he has been given a second chance to connect with the core of his being that he has neglected for so long. While strolling the streets of İstanbul, he was “seeking out his own center” (212) as well as looking for Füsun. Now that he has found her, he feels he is finally at home. Even Füsun’s marriage to Feridun, a would-be film director and a screenwriter of cheap second-rate movies, does not stop Kemal from calling on her.

As he later tells us, Kemal visits Füsun’s family house in Çukurcuma 1,593 times between October 23, 1976 and August 26, 1984. His compulsive visits are of the same nature: he spends almost eight years “eating supper, watching television, and chatting amiably without purpose” (284). The repetitive quality of


these get-togethers makes them seem more like religious rituals than social calls. Jale Parla calls this part of the novel “Ziyaret” (the Pilgrimage) in reference to the Sufi tradition of the regular visits to “tekke” (the convent). She suggests Kemal’s visits to the Keskin household should be read as part of “a story of maturation and formation,”7 where the protagonist gives up his ego and submits to the order of a higher truth: “Kemal is just an ordinary bourgeois. The house in Çukurcuma, however, is a sacred place reserved for love; it is a çilehane (a place of religious retreat) where one would pay the price of earlier sins and prove one’s loyalty” (Parla, “Bir olgunlaşma ve kemâle erme öyküsü”).

The recurrent scenes and the cyclical narration resemble Sufi prayers in which Allah’s names are chanted. In fact, the presence of recurrent scenes creates cir-cularity, breaking the linear timeline of the narrative. Like the slow-paced and almost viscous temporality of A Mind at Peace, these scenes challenge the notion of linear and therefore irreversible time typical in modernity. Modern time seems to have yielded to the languid atmosphere in the Keskin household. Being suggestive of a tekke in its simplicity, the apartment is decorated modestly. The only excep-tion is the giant German-made clock on the wall, which is there “not to measure time, but to be a constant reminder to the whole family of time’s continuity, and to bear witness to the ‘official world’ outside” (283).

In this atmosphere, Kemal submits to “simple essences” and begins his long journey of “fasting and praying” in hopes of finding love again. The visits open his eyes to a new world. He starts noticing small but beautiful details like the china dogs sitting on the television set. Having probably remained from the radio days, thus reminiscent of an innocent past, the figurines emerge as a counter-image of the Jenny Colon handbag. As Parla suggests, Kemal has come to see the world in a different light after spending almost eight years in Füsun’s house. He has developed an awareness he did not have before. But has he really gone through a Bildung? Now that he is sitting together with Füsun and her family in the eve-nings, basking in the warmth emanating from that simply decorated living room, enjoying the comforting sight of the little china dogs on the television set, which give him peace “by their mere presence” (375), has he found his center? Has he finally regained the long lost paradise? Hardly.

Kemal reminds us of Mümtaz, for he also prefers to observe the world rather than actively take part in it. He is homesick for a home he never had and this feeling totally paralyzes him. He stands at the shore of life watching it pass by in the same manner that he watches Füsun walk around the apartment. But unlike Mümtaz, he is more than a spectator. He takes the liberty of stealing an inventory of items from that pure, untainted, “innocent” world. He admires its wholeness and wants to possess it once and for all. In fact, as he confesses at one point, he replaces this “genuine” world with copies: “After having taken all those matchboxes, and Füsun’s cigarette butts, and the saltshakers, the coffee cups, the hairpins, and the barrettes — things not difficult to pick up, because people rarely notice them missing — I began to set my sights on things like ashtrays, cups, and slippers, gradually beginning to replace them with new ones” (374).


As the novel comes to a close, Kemal makes plans to take Füsun to Paris (a city associated with his Sorbonne-educated fiancée). This is where we realize that he is toying with the idea of making “a modern woman” out of her: a gesture no different from replacing the Keskin family’s vintage china dogs with new ones. Kemal wants to transform Füsun into the world of “substitutes,” to make her a part of his collection. This is an unforgivable act that makes him lose his beloved as well as his long-preserved innocence.

