“Yaşanmamış bütün olayları yeniden sahneye koymak gibi tarihsel bir görevimiz var.”1
Tehlikeli Oyunlar
“I present to you History, the fabrication, the diversion, the reality-obscuring drama. History,
and its near relative, Histrionics…”
Waterland
1
“We have a historical mission to put on stage again all the events that did not take place.”
1
PREFACE
This research project, at first, started to investigate the relationship between tradition/past and
identity in the modern Turkish novel. Influenced by the writings of various critics on the
subject, I decided to analyze this relationship within a theoretical framework. For this reason,
I was reading all the novels I came across with this idea in mind. Undoubtedly, the literary
and political discussions in Turkey which focused on an identity crisis that contains both a
mimicking of Western ideals and a strong attachment to Turkish “roots” played a role in the
formation of my ideas for this project. Such discussions reflected literature too and in fact
have been discussed since the beginning. In the first half of the twentieth century, the famous
Turkish writer, critic and poet, Professor Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar claimed:
Today’s poetry consists of a following and imitation of foreigners. But, we cannot
philosophize about it; that is our lack. Literature advances along with philosophy in
Europe. Existentialisme. We lack a philosophical crisis. Why is it so? Our history
has always fallen behind. The examples are right in front of us but we cannot receive
philosophy at once. We think philosophers ponder over philosophy; it is
philosophers that ponder over philosophy but it is life that carries it. (2002: 214)2
This lack, the problem of the inability to philosophize about literature would be discussed as
the principal issue in Turkish literature for longer years. However, it should also be
questioned how Turkish literature which has a grandeur culture of oral literature could not
exhibit a literary development. Perhaps it should be noted here that in Turkey, in literature as
well as in every other field all definitions and observations are made with respect to an
inferiority complex and a defense mechanism with respect to Europe. As Nurdan Gürbilek
clearly states:
When I say Turkishness, I do not mean an original or an autonomous condition
which could be described on its own, structural backwardness which resists all kinds
of modern movements or an essential reality of localness created as a result of an
effort to define this country’s genuine locals. On the contrary, I am talking about a
dilemma which has always shaped in relation to the modern world since the
beginning, a double-valued attachment which has always produced opposite feelings
“Bugünkü şiirimizin manzarası dışarıyı takip ve taklittir. Yalnız, filozofisini yapamıyoruz, eksiğimiz budur.
Avrupa’da edebiyat felsefe ile beraber yürür. Existentialisme. Bizde felsefi buhran yok. Bu nereden geliyor?
Tarihimiz hep geri kalmıştır. Örnekler karşımızda hazır yalnız bir seferde felsefeyi alamıyoruz. Felsefeyi yalnız
filozoflar kurar zannediyoruz; felsefeyi filozoflar kurar ama hayat taşır.”
2
2
in the cultural domain, an enchantment and a call for coming back to oneself which
have influenced literature as well as popular imagination, a fear of fascination and a
loss of self, a condition of admiration for the foreigner and xenophobia which, most
of the time have to exist side by side in the same spirit, a feeling of insufficiency and
a defense reflex and finally a political and cultural context in which all these
emotions are persistently provoked. (2001: 7-8)3
The idea of an underdevelopment, particularly seen in the works of Oğuz Atay, A. Hamdi
Tanpınar and Yusuf Atılgan could be explained by Gürbilek’s analysis. The characters these
writers create are symbols of confused identities. However they are also portrayed as
characters that cannot situate themselves within the Western system either. For this reason, in
these novels, the notion of underdevelopment is both something that is made fun of and
something that the characters are condemned to. Perhaps it is this condition of impasse which
creates the lack Tanpınar talks about. However there are some Turkish writers who benefited
artistically from this dilemma, reflected it in their works and developed a unique
interpretation in Turkish fiction. Among these are Latife Tekin, A. Hamdi Tanpınar, Oğuz
Atay, Adalet Ağaoğlu and so on. What is considered eclectic is perhaps the authentic itself.
While I was preoccupied with these discussions, I carried out some research and discovered
that a lot had already been written on this issue. Since I could not guarantee an analysis with a
wider scope, and since I did not have enough background for such a thorough analysis I
changed my research subject. In fact, this change established itself not because of an
obligation but rather within a natural process which developed by itself. My research subject
will hopefully show itself efficient in contributing to literary discussions on historical fiction.
“Türklük derken kendi başına tarif edilebilen özerk ya da kökensel bir durumdan, her türden modern hamleye
direnen yapısal bir gerilikten ya da bu ülkenin gerçek yerlisini tanımlama çabası sonucunda ulaşılmış özsel bir
yerel hakikatten değil, tersine başından bu yana daima modern dünyayla ilişki içinde şekillenmiş bir çifte
açmazdan, kültürel alanda daima karşıt duygular üretmiş çiftdeğerli bir bağlanıştan, popüler imgelemi olduğu
kadar edebiyatı da etkilemiş bir kapılma ve kendine dönme çağrısından, bir büyülenme ve kendini kaybetme
korkusundan, çoğu zaman aynı ruhta yan yana yaşamak zorunda kalan bir yabancı hayranlığı ve yabancı
düşmanlığından, bir yetersizlik duygusu ve savunma refleksinden, nihayet bütün bu duyguların ısrarla
kışkırtıldığı bir politik-kültürel bağlamdan söz ediyorum.”
3
3
INTRODUCTION
While I have been enrolled in the Research MA program Literary Studies at Utrecht
University, I have been interested in postmodernist theory, cultural memory, postmodernist
rewritings and history-writing within fiction. With these issues in mind, I turned to two
significant texts of modern Turkish fiction and started to think about how I could approach
these texts as an example of history-writing within fiction. Both Ölmeye Yatmak [Lying Down
to Die] (1973) by Adalet Ağaoğlu and Tutunamayanlar [The Disconnected] (1971) by Oğuz
Atay are noticeable texts in terms of what they tell as well as how they tell it. The
Disconnected tells with a cynic and ironic tone the tragic story of a man’s dragging himself to
death. Lying Down to Die foregrounds a woman’s encounter with her past. Both novels have
been mostly analyzed within either a modernist literary framework – The Disconnected as an
example of the bildungsroman – or a feminist framework. As both novels deal with the
representation of history I would like to see how this representation functions in relation to
theories on history writing within fiction. Within a theoretical framework established by
theoreticians like Linda Hutcheon, Amy Elias and Keith Jenkins, this research project
analyzes these two texts. It aims to work on a two-way analysis. It focuses on a close reading
of the primary sources to validate the theoretical framework. It also investigates these two
novels as points of reference to critically analyze and compare the theories to one another. In
this sense, my main point of focus will be these texts in terms of their relation to one another
and the theories. My research question is a two-fold one: It aims to investigate whether the
engagement with the past in these novels signifies any concern for the problematization of
history as such. It also questions whether the use of the past and history in these novels works
rather as a mediator to critically refer to a lived past. I believe that this research will give way
to the analyses of such texts within a broader context. I would like to see how this research
will contribute to any new definitions and/or the reconsideration of the concept of the
postmodern historical novel. It aims to see how far the application of these theories extends in
different contexts.
The Disconnected and Lying Down to Die subvert the discussions on identity and the problem
of lack Tanpınar addresses. While they tell their stories and histories, they also philosophize
about them. The contradictory images the characters represent, as we will see, could be seen
as a reflection of the cultural dilemma Gürbilek proposes. Modern as well as postmodern
4
fiction in Turkey now philosophizes about fiction’s own conditions of creation and the
country’s cultural context within which fiction is created. It produces opinions through fiction
on the complex literary and cultural identity. For this reason, the study of two structurally
distinct texts produced within the mentioned cultural context enables us to reconsider the
workings of fictional history-writing.
The initial starting point for this research project is closely linked to the notion of history. The
idea of history writing within fiction could give insights into the search for both a literary as
well as a cultural identity. The way the two novels conceive of, use and even abuse history is
significant to the creation of a public memory as well as the imaginative construction of
identity. What is more, the analysis of history writing in these two texts from the 1970s, when
discussions on history as a concept as well as the history of Turkey were not fully articulated
yet, creates ways for us to understand to what extent these texts are antecedent of and where
they intersect with discussions of history today. With the proliferation of popular historical
novels as well as biographies, popular history journals, the special interest in the visual and
textual representation of historical events, official history has lost its hegemonic place as a
source of reference.4 Critical discussions of great historical events have come to be articulated
more easily. Preceding this atmosphere, both Lying Down to Die and The Disconnected give
us hints as to the upcoming discussions. The novels answer questions of why and how they
deal with the representation of history, how they could initiate and manipulate discussions of
history and what history means for Turkish literature as well as the Turkish audience.
The primary distinction between Turkish modern fiction and Western modernism is said to be
the inability of the modern Turkish novel to fully appropriate Western aestheticism. While the
Western modern novelist abolishes history, the Turkish novelist, on the contrary, internalizes
the historical and the political. This tradition of incorporating the political continues within
postmodernist writing as well. As S. Dilek Yalçın-Çelik argues:
In our literature, postmodern construction could be observed through certain
influences. Search for new forms, the text’s fictional quality, the tendency to play on
words within the construction of the work are the main changes in the narrative.
Apart from incorporating such elements into our literature, postmodernism manifests
4
In the past ten years, Turkish cinema has chosen as its subject matter various elements from recent history
including those that give rise to big controversies.
5
itself as a narrative form which adds to its content, theories of history, sociology,
politics, literature and art. (2005: 18)5
Socially critical fiction which had come to be the principal feature of Turkish fiction for a
long time still manifests itself, to a small degree, in Turkish postmodernism, as Yalçın-Çelik
states. Social and political critiques have dominated Turkish fiction as realism was a main
mode of writing. Some examples of Turkish fiction almost sidelined artistic consciousness for
social criticism. In Yıldız Ecevit’s words “Turkish fiction usually follows a realist line; its
main tendency has always been towards the social” (2006: 83).6 Following Tanpınar’s
observation that the philosophy of art is lacking in Turkey, we could perhaps say that it is
inevitable that there is a tendency to make art a part of daily life, politics and history as
opposed to categorically separate it from these. In Turkey, not only fiction but also literary
criticism, to a certain degree, incorporates politics, sociology and history into its text. While a
preoccupation with discussions of postmodernism continues, such issues are discussed in
connection to a (lack) of material condition within which postmodernism exhibits itself. Many
postmodernist novels have been written, particularly since 1980. While some of them use
history and/or politics as decorative tools within fiction for commercial purposes, others use
them as critical tools. In both cases, the place of history and politics within Turkish fiction is
asserted. Undoubtedly the Western discussions on postmodernism and history are reflected in
the Turkish context as well. However, it seems that these discussions are continuously made
in reference to some historical fact instead of merely as an abstract critique of concepts. While
issues of pluralism or independence from absolutism are discussed, the critic could refer to the
historical reality of domineering totalitarianism Turkey experienced some 25 years ago. For
this reason, issues on postmodernism and history are reflected in the cultural criticism in and
through the cultural past. It seems to be the case that Turkish literary postmodernism mainly
follows its Western father, but it manages to incorporate politics and history in a way that is
distinctive from the West.
However, Yalçın-Çelik’s definition of “Western postmodernism” is rather limiting for today
we could talk about what Hal Foster calls a “postmodernism of resistance” (1985: ix). As
opposed to limiting postmodernism to innovations of literary forms, structures and styles,
“Edebiyatımızda postmodern kurgu dolaylı etkilenmeler şeklinde görülmüştür. Batı edebiyatlarında görülen,
yeni biçimsel arayışları, metnin kurmaca olma özelliği, dil oyunlarını kurguda kullanma tarzındaki eğilim ilk
olarak karşımıza çıkan anlatım biçimi değişimleridir. Postmodernizm, edebiyatımızda tüm bu unsurları katmanın
yanı sıra, anlatımın içerisine tarihin, sosyolojinin, siyaset biliminin, edebiyatın ve sanatın bilgi kuramlarının
eklemlenmesi ile oluşan anlatım biçimi şeklinde kendini göstermiştir.”
6
“Genelde gerçekçi bir çizgi izler Türk romanı; toplumsallık ise onun başat eğilimi olmuştur her zaman.”
5
6
“postmodernism of resistance” seeks to question and deconstruct origins, conventions and
areas of knowledge. Such an idea of resistance characterizes Lying Down to Die’s and The
Disconnected’s representation of history. Apart from the way history is perceived and
represented, the way literary texts present themselves as areas of resistance and challenge
against origins, their capacity as thought-provoking texts is significant for this project as well.
The biased position of Ağaoğlu and Atay in their daily lives undoubtedly fashion the reading
of their novels. It is no surprise that Adalet Ağaoğlu, for instance, is an active political figure
even today. The writers’ own political and artistic affiliations enable us to develop a broader
contextual analysis.
This research project is not a categorical or chronological study of the examples of historical
fiction in Turkey. Instead, it is an attempt to read the two novels mentioned in the framework
of the theoretical background outlined. In this study neither of the novels is considered
representatives of the genre of (post)modernist historical novel. However, these two novels
are considered epitomes of an understanding in literature which questions the objectivity and
absolutism of historical knowledge and of any kind of knowledge for that matter; which
incorporates the subjective, the political and the imaginative all at the same time into the
corpus of Turkish literature. They are historical to the degree that they create a historical
consciousness and question the dominant perception of history. What is distinctive in this
study is that instead of dealing with novels that establish a direct relationship with a historical
era such as Nedim Gürsel’s Boğazkesen (1995)7 it deals with novels which create possibilities
for a multi-layered reading. It will be dealing with the way the crisis of history is represented
in fiction. It will also question whether there could be an alternative way of incorporating the
political into fiction apart from the reference to the problematization of history as a concept
and how social critique within the context of Turkey works in (post)modernist fiction.
Nedim Gürsel’s Boğazkesen mainly relates its story to the 15th century and portrays the Ottoman sultan
Mehmet II the Conqueror as a fictional character while imagining the historical condition through the sultan’s
consciousness.
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7
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
8
THE CONCEPTION OF THE PAST
The Sublime
The difficulty in defining categorically what History is and what it covers, represents and
signifies results from the difficulty in capturing the past itself. What is meant by past is “the
referent which composes that History.” While the writers and readers of history maintain a
certain confidence that we could learn through history, that we envision the past through our
readings and writings and that humankind is subordinate to the mechanisms of History in a
Hegelian sense, new approaches to what history and the past really mean and how we could,
if at all, recover that past reveal themselves within the academia. The past is the condition for
the working of the concept of history; yet “what do we know about that past” and even more
importantly “what exactly is the past” appear as the two central questions posed in this
section.
If history is a narrative attempt at putting together the pieces that constitute the events that
happened in the past, then how are we to define what the past is and what it constitutes? In
order to answer this question we must bear in mind that to designate the past as such is an
impossible task as we do not deal with a tangible category. Hence, the problem occurs: from
the beginning, our perception of the past fails as the idea of representing the past as such is
considered problematic. The impossibility signals negativity; that is to say, we could only
present the past through its negativity. It is assumed that the impossibility of the designation
of the past as such is the mark of the past itself. If it has ontology of its own, then it is only the
unpresentability that could confirm its autonomous ontological dimension. The past as an area
is conceived to be beyond reason and expression if it is analyzed in terms of what some
theorists call its sublimity. Through this idea of negativity-unpresentability on which the
notion of the past is based, I will now turn to an account of the sublime as proposed by Amy
Elias in the conceptualization of the past.
