This study gives voice to three ways of becoming modern in the Turkish experience through a reading of the novels of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz Atay, and Orhan Pamuk.Footnote ¹ The first possibility, represented by the works of Tanpınar, is more conservative and defensive, concerned with preserving what is considered authentic culture. Anti-individualistic, it nonetheless attempts to appropriate Western culture and the change generated by its impact within “the traditional essence.” The second possibility, represented by the works of Atay, is open ended: it reaches beyond the limitations of the Turkish social-historical domain to create a new individual (and implicitly social) existence while remaining critical of Western “individuality.” The last possibility, represented by the works of Pamuk, expresses the dominant concept of “modernization” in Turkey, which equates modernization with Westernization. Individualization comes to mean replication of “Western individuality.”

The novel in Turkey was born in the Westernization process and adopted Westernization as its main problematic. The first explorations of novelistic prose took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries before the final breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Eminent critic Berna Moran points out that for the first novelists, like Şemsettin Sami, Namık Kemal, and Ahmet Mithat, European literature, particularly the novel, was “the sign of a superior civilization”; they regarded the prevalent Ottoman-Turkish storytelling literature as “backward.” For these writers, the transition from story to novel was emblematic of a change from “day-dreaming to rationalism, from childhood to maturity,” in sum, “from primitive to civilized life.”Footnote ²

These early novels criticized pretentious and superficial imitations of the West through a pathetic (alafranga) character while presenting “correct Westernization” through a countercharacter.Footnote ³ Ahmet Mithat's Felatun Bey ve Rakım Efendi animates these two figures; for instance, Felatun Bey represents “the alafranga snob who gets carried away by the consumption economy” and Rakım Efendi is an Ottoman gentleman who “is Westernized to a convenient extent” and “who understands Westernization correctly.” He is hardworking, competent, thrifty, and has “Western enjoyments.”Footnote ⁴

The works of the three authors in this study deserve the “modern” label not only because of their literary quality—such as the able use of stream of consciousness in exposing their subjects’ soul-searching and internal journeys of becoming—but also because of their ideational terrain. Unlike earlier novels, they are set against a background of holistic Westernization. This republican project of Westernization aimed to displace the duality (between prevalent Ottoman institutions and Western institutions and between Ottoman identity and Western ideas) that characterized life, thought, and institutions in the late Ottoman era. This process of becoming and soul searching is experienced with a full exposure to different cultures and values. Identities and ways of being are no longer given and stable. These novels’ protagonists need to affirm a self, to create or remake one along the model of someone else.

Whichever way they choose, these characters must first “know” themselves. In their searches and reflections, they confront a certain social-historical domain and its effects. They find themselves in a confusing in-betweenness. On the one hand, they want and need to change both themselves and their social-historical domain; on the other hand, they feel a sense of belonging and sympathy for familiar cultural features. The novels of Tanpınar, Atay, and Pamuk represent different ways of searching and different responses to the results. In sum, the characters are looking for the “Turkish modern” in a new social and cultural space—deformed and destabilized but at the same time opened up by the radicalization of Turkish modernization. There is an implicit thematic unity among these works in the “modern condition” of postrepublican Turkey.

The term “Turkish modernization” has been coined in Turkish historiography and social science to describe the ongoing transformation of the Turkish social-historical domain, supposedly toward a modern and Western model. The process is assumed to have started with late-Ottoman reform and is expected to culminate in a full replication of Western (European) modernity. The selection and acceptance of “modernization” reflects both the historical characteristics and contradictions of the Turkish experience. Following Osborne, if one understands 20th-century concepts of modernization in the context of the expanding dialectic of differentiation and homogenization, they presuppose “a scale of development.” On this scale, progress is defined “in terms of the projection of certain people's presents as other people's futures.”Footnote ⁵ This idea of progress has characterized the Turkish experience, emulating the ever-new present of Western modernity so as to move Turkish society toward its own future. Yet it presents a contradiction in terms. If modernity designates a temporality that not only is chronologically “new” but also depends on a claim for qualitative newness (the claim that modernity constantly renews itself qualitatively), modernization is bound to imply an ever-same dependence, an insurmountable time gap. Therefore, it is a self-contradiction to expect that Turkey would catch up with modernity through modernization.

“Turkish modernization” was also an elite-led, top-down, and politically controlled attempt (and aspiration) to emulate/transfer Western modernity. Hence it would be more appropriate to talk about the modernism of Turkish (political and cultural) elites if we define modernism, following Berman and Osborne, as “that amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the subjects as well as the objects of modernization.”Footnote ⁶ Instead of “Turkish modernization,” we should explore various modernisms in Turkish experience, ranging from the top-down, elite-led modernism to different critical visions of becoming modern. The term “modernisms” denotes visions, ideas, and attempts but not necessarily the overall, systemic, and linear transformation (toward a certain model) implied by “modernization.”

Yet, these conceptions of modernity, modernism, and modernization are still Eurocentric. They grew out of particular experiences in the centers of rising European modernity, “a time-consciousness derived from and punctuated exclusively by changes in the public, urban worlds of London, Berlin and Paris,” as Paul Gilroy writes.Footnote ⁷ As such, they limit our perceptions of “other” experiences of modernity or becoming modern, the variety of “historically specific and unavoidably complex configurations of individualization and embodiment.”Footnote ⁸ Experiences and subjectivities that generate their own temporality in the endeavor to attain social and cultural autonomy do not fit within the terms of a dominant, expanding, and repressive Euro-American modernity.