The Bildungsheld is supposed to lose his innocence in order to gain experi-ence. Usually this will involve concessions and compromises, but in the end the protagonist will grow out of his unsophisticated self and become mature. For this to happen, the protagonist must give up on himself, that is to say, abandon his old convictions, ideas and beliefs. The learning process involves a painful journey, which leads consciousness to “the point where it ‘de-fetishizes’ itself and, through this, becomes capable of knowing the truth” (Žižek 48).8

In his obsession with the absolute, however, Kemal fails to “de-fetishize” him-self. On the contrary, he fetishizes the whole world. His love for Füsun takes the form of a gigantic performance, as he becomes obsessed with building his “museum of innocence,” a collection of objects that grows into unthinkable proportions dur-ing the 409 weeks he spends with the Keskins. The fetish here must be understood not only as the displacement of sexual desire but also as a sign of losing the world. It points to the absence of the real. While the fetish involves the replacement “the original,” it also marks the absence that started the whole process. Kemal’s infatua-tion with Füsun’s belongings, therefore, becomes the indication of a “lack” as these objects cover the absence of a real relationship with the outside world.

Ironically, in his search for the “authentic,” Kemal becomes the master of the “ersatz” world he has been dreading for so long. Through his encounter with Füsun, Kemal realizes that he lives in a world of “poor copies,” imitations or appearances, and this realization makes him strive for “the real.” In its very core, this journey suggests the attainment of self-knowledge, but it does not finally deliver what it promises. Kemal fails to reach the real, because rather than simply living, he prefers encapsulating his experience into an eternal and timeless form. In other words, his attempt to “collect” this knowledge turns the whole idea behind the educative error and the consecutive journey into a lifeless and frozen world: a museum, “where Time is transformed into Space” (510).

TURKISH BILDUNGSHELD AS BEAUTIFUL SOUL

Unable to find a place in the narrative of modernity, the Turkish novelistic hero is trapped in an abstract ideal. Paralyzed by a double-edged longing — nostalgia for the past and an impossible yearning for the modern — he becomes detached from reality. By merely contemplating rather than acting, he either stumbles through a lifeless world of appearances, as Kemal does in the Museum of Innocence, or fails to represent the universality he claims to bear within himself, as in the case of Mümtaz in A Mind at Peace.


This pattern leads us back to Goethe and a bizarre episode in Wilhelm Meister, the quintessential Bildungsroman. Though the novel basically portrays the journey of its young protagonist towards maturity and social responsibility, it diverges from its subject matter and consistent structure when an awkward manuscript appears in the Sixth Book. “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul” is a completely independent episode that depicts the memoirs of a secluded woman. Inspired by his eccentric acquaintance Katherina von Klettenberg (Norton 248–249), Goethe portrays a pious character with a fervid personal relationship with God and a vivid imagination that borders on delusion. The “beautiful soul” is an unconventional character living in solitary confinement and religious contemplation. Having failed in her “intercourse” with real life, she has developed a bond with God through which she finds an outlet for her passionate character:

In my intercourse with my invisible Friend, I felt the sweetest enjoyment of all my powers. My desire of constantly enjoying this felicity was so predominant, that I abandoned without hesitation whatever marred our intercourse; and here experience was my best teacher. But it was with me as with sick persons, who have no medicine, and try to help themselves by diet. (Volume 2: 97)

This diet is a diet limiting the consumption of life. The beautiful soul starves herself of people, of relations, of “mediation.”9 Hers is what we may call rather loosely a social anorexia. This is why, when she talks about experience, she does not mean life-experience. Rather, she has in mind her own interior journey in search of the absolute. Her ordeal is not comparable to the trials Wilhelm goes through. While Wilhelm’s personal improvement is a moral cultivation primarily based on interaction with the outside world, the beautiful soul goes through stages of maturation in her inner space — if she ever does indeed mature. In fact, she is usually regarded as a static and unchanging character. As she withdraws from the outside world, she turns inward in the hope of finding the universal within herself. Lost in her own inwardness, she becomes what Wilhelm von Humboldt (in a letter to Schiller) calls the picture of “a completely isolated and eternally ill imagination” (qtd. in Norton 253).