Elias implies a distinction between two kinds of History in Sublime Desire (2001): one is
governed by a perception that “history is incomprehensible to the limited, mortal human
intelligence. The life of the individual is as nothing compared to the functioning of History,
oblivious of and impervious to human overtures” (7) and the other states that “History can no
9
longer be understood as a linear process or stable narrative, and concepts such as forward and
backward in time become meaningless” (8).8 While in the former statement there is a sense of
Hegelianism which highlights the notion of Progress, the latter conceives of history in a “postEinsteinian universe” dominated by a theory of relativity pointing out the meaninglessness of
time (Elias 2001: 8). What distinguishes the sublimity of the past from History or any other
conventional understanding of the past is its chaotic and meaningless nature. The past is not a
conceivable entity in itself but it is a fragmented, chaotic heap of events. Therefore the
sublimity comes from the fact that we cannot make sense of the past as such and we need
history in order to represent what happened in a linear, narrative fashion. However, the past
itself is unrepresentable. As opposed to the conventional conception of History which
advocates history as progressive, linear, continuous, the past signifies what is spatial,
discontinuous and destructive. The shift from the principle of linearity to that of spatiality is
explored within the shift from the modern times to the postmodern times:
The primary characteristic of the postmodern has come to be its rejection of linear
models (of time, history, positivism, progress) for other spatial models such as
flatness, roundness, circularity, or pendulum motion… Fragmentation is a visual
metaphor; to fragment history, or to dig within its depths, is a metaphorically
“spatializing” activity. (Elias 2001: 105)
Since what we call time in the postmodern conception is spatial rather than temporal and
linear, the past emerges as something that is ever-present. Hence the past is not a condition
that happened “before the here and now” that we could literally go back to and comprehend
the pastness of. On the contrary, it is a condition which we perpetually have a relationship
with, in and through the present. The past is always in the here and now. The process of
fragmentation and digging within the spatializing activity is the result of this condition of the
presence of the past. The exploration of the past is not a move backwards but a move towards
the depths of time. This perpetual presentness of time allows us to conceive of the past as the
present and therefore enables us to fragment and cut across it. The narrative representation of
time both in The Disconnected and Lying Down to Die signal such an understanding of the
presence of the past. Hence the central presumption that history (used as corresponding to the
meaning of “everything that happened in the past; past events”) is continuous becomes an
illusion. Hans Kellner observes:
8
Amy Elias does not seem to make a clear distinction between the words past and history. She uses history
(without a capital h) to propose an understanding of the word as past time and space rather than as the name of a
discipline.
10
Continuity is the central intuitive certainty we have about history… However, this is
only an institution, and not provable, strictly speaking. History, furthermore could
never claim to be about the continuous past itself; at best it is a reasoned report on
the documented sources of the past, whatever from those sources may take. Yet
these sources are clearly not continuous, nor is conscious human experience of time
continuous… What is continuous is not so much reality, or the form in which reality
exists (as artifact) in its obvious discontinuity, but the form in which our culture
represents reality. (1989: 128-129)
Reality as past or present, then, is not continuous in itself. It is our narrative understanding of
time that creates the illusion that the past as history is continuous. In this respect, the past is
not attainable or accessible as such and it is this problematic condition of existence that
introduces the past as sublime.
The unrepresentability of the past is that it is problematic to articulate the thing that happened.
The moment of articulation is actually the moment of the loss of the “thing that happened.”
To express the past in words or in visual representation is to appropriate it within a
subjectively interpreted framework. The act of expression negates the past as an existential
domain. With representation the past extends itself to a world of meanings and conclusions.
That is why, Elias argues, “what is not possible to speak becomes the locus of meaning within
history” (25). As soon as the past is put into representation it is no longer the past that we
conceive of. It is because of this resistance towards expression and representation that the past
acquires a sense of sublimity. In the Kantian sense, the sublime exists when “the imagination
can conceive of an Idea but not of a presentation of that Idea, a way to make that idea visible”
(Elias 2001: 27). What makes the past as the “ever-present” is this conceivability rather than
representation. In The Postmodern Condition (1984), Jean-François Lyotard makes it clear
that “it is our business not to supply reality but to invent allusions to the conceivable which
cannot be presented” (81). Lyotard’s explanation of the postmodern, particularly postmodern
aesthetics, as the sublime condition sheds light on the conception of the past as the sublime:
The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable
in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the
consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia
for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy
them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable. (1984: 81)
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The putting forward of the unpresentable in the presentation itself is an effort of struggle for
other truths for the sake of their “otherness;” that is to say, it is an effort to perceive the
otherness of the past. Our testimony to the unpresentable creates a sense of contestability
within our evaluation of life: “If the world admits of no fixed reference points, then the point
of being in the world involves its contestability” (Browning 2000: 26). There is no point in the
past that we could refer to or reflect or put in frames and that is the sublimity of the past. It is
gone, cannot be retrieved as it is yet it could only be conceived. This awareness of the
sublimity of the past triggers the recognition that it activates and mobilizes the human search
and exploration into the “other,” and resistance against totality and linearity. As the final
argument of The Postmodern Condition Lyotard states:
We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the
reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the
communicable experience… Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the
unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name. (81-82)
The “dissensus” between the concept and the sensible is a significant guideline in the
understanding of the sublime. The past exists only as the unrepresentable. In such a condition,
new presentations exist to instill a stronger sense of the sublime. The way The Disconnected
deals with the past is through its perpetual presence as the sublime whereas the way Lying
Down to Die deals with it is through the proliferation of new presentations of it which, once
again, signal the impossibility of representation and thus the sublimity of the past.
The Desire
Amy Elias, as we have seen, defines history as a desired horizon. Particularly, postmodernist
consciousness which she calls a “post-traumatic” consciousness, redefines the historical
sublime as a “desired horizon that can never be reached but approached in attempts to
understand human origins and the meaning of lived existence” (2001: xviii). This desire could
perhaps be explained by a two-way theory: It is a desire for the sublime which is the result of
the sublime experience and which opens up an experience of both pleasure and pain. Lyotard
states that the aesthetics of the sublime is:
A pleasure mixed with pain, a pleasure that comes from pain. In the event of an
absolutely large object … which like all absolutes can only be thought, without any
sensible/sensory intuition, as an Idea of reason, the faculty of presentation, the
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imagination fails to provide a representation corresponding to this Idea. This failure
of expression gives rise to a pain, a kind of cleavage within the subject between what
can be conceived and what can be imagined or presented. But this pain, in turn,
engenders a pleasure, in fact a double pleasure: the impotence of the imagination
attests a contrario to an imagination striving to figure even that which cannot be
figured, and that the imagination aims to harmonize its object with that of reason –
and that furthermore the inadequacy of the images is a negative sign of the immense
power of ideas. This dislocation of the faculties among themselves gives rise to the
extreme tension (Kant calls it agitation) that characterizes the pathos of the sublime,
as opposed to the calm feeling of beauty. (1989: 203-204)
The experience of the sublime creates a sense of disorientation among the imaginative
faculties and thus the impossibility of representation. Hence the holistic totality of the past;
that is everything that happened is impossible to imagine, to represent. The feeling of
sublimity not only negates its own expression but it also disrupts the ordinary. It opens a crack
in our experience of life which makes everything seem banal. This notion of a breakdown and
a sense of disorientation lie at the heart of the sublime experience and it is at the face of this
sublime experience of the past that desire is aroused. Past reality is the source of agitation, of
the sublime itself.9 It is this mixture of a feeling of both pleasure and pain that the Selim of
The Disconnected experiences at the face of his exploration into the past.
The desire for the past also signals a desire for foundations and knowledge, for the ability to
perceive history as a foundational ground for the meaning and objective of existence. It posits
history-writing as a foundational ground with definitive beginnings and endings. The writing
of the past becomes this way, a legitimation of knowledge by appealing to some grand
narrative. In the Lyotardian sense, “the mode of legitimation…reintroduces narrative as the
validity of knowledge” (Lyotard 1984: 31). That is to say, to transform our desire for ground,
we turn the sublime yet conceivable past into a self-conscious narrative form; that is history.
The paradox remains firmly still in this formulation. The moment one writes about the past,
Perhaps we should turn here to Gianni Vattimo’s explanation of the sense of disorientation as the main
dominant of the postmodern experience. By pointing out the analogy between Heidegger’s notion of “Stoss” and
Benjamin’s “shock,” he develops the idea of the new essence of art in late-industrial society. He names this
essence “disorientation:” “the two conceptions, Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s have at least one feature in
common: their insistence on disorientation. In each case, aesthetic experience appears to be an experience of
estrangement, which then requires recomposition and readjustment. However, the aim of this is not to reach a
final recomposed state. Instead aesthetic experience is directed towards keeping the disorientation alive” The
Transparent Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992 (51). In connection to the pathos of the sublime, late-modern
aesthetics creates a sense of disruption and dissonance rather than harmony.
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the past is no longer. The moment he thinks he captures it is precisely the moment he loses it.
Once it is recognized that the past/history is incomprehensible, history comes to be “merely
‘desire’ for solid ground beneath one’s feet – a desire for a Blakean organized innocence, a
desire for the Truth that is out there” (Elias 2001: xviii).
The sublime, according to Lyotard, is indeterminate. It is the bearing witness to the
inexpressible: “The inexpressible does not reside in an over there, in another words, or
another time, but in this: in that (something) happens” (1989: 199). The Lyotardian notion of
indeterminacy is connected to the idea of the presence of the past; in other words the fact that
the past is perpetually present and that we cannot control it. Derrida’s discourse on
hauntology highlights this notion of indeterminacy as the central quality of the specter’s
haunting. Presuming that the past is sublime in the Lyotardian sense, its perpetual presence
presupposes a kind of existence which we cannot control; a coming back which we could call
“haunting.” According to Derrida, “the Thing [Chose] [that] haunts…[causes], [inhabits]
without residing” (1994: 18). This “non-present presence” is conceived of as a ghost. It
emerges as something we could conceive yet are not able to represent in any form:
One never inherits without coming to terms with [s’expliquer avec] some specter,
and therefore with more than one specter. With the fault but also the injunction of
more than one. That is the originary wrong, the birth wound from which he [Hamlet]
suffers, a bottomless wound, an irreparable tragedy, the indefinite malediction that
marks the history of the law or history as law: that “time is out of joint” is what is
also attested by birth itself when it dooms someone to be the man of right and law
only by becoming an inheritor, redresser of wrongs, that is, only by castigating,
punishing, killing. (21)
By exemplifying Hamlet’s experience of seeing his father’s ghost, Derrida proclaims that the
ghost/past opens up a space which creates the recognition in the haunted subject that the
ghostly past is perpetually out there, its presence creates the imperative that the subject should
follow; to inherit, to come to terms. It moves through us. It brings the injunction. However,
this injunction is destructive for Hamlet. Hamlet destroys himself to the extent that he listens
to this voice coming from the past; the voice of the past itself. The haunting opens up a space
into the past, but it does not offer any opportunity to the subject to elude that past. The subject
is left with having this sublime experience. The haunting reminds us that the traumatic is
invariably with us. Hamlet’s self-destruction takes place to the extent that he realizes the
presence of the traumatic past. The more he tries to retrieve, fix, undo, re-present (by putting
14
the act on stage) the past, the more he fails to reach it and he is left with a doomed destiny. He
becomes “witness to the fact that there is indeterminacy” (Lyotard 1989: 206).
Historical phenomena, which in this chapter have been defined under the name “past,” allude
to that thing which is neither presentable nor fathomable. When Lyotard argues that “what
best determines the sublime is the indeterminate” (1989: 404), he seems to imply that the
sublime past with its chaotic, disturbing and forceful nature is invariably present in the here
and now in such a way that it is uncontrollable. As Lyotard furthermore argues “all great
historical upheavals…are the formless and figureless in historical human nature. Ethically
there is nothing valid about them” (404). Hence, before readers and writers of history move
on to transform that sublime area which is called the past into something that could be
apprehended through form, it is essential that the readers and writers of history should bear in
mind that our construction, textualization and even fictionalization of the past could only be a
struggle for putting the “unpresentable into presentation itself” (Lyotard 1984: 81).
15
CONTEMPORARY VIEWS OF HISTORY
Starting from the presumption that there is a distinction between what we call the past and
what we call history, we arrive at the conclusion that while the past signifies alterity and the
sublime, history provides us with the appropriation of that condition of alterity. Questioning
the autonomy of history and of historical knowledge leads one to distinguish between two
distinct perceptions: the postmodernist perception of history and the conventional perception
of history. Gabrielle Spiegel announces a crisis within the academia among historians after
the “linguistic turn.” The stunning remark that “there is nothing outside the text” (Derrida
1976: 158) questions not only historical knowledge’s pretension to autonomy but also that of
any other type of knowledge. Spiegel argues:
Historians have accurately sensed that the “linguistic turn” challenges this ethical
foundation for the practice of history by problematizing not merely the methods
historians have traditionally used to study it, but the very notion of the past as a
recuperable object of study. (1997: 262)
The awareness that the linguistic turn contests not only methods but also the presumption that
the past reality is something we can capture and, what is more, we can objectify and represent
is integral to the understanding of conceptualizing the past as the sublime. While the sublime
past is a perpetual present, an indeterminate “non-object, a non-present present, a being-there
of an absent” (Derrida 1994: 6), “history is never present to us in anything but a discursive
form” (Spiegel 1997: 247). The textualization of the past is precisely the practice of
converting that alterity into familiarity within a discursive pattern of construction.
Perhaps, what we need to know today is that one of the perceptions of history claims that
historical reality is reachable within its borders while the other presupposes that it is
unreachable and hence extra-textuality stands for a sense of impossibility for humankind.
Particularly postmodernist historical understanding postulates that the real pre-empts the
textual but it is postmodern art – and in this case history-writing – which struggles for the
insertion of the unpresentable into the presentation. The text analyses in this study which will
be presented thoroughly later are conducted in the framework of the contestability of the idea
that the real past is reachable. They examine the ways in which the past is represented and the
kind of judgments about the past and history these new ways of presentation bring about.
16
History: Ideology, Theory or Discipline?
We have been observing how history is conceived of within postmodernist thought. In order
to speak of a transformation of the past into history perhaps it is necessary that we specify
how history is defined, categorized and disciplined. Theorists have been trying to define
history in their own ways. What is common in these definitions – or rather explanations – is
that they all explain history in terms of a reference to some extra-disciplinary practice within
which it works. Thus history is never a given, but a construct. According to Barthes, it works
through signification (1997: 122); according to Spiegel it works through mediation (1997:
262). The conception of history proposed by Keith Jenkins is quite significant. He alludes to
history as theoretical. Its theoretical, self-reflexive condition implies the dominant reality of
our times which is postmodernism. It is due to the failure of the project of modernity (so
Keith Jenkins and many other writers argue) and the resistance to grand narratives that history
is presented now, to a certain extent, without pretensions to objectivity, the predominance of
Eurocentric views. Such an understanding also created conditions for challenging the notion
of history in the upper case as well as lower case.10 History became not only theoretical but
also critical in the sense that it turned to itself and questioned its own status as a discipline.