That is why Nilüfer Göle suggests “non-Western modernities” as a “theoretical and methodological effort to create new ways of reading and seeing some aspects of social life which have been either repressed as discordant with modernity or judged and dismissed as repressive or transitory phenomena.”Footnote ⁹ As Göle affirms, “it is a conceptual effort trying to create a new awareness.” This new awareness depends on such postulates as “decentring the West, introducing coeval time, replacing the perspective of ‘lack’ with extra modernity and dissonant traditions.” Through this awareness we can make sense of apparently “discordant” and “repressed” aspects of social life; “indigenization” and “hybridization” of modernity replace “antimodern” or “reactionary.” That is, modern existence may take heterogeneous forms not necessarily in conformity with a presumed model. Yet Göle's theoretical framework still presupposes the preeminence of Western modernity as representative of “the general principles of modernity.”Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, in this perspective, “indigenization” remains a practice of “borrowing.”

Some of these limitations of Göle's thought-provoking framework have been addressed by Meltem Ahıska. She argues that in the context of Turkish experience Göle overemphasizes the heterogeneity and hybridity of modern identities; they “boil down to the historical markers of East and West to the extent that these identities are appropriated within the limits of national identity.”Footnote ¹¹ Therefore, she proposes a new concept: “occidentalism.” She writes, “It opens a space for the positivity of the other—its experiences, utterances, and practices—instead of adopting the often negative definition of the other in theories of Orientalism.” Occidentalism reveals “how the ‘Orientals’ answered back to their representation by the West” and “brings into view a complex field of subjectivity.”Footnote ¹² We need to pursue this “complex subjectivity of the other.” However, Ahıska limits this field and corresponding experiences with a fixed form (no matter how much content may change) focusing on East–West duality and endless mirror games: “how the non-Western imagines that the West sees itself is incorporated in the reflection on its own identity.”Footnote ¹³

What is needed is an engaged perspective that gives voice to the possibilities of social and individual autonomy in the Turkish experience as the “real” dynamic of becoming modern. Only through these searches and experiences can the imposed dualisms and negations be overcome. This article explores these possibilities through the works under focus. Still we must radicalize the context. Gilroy, in his work Black Atlantic, does not criticize the Euro-American-centric conceptions of modernity simply to make a “corrective inclusion of the black commentaries on the modern” possible. He is rather arguing for “the inversion of the relationship between margin and centre” that for him requires “a return to and a rethinking of the characteristically modern relationship between the master and the slave.”Footnote ¹⁴ This inversion, according to Gilroy, “complements and extends the work of feminist philosophers who have opposed the figuration of woman as a sign for the repressed or irrational Other of rationality identified as male.”Footnote ¹⁵

Gilroy shows that African American slaves achieved sense of self and social and cultural autonomy by not establishing a “dependent other.” They constructed their identities against the backdrop of dualisms that imposed essences—African and European—and against “both an irremediable loss and unspeakable horror.” As such they are “truly modern.” Gilroy's quotation from Toni Morrison expresses the intensity of this claim:

As Gilroy concludes, “these strategies of survival made the truly modern person. They are a response to predatory Western phenomena.”Footnote ¹⁷

My analysis rethinks modern existence and modernity. Both involve possibilities for gaining a consciousness that does not depend on repressing self or other, for attaining social and individual autonomy, and for unceasingly constructing one's subjectivity against imposed dualisms and essences. Modern existence and modernity should not presuppose a model or measure their worth by proximity to a center. In search and affirmation of such possibilities, this paper engages with the modern Turkish novel. I have organized the readings on the novelsFootnote ¹⁸ with reference to the two themes already introduced: East–West and temporality (and, by implication, autonomy). The novels are introduced based on their relevance to the theme under focus, not by order of primacy or equal time for each author. The concern here is to provide a clear, concise representation of a particular way of constituting the “Turkish modern.” Bringing in more works by the same author would not change the substance of my argument.

THE CHALLENGE OF CONSTITUTING A SELF ACROSS THE EAST–WEST DIVIDE

Tanpınar's Huzur (Inner Peace) is regarded as the first great Turkish novel—an in-depth excursion on the distinctive Ottoman-Turkish “area of culture” (Tanpınar's designation) in comparison with “the West.”Footnote ¹⁹ The novel concerns the emergence of a love (between Mümtaz and Nuran), its aesthetic experience, and its destruction by a third person (Suat) through his suicide. However, Tanpınar introduces the characters as embodiments of civilizational characteristics and reflects on existential problems through their states of mind and their relations. Even the love between Mümtaz and Nuran is portrayed as peculiar to the “culture” of the “Ottoman-Turkish area of civilization.” Mümtaz, for instance, is an aesthete and intellectual facing problems resulting from the “Westernization-modernization” process. Huzur filters the sequence of events on the eve of World War II through the consciousness of Mümtaz. The character of İhsan, a relative of Mümtaz, articulates the searches and concerns generated by the encounter between cultures; he serves as the speaker for Ottoman-Turkish civilization. He raises Mümtaz after the boy's mother dies. A man of culture and thought, İhsan is a superego figure for Mümtaz.