In his reading of this concept, Hegel challenges the notion of moral or aesthetic idealism characteristic to German romanticism. The Beautiful Soul, which stands for Schiller’s romantic ideal of the solitary artist, as well as Kant’s understanding of inner moral beauty, turns upside down in Hegel’s “inverted world.” It becomes the image of a twisted consciousness, “disordered to the point of madness (that) wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consump-tion” (658). The problem with the beautiful soul in Hegel’s Phenomenology is that it has no point of reference. It does not acknowledge the fact that it depends on the “other” in its being. By detaching itself from the world and turning to itself, the beautiful soul fails to transform its thought into being, and pays the price for mere contemplation, its very existence “fading like a vapor” into the air (665–67). As it is completely cut off from the public sphere, it eventually becomes distorted. As Steven B. Smith also observes, the problem with the


beautiful soul is not that it is religious as such, but that it religiously observes the resolution that it should take no part in the real world. It does not want to contaminate itself with action and consequences. In order to preserve its purity, it carefully stays away from any contact with actuality and attributes to itself “a self-willed importance” (79).

Be it a sentimental Schillerian idealist like Mümtaz in the case of Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace, a self-deluded narcissist like Kemal in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, or a character with an acute self-consciousness like Selim, the protagonist of Atay’s The Disconnected, the beautiful soul is a recurrent figure in the Turkish novel. Female Bildungsroman characters are no different in the sense they rarely go through a dialectical formation. They emerge as the idealized version of moral beauty like Rabia in Halide Edip’s Sinekli Bakkal (The Clown and his Daughter [1935]), suffer from a saintly stoicism like Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Aysel in Ölmeye Yatmak (Lying Down to Die [1971]), or a form of an extreme pietism, as in the case of Nazan in Selçuk Orhan’s 40 Hadis (40 Hadith [2010]).10

Populated with characters that embody self-negation and isolation, the Turk-ish formation story offers hardly any possibility of transcendence. The Turkish intellectual, whose identity is disrupted with the advent of modernity, resides in a permanent delusion about himself and the world. The novelistic hero suffers from what we might call an emotional and intellectual “short circuit” stemming from his self-referential subjectivity, which detaches him or her not only from the world, but also from his/her own substance.

Both Mümtaz and Kemal emerge as contemporary reflections of the “Beauti-ful Soul” in their search for aesthetic autonomy, their narcissistic self-involvement and nostalgic longing for a distant and irretrievable past. More or less “spiritual dandies” themselves, they both demand purity: a pursuit that ends only in the attainment of an abstraction. They do not give up on their search of the absolute for the sake of “normality,” but they pay the price. Haunted by the ghosts of an idyllic time, they lose their grasp on the world itself. Mümtaz is possessed by an ideal of pure selfhood and positions himself above the aesthetics and morality of ordinary life, while Kemal destroys the possibility of a real relationship, because in his shameless self-indulgence, he overlooks the fact that love involves acknowl-edging the existence of another ego.

The problem with the Turkish Bildungsheld is that he is consumed with a desire to go back to an authentic self. Tanpınar himself talks about the necessity of “going back to our true selves, going back to our own past, going back to our own cultural wealth and looking in us for content as well as perfection” (Edebiyat Üzerine Makaleler 89). This fixation on an uncontaminated refined and genuine self, however, destroys all possibility of authenticity, because it is desperately seeking recognition. The quest for a unique and genuine identity becomes a performance for the imagined Western gaze. It takes the form of Occidentalism, and creates a distorted reality in which all practices of the subject are “ justified in and against the imagined idea of ‘the West’ ” (Ahıska, “Occidentalism” 16), even when they seem to be conducted in the most private areas of life.