Postmodernist historical theory postulates that earlier assumptions about totalitarian views of
history need to be contested by history itself. Today’s postmodernist view of history arises out
of the understanding that there is no legitimating foundation for any kind of knowledge. In
Jenkins’s words:
We must accept that we live and have always lived amidst social formations having
no legitimating, ontological, epistemological, methodological or ethical grounds for
beliefs and actions beyond the status of an ultimately self-referencing (rhetorical)
conversation. (1997: 4)
The emancipation of history from a sense of reference to a legitimating knowledge reenvisions history as a liberalist and pluralist area of contestation. If more and more totalitarian
views are deprived of their power, more versions of the Story get articulated. What we call
10
Keith Jenkins distinguishes between two conditions of history: upper case and the lower case. According to
this, upper case history (as History with a capital H) is “a way of looking at the past in terms which assigned to
contingent events and situations an objective significance by identifying their place and function within a general
schema of historical development usually construed as appropriately progressive” and lower case history is
“history construed in ‘academic’ and ‘particularistic’ forms which, whilst insisting with as much force as any
upper case history ever did that it was ‘proper’ history, modestly eschewed metanarrative claims that it was
discovering in the past meaningful trajectories, purposes and teleologies” The Postmodern History Reader.
London and New York: Routledge, 1997 (5-6).
17
historical objectivism is not a concept that could exist independent of any theoretical
standpoint or interpretive line. In this respect, history emerges as the capacity to (re)present
past events in connection to certain interpretive lines instead of the condition of
correspondence to the past as such. One of the main discourses that the postmodernist
historical understanding makes use of is the one of subjective interpretation. Hence, we
conceive of the past and of history as two separate entities. The past is out there, and even in
the here and now as the sublime, but our access to it is problematic. History, then, becomes an
appropriation of the past. In Jenkins’s words, history is actually just “[a theory] about the past
and how it should be appropriated” (8).11
In the postmodernist configuration of history, histories, as theories about the past, are
constructed on the ground of certain ideological assumptions. Jenkins boldly contends that all
histories are ideological. He argues:
The whole modernist History/history ensemble now appears as a self-referential,
problematical expression of interests, an ideological – interpretative discourse
without any non-historicized access to the past as such. In fact history now appears
to be just one more foundationless, positioned expression in a world of
foundationless, positioned expressions. (1997: 6)
Accordingly, in our world, for any kind of history to be able to identify itself, it needs to
position itself against, beside, above or below another one. History in the postmodern times,
like any other form of knowledge, announces the end of the faith in knowledge itself. The
historical text expresses its own interests by referencing to other historical texts instead of
pointing out a fixed point of reference within the past. Jenkins’s position implies that any
construction of the past articulates itself with reference to its own interests and priorities,
“establishing or reinforcing group identities” (1997: 215). Bülent Somay, in Tarihin Bilinçdışı
(2003), gives some interesting insight into the workings of self-referentiality and
identification in historical discourse:
While we are looking through the electron microscope and writing the history of the
atomic particles, we are actually writing the history of our own action of
observation. We report all the chemical experiments we make as the movement of
the elements, compounds and mixtures but in fact, they are the records of our own
observation and experimentation…History is multiple-choice, multiple-sided and
It should be noted that Keith Jenkins’ revolutionary views of history are indeed controversial among
historians. However, they are significant for and relevant to analyzing history-writing within fiction today.
11
18
our own observation, our own intervention is just one of the many possible
observations and interventions (2004: 35).12
The explanation of history-writing as a set of positioned expressions is indispensable in a
world which ensures the existence of subjective discourses against foundational reality.
The postmodernist configuration of history assumes that the past, unlike what conventional
historians think, is not “homologously structured” (Berkhofer 1995: 37). An idea of a
homologous structure is actually antithetical to the conception of the past as sublime since the
sublime is formless, figureless and unfathomable. Berkhofer points out the fact that all history
writing is narrative writing. Hence what appears as homologously structured is in effect our
own narrative understanding of the otherwise non-linear, incoherent set of events. In this
homologous structure by which narrative is formed, ideological practices, as Jenkins argues,
are constantly at work. What determines the beginnings and endings of history? What
determines the namings and periodizations? Who determines whose story is told? These are
all central questions posed at the advocates of a presumptuously totalitarian view on history.
Each historical narrative is written within certain ideological presuppositions. When the
history writer/historian assumes the reality of the past, he is aware that he cannot fully grasp
this sublime past precisely because he transforms it into a text laden with ideological positions
and subtle particular interests. He, in a way, theorizes about the past. However, it is the
narrative itself that makes a contact with the reality of the past humanly possible. Berkhofer
suggests that what we call the study of history is a study of the textual form in which stories
from the past are written (55). We need to distinguish between a past reality and the various
forms of representing that past reality. While reading a historical document, text, narrative
and so on, one does not so much deal with the past as with the narrative organization of events
from the past. Robert Berkhofer suggests:
To reduce a history text to a number of factual propositions about a past reality
overlooks the rest of the text as a multilayered form of representation. Thus the
validity of an interpretation or a text cannot be a mere matter of calculating its
proportion of factual propositions. It must also be based on the narrative
organization or the rhetorical exposition. (1995: 55)
“Elektron mikroskobundan bakıp atom-altı parçacıkların hareketlerinin tarihini yazarken, aslında kendi
gözleme fiilimizin tarihini yazıyoruz. Yaptığımız her kimyasal deneyi elementlerin, bileşiklerin, karışımların
hareketi olarak kayda geçiyoruz, ama aslında onlar bizim gözleme, deney yapma fiillerimizin kayıtları.…Tarih
çok seçenekli, çok veçhelidir ve bizim gözlemimiz, bizim müdahalemiz, olası gözlemlerden, olası
müdahalelerden yalnızca biridir.”
12
19
It is in its textual form that history is self-referential. It actually refers to its own material as
text rather than to any comprehensible past. To sum up the discussion as to what history really
is and what it refers to, Berkhofer is worth quoting once again:
Just what is the referent for the word “history”? It cannot be the past as such,
because that is absent by definition…Because the past is gone, no one can point to it
in the same way that one can point to a horse and tree (or even a picture of them) as
the objects to which the words “horse” and “tree” refer…Historians can point, at
best, to actual remains that supposedly come to us from the past as the sources of the
evidence they use for their historical reconstructions. (1995: 62)
What, then, is history? Before reaching a consensus on this discussion, one could argue that it
is the most efficient way to theorize about and appropriate the past. The presupposition that
all history is a text enables us to think of history as part of a big intertextual play. Remains
from the past which are organized in a narrative fashion reflect the particular interests of those
who organize and construct them and all are interconnected to one another within the Text.
What we are left of at this point is probably an urge of emancipation from the illusion of
objectivism and realism.
History as Representative
The meaning of history…does not only show itself in the great deeds and misdeeds of the
agents or actors who become famous in history, but also in the feeling of the obscure and
distant spectators who see and hear them and who, in the sound and fury of the res gestae,
distinguish between what is just and what is not.
–Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute
There seems to be a direct link between the historian’s claim to veracity and truth and the way
he uses historical discourse as a way of meaning making and what is more of the production
of Truth in the sense that Foucault uses it. Certainly history, particularly when thought of as a
narrative construction, has been used according to particular interests of groups to silence,
exclude or include certain aspects of the past reality. History’s claim to truth creates a sense of
hegemony which favors the center as opposed to the peripheries. An important question being
20
asked today is what actually happens to the oppressed, the marginal and the peripheral. Bülent
Somay names those unwritten marginalities as the “unconscious of history” (2004: 19).
Accordingly, that which has been oppressed eventually comes back like the haunting of the
ghost. The “ghostly” past, like the ghost itself ceaselessly circulates in life. The one that has
been oppressed, hidden and crushed always comes back in different forms. However this
coming back is not an altogether unproblematic one. The thing that comes back always
disrupts the normal continuum of things. Foucault, in an essay entitled “Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History” argues:
History becomes “effective” to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our
very being – as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body
and sets it against itself. “Effective” history deprives the self of the reassuring
stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a
voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional
foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity. This is because
knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. (1977: 154)
The sense of discontinuity effective history introduces to us implies an interruption in our
narrative understanding of the past. What history should do, instead of serving a totalitarian
concept of the past, is to fragment it into pieces, providing us with alternative stories. Then, it
could open up a crack in our acceptance of the hegemonic assumption that history is
progressive, compositional and homogeneous. The undoing of traditional foundations not
only affect our own understanding but it also triggers new presentations of the sublime – for
that which is oppressed and traumatic is also automatically the sublime – and helps the
production of new representatives for the past itself. What we should bear in mind while
distinguishing between History and histories is the existence of the silenced and the excluded
within history. This way history comes to stand for a relativist, pluralist order representative
of as many voices as possible. Different histories open up the past to the present to avoid any
teleological and conclusive form it could get. Who tells what and which subject gets told as
well as where the story begins and ends are some of the considerable questions to be raised in
history-writing. Kellner observes “how the fundamental choices made by historians affect the
stories they tell and reveal the nature of their historical understanding:”
To begin a history of the American people with the Plymouth landing entails a plot
very different from one that starts with Columbus or with the Constitutional
Convention…Beginnings and endings are never “given” in our universe of life in
time, yet without conventionalized temporal frames – historical periods – the
21
landmarks that prevent events in time from swirling meaninglessly would be gone.
(1997: 134)
Certainly Kellner is referring to the meaning making process of history. What the historian
deals with in his study of the past is not so much the past itself as literary conventions through
which he creates meanings out of the “scattered and profoundly meaningless debris we find
around us” (1989: 10). Presumably the debris constitutes the sublime, something we cannot
make sense of but we can make sense out of. Therefore history becomes a reflection upon the
meaningless debris and each reflection creates its own agents and objects. Each reflection
inevitably poses the question of what to represent as well as how to represent it. What governs
the operation of history, in the end, turns out to be the individual will to represent. This
problem of representativity situates history as an ethical/political practice.
How does history compose itself as a pluralist discourse? It is directly linked to Foucault’s
notion of Truth and its operation through power structures:
Each society has its régime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of
discourse which it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances
which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each
is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of
truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true…it is
produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great
political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media); lastly, it is the
issues of a whole political debate and social confrontation (‘ideological’ struggles).
(2001: 1668-1669).
Truth’s connection to power is linked with the Lyotardian discourse of legitimation.
Accordingly, legitimation operates through “reference to a metadiscourse” (1984: xxiii). The
apparatuses Foucault mentions legitimate their own power by alluding to a metadiscourse
which they posit as “truth” and therefore create their own area of sovereignty. When we apply
this strategy of legitimation to the writing of history both in the upper case and the lower case
as defined by Keith Jenkins, we see that history posed as the truth by those who write it could
only be the representative of the so-called truth that it contains. It is in this sense that history
is tied to the statuses of those who write it. However, history could claim to be the
representative of as many truths as possible as long as truths distinctive of one another are
written. As opposed to the operation of truth within society as described by Foucault, the
condition for the unrepresented, oppressed and the excluded to produce their own statements
22
about history could only be actualized through a pluralist understanding of history. This way,
not only do we disengage ourselves from discussions on truthfulness but we could also create
a pluralist understanding of representativity. One of the many effective ways of introducing
this idea has been through literature. History-writing within fiction is an active way of
deconstructing the established relation between truth and power by presenting new histories to
its audience.
Historical knowledge operates through the workings of narrative. Accordingly, the
consideration of history as a rhetorical expression presupposes the fact that the factors which
constitute this rhetoric should be taken into account in both reading and writing history.
Narrativization requires the construction of a plot: emplotment. Emplotment determines the
procedure of selection; that is to say, whether to include or exclude a certain past event from
the narrative. The act of selection which exists at the center of the concept of narrativity
determines what the historical text represents and how it represents it. It is in this sense that
each history ends up being a representative for the history of some person, group or condition.
The history of the French Revolution inevitably represents the ones that made the revolution
and similarly the history of the “Conquest of İstanbul” eventually represent and/or consider
worth representing, the conquerors and not the conquered ones. However the idea of
representativity is supposed to be multi-sided; accordingly the repressed, silenced aspect of
one historical narrative could very well be the representative, even the “hero” in another one.
In this context, history emerges as a giant cauldron which contains thousands of possible
appropriations of the past simultaneously.
The Appropriation of the Past in Fiction: Innovations of the Historical Novel
In the framework of these contemporary views on history (the discussions of representability
as well as representativity), particularly post-1960s fiction, have marginalized the approach
towards history within fiction. The genre of fiction demonstrated an affiliation with history
and the new views on history confirmed this relationship. The incorporation of historical
context into fiction created new insights into the ways of re-presenting the past in/as fiction
while accepting the unintelligibility of the past as such. In this sense, fiction emerges as one
of the ways of recovering that alterity we call the past. Especially the practice of this
representation of the past in a subverted fashion gave fiction a mission to announce that all
23
efforts to represent the past serve to affirm its unrepresentability. Hence fiction conceives of
its incorporation of history mainly as a theoretical concern. What these novels – as well as the
two examples analyzed in this study – choose to do is to face history in order to critically
reflect upon the conceptualization of the idea particularly in the light of the contemporary
views on history.
The close relationship between history and literature manifests the idea that the two
disciplines, in their own area of expression, still constantly refer to one another. This is
marked by the fact that, as it has been discussed under the title “Contemporary Views of
History,” there has been a radical shift in the understanding of history in the last decades.
However, another very important motive underpins this relationship between the two
disciplines. History and literature in the classical age as well as in the Renaissance was
perceived to be inextricably bound up with each other (Yalçın-Çelik 2005: 58). Instead of
demarcating between two separate areas as history and literature, these two areas have been
perceived of as points of reference that keep alluding to one another up until the 18 th century.
The historical narrative contained historical knowledge as well as a literary form and hence
revealed a consciousness for the aesthetic:
When we look at the historical texts written from the age of Thukydides in which
history was first seen as a narrative until the modern age, we see that in these texts
historical knowledge, literary knowledge and aesthetics are all present at the same
time. (Yalçın-Çelik 2005: 58)13
Thus aesthetics emerges as something that is not independent of but on the contrary, inclusive
of history writing. Such an idea is integral to the understanding of history which is developed
into a story for the ordinary reader to enjoy and appreciate as well as learn from. The
historical novel is not so much an invention of literature as it is an extension of history into
literature through an already established relationship:
The events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of
them and the highlighting of others, by characterization, motific repetition, variation
of tone and point of view, alternative descriptive strategies, and the like – in short,
all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a
novel or play. (White 2001: 1715)
“Tarihin anlatı biçiminde ilk olarak görüldüğü Thukydides’ten modern çağa gelene kadar yazılmış olan tarih
metinlerine bakıldığı zaman, bu metinlerde hem tarih bilgisi, hem edebi bilgiler, hem de estetiğin bir arada
bulunduğu görülmektedir.”
13
24
The configuration of the past as a concept within fiction is connected to the idea of the
sublime desire as defined by Amy Elias. She defines a mode of consciousness which she calls
“metahistory.” “Metahistory” presumes the unknowability and the inaccessibility of history
and because of this it includes a sense of desire. Through this desire, metahistory questions
the possibility of grasping the truth of the past. In order to problematize history, these novels
represent a desire for history. This is the main paradox engulfing fictional history writing.