Mümtaz loves Nuran as a “part” and representative of Ottoman-Turkish culture. The lineage of Nuran's father is connected with MevlevisFootnote ²⁰ while her mother's lineage is rooted in Bektaşis.Footnote ²¹ In addition to her full knowledge of and skill in classical Turkish music, she is familiar with folk songs and folk dances. The author portrays Mümtaz's love for Nuran as peculiar to this culture, a highly sublimated love; Mümtaz imagines the different moods on her face as decorations of Ottoman artists and compositions of classical Turkish music. He thinks that “he lives the heritage of a culture through the love of Nuran.” The author explains these feelings as a “peculiar style of loving” coming from the “ancestors.” Even the folk songs “which are most tied to a bloody lust for the flesh” ask for “gathering of the universe in the beloved.”Footnote ²²

In a Mevlevi ritual, where Mümtaz, İhsan, Nuran, and their friends come together, the portrayal of the old ney Footnote ²³ player Emin Dede,Footnote ²⁴ who leads the ritual, reflects the sublimated form of existence created by erasing individuality. Again, the author explains that “Emin Dede was one of the men that a civilization chooses as its most excellent instruments.”Footnote ²⁵ He continues: “The centuries old Mevlevi education had erased everything that is individualistic in him and melted this inspired, mild, and patient man” within “a lack of identity.” He was “a man hidden in his materiality and in his civilization.”Footnote ²⁶ As Tanpınar notes in his portrayal, “despite the changes in our life” and “despite the persistent denials which turned himself and his art to a magnificent ruin or to an eclipse of the sun, he was [the] equal of and friendly to everybody.”Footnote ²⁷ Through the gaze of Mümtaz, Tanpınar compares Emin Dede with “the most excellent instruments” of Western civilization:

Looking at Emin Dede, whose art is not an instrument of an ego but rather a way to unification with “the great wholeness,” Mümtaz thinks that “this is the East.” For him, it is a source of both an “incurable sickness” (from the perspective of Westernization) and “inexhaustible power” (from the perspective of tradition).

The figure who disturbs this “bliss,” this “inner peace,” is symbolized by Suat. He stands at an external point to the self-containedness of the others. He listens to the music “very politely and by respecting the composition played and the players.” Yet, at the same time, he pays “cruel attention” to the performance with his “freedom of thought.”Footnote ²⁹ He stays outside of this spiritual journey of unification (in being). And he says that “what is boring me is this turning around the nothingness . . . this obsessive striving.”Footnote ³⁰ At that moment, he quarrels with İhsan. Suat objects to the atmosphere by crying, “I want freedom not saintliness,” and he asks İhsan to define freedom. İhsan says it is “the benefaction that we wish for the others.” Suat asks, “What about yourself then?” He asserts that “all of us exist separately.” İhsan responds, “Once you say this you lose everything. The being is one and we are part of it.”Footnote ³¹

After Suat leaves, the characters discuss the sufferings he has undergone. İhsan closes the discussion with the remark that he does not care about Suat and that he does not have the time to consider the problems of individuality. He affirms that he is “busy with the community.” Yet, Mümtaz “shares” the “sufferings” of Suat. He feels that Suat is also a part of his reality. Still, Mümtaz thinks that he disagrees with Suat.Footnote ³² The existential forms of both “Eastern” and “Western” civilization fragment the same subject from within. The East–West duality seen on the level of the institutions and ideas in the previous era turns into an internal duality within the subject.

In contrast, both İhsan and Mümtaz as men of culture are not closed to the West. They allude to Western music, literature, and paintings in the novel; sometimes they describe their experiences in terms of these works of art. Yet they “like” these works of Western culture only when they live through the works of “their culture.” The reality in which the former are produced and the reality in which the two characters live “differs.” That is why Westernization alone is not enough. İhsan talks about the “necessity of constructing a new life unique to us and compatible to our conditions without closing ourselves to the West and by preserving our ties with the past.”Footnote ³³

The novels of Atay represent similar inner contradictions and strivings of subjects torn by “Eastern” and “Western” forms of existence. Yet, the characters also try to go beyond them to constitute a new subjectivity. Yıldız Ecevit emphasizes that Atay is the “real precursor” in Turkish literature of “stream of consciousness,” the technique introduced by James Joyce in the modern Western novel.Footnote ³⁴ She adds that he “sends his figures on a journey through their internal worlds” like “most of the modern Western authors do.”Footnote ³⁵ In their internal worlds they face the troubling duality Tanpınar portrayed before.

The character of Hikmet Benol in Atay's second novel, Tehlikeli Oyunlar (Dangerous Plays), fully embodies this internal duality in an ironic way. Hikmet Benol (whose first name means “wisdom” while his surname denotes “becoming I”) moves to a gecekondu (shack) to “get rest” and to engage in “self-criticism” and “self-reflection,” which he feels are “lacking in this country.” Yet he becomes “the first victim of this practice.” He faces “several Hikmets” and cannot continue this self-questioning.Footnote ³⁶ He commits suicide in the end.