This burdens the Turkish novelistic hero with a theatricality he cannot shake off. His identity is that of an “actor” for whom everything is reduced to a stage performance — even his most intimate moments. Mümtaz’s semi-philosophical soliloquys and Kemal’s meandering reminiscences share the same artificial qual-ity. It is not that these characters are not genuine. On the contrary, they are true to themselves and to their emotions. The problem is that even the most intimate areas of their lives are infiltrated by the suspicion that everything might be a counterfeit, just a poor copy of the original. This suspicion makes it impossible for them to possess their individual experience and make it the ground of their personal growth. This is the source of the neurosis that contaminates their lives with fantasies, inflicts them with perfectionism, and finally condemns them to a schizoid isolation.11

CONCLUSION

The classical Bildungsheld contains his “meaning” from the very beginning: a “meaning” that is embedded in the plot of the novel and that will become more and more visible as the story develops. We know that Goethe’s Wilhelm will finally overcome his wanderlust and settle down, that Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett will tame her pride and marry Darcy, or that Charles Dickens’s Pip will drop any pretense and claim his true identity as a gentleman. All these characters are at least presented with a chance of “normality,” with the hope that they can find for themselves a place in society. While contact with the outside world is painful, their suffering pays off in the end. The journey promises transcendence. It enables these characters to overcome their particularity and become social entities while they in return change the world and make it a better place.

Hence, in the classical Bildungsroman, the world is not an abstract predicate. It becomes “real” as long as the protagonist acts in it.12 It is concrete in the sense that it is translated into experience: the novelistic hero knows the world within himself as its moments. In the case of the Turkish Bildungsroman, however, as the world outside is replaced with an abstract ideal, knowledge becomes completely externalized, and self-realization becomes impossible. As the individual places his “meaning” outside himself and tries to attain it in the form of a transcenden-tal object, he himself also turns into an abstraction, merely “a thought entity” incapable of interacting with the world — which is exactly what the Beautiful Soul is about.

The emblem of the eighteenth century ethics and aesthetics, the Beautiful Soul made its way into Wilhelm Meister, the quintessential Bildungsroman defined by its interest in “quotidian reality.” However, by using it as a counterpoint to the main storyline, Goethe rationalizes this experience, which becomes transformed into the totality of Wilhelm’s education. Everything serves his Bildung, even death and madness. Everything should find its place in the social structure, every void must be filled, and no room should be left for the unknown or the unfamiliar that could cast a shadow to the radiant conclusion of the book (Moretti 47). On


the other hand, because of its stubborn interest in spirituality, the Turkish Bil-dungsroman makes room for such eccentricity and traces of the unknown. With its mystical undertones and ongoing commitment to Islamic practices, it also problematizes the assumption that secularism governs modernity’s cultural forms.

Failing to internalize the cultural forms of modernity imposed upon him, the Turkish Bildungsheld returns to his “not yet severed link with the transcendental order,” but unlike his Western counterpart, he does not long “for an earthly home, which may correspond to its ideal” (Lukács 131). Instead, he clings to the ideal, which he views as the core of his true identity. His interiority has nothing to do with the “concrete idealism,” of his Western counterpart, because rather than seeking fulfillment in action, in “effective dealings with reality,” he tries to find solace in contemplation (132). However, he can neither dwell in the “transcendental order” that is no longer there, nor is he able to replace it with a worldly one.

Being caught in the double bind of “the real” that he cannot adapt to and “the ideal” that cannot live up to, the Turkish novelistic hero becomes trapped in his own consciousness. He loses his point of reference and suffocates in his own subjectivity. He does not recognize himself as an active agent, who would make history by bringing together the opposing moments of tradition and modernity. Instead he locates his moral ideal in a perfect world that falls beyond his reach, and becomes a neurotic, overanxious, self-obsessed purist in search of absolute authenticity, i.e., the Beautiful Soul.

Acknowledgments

I would like to gratefully acknowledge TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) for the post-doctoral scholarship it offered and Prof. Victoria Kahn (Chair of Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley) for inviting me to U.C. Berkeley as a visiting scholar. Both contributed to the writing of this paper.