Besides, the way Amy Elias defines “metahistory” confirms this paradox: “the ability to
theorize and ironically desire history rather than access it through discovery and
reconstruction” (2001: xvii). According to this history is theorized through an ironic depiction
of it within fiction. This understanding emerges as the main characteristic of postmodernist
historical fiction. Thus, such novels refer to history only by exploiting it. This is not so much
a literary game for its own sake as it is a reminder to the readers that what we know as history
is subject to change in the hands of different writers. It demonstrates the possibilities of
deconstruction within fiction. It acknowledges history as a system of signification, as a
construct yet it also acknowledges the dependency of fiction on historical context. It is in this
sense that, as Linda Hutcheon famously argues in her definition of “historiographic
metafiction” as that which “installs and subverts” (1988: 118). In the theorization of the
“historiographic metafiction,” Hutcheon is specifically interested in problematizing historical
representation, questioning the validity of any representation rather than particular ways of
recapturing or re-presenting the past. The paradox of desiring history yet desiring it ironically
and that of the incorporation of that which is contested entails such works of fiction to
deconstruct the past in such a way that they create new versions and representations of the
historical past. In this context, their problematizing return to history emerges as a self-aware
critical re-thinking of the way the past is constructed.
Thus, the writers of (post)modernist historical fiction contemplate the past/history as a
construct and therefore this type of fiction emerges as a creative way of rebuilding, undoing
and even deconstructing that construct we call history. They differ entirely from the historical
novels of Walter Scott in which a particular historical period in time is reflected and certain
elements pertaining to that period are romanticized through fiction. As opposed to this, postwar historical fiction history-writing appears as a conceptual concern for the writer. Perhaps
the kind of romanticism we could talk about in such novels is a subverted romanticism in
which certain facts about history are abused and absurdity is highlighted for the sake of the
deconstruction of the historical myth. Such novels incorporate the underdog in their historical
25
stories, they envision contradictory versions of history, and engage in formal strategies in
their writing of history to emphasize the role of rhetorical expression in historical writing. All
such concerns point out two central questions: There is a past but “how can we know that past
today – and what can we know of it?” (Hutcheon 1988: 92).
The main paradox about the innovative historical fiction’s incorporation of history, as it has
been observed, is that it faces history while constantly working on the deconstruction of it.
This way, this kind of fiction aspires to open the past to present interpretation and present its
contestability as an objective to be achieved. It highlights the unrepresentability of the past by
first depicting it within a representational framework and then ungrounding this depiction by
stressing out the impossibility of representation through subversion and irony. Hutcheon
argues that in such novels “any ground upon which to base representation and narration fades
away in such a way that the ground is first inscribed then subverted” (1988: 92). The
Disconnected, for instance, subverts its inscription of historical context by creating a parody
out of that historical context; perhaps what we could call a mock epic. The parodic/ironic
discourse used in such novels refers to two contradictory factors according to Hutcheon:
authority and transgression (1985: 68). They establish a ground by referring to a historical
context and then subvert the referred to context. The simultaneous existence of the
dependency on and the transgression of “history” as a foundational ground create the paradox.
Hutcheon’s “historiographic metafiction” is characterized by this paradox.
The innovative historical novel mainly experiments with the way fiction refers to historical
reality. Apart from the problem of representation as a conceptual concern, they also engage in
certain formal and fictional strategies in their inversion of historical context so as to establish
an interpretive line in their contemplation of the past. In other words, it is as important to
study what we can know about the past as it is important to know how we can know that past.
Through such works of fiction, the themes and issues not only determine the biases of the
writer but they also establish fiction as a space for integrating subjective historical experience
into the writing of history. In this respect, while fiction subverts historical context it also adds
to the context by individuating it. Fiction manages to break down the holistic image of
History by re-imagining it within an individual consciousness. This is what Elisabeth
Wesseling calls the “subjectivization of history” (1991: 75). In her theorization of the
innovations of the historical novel, she lists various strategies deployed by such novels to
create this sense of subjectivization of history. She focuses on the main character – who
26
sometimes is the narrator, too – in these novels as an agent in the making of history through
their imaginative, contemplative views of history. Through the eyes of “an opaque personality
who absorbs history as she changes through time” (1991: 77) we, the readers, envision the
past:
The subjectivization of history effects a balance between fictional characters and
outer circumstances which differs considerably from that of the classical model of
historical fiction. In Scott’s novels, the heroes function as pretexts for inserting
lengthy descriptions of the milieu of former epochs into the text. Edward Waverley,
for instance, is used as a transparent medium through which historical forces and
circumstances are revealed to the reader. Orlando, on the contrary, is an opaque,
mysterious personality who absorbs history as she changes through time, while her
psyche constitutes the focus of interest in Woolf’s novel. (76-77)
The fictional characters of these historical novels, in a way, create a vision of the past which
is derived from the ways they animate their memory as well as their imagination. Graham
Swift’s Waterland’s (1983) history teacher Tom Crick, for instance, appears in the novel as an
absorber of history, a teller of stories. His own envisioning of history is framed in the novel
and it is through his comments upon history that the novel reveals its subjective representation
of history. His complex personality is centralized in the story. Instead of making characters
out of history, fictional characters like Tom Crick make their own histories. Likewise in Lying
Down to Die certain aspects of what we read as history are filtered through the main character
Aysel’s consciousness and in this sense the readers read her version of history. The use of
letters and journals points out the specific choices these characters make. Nevertheless
Aysel’s psyche does constitute the point of focus in the narrative as the readers see her
remember as well as contemplate upon herself and her past.
The formal strategies used to produce this sense of subjectivization of history in innovative
historical novels could be listed as the incorporation of different forms of narrative, multiple
focalization, explicit commentaries upon history as a concept, the historian-like characters and
so on. However, subjectivization of history is significant to the understanding of history in
two ways: First, it eliminates any pretensions to grasping the truth of the past by showing that
every interpretation of the past points towards a different truth. Secondly, it establishes a
search for the past, a multilayered site which makes the constant re-evaluation of the past
possible and it makes this re-evaluation possible within a literary context.
27
Even though these novels eliminate the pretension to absolute truth, they at the same time
establish their fiction only within a factual framework. The historical novel, either in the
classical or the postmodernist sense, inevitably deals with historical content as a referent for
its fiction. Accordingly, in the postmodernist historical fiction, historical content is first
established and then subverted. The historical novel in the classical sense, though, creates its
fiction within a factual framework which destabilizes its status as fiction. Barbara Foley coins
the term “psuedofactual” for such novels. According to Foley, the “pseudofactual” novel
emerges around the seventeenth century as a kind of fiction which makes claims to veracity
and verifiability only within a fictional framework. She adds: “When writers of fiction invoke
additional claims to veracity, then, they do so not because they pretend to be writing history
or biography but because they wish to assure us that they tell the truth. This truth is not a
‘factual’ truth, and they do not intend to fools us into thinking that it is” (1986: 111). In this
sense, the factual character of the fiction emerges as the assurance of truthfulness but only
within a fictional framework. The kind of ambiguity created through this determines the
novel’s stance on its fictional status. Foley argues that the “reader is asked to view the text’s
speaker as simultaneously part of the text’s analogous configuration – and hence a fictional
character – and as an autonomous voice commenting on the referent from a position external
to fictionality” (112).
Another innovative strategy used by historical fiction is the creation of alternative versions of
history within a fictional framework. The production of alternative histories within fiction
reveals the workings of the processes of appropriation and selection in history writing.
Alternative versions are created in these works of fiction, most of the time, at the cost of
exploiting what we know as “historical facts.” This exploitation, however, is done to show
how histories actually are biased. By creating alternative versions of history these works of
fiction not only reveal the subjectivity of historical knowledge but they also succeed in
subverting the role of power in the inscription of historical knowledge. By doing this they
implicitly state that history is perpetually in the hands of those that make it and being placed
in “other” hands, history could have been otherwise. Wesseling observes:
Postmodernist writers do not consider it their task to propagate historical knowledge,
but to inquire into the very possibility, nature, and use of historical knowledge from
an epistemological or a political perspective. [They] expose the partisan nature of
historical knowledge by foregrounding the intimate connection between versions of
history and the legitimation of political power. These modes of questioning
28
historical knowledge go together with different sets of literary strategies, the first
inducing the development of self-reflexive devices, the second the invention of
alternate histories. (1991: 73-74)
The creation of alternate histories within fiction challenges the sense of closure which is
implicitly advocated by the official form of historical knowledge. Underneath this urge to
create alternate histories lies the desire, particularly for the marginalized, the cast out, to
narrate their own version of truth and inscribe their own point of view. It is interesting that the
idea of the marginalized – in this case the insignificant – people’s story could be traced back
to Lukacs’s own theorization of the novel. Lukacs proclaims that the historical novel creates
types in its efforts of reflecting the atmosphere of the historical era it depicts. These types
specifically represent the insignificant and it is through the dramatization of the insignificant
characters – these types – that the historical reality is given (Lukacs 1998: 290-293).
By exploiting official history the innovative historical novel does not necessarily debunk it
but create ways for readers to be open to alternatives and questioning about the position of
historical knowledge. They also do not necessarily expose their own versions of history as the
true or the correct version; far from it, their inscription of history helps to develop a pluralist
and versatile understanding of history while it also contributes to history’s condition of
malleability as it is possible to come up with various versions of history. J.M. Coetzee’s Foe
(1986), for instance, not only inserts the woman’s voice into the story of the White Christian
male but, at the same time, it questions that woman’s voice, by integrating the voicelessness
of the black man into the story. Different perspectives clash and this signifies the possibility
and the subjectivity of each and every historical account. Linda Hutcheon observes that “Foe
reveals that storytellers can certainly silence, exclude, and absent certain past events – and
people – but it also suggests that historians have done the same” (1988: 107). After all, to
what extent is history writing different from storytelling?
Consequently what Amy Elias’s “metahistory” and Linda Hutcheon’s “historiographic
metafiction” seek to do is to create a set of challenges against the establishment of historical
knowledge. These challenges include the questioning of historical knowledge as a
foundational ground for Truth especially by pointing out the significance of literary devices
and rhetorical expression in the production of that truth, the contesting of the authority of the
historical sources by emphasizing their narrative nature and finally the questioning the
autonomy of history and the argument that the different possible forms of historical
29
representation refutes the claim that history is one separate accessible category. In the light of
all this, the relationship of literature – particularly that of fiction – to history is in their use of
narrative representation. Narrative makes it possible for the readers to blur the borders
between what is fact and what is fiction. Hayden White refers to historical narratives as
“verbal fictions” (White 2001: 1713). It is this understanding that makes it possible to contest
historical knowledge. Literature, by incorporating the historical into the fictional, has shown
that it could conduct the reader to critically reflect upon the nature of historical knowledge
and instill the idea that what we call history is a limitless number of commentaries and
interpretations about past events. Thus it is significant to bear in mind the deconstructive
nature of fictional history writing. Hans Kellner observes:
To read history out of focus promotes human ways of knowing, an understanding of
the past as a sign for the respect for reality which insists that even reality should not
control our lives, it must remain in the awkward crookedness of unending
examination, re-emplotting and re-interpretation. (1989: 25)
What Kellner proposes by a crooked way of reading history is being critical about history;
that is about the ways we understand and contemplate upon the past, making room for
constant re-interpretation.
History in Turkish Fiction
The essential relationship between history and literature configures the historical novel today
not only in Turkey but also in the rest of the world. However, each culture creates its own
conditions for the formation of the historical novel. The beginnings of the historical novel in
Turkey traces itself back to the playful relationship between history and literature. For all
audiences, historical novels have always been popular because they have not only been a
source of knowledge for the audience but also an object of enjoyment. This is the case in
Turkey as well. According to Yalçın-Çelik, products of oral history such as legends and folk
stories have been the main source for the distribution of historical knowledge (2005: 62). But
a Western style of the historical novel established itself in the 19th century in Turkey. Authors
like Namık Kemal, Ahmet Mithat Efendi created such novels. As Yalçın-Çelik writes, the
translations of Alexander Dumas Pére were widely read during those times. She attributes this
special interest to the fact that the Turkish audience enjoyed the merging of history and
adventure within a fictional framework (63-64). It is interesting to see that what is liked is
30
actually the story (history as story) rather than what we call historical knowledge. Hence,
perhaps an aesthetic consciousness in the historical narrative has appealed more to the reader
ever since.
If we take a brief look at the development of the historical novel in Turkey we will see that
there is a direct link between the social and political condition and the way the historical
novel has developed. After the first historical novels written in the 19th century, a national
literary consciousness is created. This is due to the fact that the independence war (19191923) was fought. These historical novels served to develop that national consciousness by
telling stories about the war. Some of these include works by Halide Edip Adıvar, 14 a very
important feminist figure and activist, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu,15 Refik Halit Karay.16 As
Yalçın-Çelik observes, the historical novel in Turkey makes a shift from one which is didactic
and which deals with historical “facts” so as to convey a sense of knowledge to the reader to
one which is based on fiction to create historical consciousness (71). Fictional history-writing
is undoubtedly positioned and more subjective. Kemal Tahir wrote such novels. His famous
trilogy Esir Şehrin İnsanları (1956), Esir Şehrin Mahpusu (1961) and Yol Ayrımı (1971)
centralizes their story around the people of İstanbul during the years of invasion. This trilogy
is considered a closer look at the history of the people of a city by focusing on the ways the
insignificant people of the times struggle with the fierce mechanism of History.
The popularization of history could be attributed to the ways in which historical fiction
harmonizes history with adventure. All historical novels, above all, tell a story. However, the
proliferation of popular historical novels within the last two decades could also be explained
by the fact that there has been a shift in the understanding of history in Turkey. With the
introduction of the postmodernist views on history, history has come to be understood not
only as a multi-layered, subjectivized area of knowledge, but it has also started gaining
popularity as it has become easier to access. Newspaper columns about history, books on city
histories have shifted attention to history as a popular domain of knowledge. This attention is
partly due to the fact that cultural memory is empowered through the increase on the
publishing of biographies and the increasing amount of people wondering about their “past”
(Özyürek 2006: 7). To construct history as part of a big narrative game, as it is practiced in
Ateşten Gömlek (1922), Vurun Kahpeye (1926)
Yaban (1932)
16
İstanbul’un Bir Yüzü (1920)
14
15
31
postmodernist literature, has immensely appealed to people. Such discussions of history as
well as the human curiosity for other lives have enabled popular historical fiction to become
one of the best-selling genres of Turkey. Apart from the popular and commercial historical
fiction which mainly includes biographies and memoirs, postmodernist historical novels
which are academically prominent have become popular, too. Particularly, Orhan Pamuk’s
Benim Adım Kırmızı (1998) and Nedim Gürsel’s Boğazkesen (1995) emerge as historical
novels. These novels developed new insights into the ways history is written in fiction and
served to fashion the new Turkish historical novel reader, too.
However, this study’s main concern is to investigate the ways of historical representation in
novels which are not necessarily “historical,” nevertheless succeed in creating historical
consciousness. Neither The Disconnected not Lying Down to Die is specifically a historical
novel. However they manage to create a historical consciousness, manage to question
historical knowledge and what could be labeled as “historical.” Both novels could be
considered novels of revolt. Both novels manage to touch critical spots in history and interpret
these from predominantly distinct perspectives in their fiction. They, at the same time,
individualize the stories from the past. Even though the novels are stories of individuals, they
diffuse these stories within a socio-historical context. They present the kind of crisis the
characters experience in relation to historical crises. In this respect, it will not be correct to
designate these novels as “popular historical novels.” They are novels which incorporate the
historical into their narrative in such a way as to analytically benefit from it.