In the upstairs of the gecekondu resides a retired colonel interested in history, which he conceives of as superficial stories regarding the past. One of his Turkish referents, “translator Arif,” symbolizes the obscure, sloppy, and confused Turkish intellectuals of the prior generation who depended on Western culture even as they were at odds with its “idea and the spirit.” Both Arif's naiveté and sincerity come through in his words.

Hikmet highlights the wider social and cultural characteristics of “his country” through the themes of “playing games” and “childishness.” The novel's fourteenth chapter is “The Great Game.” There, Hikmet says that “our country is a huge playground.” He adds, “Our people play the same game for years,” and “they are tired of their inability to make it look like reality.”Footnote ³⁷ This life in games is discordant with “rationality,” “reality,” and “truth.” It is a kind of fantasy world. That is why he declares the “joy of getting rid of this imitation of reason which we think is what reason is.” What we should do is to leave ourselves completely to the games. Therefore, he claims that “the world should be divided into two . . . Those who want to live in accordance with the principles of Descartes should leave from now on.”Footnote ³⁸

Hikmet's love affair with Bilge (whose name means “learned/wise one”) is dominated by these concerns, and it fails as a result. She is a graduate of philosophy and knows English. Hikmet describes her as rational, spontaneous, and self-confident—the characteristics that challenge his existential circumstances. As their affair deepens, he feels divided between the demands that this relationship imposes on him and his life in games and plays that he shares with the retired colonel in the gecekondu. According to Hikmet, Bilge “is on the side of the Brits.” At one point he decides to take her to the gecekondu to introduce her to the colonel and his life. He tells the colonel that they will stay over for the night—a “custom,” Hikmet emphasizes, that is a sign of the Turkish people's hospitality, sincerity, and warmth. He continues this irony in his talk with the colonel: “According to the economists, this staying over for the night is the cause of our underdevelopment while the Brits developed because they gave up this custom.” The satire blooms:

When Bilge sees the games and plays at Hikmet's place and when translator Arif is introduced to her, she says that she does not understand. “Why are you like those people who try to do sloppy things in this country? Why don't you keep firm?” The retired colonel defends Arif by claiming that “he is one of our genuine values against Western thought who cannot be rejected at first glance.” Bilge objects: “You should not be carried away by these delusions. When one knows the West a bit, feels its deepness and its greatness, one would not waste time with such obscure words.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In a sense, this meeting symbolizes the destruction of Hikmet's and the retired colonel's “fantasy” world by “Western rationality” and the “truth” that it imposes, which portrays them as “sloppy,” “living in self-delusions,” and “wasting time.” After that, Hikmet intensifies his reflection on his circumstance and on his differences with Bilge in the gecekondu, and he decides not to see her any more. He is tired of life even before experiencing it.

Under the weight of these reflections and of his problematic affair with Bilge, Hikmet feels he is breaking into pieces. He needs some sort of a “therapy,” but he would not “go to a psychoanalyst as a Brit would do.” Instead, he consults the retired colonel as his “doctor.” There he talks about “the crowd of Hikmets” and says that he has thought about writing an “encyclopaedia of Hikmets.” He talks about the impossibility of continuing the self-criticism and self-questioning because there is not a single self. He expresses his difficulty in pulling his pieces together because “the pieces are not taken from the people who lived in the same century; besides there are differences of race, religion, and language between them.” Therefore, he reasons, “my pieces taken from the East rebel against the West; that's why sometimes I do not like the Brits.”Footnote ⁴¹

Like Tanpınar, Atay reflects on the social and cultural world of Turkish people in terms of “characteristics” and “differences” in comparison to the Western world. Atay reveals their interaction and clash within the subject; it is part of his seeking how “individuality” and “subjectivity” can be constituted both through and in the contradictions, dissonances, and fragmentations that this encounter creates.

In Pamuk's novels we finally see the fully constituted self, but this becomes possible only through becoming “someone else,” a self-centered, rational individual of the West. This process of becoming coincides with a full replication/emulation of “Western individuality” and a total disavowal of the “Eastern” way of existence. According to Pamuk, Tanpınar could not have become a modernist because he represented the “identity of a man of community who is aware of modernism.” Therefore, Pamuk says, “this dilemma which he experienced” shaped Tanpınar's literary position and prevented him from adopting a modernist stand.Footnote ⁴² Pamuk, in contrast, has created “individuals” rather than “men of community.” His characters are individuals even in historical periods in which they are supposed be “in, and part, of community.”

The thematic unity in Pamuk's works stems from his subjects’ envy for their imagined “ideal form,” the self-conscious “individual of the West.” In line with this, Pamuk affirms the emergence of the gaze of this “ideal individual” through and in Turkish modernization. In his conception, Westernization and individualization coincide. This process of individualization is realized through a disavowal of the image of Turkish people's Eastern social and cultural life. Pamuk takes the route from which Atay refrained in his search.

In Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Mr. Cevdet and His Sons), Pamuk's first novel published in 1982, the formation of the Westernizing Turkish bourgeoisie in Istanbul is portrayed through the history of Turkish modernization. Cevdet Bey is one of the rare Muslim merchants of Istanbul at the beginning of the 20th century. He aspires to a Western bourgeois and family life. Apolitical and self-interested, he is concerned only with the growth of his business and hence the acquisition of money and accumulation of savings. He is modest and ascetic. In this sense, he resembles the early bourgeoisie of “Puritans” described by Max Weber.Footnote ⁴³

At the threshold of business growth and family life, he thinks that he is “different from the others,” and he values his singularity as the only Muslim merchant among the Ottoman Empire minorities who dominate trade and business. He tries to give up his “Oriental” attitudes and habits, aiming to set up a life like the one in the books he read during his private French lessons. At the beginning of the novel, he is engaged to the daughter of a paşa (Şükrü Paşa, who believes in the necessity of Westernization and took his daughters to Paris) and buys a big, splendid house.

The second part of the novel opens in 1936. We now see the settled business and family life of Cevdet Bey in the postrepublican era. He and his wife live in that big house with his two sons, who are married, and his only daughter. His sons also work in his business, which has thrived in the war years through procurements that Cevdet Bey received from the government. Their domestic life reflects a composed mix of Western attitudes and pleasures and traditional life. While their daughter plays piano, they drink liquor with a meal of a sacrificed sheep served by their cook during the bayram (festivity) of sacrifice. The elder son, Osman, seems to be happy with this life and the business that he manages. In contrast, the younger son, Refik, is not very involved with business and family. He is happy in his marriage but not with life. This section of the novel ends with Cevdet Bey's death.

In this milieu, envy of Europe is a common characteristic. In a dinner devoted to the memory of Cevdet Bey, Sait Bey, a descendant of the Ottoman aristocracy, speaks frankly: “Europe, ah Europe! I always think of you, each time I go there I think of her. Why are they so and we are like that?”Footnote ⁴⁴ The question appeals to Refik, depressed and searching for the meaning of life. He writes in his diary, “I thought of that dinner. Why are we like this? Why are they so, and we are like this? Why do I like to read Rousseau and Voltaire, but I do not enjoy Tevfik Fikret or Namık Kemal? Why am I so as well?”Footnote ⁴⁵

In this reflective mood, he decides to go to Kemah, a district in eastern Turkey, where an engineer friend is directing the construction of a railroad tunnel. Refik expects to read, study, and reflect. There he meets a German engineer, Herr Rudolph, who came to Turkey to build roads and railways ten years ago but did not return after Hitler came to power. Herr Rudolph is critical of “German narrow-mindedness”; he thinks that Refik has a “soul different from the Turks.” On one occasion, Herr Rudolph recites Hölderlin to express this “difference” and translate it into Turkish. Hölderlin likens “the East” to “a magnificent despot”; in the East “people kneel down before starting to walk and pray before starting to talk.” Herr Rudolph tells Refik and his friend that neither of them belongs to this land just as “the light of the reason” is irreconcilable with “the soul of the East.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Refik carries out studies on the “solution of the rural problem in Turkey.” He reflects on what to do in order to “save” villages from the “darkness of the Middle Ages” and “to link them with the cities and with the revolutions.” He thinks about Herr Rudolph's advice to hold tight to rationality. In his diary, he writes under the impact of Herr Rudolph's ideas about his incongruence “with this country.”Footnote ⁴⁷

After his return to Istanbul, Refik, along with his wife and his daughter, born just after the death of Cevdet Bey, move out of his father's house to an apartment. He continues to contemplate how to enlighten the Turkish people while he works unhappily in the trading business managed by his elder brother. During the celebration of his nephew's circumcision, Refik decides that what is needed is a movement of culture to abolish “such disgusting” customs. To this end he is determined to found a publishing house to print books by the likes of Daniel Defoe and Rousseau for everyone.Footnote ⁴⁸

The novel's third section, the epilogue, opens in 1970 with the third generation of Cevdet Bey's family. We find out that Refik had a son, Ahmet, and that his wife divorced him and married another man. We also understand that Refik died after his unsuccessful attempt to run a publishing house. What Ahmet represents is important; he seems to embody the culmination of Turkish modernization. Ahmet's existential concerns and mode of existence provide the wider perspective through which Pamuk presents this history. Ahmet is a painter, educated in Paris. Although interested in left-wing politics, he is not an active militant. His discussion with his girlfriend, İlknur, on the meaning of his art reflects the implications of this perspective. A Ph.D. student in art history, she asks him, “Do you mean that everything, all this flux, this complex life, are for your paintings?” He replies, “For me they are. I cannot paint if I do not believe in this.” İlknur points out that Ahmet has “a very individualist theory, locating oneself to the center of everything.”Footnote ⁴⁹

As they talk about Refik's diary, İlknur says, “I was thinking that we were more alafranga. But your dad is more distanced from the people than we are.” Ahmet concludes that “to imagine that the old generation lived in wholeness is an old mistake.” He adds that “only the ones who imagine the past as heaven think so.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Pamuk represents the history of Turkish modernization from the perspective of emerging self-centered individuals. The existence Pamuk affirms is the antithesis of Tanpınar's search for “wholeness.” Tanpınar is concerned with the disintegration of a “wholeness” he sees as particular to Ottoman-Turkish culture. Tanpınar's characters suffer from the disintegration of this “immanent unity.” By contrast, Pamuk affirms differentiated individuality as the center of social life in the historical process. The image of “wholeness” can be only a “dream,” according to Pamuk.