Notes

1. Hegel’s primary task is to show that individual consciousness should be aware of its ontological relation to other individual consciousnesses, and this is at the very heart of its being. Therefore, Spirit for Hegel is the experience of a subject that is plural rather than singular, or as Hegel puts it is an “Ego that is ‘we,’ a plurality of Egos, and ‘we’ that is a single Ego” (227).

2. For a thorough discussion of Turkey’s project of modernization, see Bozdoğan and Kasaba.

3. With specific reference to the characters of Oğuz Atay, Gürbilek says that they all suffer from the lack of what maybe called “science du monde.” They do not know the ways of the world, and therefore have to remain at home “being doomed to an endless childhood” (Yer Değiştiren Gölge 30–31).

4. This holds true for most Bildungsromane in Turkey, with the exception of the so-called “village novels,” a sub-genre dominated by a patriotic sentiment usually embodied in an idealist hero who, undertaking the duty of guarding the Republic, goes to the countryside and serves people. Parla maintains that the “village novels,” such as Mahmut Makal’s Bizim Köy (Our Village, 1950), Talip


Apaydın’s Sarı Traktör (The Yellow Tractor, 1958), Yaşar Kemal’s Teneke (Tin, 1955), and Fakir Baykurt’s Kaplumbağalar (The Turtles, 1967), are the product of a “paternalistic nationalism” which found its best expression in the ideology of the time “a synthesis of Kemalism, nationalism, socialism, and communism — quite an incongruous mix” (“From Allegory to Parable” 18).

It is also interesting to note that the pattern of “village novels” is repeated later in Islamist “salvation novels” of the 1980s and 90s, in which the main character goes through ordeals, only to be spiritually enlightened in the end. The stereotype of idealistic teachers is replaced by the conventional image of young and dedicated doctors. The issue of Westernization or modernization, however, remains the central concern. The works of Ahmet Günbay Yıldız, Emine Şenlikoğlu, Hekimoğlu İsmail, Sevim Asımgil, Halit Ertuğrul, İsmail Fatih Ceylan, and Şerif Benekçi are among the “salvation novels” written between the years 1980–2000. See Çayır.

5. We know that Tanpınar was familiar with Mann’s novel. In fact, in his article entitled “Huzur Romanında Alman Edebiyatı İzleri” (The Influence of German Literature on A Mind at Peace), Gürsel Aytaç goes as far as to suggest that he even might have borrowed “the neoromantic narrative style in addition to the themes of decay and death” from The Magic Mountain.

6. I am using the term Miteinandersein [being-amongst-others] in the way Heidegger would have it — yet, with a certain amount of reservation considering its possible connotations of hierarchy and power. My approach is closer to Heidegger’s later and richer account of the term in Einleitung in die Philosophie, where Miteinandersein is a “sharing in the truth” (Sichteilen in die Wahrheit 92–106), a form of being-together that can be authentic — as opposed to the class-stricken Nebeneinandersein [being-alongside-with-others], which is open to power relations.

7. Here Parla not only draws our attention to the double-meaning of the word “visit,” but also plays on the word “kemal,” which means “mature,” or more relevant to our context, “gebildet.”

8. In “The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan,” Žižek talks about the Hegelian “nega-tivity” in terms of the “loss of the loss” (where negation implies an affirmation), and suggests that knowledge is possible only by the subject’s constant “cancellation” (de-fetishizing) of itself.

9. Simply put, “mediation” is the process according to which the dialectic functions: two oppos-ing positions are mediated into a synthesis. According to Hegel, then, all movement takes place according to mediation: what progress we perceive is really a process of mediation.

10. I’d like to thank Nergis Ertürk who suggested that I give more thought to the “femininity” of the Beautiful Soul in Goethe. This may correspond to an account of Orientalism in relation to my reading of the Turkish Bildungsroman: that is to say, how the novelistic hero sees itself as “feminine and inherently passive” in comparison to its “masculine and active” Western counterpart. However, this interpretation opens a new (and probably controversial) question going beyond the scope of this paper, which I hope to consider as part of a separate discussion.