As history is popularized in Turkey as well as the rest of the world, more opinions on what
history is and how it works get told. The interest in small histories, studies on recent history,
documentaries about controversial historical events proliferate. History becomes something
that everyone can produce – particularly oral histories – instead of being a big database from
which everyone can benefit. Subjectivization is actually a central motive in history-writing:
History is the story of the white, of the European, of the Central Committee and
finally of history professors. Undoubtedly every story is determined by the identity
and the ideological preferences of the one that tells it. If only things were that
simple, how easy it would be to clean it out! However, the problem is much more
complicated: The history-writer’s, chronicler’s childhood, personality formation
procedure, Oedipal obsessions, relationship with his parents, attitude towards
women, homophobic paranoia, education, social status, Offices he has to “comply
32
with,” order in the hierarchy of “science,” overt or covert racist obsessions (not
beliefs but obsessions), all of these permeate the whole story being told. (Somay
2004: 26)17
While Somay lists the elements which condition the historian in his writing, he attracts
attention to internal ones instead of external ones. If we distinguish between an “internal
history” and an “external history,” perhaps we could say that the historian’s internal history
determines external history; that is, his history-writing. A person’s own internal history is the
process of psychological, social and historical development of the individual. In this case, not
only the White male history-writer but all history-writers are conditioned by internal elements
varying from the condition of their inner world, their way of thinking to their personal affairs
and way of upbringing. For this reason, without making this distinction between an “internal
history” and an “external history” it is hard to figure how fictional characters, especially those
of Lying Down to Die and The Disconnected write their histories. Such a view makes it clear
that novels like these derive their (hi)stories from the characters’ histories. Such novels do not
necessarily create a historical atmosphere but manage to form stories in which internal and
external histories intersect. Perhaps the politically-conscious novels in Turkey such as those
of Adalet Ağaoğlu’s could be labeled as novels of “remembering the past” instead of
historical novels. The discussions of subjectivization in history like Somay’s get to be
articulated more often in Turkey as excluded groups demanded historical recognition. This is
also due to the fact that there is a so-called “trend” to play with history. For instance, many
subjective representations of the 1980 military coup have been expressed in recent years. In
this sense, subjective historical representations also become resistance spots against
hegemonic powers.
Efforts of telling individual stories through history demonstrate how history becomes a part of
fiction in Turkey. “Novels of identity” could as well base their stories on history. Oğuz
Atay’s, Adalet Ağaoğlu’s, A. Hamdi Tanpınar’s are such novels. The subjectivization of
history serves to maintain a broader contextual image of the characters. It also makes us see
“Tarih beyazların hikayesidir, Avrupalı’nın hikayesidir, Merkez Komite’nin ve en nihayet, tarih
profesörlerinin hikayesidir. Tabii ki her hikaye, onu anlatanın kimliğine, ideolojik tercihlerine göre belirlenecek.
Ama keşke iş bu kadarla kalsaydı, o zaman ayıklamak ne kolay olurdu! Oysa mesele çok daha karışık:
Tarihyazımcısının, vakanüvisin çocukluğu, kişilik oluşum süreci, Oidipal saplantıları, annesi ve babasıyla
ilişkisi, kadınlara karşı tutumu, homofobik paranoyaları, aldığı eğitim, toplumsal konumu, “iyi geçinmek”
zorunda olduğu makamlar, “bilim” hiyerarşisindeki basamağı, açık ya da gizli ırkçı saplantıları (inançları değil
saplantıları) tüm bunlar anlatılan hikayenin noktasına ve virgülüne siniyor.”
17
33
how fiction becomes the place for individualizing History and creating histories. Nurdan
Gürbilek observes historical representation in literature:
Every modern look that wants to remember bears a risk: To make the past the fiction
of the one who remembers it; to look at a past which is dispersed and gone, through
today’s subjectivity, to meet today’s needs. Perhaps that is why most efforts of
remembering turn into a search for an origin which could hold a mirror up to the
dreams of the one that remembers… Looking at the past does not always mean that
the past looks back at us, too. (Gürbilek 2005: 13)18
These types of novels try to enliven a past which is gone. They are attempts at animating and
giving meaning to that negativity we call the past within a subjective framework. Looking at
the past in these novels becomes a looking at the self. Their function is to make the reader
reflect upon history and a historical event with its conditions while presenting an individual
story.
The historical novel in Turkey manifests itself in various ways. While in the beginning it
mainly consisted of texts that distribute historical knowledge, later the fictional character
became much more significant. Modernist and postmodernist novels which incorporate the
historical into their narrative bring new insights into the discussions of the historical novel.
They exhibit that history could be constructed through the imagination; it could be privatized
in the face of individual stories, could be altered, subverted and even parodied. All these
innovations of the historical novel in Turkey both gave rise to and resulted from discussions
of history.
“Hatırlamak isteyen her modern bakışın taşıdığı bir risk var: Geçmişi hatırlayanın kurgusundan ibaret kılmak;
dağılıp gitmiş bir geçmişe, bugünün ihtiyaçlarını karşılamak üzere, bugünün öznelliğinden bakmak. Belki de bu
yüzden hatırlama çabalarının çoğu, hatırlayanın hülyalarına ayna tutacak bir köken arayışına dönüşür… Geçmişe
bakmak, onun dönüp bize bakması demek değildir her zaman.”
18
34
TEXT ANALYSES
35
A
TURKISH
CASE:
THE
DISCONNECTED
AS
POSTMODERNIST HISTORICAL FICTION
Oğuz Atay’s The Disconnected (1971) is a text of resistance. Published in the beginning of
the 1970s in an atmosphere of political instability and turmoil, it could not receive the acclaim
it expected. However, after 1980s, it has become a cult in Turkish literature and has been
analyzed since then. Yıldız Ecevit attributes the lack of interest in The Disconnected when it
was first published, not only to a conservative literary atmosphere but also to the political
situation in Turkey as well as in the rest of the world:
The main barrier against [The Disconnected] was not only the rejection of formal
novelties in Turkish literature. It is recorded in history that the year 1968 in which
the novel was written was a period of great social turmoil in Western countries.
1960s is a period in history in which a strong sense of resistance was created against
the capitalist system, the technology culture that had become a melting pot for all
cultures and the consumer society that had been the bringer of a new idea of ethics…
The student movements spread to Turkey, too and although they finished soon in the
West, in Turkey they caused the birth of social and political chaos which would
prevail in Turkey for longer periods… [During this period] both the writer and the
reader shifted interest in social issues…In Turkish literature when socially oriented
novels were written with respect to an archaic aesthetics of traditionalism and
realism, Oğuz Atay created his art in the light of the understanding of the “new
novel” (2007: 232-233).19
Through its remarkable content and structure, it has become the forerunner of a sense of
innovation experienced in the Turkish novel. Containing certain biographical elements from
Atay’s own life, the novel has become specifically popular among those who, in one way or
the other, feel affiliated to Atay’s definition of those who are disconnected.
“[Bu roman] için ana engel, yalnızca Türk edebiyatının biçimci yeniliklere kapalı yapısı değildir. Romanın
yazıldığı 1968 yılı, Batı ülkelerinde büyük toplumsal çalkantıların yaşandığı bir dönem olarak tarihe geçer.
Altmışlı yıllar; gemi azıya almış kapitalist düzene, tüm kültürlerin içinde eriyip yok olduğu teknoloji kültürüne
ve yeni bir etiğin taşıyıcısı olan tüketim toplumuna karşı gerek siyasal gerekse sanatsal düzlemlerde güçlü bir
başkaldırının yaşandığı bir tarih kesitidir…öğrenci ayaklanmaları Türk üniversitelerine de sıçrar; Batı’da kısa
sürede geride bırakılmasına karşılık, Türkiye’yi uzun süre kıskacına alacak olan bir toplumsal kargaşa ortamının
doğmasına yol açar…gerek yazarın gerekse okurun dikkati toplumdaki çalkantılara yönelmiştir daha çok…Türk
edebiyatında, arkaik bir estetiğin geleneksel/gerçekçi anlayışıyla kotarılmış toplumcu içerikli köy romanlarının
baş tacı edildiği o günlerde, Oğuz Atay bu anlayışın tümüyle dışında yer alan yeni bir roman estetiğinin
dünyasında yol almaya başlamıştır.”
19
36
Oğuz Atay is one of the most innovative writers in Turkish literature. Originally an engineer,
Oğuz Atay introduced many novelties in Turkish fiction when he published Tutunamayanlar
in 1971. Based partly on Atay’s own life, the novel created a strong sense of criticism in
literary circles. For some critics, he is considered the first postmodernist writer in Turkey.
Influenced by authors such as Dostoyevski, Musil, Joyce and so on, Atay incorporated
modernism in Turkish fiction. However, Atay also was appreciated for his presentation of the
conditions of the society he lives in with all its depth. He wrote three other novels, a series of
short stories and a play. He died before completing his biggest project he called “Türkiye’nin
Ruhu” [The Spirit of Turkey] which aspired to analyze the Turkish people and “the
phenomena which grow out of a bicultural condition” (Ecevit 2007: 454)20
The Disconnected is a story about the middle-aged, successful engineer Turgut’s devastation
upon the news of the death of his best friend Selim. Throughout the novel we witness
Turgut’s journey into the realm of the unknown – death – as he starts an investigation into the
causes of his friend’s suicide. The narrative is constantly disrupted by textual references to
historical figures, (imaginary) conversations with dead people, ironic reconstructions of the
nation’s past. A significant part of the novel indicates an attempt to rewrite history. In this
mental journey towards memory, history and the unknown, Turgut not only re-discovers
Selim and his life but he also starts questioning his own. The heavy responsibility of opening
the files about Selim’s past on the one hand disturbs Turgut, and on the other hand causes him
to open himself up to the past as well. Accordingly, the novel puts the notion of history in the
middle of its story and questions it.
In the novel, the re-writing of history is taking place as we encounter Selim’s attempts to
write his own story within the main story of the novel. The “Song of the Disconnected”
[Tutunamayanların Şarkısı] is a tongue-in-cheek, almost farcical attempt of the main character
Selim’s creation of his biography- rather his past – in a mock-epic poetic form. This parodic
piece which the author calls “The Song of the Disconnected” is significant in various ways.
First, by its specific title, it establishes a sense of commonness around which to build the
cultural memory of those that are marginalized. “Tutunamayanlar” literally means “those who
cannot hold on (to anything).” Oğuz Atay introduces a creative expression for those who are,
20
“çiftkültürlülüğün doğurduğu fenomenler”
37
in one way or another marginalized. They are people who are self-conscious, contemplative
with a lack of self-confidence in life and not suitable to the conditions of a system based on
rivalry and competition. Presumably bearing in mind the idea of the “survival of the fittest,”
Atay attempts to attract attention to those that cannot survive. It could be considered an effort
to put back into the frame the excluded. The return to the past in the novel overlaps the search
into the act of “disconnecting.” Selim’s exclusion in life is linked to his sad past. However,
Oğuz Atay does not specifically refer to the exclusion of a group in social life or in history.
What is significant here is that an imaginary condition of disconnectedness is created to relate
all the excluded in their own ways. Selim’s story is the story of the loser. The Song of the
Disconnected” is written as a legend to identify Selim and his past and link it to those who are
like him. Hence Atay not only questions but also ridicules official discourse by copying it in
his own way. Finally, this piece signifies a desire for writing. It becomes a space for the
author to experiment with genres, forms and even ideas – that is, the idea of creating epical
accounts of the ordinary man. The whole text is constructed in and through this experience of
writing.
The narrative consists of several different modes of existence – life, death, dreaming,
haunting – multiple subjective voices, and so on. This interrelation of different worlds
characterizes the text as a space of “confrontation among worlds” (McHale 1992: 152):
“Different languages, different registers of the same language, different discourses each
construct the world differently; in effect, they each construct different worlds” (McHale 1992:
153). The world of The Disconnected is such a world of multiple voices, different discourses,
different forms of writing. To some extent, it could even be argued whether Selim, Turgut
(Selim’s friend) and Olric (Turgut’s inner voice) are different dimensions of one and the same
person. This pluralist view creates a space in the text which is dominated by writing. And the
power of language and writing in the novel is marked by a disobedient and tumultuous form
of noise.21 This sense of pluralism is important in my reading of The Disconnected in which
different worlds always clash and that seems to be the only way that they could exist in the
novel.
Nurdan Gübilek claims that Oğuz Atay creates a form of speech in his novels in which words reproduce
themselves and in which the speaker constantly feels the need to produce new ways of speech. In the novels of
Atay, language always consists of various sounds put together and the accumulation of various layers of
discourse. Gürbilek contends that the author always knew that what he wanted to tell, he could only tell it
through “noise.” Ev Ödevi. İstanbul: Metis,2004 (13-14).
21
38
In connection with this notion of clash, I would like to point out a distinction between the
epistemological dominant and the ontological dominant put forward by Brian McHale.
McHale contends:
Modernist fiction is fiction organized in terms of an epistemological dominant,
fiction whose formal strategies implicitly raise issues of the accessibility, reliability
or unreliability, transmission, circulation, etc., of knowledge about the world
(compare Higgins’s “cognitive” question, “How can I interpret this world of which I
am a part?”). Postmodernist fiction, on the other hand, is fiction organized in terms
of an ontological dominant, fiction whose formal strategies implicitly raise issues of
the mode of being of fictional worlds and their inhabitants, and/or reflect on the
plurality and diversity of worlds, … (compare the “postcognitive” question, “Which
world is this?”) (1992: 146-147).
This distinction is significant for the different possible readings of The Disconnected and the
simultaneous existence of such differences in our reading of the text. Interestingly, The
Disconnected is a text which is organized both in terms of an epistemological dominant and
an ontological dominant. On the one hand, we have the story of a man who is trying to
interpret the world, his past and accordingly his identity; a man who is willing to tell, to
narrate, to interpret, a man who experiences both physical and mental affliction in his relation
to the world and his past, a man who strives to grasp the real past. On the other hand, in this
so-called journey, the text highlights the tensions between conflicting perceptions, it
foregrounds simultaneously different worlds, different voices; the narrative is subverted with
parodic constructions, intertextual sections, and so on. The fact that these two dominants are
present in the text at the same time prevents the text from being limiting for the reader. At this
moment, Foster’s definition of the “postmodernism of resistance” becomes crucial. The
Disconnected is above all a critique/questioning of traditions and origins (and not only an
endeavor of formal innovation for the sake of itself), a challenge to the representation of
history and a sincere desire to represent, to narrate, to tell.
Desire for History
“Anlatamıyorlar anlatılamayanı. Anlatmak gerek”22
22
“They cannot tell that which cannot be told. It has to be told.” (Tutunamayanlar, 133).
39
The Disconnected is marked by an inextinguishable desire to narrate. We can deduce this
from Selim’s undertaking to write the epic of “the disconnected,” from his initiative of
keeping a diary, from Turgut’s efforts to tell the world about Selim after his death by
investigating the causes of his death, and from Selim’s obstinacy about himself and the world
he lives in, his insistence on continuing to live and write despite all the pain he suffers. Even
in the beginning of the novel, the “publisher’s note” on the one hand creates a sense of doubt
in the reader’s mind about the truthfulness of the story on a metafictional level; and on the
other hand underlines the fact that this is a narrative, a story which is necessary to tell. The
publisher’s note which is signed by an imaginary publisher at the beginning of the book
declares the publisher’s incredulity at the story told in the book. The related part follows:
We would like to declare that we have no certainty as to the truthfulness of this book
which is claimed to be based on a story that took place years ago…we would like the
readers to accept that the events in this book are products of imagination and that the
people mentioned do not actually exist (2004: 21).23
This note resembles the 17th century fiction’s justification of truthfulness with an authorial
warning that the author/publisher is a mediator and has nothing to do with the account given.