His second novel, Sessiz Ev (The Quiet House), starts where his first novel ends historically, that is, in the 1970s, but this novel focuses on the same history. Center stage is a big house in a seaside resort, Gebze, a coastline district east of Istanbul. A grandmother, Fatma, waits for her two grandsons and only granddaughter, who visit her each summer. The eldest grandson, Faruk, is a historian at a university in Istanbul. He seems to be one of those intellectuals whom Atay severely criticizes—inactive, self-absorbed, and depressed by his sloppy existence in between the ideal of Western forms and their deformed copies in Turkey. Nilgün, the granddaughter, is a university student and the only character in the novel who does not speak in her own voice. A left-winger, she seems to be the most positive character in the novel: she is direct, open-minded, hopeful, and free from the complexes and superficial ambitions of her brothers and other people. Unlike her elder brother, she has an independent self-consciousness. While drinking, Faruk confides in her that he is tired of a “dual life.” He says that he cannot stand living with two souls. He asks Nilgün if sometimes she thinks that she is two persons at the same time. That “never happens,” Nilgün replies.Footnote ⁵¹ At the end of the novel she dies after a beating by a young right-wing militant, once her childhood friend.

Grandmother Fatma had moved to Gebze with her husband years ago, in the early 1900s. While awaiting the arrival of her grandchildren, she remembers her marriage, how they settled on the coast thinking that it would be a temporary residence. Her husband, Selahattin, was a doctor, an ardent advocate of freedom and science, but pretentious, like most intellectuals of that generation. Although he supported the Union and Progress Party, it found him “excessive”; it excommunicated him and forced him to leave Istanbul. They were heading east on a train when Fatma became sick, so they got off in Gebze. In this quiet place Dr. Selahattin devoted himself to preparing an encyclopedia of the natural and social sciences. As this “mission” absorbed him, plans of returning faded away.

When Fatma's grandchildren arrive, they go with her to the graveyard to visit their grandfather and father. On the road, Fatma remembers her rare strolls with her husband—and his apologies for not doing this more often because of his exhausting work on the encyclopedia. Elsewhere in the novel, she remembers their early years in this place, when he seemed satisfied with life in the embrace of nature. Once, he had told her that it is impossible “not to be amazed by nature” and that they would live “in the embrace of nature like Ruso [Rousseau] and keep away from unnatural idiot sultans and flatterer pashas and review everything by our reason.”Footnote ⁵² At his grave we see the surname he gave himself: “Darvınoğlu” (son of Darwin).

Dr. Selahattin, the most interesting character in the novel, comes to the stage when Fatma leans toward the past. On the one hand, the author has distanced this character by presenting his pretentious, exaggerated Westernism and modernism as a tragic, sometimes ridiculous, and alienated mode of existence. On the other hand, sometimes Dr. Selahattin's critiques are in line with the author's main problematic—that is, the deepening of Dr. Selahattin's critical remarks on Ottoman-Turkish politics, society, and cultural life represents the stages of an emerging perspective on the differentiated, self-centered individual.

His “discovery of death” is a case in point. Fatma remembers her husband working on the letter “Ö” for his encyclopedia when he makes a “most important discovery”: Ölüm (death). He seems to have discovered existentialism. He says that it is “nothingness,” and “nobody is aware of this in the East . . . Now I understood everything; I understood why they are so and we are like this. I understood why the East is East and the West is West.”Footnote ⁵³ He joyfully declares that he “discovered that invisible borderline between them and us.” He continues his revelation,

Then he reinterprets Cartesian logos by saying, “I think death[; therefore,] I am a Westerner.” As he continues, “I am the first Westerner from the East, the first East which became the West!”Footnote ⁵⁵ After this discovery, he despises the Turkish people, whom he calls “the idiots” and “poors,” and their culture. For him, “they are living in rest, satisfied and quiet, without suspecting anything, without being aware of the existence of the life they are living.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Dr. Selahattin speaks ardently of constituting oneself as the center of the world through detachment from “the herd” and “meaningless” flow. This is the counterposition of Tanpınar's search to reconstitute the subjectivity whose experiences “flow” in and through “immanent unity.” Pamuk seems to reply to Tanpınar through Dr. Selahattin however pathetic, mad, and lost he seems. Perhaps these traits allow the author to speak through him without restraint.

In Pamuk's third novel, Beyaz Kale (White Castle), the first-person narrator is a Venetian captured by the Turks while travelling from Venice to Naples in the second half of the 17th century. The story begins with the Venetian's memory of waiting for his capture and trying to memorize his past in order not to lose it. He had studied “science and art” in Florence and Venice. Strong in astronomy, math, physics, and painting, he “naturally” was “one of those arrogants.” “Sneering at the others,” he considered himself “unique . . . more intelligent and more creative,” that is, he was “an ordinary youngster.”Footnote ⁵⁷ These words express the social and cultural characteristics of Venice—and, the novel implies, the development of the West in arts and sciences. After his capture, the Venetian is given as a slave to a hoca (the title signifying the profession of dealing with science within the confines of Islamic learning) because they share a common interest in astronomy and sciences. On this background, the novel tells the story of an Ottoman hoca becoming “Venetian” (and vice versa).