11. Lacan suggests that the “dialectic of the beautiful soul” in the Phenomenology should be read as the portrayal of the modern man as a neurotic. The disorder he suffers from does not belong to the world around him but is produced by him. All his attempts to overcome this disorder increase it, just because they are the driving forces of that disorder: “The moi, the ego, of modern man, as I have indicated elsewhere, has taken on its form in the dialectical impasse of the belle âme who does not recognize his very own raison d’être in the disorder that he denounces in the world” (Ecrits 70).

12. The reader should be reminded that the German term in question here is Wirklichkeit (“reality” or actuality) derived from the verb “to act” (wirken), which makes it clear that the type of “actuality” we are talking about is not a merely passive, natural given. What is “actual” is always a consequence of a deed, of action.


Works cited

Ahıska, Meltem. “Garbiyatçılık: Türkiye’de Modernliğin Grameri.” Bora and Gültekingil 1039–1065.

———. “Occidentalism: The Historical Fantasy of the Modern.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 102.2/3 (2003): 351–379. Print.

Aytaç, Gürsel. “Huzur Romanında Alman Edebiyatı İzleri.” Littera 28 (2011): 195–201. Print.

Bora, Tanıl and Murat Gültekingil, eds. Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce. Volume 9. İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2009. Print.

Bozdoğan, Sibel and Reşat Kasaba, eds. Rethinking modernity and national identity in Turkey. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1997. Print.

Çayır, Kenan. Islamic Literature in Contemporary Turkey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels. Vol. 2. New York: John W. Lovell Company, 1882. Print.

Gürbilek, Nurdan. Kötü Çocuk Türk. İstanbul: Metis Yayınları, 2004. Print.

———.Yer Değiştiren Gölge. İstanbul: Metis Yayınları, 1995. Print.

Hegel, G.W.F. The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J.B. Baillie. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1910. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. Einleitung in die Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vittorio Klostermann, 1996. Print.

Kurtoğlu, Zerrin. “Devlet Aklı ve Toplumsal Muhayyile arasında Din ve Siyaset.” Bora and Gültekingil 617–633.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006. Print.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Merlin, 1971. Print.

Meriç, Cemil. Kültürden İrfana. İstanbul: İnsan Yayınları, 1986. Print.

Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London: Verso, 1987. Print.

Norton, Robert E. The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century. London: Cornell UP, 1995. Print.

Parla, Jale. “From Allegory to Parable: Inscriptions of Anatolia in the Turkish Novel.” New Perspectives on Turkey 36 (2007): 11–27. Print.

———. “Bir olgunlaşma ve kemâle erme öyküsü: Masumiyet Müzesi” [Museum of Innocence: A Story of Maturation.] Milliyet Kitap 11 Sept. 2008. Web. 4 June 2012. ‹http://kitap.milliyet.com .tr/bir-olgunlasma-ve-kem-le-erme-oykusu/kitap/haberdetay/11.09.2008/989547/default.htm›.

Pamuk, Orhan. Museum of Innocence London: Faber & Faber, 2009. Print.

Smith, Steven B. Hegel ’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. Print.

Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. A Mind at Peace. Trans. Erdağ Göknar. New York: Archipelago Books, 2008. Print.

———. Edebiyat Üzerine Makaleler. İstanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1977. Print.

Tural, Secaattin. “Huzur Romanında Nihilist bir Karakter: Suad” Turkish Studies: International Periodical for the Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic 5.4 (Fall 2010): 1488–99. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. Interrogating the Real. Eds. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens. London: Continuum, 2005. Print.

"Wandering on the peripheries": Turkish novelistic hero as "Beautiful Soul"

Documents

Transcript of "Wandering on the peripheries": Turkish novelistic hero as "Beautiful Soul"