In the preface of Moll Flanders (1722), Defoe informs his readers: “an author must be hard
put to it [the story] to wrap it up so clean as not to give room, especially for vicious readers, to
turn it to his disadvantage” (1994: 1). A similar sense of self-protection by the publisher could
be observed in The Disconnected. There is a story to be told and the physical texts in our
hands mediate it without interfering into it. It is supposedly Selim’s history that we read.
Despite the fact that he will never be able to reflect the reality of the past as such, Selim by
“telling that which cannot be told,” writing about it, perhaps touches a spot which is sacred,
painful, forbidden and should not be touched at all and he destroys himself. This destruction is
obviously created not only by writing about his past (re-writing the past in “The Song of the
Disconnected”). It is rather related to a whole understanding of life which is inseparable from
the past, which is reconfigured each time by going back to the past; a life which is dominated
by the past. Perhaps it is necessary at this point to analyze the notion of “that which cannot be
told” in the framework of the notion of “sublime” that Elias refers to.
“Yıllar önce meydana geldiği ileri sürülen bir olaya dayanan bu kitabın gerçekliği hakkında kesin bir söz
söyleyemeyeceğimizi belirtmek isteriz…kitaptaki olayların bütünüyle hayal ürünü olduğunun ve kişilerin
gerçekten yaşamadığının okuyucular tarafından kabulünü özellikle rica ederiz.”
23
40
Amy Elias defines the kind of postmodernist historical novels under the category of
“metahistorical romances.” In this definition the notion “metahistory” – which has been used
by some other critics and theorists as well – implicates a paradoxical attitude towards history.
It both signifies a desire for history and at the same time maintains an ironic attitude in the
desire for this access to history. This is the main paradox of the postmodern in general as well
as of the postmodern historical novel. The unconditional desire for history puts the writer in a
state in which he wants to narrate – because he can only fulfill his desire this way – and in
which he also knows that his narration will never really capture the historical past as such.
This is the main state of affairs in which The Disconnected’s protagonist writes the absurd
epic about the past. Elias contends that “this desire for History, for the ‘secular sacred’
sublime – for awe, certainty and belief in the absence of the Word – leads postmodern
narrative fiction to new representations of the historical past” (2001: xviii). In The
Disconnected we get to see this tension born out of a disbelief in the power of the Word to
“represent” the desired reality of the past and the dependence on the Word as the one and only
way to embody this desire. When Selim says “They cannot tell that which cannot be told. It
has to be told… But, Selim Işık loves being understood without having to tell” (2004: 133),24
he implies precisely this tension. “That which cannot be told is the sacred, traumatic area of
his consciousness which he knows has to be told yet he also knows this traumatic
consciousness will lose its power as soon as it is expressed in words. That is why he longs for
an alternative in which he could be understood without telling. The whole idea of being
understood predominates the text. Telling your own story is a prerequisite for being
understood in the novel. Re-writing history, “his own story” is a significant part of this
prerequisite.
Selim’s being underdeveloped, being disconnected from the world around him, his isolation
from society: All these constitute that which cannot be articulated within his past. The only
way he can encounter this sublime past is through writing which could only represent this
history in a subverted, unserious manner. He finds a new representational framework for his
past experience which is sarcastic, scornful of other people and therefore less painful for
himself. However this ironic attitude towards history is only a disguise for his genuine desire
to say something about history. In the Lyotardian sense, the impossibility of the articulation of
the sublime seems to stem from its oppression in the social and political consciousness of
24
“Anlatamıyorlar anlatılamayanı. Anlatmak gerek… Oysa, mesela Selim Işık anlatmadan anlaşılmaya aşık.”
41
people. In The Disconnected, unpresentability is also a result of the past’s traumatic character
in the consciousnesses of the subject. Selim writes his absurd epic, in a way to show that the
unpresentable exists:
My hands are unwilling to write, let’s not go into the depths.
Stone Age, the Age of Sabri, the Age of Nihat, Bronze Age
He fell in love – and couldn’t tell - the Age of Shame
He was shameful all his life… (133)25
Selim refers to that which he does not want to remember, that which happened in the past yet
is traumatic and therefore unpresentable in his representation. This is just one of the many
misfortunes of his childhood. By putting this in an ironic representational framework he
and/or the author not only experiments with an innovative style for historical representation
but also tries to ease the trauma of the unfortunate experiences of his past. Selim’s efforts to
parody his past is to some extent a denial, in other ways, a defamiliarization. In Hayden
White’s words “events are detraumatized and refamiliarized” in the historical account Selim
creates for himself (2001: 1718). In other words, they are put in other contexts. This selfdegradation is funny to the extent that the very sincerity of the pain expressed underneath this
irony is ignored. In a superficial reading we smile at such sentences as “He was ignorant, how
could he know the word libido,” “He experienced his first day in a provincial residence, the
grandmother rocks his cradle slowly and with an Ottoman patience,26 the grandfather deaf and
senile,” “the only underdeveloped son of an underdeveloped father,” “What will become of
this kid, Müzeyyen? I’d rather he was naughty than timorous,” “If you, like me, … lived with
boredom and hatred, if Ankara’s sun has benumbed your brain too, if you have wandered
around Hergele Square as a Republican child who has no other notion than to follow the path
of Atatürk…then you, too, lost (like me)” (114, 115, 117, 121, 124).27 The expression of a
father figure is dominant in The Disconnected. Selim is a character who has problems with his
father. According to Gürbilek, Atay’s protagonists are always characterized by their
“Elim varmıyor yazmaya, inmeyelim derine. Taş devri, Sabri devri, Nihat devri, Tunç devri. Aşık oldu –
söyleyemez – utanç devri. Hep utandı hayatı boyunca…” Sabri and Nihat are common Turkish male names
which probably are the names of the friends of Selim. The word bronze is phonetically the same with a proper
name in Turkish (Tunç) so it is not obvious whether the writer uses it here as a proper name or as the name of a
historical era.
26
An expression used in the Turkish language to indicate a grandiose sense of patience.
27
“Cahildi, ne bilsindi libidonun adını.”, “Bir taşra konağında yaşadı ilk gündüzü. Büyükanne Osmanlı sabrıyla
ağır ağır sallıyor beşiğini. Dede bunak ve sağır.”, “Az gelişmiş babanın az gelişmiş tek oğlu”, “’Bu çocuk ne
olacak böyle, Müzeyyen? Yaramaz. Olsaydı pısırık olacağına.’”, “Siz de benim gibi, … sıkıntı ve nefretle
yaşadınızsa, Ankara güneşi sizin de uyuşturmuşsa beyninizi, Ata’nın izinde gitmekten başka bir kavramı
olmayan Cumhuriyet çocuğu olarak yayan, pis pis gezdinizse … Hergele Meydanı’nda … kaybettiniz (benim
gibi).”
25
42
problematic relationships with their fathers. Almost all of his characters refrain from
resembling their fathers: “[Selim experiences] suffering because of and on behalf of others.”28
Therefore from the beginning, the modern Turkish novel (anti)hero is conceived of as the
orphan whose father is condemned to foreign ideals and thus has lost his power. (Gürbilek
2001: 62). Moreover, these father figures – Selim’s own father as well as Atatürk – signify
idols in Selim’s life whose expectations he has to live up to. In this respect, the notion of
being underdeveloped is not just a source of embarrassment and inferiority. The constant
reference to his being underdeveloped is a reaction against the understanding that one has to
follow the convention of underdevelopment. In another interpretive level, it implies that “we”
are underdeveloped only because “they” are developed. It critiques the self-defensive reflex of
the East which looks at itself only through the mirror of the West. Therefore a constant
experience of suffering is revealed through the expression of such sentences. In this
seemingly tongue-in-cheek attempt to present the inexpressible traumas of his childhood,
Selim is also willingly historicizing social life in Turkey. He associates his own traumas with
other such traumatic experiences of society which are never really expressed. The notion of
being from the provinces, the pressure of being a member of one of the first generations of the
Republic, the notion of being an “underdeveloped” nation and society are experiences which
Selim historicizes in his narrative. Finally, the idea of a “loser’s story” is dominant throughout
the novel. We, as readers, realize that Selim wants to “tell” it, to get rid of this traumatic
experience. The desire to overcome the sublime is the reason for the desire to narrate.
However, Selim’s mistrust in words enables him to narrate in a subverted manner.
Selim’s desire to re-contextualize his pain through ironic constructions of his past, his efforts
to present the unpresentable only through subversion still do not completely rule out his
hidden attempts to express, enunciate, narrate and recount his past. We witness certain
frustrated statements in between this seemingly tongue-in-cheek attempt to rewrite history.
This frustration is clear in a passage where Selim expresses his unfriendliness towards
“foreigners:”
So I am dying now and I don’t appoint anybody in my place. I will take all my fury
to my grave. I couldn’t explain to anyone while I lived… They despise my
underdeveloped anger, they look down on it… I hope you will find a cure to death
28
“Başkaları yüzünden ve başkaları adına genç yaşta acı çekmektedirler.”
43
soon so that I will be whining in your ears for thousands of years. What if they
eventually understand me? Even worse, even worse. (657)29
What Selim does here is to associate the kind of underestimation and discontent directed at
the East with the kind of underestimation he has experienced all his life. This association
contributes to the “loser” discourse he develops in order to identify himself and the people
like him, the disconnected. By writing back to an official history of winners and victors he
gives voice to and speaks on behalf of all the disconnected. The desire for narration becomes
significant again in this context because it also emerges as a liberated space for him to take
revenge on and make fun of the so-called winners.
Nurdan Gürbilek posits that Oğuz Atay’s irony stems from “the tension between the necessity
for narration and its impossibility” (2004: 15).30 Seen from this point of view Selim’s desire
for history and for the narration of that history could be linked to a notion of
relation/belonging to some sort of origin. This chapter will turn to the notion of identity and
belongingness later. However this desire could also be explained by another desire to express
and explain the self. Selim knows from the beginning that he cannot tell history with perfect
accuracy, exactitude and authenticity and therefore chooses to tell it ironically. This sense of
irony makes the return to history a problematizing one; it not only highlights the problem of
the historical representation but it also requires irony as the only way to overcome this
problem if one wants to write. Since a sober, serious manner would make the writer’s text
“cheesy,” irony is inevitable. Selim knows that narrative is an altogether problematic concept
but he also knows that it is the only way for him to present himself. Through this paradox
situated at the center of his writing, Selim and the writer both mock representation and the
desire for narration and also retain an ardent passion for writing/narrating.
This passion, at certain points in the narrative turns into a writing frenzy. The excessive
passion for explaining and narrating implies on the one hand, the exuberance of someone who
has been silenced all his life; on the other hand and on a more abstract level, this
excessiveness mocks the general efforts of historians as well as scientists to explain and
rationalize everything. On another level, it also implicitly mocks the author Oğuz Atay’s
“Ben de ölüp gidiyorum işte ve yerime kimseyi bırakmıyorum. Bütün öfkelerimi toprağa götüreceğim.
Yaşarken de anlatamadım kimseye… Az gelişmiş öfkeme de burun kıvırıyorlar, dudak büküyorlar… İnşallah
yakında ölüme de çare bulursunuz ve ben de binlerce yıl kulağınızın dibinde sızlanır dururum. Ya beni anlarlarsa
sonunda? Daha kötü, daha kötü.”
30
“Anlatma gereği ile anlatmanın imkansızlığı arasındaki gerilim”
29
44
desire to write everything he so far has kept to himself. In one of the first receptions of The
Disconnected, the critic Fethi Naci criticizes the novel by the following statement:
“Apparently this writer has written down everything that came to his mind!” (Ecevit 2007:
312).31
The absurd historical epic assumed to be written by Selim in the novel is entitled “Yesterday,
Today, Tomorrow” [Dün Bugün Yarın]. It consists of a preface followed by five separate
songs. This is a text that Turgut comes across while he searches Selim’s room after his death.
He also comes across some other explanatory notes to the epic which are presumably written
by a man called Süleyman Kargı. In this exegesis, it is striking to the readers how each
explanation is carefully constructed to correspond to some past reality (which obviously is
fallacious) and the rational and scientific tone with which everything is explained. These
notes seem to function in two different ways. In the first place they represent Süleyman’s
efforts to “present” Selim to the world and therefore Atay once more points out the notion of
telling and being understood. As opposed to the absurdity of Selim’s text, this text is serious
in tone and it is in the service of rationalizing and historicizing Selim’s text by referring to
certain social, historical and scientific phenomena. In this respect, if Selim’s text is an
example of irony, the explanations of Süleyman Kargı are an example of a very wellconstructed satire. On the other hand, the discrepancy between false and misrepresented
content and the sober and serious manner with which it is written problematizes the power of
representation and narration as the ultimate ground for knowledge and truth. While implicitly
condemning official history for the sake of subjective history and showing how documents
could be used, manipulated and exploited either intentionally or unintentionally, the author,
too, delves into a practice of documenting, categorizing and explaining everything through the
character Süleyman:
I start with the discussion of the common title of the songs “Yesterday, Today,
Tomorrow.” What does Selim mean by the word “Yesterday?” … In my opinion, the
“unique and Turk” (line 7) Selim obviously wishes to refer to the place of Turks
within history. “Yesterday,” namely the Turks in Central Asia… How was their
situation? Was it, as the English say, ‘dull and wild’? (see the quatrain before the
preface, line 3). “Kamus-u Berceste-i Türki”32 which I have consulted upon for this
“Aklına geleni yazmış bu romancı!”
This is one of the many false documents Atay invents. It could be translated as “Selected Dictionary of
Turkish Language”
31
32
45
matter writes: ‘Turks led tribal lives before they migrated to their homeland… We
can prove how this system is remote from today’s life conditions by the fact that
such words as glass, straw, tie, rent (apartment rent), …coffin, music, education,
bed,… word, sentence were not known in this language… (137-138)33
In another passage similar to this Süleyman refers to an ancient Turkish inscription called
“Bilig-Tenüz” which reminds one of a famous book by Yusuf Has Hacip entitled Kutadgu
Bilig completed in the 11th century. In his notes Süleyman Kargı takes up two pages to
explain this work (146-147). In yet another passage, he takes up the word “tutunamayanlar”
used by Selim and defines the term with the help of the “encyclopedia of weird creatures.”