As we have seen in this section, how authors approach the problem of constituting one's self across the East–West divide reveals the three possibilities of Turkish modernism. Tanpınar's novel represents a conservative appropriation of Western modernity in which the traditional self as an embodiment of traditional culture, as “a part of the whole,” is preserved with a cautious openness to the West. It is a case of “indigenization of modernity” as described by Göle.

In Atay's work, the subject tries to overcome this divide through incessant self-questioning in an attempt to open up a new way of existence but ultimately collapses within the confines of the inner contradictions generated by this divide. This is occidentalism as described by Ahıska. The complex field of identity “boils down to the historical markers of East and West,” in which subjects react “back to their representation by the West.” However, the possibility of the Turkish modern sought by Atay cannot be reduced to this categorization; he aims to overcome the limitations of the Turkish social-historical domain while remaining critical of the Western image of “individuality.”

Pamuk expresses the conventional idea of Turkish modernization in which modernization coincides with Westernization and individualization comes to mean the replication of Western individuality. In the next section, I scrutinize the idea of temporality that permeates the works of these authors and clarify the existential foundation of these three possibilities of Turkish modernism.

TEMPORALITY

As explained previously, the main characters in the novel Huzur represent the embodied figurations of Ottoman-Turkish civilization. According to Tanpınar, the essential aspect of this culture is the “wholeness of time,” which covers life and the modes of conceiving and experiencing existence. Modernity's objective, “empty,” and progressing time and singular existence in multiplicity are “alien” to this area of culture. Western modernity abstracts time from social and cultural practices and imposes on it a quantifiable “concreteness” on a horizontal axis. The idea of progress is crystallized through and in this fiction of time. However, in a social and cultural area in which existence is understood as “being a part of the whole” and through a vertical condensation in the unification in being, this modern fiction of time and the social and cultural development it represents lead to dissonances and existential problems.

Tanpınar reflects, in this context, on the differences and relationships between these vastly different “areas of culture.” Tanpınar's attempt to reaffirm the “unique temporality” of Ottoman-Turkish culture differs from the main problematic of the modern Western novel, which, as Mikhail Bakhtin points out, centers on “the disintegration of the immanent unity of time.” Through this disintegration, “the separation and detachment of individual life sequences from the whole” becomes possible. In this process, the emergence of an “interior aspect” splits “the public exteriority of the man within the social whole.” That is why the “becoming” of man within this duality and under the lack of wholeness is the main theme of the modern novel.Footnote ⁵⁸ In response to the domination of homogenous, objective, and empty time in public life, that artistic imagination and theorization of a “multiplicity of private times that may vary from moment to moment in the individual, from one individual to another according to personality, and among different groups as a function of social organization” gained prominence.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is this public time “that Proust found superficial and Kafka terrifying [and that] Joyce found to be arbitrary and ill suited to order the diverse temporal experiences of life.”Footnote ⁶⁰

The context in which Tanpınar takes a stand against the centrality of homogenous, empty, and measured time in social life is different from these searches for private temporalities. Mümtaz, in the novel Huzur, does not seek to affirm the private/interior temporality of his life alongside the public/exterior temporality. He imagines that he lives within the peculiar temporality of a civilization, of an area of culture. His experiences stem from the specific cultural constitution of the “social whole” in which he lives. Therefore, Tanpınar seeks to affirm the “immanent unity of time” as the peculiarity of the civilization and the culture of which he conceives himself to be a part. He does not portray a differentiated private and interior temporality. On the contrary, he is in search of the “wholeness” that is disintegrating. In Huzur, he says that “it was only in human beings that the absolute time and its wholeness is separated into two instances” because “we measure the duration by our shadow in the land.” As a result, life and death are separated, and “our thought oscillates between these two poles as the pendulum of a clock.” That is why a human being is “the prisoner of time” desperately “trying to get out of it.” “Instead of getting lost in its large and infinite river and flowing through it together with everything,” we try to “watch it from the outside.” In this sense, he concludes that we had to cope with this reality once “we broke the wholeness of the zero and accepted [it] to be a number.”Footnote ⁶¹

In Atay's works, however, “the immanent unity of time” has already disintegrated, and the main characters, in a deadly self-struggle, try hard to open up a new domain for an “interior temporality” of self-constitution. Atay projects a possibility of a new way of existence by rejecting both imposed traditions and essences and Western prescriptions that repress others’ subjectivity.

In Atay's Tutunamayanlar (The Losers), Turgut Özben traces the footsteps of his old friend Selim Işık, who has committed suicide. Turgut tries to reconstruct Selim's life through the writings and letters he left behind and through other friends, talking to them to understand what Selim “lived” and why he committed suicide. Step by step, he comes to adopt “Selim's way.” Their surnames symbolize this relation. Işık (the light) guides the journey of becoming, of self-constitution, for Özben (ego). As a result, Turgut leaves his petit-bourgeois life, his wife and children, his house, and his job as an engineer; he gets lost on his journey.

Selim graduated from the civil engineering department of the university and completed his military service by working in a state institution. In these years, he attempted to constitute an “individual” through self-criticism and self-reflection. He aspired to be an active individual “acting upon” life, yet his actions were confined to the games he invented, as reflected in his writings, which ridicule all the discourses he came across in this process of self-reflection. In an essay titled “What to Do?,” Selim writes,

In another note, he sees his dilemma in Hamlet's “to be or not to be,” explaining that these words should not be translated into Turkish as “to live or to die” because they really mean the dilemma between “all the positive, affirmative actions” and “all the negative actions.”Footnote ⁶³

In his ironic lyrics, parodying different forms of Turkish poetry, Selim reflects critically on his life. At the beginning he expresses his internal contradictions:

In these lyrics, lines express how his upbringing, education, and circumstances constituted a being with inhibitions accepting conformism that made him alien to life.

Selim identifies with “the losers” in order to break free of social and cultural constraints and inhibitions in his rebellious soul-searching. In these lyrics he alludes to Jesus Christ, whom he regards as his “light”:

In these writings, Selim mocks his wider political, cultural, and social circumstances—the superficial, imitative, and pretentious structures and actors. He touches upon topics ranging from the revolutions founding the postrepublican era (which he calls rootless “copies”) to the complexes about and envy of the modern Western world. Out of and against these political, social, and cultural circumstances and this personal history he endeavors to constitute an “individual.” He rebels through his exhaustive readings, games, and parodies that he invents with never-ending irony. Yet, he cannot realize the positive “action” he seeks. Even his love for Günseli does not help him transcend this mode of being. On the contrary, this real experience of life points up the futility of all these solitary searches, rebellions, thoughts, and games because they are not realized in life. This shows him the reality of “living the time.”

In this process of self-reflection and self-criticism, he implies that there is something in his being that eludes “rational” analysis. It explains why he does not like the “cold” and distanced rationality of Westerners. He claims that his reality might not be compatible with their frames of analysis. Selim anticipates that his personality would be explained in terms of “psycho-somethings” invented by “Western uncles.” He objects to the reduction of his personality to discourses on “narcissism.” He writes, “Maybe I was an earthworm different from all of you and half crushed.” It is in the crushed half that his childish naiveté and sincerity, “the ambition of creativity,” his humor, “his hands wishing to caress Günseli,” his love for Christ, all of his hopes, and his will to live are left. In the other half, there is just the “pain of death.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In his fantasy of world catastrophes as punishment for those who cause his suffering, “the privilege of reasoning of the Westerners is abolished and is given to nobody” and “the books of Descartes are burnt.”Footnote ⁶⁷ He dislikes foreigners, especially “cold” and “distanced” intellectuals, because “our people” have tried hard to be liked by them. He cannot stand “their evaluations of his nonsense by a cold face.” “They always find a better specimen of what I have been and what I am from their files and impose it on me,” he continues. However, “it would be worse” if they understood him. “I would have shown them if I had not been born in an underdeveloped country and if I had not exhausted myself with this burning rage.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Turgut feels the same contradictions with which Selim had been struggling. He constantly contrasts the sincerity and frankness of the “man of the East” with the distanced scientific reason of “the Westerner.” Yet he is determined to go beyond this internal cultural confusion in his “journey of becoming.” He wants to write “a new prelude to himself,” to “create a new language, a language which would tell him to himself.” He declares, “I am not the heir of any tradition.” He assumes that Westerners “would say No” to this attempt. Yet he rebels: “An underdeveloped country is supposed to have a poor cultural heritage. I reject this heritage. I am not something like Karagöz.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Leaving his petit-bourgeois life behind in order to follow the “light” of Selim, he gets lost on his journeys. In the last paragraph of the novel, “the passengers, being unaware of Turgut, and Selim, who does not leave his mind, were rushing with the anxiety of catching the train.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This passage expresses the “private,” “interior” character of this process of becoming and implies a “separating out and detaching individual life sequences from the whole,” as Bakhtin writes.Footnote ⁷¹ An individual's private, interior temporality of becoming is affirmed by Atay. The search for the immanent unity of time in Tanpınar gives way to the search for the spontaneous, self-conscious, and autonomous individual. This temporality of becoming requires a repudiation of the repressive dualisms (East–West) and imposed essences. It opens up a “truly modern” way of life and existence in which free and creative self-constitution that is not repressed and is not repressive of others becomes a true possibility.

In Pamuk's novels, a temporality of becoming is a process of emulation, of replicating someone else's being. In the consciousness of Westernizing/Westernized subjects, Turkish culture—its people and social life—appears as unchanging, “dull,” and eternally sleepy. Yet, this image, which is reflected by “Westernizing/Westernized” subjects temporalized in their struggle to replicate “the Western modern,” turns out to be a stark reality of contemporary Turkish society in Pamuk's Kara Kitap (Black Book). The novel is a “black” depiction of Turkish society in the microcosm (or macrocosm) of Istanbul. It is a society encapsulated by a “national sadness.” People are overwhelmed by defeat, misery, loss of memory, and hopeless efforts to imitate “someone else.” (Pamuk suggests the impact of recent Turkish history, from a collapsed empire to a republic aiming to erase the memory of the past and establish a new, Westernized society.) However, they are caught at a standstill. They are not themselves and imitating “someone else.” Yet, they cannot become whom they emulate. They are trapped in repetitive acts of imitation. Lacking the capacity of self-creation, they are devoid of temporality. However, what else can be expected in such a society? As the main character asks, “Isn't it better to be a bad imitation of someone else than to be someone who lost his past, memories and dreams?”Footnote ⁷²