The encyclopedia gives the Latin name as “disconnectus erectus:” a clumsy and fearful
animal. There are some which are the size of a human being… Their paws and nails are very
weak… They cannot sense danger from afar… [They usually] reside in secluded houses…
They do not know how to protect themselves” (149-150).34 In a passage in which Süleyman
claims to have found important documents about a young Turkish boy in Central Asia he
addresses Western historians: “Western historians constantly talk about documents… Do you
want documents, esteemed historians? What else do we have than documents? Here is a
document for you…” (183).35
All these passages are worth quoting here for their exemplification of the way Atay turns the
desire to narrate into a powerful instrument of mockery, irony and parody. However, despite
their ridiculous connotations and ironic content, they signify a critique of certain social
institutions, of Western rationality, of the notion of encyclopedic knowledge as well as
historical knowledge, of bourgeois practices and so on. It seems that in an environment with a
chaotic distribution of knowledge, the writer desires to insert his own sense of knowledge. By
imitating and mimicking a historicist and scientific discourse Atay mocks the whole idea of
such discourses. At the same time, he acknowledges discourses as a significant way to
“Şarkıların ortak adı olan ‘Dün Bugün Yarın’ı ele alarak işe başlıyorum. Selim, ‘Dün’ kelimesiyle ne demek
istiyor? … Bana göre ‘Tek ve Türk’ (mısra 7) olan Selim, elbette Türklerin tarih içinde nasıl yer aldığı
meselesine değinmek istiyor. ‘Dün’, yani Orta Asya’daki Türkler… Bu durum nasıldı? İngilizlerin dediği gibi
‘dull and wild’ mıydı? (Bak: ithaftan önceki dörtlük, mısra 3). Bu konuda başvurduğum ‘Kamus-u Berceste-i
Türki’ şunları yazıyor: Türkler Orta Asya’dan anavatana göç etmeden önce bütünüyle bir kabile hayatı
yaşıyorlardı… Bu düzenin, bugünkü hayat şartlarından ne kadar uzak olduğunu, artık dilimize yerleşmiş olan,
cam, hasır, kravat, kira (ev kirası), … tabut, müzik, tahsil, mezar, karyola, kelime, cümle gibi kelimelerin bu
dilde bilinmemesiyle kanıtlayabiliriz.”
34
“Beceriksiz ve korkak bir hayvandır. İnsan boyunda olanları bile vardır… pençeleri ve özellikle tırnakları çok
zayıftır… tehlikeyi uzaktan göremez… terkedilmiş yuvalarda yaşarlar… kendilerini korumayı bilmezler.”
35
“Batılı tarihçiler, durmadan belgelerden bahsederler… Belge mi istiyorsunuz sayın tarihçiler? Bizde belgeden
çok ne var? İşte size belge.”
33
46
represent and distribute knowledge. The parody of a scientific tone and encyclopedic
knowledge is seen in one of Borges’s short stories entitled “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”
(Borges 1964: 3). The story informs its readers about an imagined land called Uqbar. The
protagonist of the story tells his readers how he has come up with the word in an encyclopedia
and throughout the story gives his readers a description of the land by alluding to references.
Like the way Atay gives encyclopedic knowledge with a pseudo-scientific tone in a fictional
framework, Borges creates his fiction in a similar tone with constant reference to an original
text, a source. Brian McHale argues that “By writing a metatextual commentary on an
unwritten “original” text, instead of the original itself, Borges has actually created the fiction
he is ostensibly refusing to create” (1992: 27). Similarly, Atay creates his fiction and
fictionalizes his story by constructing imaginative scientific, categorical sources, references
and documents.
In this mockery, Selim who desires History, for the unpresentable in history loses his
authority as Süleyman, the distributor of knowledge, takes over. The “sublime” past to which
Selim has access only through a self-degrading irony, is torn to pieces by the diligent
narrative writing represented by Süleyman who is ready to explain everything with a strong
sense of accuracy. However what both texts do is to foreground the incapacity of historical
representation (and any kind of representation for that matter) no matter how much both want
to narrate. At the same time all these different narrations exhibit the “malleability of historical
reality” (1991: 113). Based on this idea of malleability, postmodernist historical novels
transform the “sublime” into alternative accounts of history.
An Alternative History
“Tarihin aldatıcılığından kurtulmak istiyordu”36
In Writing History as a Prophet, Elisabeth Wesseling explains the term “uchronian fictions”37
as follows:
In varying ways and with differing degrees of optimism, they invent possibilities for
disrupting the power of the establishment to reproduce itself continually, and for
“He wanted to get rid of the deceptiveness of history” (Tutunamayanlar, 136).
These fictions establish certain strategies which allow the novelists to write from a perspective Wesseling calls
“counterfactual.” In the counterfactual representational framework historical reality is deliberately depicted in a
distorted manner so as to emphasize the deceptiveness of historical knowledge. Writing History as a Prophet.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1991 (162-163).
36
37
47
transforming the basic pattern of history as a ceaseless repetition of violence and
oppression… The possibility of a new beginning for history is envisaged from the
unrealized possibilities of the past. (1991: 163)
It is precisely in this respect that we can argue that, in this novel, the historical sublime is
transformed into new versions of history. Selim’s desire for history is partly the result of his
desire to situate himself and people like him within his own account of history which is
independent of any authoritarian configuration of the past. Elias claims that such novels “use
representation as a weapon and a political shield; they directly correlate their own cultural
politics to how time and space, as history, are represented or configured” (2001: 103). To a
certain extent, Atay’s transformation of the historical sublime retains a political side to it
which reveals his own affiliations. However, he does not deliberately use representation as a
weapon to inscribe his own cultural politics into the text as do the novels discussed by Elias.
Rather, the critique produces itself somewhat naturally within the text. The Disconnected does
not announce statements about historical knowledge but it gives an alternative
account/representation of historical knowledge so that it re-contextualizes it. The
intertextuality of the novel serves to re-contextualize historical reality. Hutcheon argues that
“Postmodern intertextuality is a formal manifestation of both a desire to close the gap
between past and present of the reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context”
(1988: 118). It achieves this through giving alternative accounts of the past which
demonstrate both the “malleability of historical reality” (Wesseling 1991: 113) and the fact
that certain groups have always been ruled out from “official” accounts of history. What
differentiates Atay from other Western writers of postmodernist historical fiction is that the
alternative accounts he creates cannot only be considered as socially determined but also, as
we will now see, as the individual’s secret motive to feel a part of the crowd.
Atay’s re-contextualization does not only constitute the past but also the present. Selim is
disturbed both by the fact that history ignores him, that he cannot find a place for himself in
the historical records and by the fact that today’s world and people do not appreciate him.
Hence, his re-contextualization of the past is not just an effort to debunk official history. He is
perpetually provoked by a desire to “be something.” Even when he realizes that he is never
appreciated, and will be forgotten, he is motivated to produce documents about those he calls
“the disconnected” and thus tries to guarantee a place within historical records. His plans of
writing an encyclopedia of the disconnected could be explained through such a motivation:
48
I wrote a song for the disconnected once. They were all left in Süleyman Kargı’s
place. How strange: I don’t even have a copy of what I wrote. Nobody is as
negligent of himself as I am… I went through what I wrote and saw that I only
spoke of myself. Maybe it is good that I didn’t read it to anybody… I hope
Süleyman Kargı lost them. I hope my photo album will get lost, too. And I hope, the
day that I die, I will be forgotten like my father. I should at least have a right in this.
At least, they will say such things as “He didn’t live the way he wanted but he died
the way he wanted” after me. They will say, “He didn’t have a place among the
disconnected.” And they will say “Who is he to be a disconnected.”
I have great respect for the real disconnected. I would like to collect them all in an
encyclopedia. The Turkish Disconnected’s Encyclopedia. (671-672)38
After this long contemplation, Selim undertakes the task to write the encyclopedia of the
disconnected. In this encyclopedia we read some names in an alphabetical order and an
explanation next to every name. It is interesting to observe that all these imaginary people are
marginalized in society because of rather ridiculous reasons. Nevertheless, Selim wants to
inscribe the ridiculous, the comic and the pathetic in the records. Atay, on the one hand,
mocks the obsession of recording everything; on the other hand, he creates a social balance of
justice by putting the most obscure details of people’s lives in the picture. This also is a part
of Selim’s strong desire to write history from his vantage point. In this parodic writing, Selim
seems to have a secret motive to situate himself in the future as the “one who wrote about the
disconnected.” And this will eventually give him a noticeable place among people. At the
same time, Atay creates Selim as a very complex character and hence it is hard to observe
what is tongue-in-cheek and what is serious, at times. However, it should be noted that the
obsession with being the disconnected, writing about them, creating so-called historical
records demonstrates the secret desire of the character to achieve something even if it could
be considered ridiculous.
In different parts of the novel, Selim as well as Turgut exhibit a sense of being cast out from
society. Particularly Selim develops a “we vs they” discourse which is relevant to the
“Tutunamayanlar için şarkı yazmıştım bir zamanlar. Süleyman Kargı’da kaldı hepsi. Ne garip: Ben de bir
sureti bile yok yazdıklarımın. Kimse, kendine karşı bu kadar ihmalci değildir…Yazdıklarıma bir baktım ki
durmadan kendimi anlatmışım. Kimseye okumadığım isabet oldu… Süleyman Kargı da kaybetmiştir inşallah.
Fotoğraf albümüm de kaybolur inşallah. Ben de inşallah öldüğüm gün, babam gibi unutulurum. Buna hakkım
olmalı hiç olmazsa. Hiç olmazsa, istediği gibi yaşayamadı ama istediği gibi öldü, istediği gibi unutuldu
kabilinden soğuk bir söz ederler arkamdan. Tutunamayanların arasında bile yeri yoktu, derler. O kim,
Tutunamamak kim, derler. Gerçek tutunamayanlara saygım büyüktür. Onlar bir ansiklopedide toplamak
isterdim. Türk Tutunamayanları Ansiklopedisi.”
38
49
articulation of the alternative. In the explanatory notes Süleyman Kargı points to Selim’s
frustration by saying that he sees in Selim “the symptoms of a revolt against an inevitable and
an ineluctable destiny” (220). Süleyman furthermore discovers that in order to fight this
system Selim has addressed people in his writing. In a quasi-religious tone he says:
It is unfortunate of them that they consider emotional timidity cowardice, sincerity
adulation, and assistance repression.
It is unfortunate of them that they consider a purely naïve heart that opens up to
them a fool whose weaknesses should be abused and profited from.
They do not have any place among the people who create the future.
They will be forgotten. (221)39
The last sentence is striking in the sense that Selim almost forgets the playful pseudo-religious
tone with which he writes and reveals his own aspiration. It embodies Selim’s frustration. If
we go back to the whole passage, it is interesting because through this religious discourse
Selim transforms himself into a figure of authority who issues a decree about people’s lives.
By doing this he, in a way, avenges his past which has always imprisoned him according to its
own rules. On the one hand, this is a speech by a passionate advocate of a just system. On the
other hand, thanks to this tongue-in-cheek religious tone, he could present the unpresentable
that resides within him. While doing this, he takes this chance to express his distress to the
whole of humanity.
Throughout the novel Oğuz Atay seems to have a two-fold – or rather paradoxical – project.
On one level, he questions the possibility and credibility of narratives; the concept of
historical representation. He experiments with various forms of writing, discourses, literary
styles for this representation so as to foreground the discursive nature of representation. On
another level, through this experimentation he also produces his own discourse of history, he
contributes to the debates on how to represent past time and past space. Frank Ankersmit
argues “You have meanings only if you have representations” (2005: 96). While Atay looks
for different ways of representing history, he at the same time produces many different
possibilities for representation all of which are equally “correct.” It is in this sense that the
book is laden with the desire to narrate and to represent. While Selim implicitly questions the
meaning of historical knowledge he also continuously tries to construct his own sense of
“Ne yazık onlara ki duygulu çekingenliği korkaklık, samimiyeti yaltaklanma ve yardımı bir baskı sayarlar. Ne
yazık onlara ki kendilerine açılan saf bir kalbi zaaflarından istifade edilecek, istismar edilecek bir akılsız
sayarlar. Onların geleceği yaratan insanlar ararsında yeri yoktur. Unutulacaklardır.”
39
50
meaning within history. Selim’s ontological frustration as a character allows his own
experience of the past to be presented against the workings of history proper. In this respect,
what he creates is the history of the “other” rather than an alternative history. Unlike Lying
Down to Die in which alternative versions of history are deliberately given to create a multilayered space of representation, The Disconnected ridicules history and historical knowledge
to juxtapose it against the history it writes. However, it should be noted that it is more an
attempt to ridicule official discourses in a form of writing which comes across as “personal
history writing” than an attempt to expose the author’s own sense of history.
“History is all about distortion” says Süleyman Kargı. “History is a dream that we dream
today and that extends from the past to the future. Like all dreams, history could be
interpreted too but not while it is being dreamt” (231).40 With these noticeable statements, the
novel acknowledges the intangibility of historical knowledge and the discursive framework
within which it operates. Following these sentences Süleyman undertakes the mission of
mediating one of Selim’s dreams which depicts many famous historical figures. Among these
figures are: Alpaslan (a Turkish ruler who first invaded Anatolia), Abdülhak Hamit (late 19th
century Turkish poet), Hitler, Maxim Gorki, Osman Hamdi Bey (late 19th-century Turkish
painter), the prime minister of the time, Namık Kemal (a revolutionary 19th-century Turkish
poet-playwright) and so on. All these figures are depicted as the actors of a play in which the
actors are discussing socialism. Full of absurd content, this piece makes almost no sense at all
when read for the first time. However it is significant for various reasons. The first of these
reasons is Selim’s desire to give himself voice in an atmosphere of chaos. If historical reality
is such a chaos, he wants to come up with his own form to represent it. The second reason is
that he practices his hypothetical authority by situating himself within an environment of such
crucial figures, just like he does with the pseudo-religious discourse. Selim’s dream soon
turns into a play in which each of the famous figures have a part:
I enter the room through the balcony. In the room, there are people of various
heights. Abdülhakhamit…stands up and approaches me; tells me that everyone has
learned their parts and that we can start rehearsing. (232)41
“Tarih bir tahriften ibarettir. Tarih, geçmişten geleceğe uzanan ve bugün gördüğümüz bir rüyadır. Bütün
rüyalar gibi tarih de yorumlanabilir; ama görülürken değil.”
41
“Balkondan içeriye giriyorum. Odada çeşitli seviyelerde (tavana kadar) insanlar bulunuyorlar.
Abdülhakhamit…ayağa kalkarak bana yaklaşıyor; herkesin rolünü ezberlediğini ve provaya başlayabileceğimi
söylüyor.”
40
51
He uses the notion of “play” as a metaphor for history itself to refer to questions on the
playfulness of history as well as the ways in which the past is granted different meanings in
the hands of different actors and directors. It also questions the ways history proper grants
roles to individuals.
This sort of historical parody is written from the perspective of the downtrodden, of the
underdog. In such alternative historical accounts, Wesseling claims that roles are distributed
in a reversed fashion:
Utopian counterfactual parodies rewrite history from the perspective of groups that
have been excluded from the making and writing of history. The ideological
principle which informs their alternate histories is the sympathetic identification
with those who have suffered history. The political commitment of the novels …
emerges in their fantasies about alternate distributions of the roles of winner and
loser. They do not merely foreground groups about which official historiography
tends to remain silent, but also allot them more power than they actually
possessed… (1991: 162)
It is true that in The Disconnected history is written from the perspective of the loser. Selim
inserts his subjective experience of the past into history. However, the roles do not change in
the novel. The loser is not granted the role of the winner; he is still the loser. The significance
of history here is that it is being written by a weak figure. The “loser” here is configured by
two aspects. On the one hand, the loser is a person who could not enter the records of history
because he is an insignificant character. On the other hand, the “loser” signifies a lack of selfconfidence, authority, a sense of underdevelopment and shame; someone who is bound to
disappear from life:
The Age of Shame is a prehistoric time that comes right after Bronze Age in which
the disconnected (disconnectus erectus) first appeared on earth. Selim Işık, who is an
old-fashioned creature, tried to live this period in our age. (430)42
Interestingly, the narrative is dominated by both mockery and pathos. Selim’s authentic pain
in life makes us laugh precisely because of the way Atay puts it. He is a loser, an underdog
because he is pathetic. At the same time, the kind of history he writes for himself which is
born out of his own self-degrading irony is comical. Thus, the history of the weak is
“Utanç devri tutunamayanların (disconnectus erectus) ortaya çıktığı tunç devrinden hemen sonar gelen tarih
öncesi dönemdir. Selim Işık, modası geçmiş bir yaratık olduğu için bu dönemi günümüzde yaşamaya
çalışmıştır.”
42
52
centralized. However, there is no earnest attempt to change the records of history, only a
jesting attempt to deconstruct it for the character’s own satisfaction. Selim’s desire to
textualize his past soon turns into a practice in which he takes pleasure in degrading himself
therefore strengthening his “weak” position against the power of History. As we have seen
before, we see this in his creation of an alternative account of the history of the disconnected
towards the end of the book: Turkish Disconnected’s Encyclopedia. This is significant in
opposition to Wesseling’s argument that losers are given the winners’ roles. However
Selim/the author depict these people still as losers. Nevertheless the fact that he wants to write
about these people and construct encyclopedic knowledge about their lives points out that he
wants to produce a powerful and dominating discourse out of the insignificant lives of these
people. It is also implied in the fact that Selim exalts the notion of the disconnected to the
extent that he believes he does not deserve such an elevated description (672).43
The replacement of official historical accounts by alternative ones draws attention to an
emphasis on a sense of justice and ethics. It is remarkable how Oğuz Atay subtly makes use
of parody to constitute a condition for creating ethical discourse. After all, the novel
foregrounds the disconnected as victims of an injustice commonly practiced not only in daily
human life but also in all sorts of social institutions as well as in the production of historical
records. In Allen Thiher’s words “Parodies of Hegelian-type teleological histories are usually
accompanied by a desire for an ethical encounter with history” (1990: 20). Yet Selim never
calls the reader to come to an ethical conclusion about his situation. This is precisely because
he/Atay does not produce any solution. The reason for Atay’s tension between a desire to
write and incredulity at what is written is explained through Gürbilek’s words: “We should
see this [tension] not only as a conflict related to a historical moment but also as a
psychological conflict” (2004: 27).44 This psychological conflict partly aroused from the
discrimination between “us” and “them” reveals itself in a conversation between Selim and
Süleyman about the explanatory notes of Süleyman:
Even Selim, when he was drunk one night, finally said: ‘It became even more
complicated with the explanatory notes.’ And then – on a night when he was even
more drunk – ‘Let them be ashamed of the result’ he said. ‘Who are ‘them,’ Selim?’
Gürbilek observes: “Atay makes it evident that a common pursuit of being disconnected (the idea of being
disconnected collectively, The Disconnected Clubs, The Banks of Pity [here we can include the encyclopedia of
the disconnected]) are ridiculous and that the moment the concept ‘disconnected’ [tutunamama] transforms itself
into a positive proposition it will lose its authenticity” Yer Değiştiren Gölge. İstanbul: Metis, 2005 (43).
44
“Bunu yalnızca belli bir tarihsel ana özgü bir çatışma olarak değil, aynı zamanda ruhsal çatışma olarak da
görmek lazım.”
43
53
I asked. ‘Well, them’ he said. ‘them them them.’ ‘That’s right’ I said. ‘Them. So, not
us.’ (137).45
Spectralization of History
Thinking the Past as a Marker of Identity
The Disconnected introduces a rather problematic as well vital position for approaching the
notion of the past and of history: the spectralization of the past. What is meant by
spectralization is to reconfigure the past as another ontological dimension; to see it as a ghost
which belongs to another world, so to speak. In other words, the past incessantly comes back
to haunt. Part of Selim’s desire for history – and the narration of it – comes from his
attachment to it as a marker for his existence and identity. He sees history as the inseparable
component of life and all its layers. The idea of the dependence of the subject on his past for a
confirmation of identity is also visible in the novel. The significance of cultural memory for
the configuration of the past and its relation to identity politics is foregrounded.46
Going back to The Disconnected, we see that the encounter with the past repeatedly
reconstructs not only Selim’s relation to his past but also to his identity. Selim not only
rewrites the past but also listens to the voices from the past; from another world. Likewise,
Turgut, participates in conversations with the dead Selim. Similarly, again, Selim participates
in conversations with famous dead figures in his writings and gives voice to them through his
text. As a result, the novel emerges as a space for these “ghostly hauntings” from the past.
“Ghosts mediate cultural, historical and psychological spaces that they alone can traverse”
writes Erica L. Johnson (2004: 110). According to this definition the haunting of the ghost is
conceived of as a discursive practice of signification which both brings back and signifies the
past and affects the present and the future through this signification. In the novel, the
signification of the past indispensably creates an effect for the subjective condition of the
“Selim bile – sarhoş olduğu bir gece – ‘Açıklamalarla durum daha da karıştı,’ dedi sonunda. Sonra da – daha
sarhoş olduğu bir gece – ‘Onlar utansın sonuçtan,’ diye kestirip attı. ‘Hangi onlar Selim?’ dedim. ‘Onlar işte,’
dedi. ‘Onlar canım. Onlar, onlar, onlar.’ ‘Öyle ya,’ dedim. ‘Onlar. Yani biz değil.’”
46
Jan Assmann suggests: “The supply of knowledge in the cultural memory is characterized by sharp
distinctions made between those who belong and those who do not…Access to and transmission of this
knowledge are… [controlled] by a ‘need for identity’”. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity” in New
German Critique. No: 65, 1995 (130). Selim’s discourse of “us” and “them” could be explained by this need for
identity, too.
45
54
characters to develop. The hauntings constitute the inexpressible “sublime.” In this respect,
the past itself is sublime for the characters. However unlike the idea that the historical sublime
is a separate category which we cannot access but only desire, the hauntings in the novel
function in such a way that they blur the boundaries between the past and the present. The
realm of the dead and the realm of the living are inexplicably bound up with each other. The
voices from the past demonstrate that there is actually no escape from them. Every character
in the novel is, at one point, haunted. Atay, instead of making a clear-cut distinction between
the specter and its haunted subject, mixes them in a process where each element affects the
other. By the end of the novel the reader presumes that Selim or Turgut would not be who
they are if it weren’t for these voices from the past.
In the second verse of the “Song of the Disconnected” Selim writes:
Selim Işık, unique and Turk. And emotional, relentless.
Impatient and negative, lifeless in his life
So he was considered; he was real; no he wasn’t real.
He dug into the history of the disconnected
…
He wanted to embrace death and eternity. (114)47
This small piece gives us important clues as to how Selim configures himself as well as his
motives for his investigation of the past. From the beginning he acknowledges his desire to
look for those who are disconnected. By constructing a history of such people he also
maintains a position among them for himself. Wesseling talks about the retrieval of the past as
satisfying personal needs: “[Postmodernist novelists] expressly draw our attention to the
highly self-interested motives which cause their historian-like characters to set out on a quest
for the past” (1991: 121). Embarking on such a project of writing the history of the
disconnected in one sense helps Selim to feel part of a group, to designate an identity for him
as someone who is “disconnected.” In another sense, the mere practice of writing this history
charges him with a mission and therefore constructs an identity accordingly: Selim as
someone who looks for the disconnected. The investigation into the past (and not just the
parodic writing of the history of the disconnected) as such is determined by Selim’s constant
obsession with it which is revealed through the hauntings he experiences.
“Selim Işık tek ve Türk. Ve duygulu, amansız. Sabırsız ve olumsuz, yaşantısında cansız sanılırdı; gerçekti,
hayır gerçek değildi. Tutunamayanların tarihine eğildi…Kucaklamak isterdi ölümü ve sonsuzu.”
47
55
If we take the past to be a ghost then, what kind of a relationship to the ghost does the novel
portray? It is a frustrating relationship which dictates that the haunted subject should speak to
the ghost, express it and at the same time learn to live with it. Even though the idea of
“learning to live” implies its connection to the ghost – after all, we must learn to live with the
ghost – at the same time it negates the action of living itself since “learning to live with it”
hints at inertia, a sense of blind submission which Derrida articulates as well.48 Perhaps the
frustration emerges when “living” and “being haunted” are expressed both at the same time.
The kind of life represented in The Disconnected is precisely marked by this collision of life
and its other. As I have said earlier, haunting is always very much in the daily lives of the
characters. This intermingling which Derrida calls “learning to live” lies at the heart of
Atay’s expression of life. It is more an expression of frustration than of life. It is this complex
relationship to the ghosts of the past that inscribes the identity of Selim and Turgut within the
society they live in. Derrida argues that the ghost is indeterminate. I would like to argue that
the haunted subject is also indeterminate. The ghost is indeterminate in the sense that it has a
contradictory existence – a non-existence, so to speak – and this (non)existence is confirmed
through the existence of a haunted subject. Likewise, the haunted subject (even more
broadly, the subject as such), in my reading of The Disconnected, cannot be perceived
without his connection to the ghostly past. Turgut, before being involved with the ghost of
Selim, lives an ordinary life with his wife and two kids; the simple lifestyle of a rather welloff, educated Turkish family. There is a rupture within this “simple” life as soon as he is
haunted by the ghost of Selim. The simple routines of everyday life break and Turgut finds
himself being swept away by the spectral force of the late Selim. In this context, the ghost
opens a dimension to another kind of existing or “living” which is also an opening up into the
possibility of a loss of productive meaning in life. Sooner or later one faces the ghost, one
experiences this break within life. It is in this sense that the haunted subject is also the
indeterminate one. In “Injunctions of Marx” Derrida quotes from Valéry:
But [Hamlet] is an intellectual Hamlet. He mediates on the life and death of truths.
His ghosts are all the objects of our controversies; his remorse is all the titles of our
Derrida describes “learning to live” as a sense of living which is designated by a connection to a ghost.
Learning to live, in this sense, becomes learning to live with a ghost. It is crucial because according to Derrida,
this is the only possibility for a true living: “If it – learning to live – remains to be done, it can only happen
between life and death. Neither in life or in death alone. What happens between the two, and between all the
‘two’s’ one likes, such as between life and death, can only maintain itself with some ghost…The time of the
‘learning to live,’ a time without tutelary present, would amount to this, to which the exordium is leading us, to
learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce
without commerce of ghosts”. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New
International. New York and London: Routledge, 1994 (xviii-xix).
48
56
glory … Hamlet does not know what to do with all these skulls. But if he abandons
them!... Will he cease to be himself? (1994: 5)
The answer to this question would be an affirmative one. It is because of all these skulls that
Hamlet is what we know him to be. It is this indeterminacy of the subject that makes a
connection, even an attachment to the ghost possible. Hamlet learns to live only with the
skulls. The frustration of the subject’s existence, in a way, becomes the confirmation of his
existence.
In Derridean terms, the ghost is: “something, between something and someone, anyone or
anything, some thing, “this thing,” … this thing that looks at us, that concerns us…, comes to
defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy” (1994: 6). The
specter for Derrida is a destroyer of all kinds of binary oppositions. It is this in between
existence of a ghost that defies any system of knowledge as well as the system of given
meanings. There is no access to the borders of spectrality unless one submits to the injunction
delivered by the ghost. It is in this sense that the psychoanalytic view that the ghost should be
purged and the subject be healed emerges as a vain attempt. The so-called existence of the
ghost does not belong to ontology. Rather, this non-existent existence resists any attempt to
pull it into such categories. The arrival depends on the conjuration and through this
conjuration the relationship between the subject and the ghost is established. When Turgut
conjures Selim’s spirit, he accepts the task as a scholar or rather a mediator not because he
wants to complete Selim’s unfinished business in the world but rather because there is a
hidden, almost an inborn desire in Turgut to see himself through the dead Selim. Even though
the task is the injunction of the specter, there would be no injunction without Turgut’s
willingness to accept it or even to conjure the ghost in the first place. The willingness to
accept, in Derrida’s theorization, would be “inheritance:” “that we are heirs does not mean
that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with
this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or
know it or not” (54). The inheritance of the past is constitutive of the characters’ identities. To
paraphrase Derrida, we are, then, what we inherit whether we like it or not or both. This
inheritance does not enrich Turgut spiritually but it only presents him as what he is. He seems
to be inheriting the ghost(s) of the past and this inheritance cannot be transformed into
material and/or psychological benefit (unlike the idea of “healing experience”) but it only is a
prerequisite of the subject’s existence, the only possibility of being. He could only take the
ghost at his word. He could only fall back on the voice of past generations, of his father, of his
57
community because they are a part of his own voice even though he abhors what they
represent. Selim’s despising of his own father in the novel could be explained through this. He
will not change because he inherits from his father. In one of the short stories, Babama
Mektup [letter to my father] by Atay, the son writes a letter to the dead father: “It is now
impossible to make you change, my dear father; that is why I don’t think it is possible to
change myself either” (qtd in Gürbilek, 58).49
History has hidden from Selim and people like him all the documents that do not
favor its mission. The concern that a consistent philosophy of history is compulsory
has caused many facts to be put aside. There could have been no other way. Nobody
had the right to separate Selim from the past and the future. Someone had to account
for this. Someone would. Yesterday, today and tomorrow should connect to his
life… That is how the title of the songs emerged. What had really happened
yesterday? Yesterday, which prepared for today and tomorrow, had to be revealed
completely… (136)50
This is a passage taken from the explanatory notes of Süleyman Kargı. There is again, a sense
of solidarity for those left at the margins (Selim and people like him), a desire to identify a
certain group of people as the “other;” in other words to give them a name. The passage
quoted also draws attention to the power of the past and what it signifies for those people.
Süleyman Kargı implies that he sees the past, that is, “yesterday” as a determinate element in
the construction of today and tomorrow. History is not a separate and autonomous
phenomenon for Selim. On the contrary, it is an inseparable part of life for him which is also a
point of constant reconstruction. The voices from the past, the hauntings not only signify the
past but also the self and the present. It is in this sense that the concept of history as a ghost is
very much related to identity politics in the novel. In an essay entitled “Can The Dead Speak
To Us?” Colin Davis argues that “by succumbing to the fiction that the dead may speak, we
give voice to the haunting within ourselves which ensures that we are also deprived of our
own voice” (2005: 79). The connection between the ghostly presence of the past, its haunting
and identity underlies the very idea that our voice is constructed through haunting. This is not
“Seni artık değiştirmek mümkün değil babacığım; bu nedenle kendimi de değiştirmenin mümkün olacağını
sanmıyorum.”
50
“Tarih, işine gelmeyen bütün belgeleri, Selim ve Selim gibilerden gizlemişti. Tutarlı bir tarih felsefesinin
zorunlu olduğu endişesi, bşirçok gerçeğin, bile bile bir yana bırakılması sonucunu doğurmuştu. Başka türlü
olamazdı. Selim’i, geçmişten ve gelecekten ayırmaya kimsenin hakkı yoktu. Bunun hesabı sorulmalıydı,
sorulacaktı. Dün, bugün ve yarın, onun yaşantısıyla birleşmeliydi…Şarkıların ortak adı böylece çıktı ortaya.
Dün, gerçekten ne olmuştu? Bugün ve yarını hazırlayan dünü, bütün çıplaklığıyla ortaya çıkartmak
gerekiyordu.”
49
58
so much a deprivation of our own voice as it is a constant reconstruction of it. Selim and
Turgut give voice to the haunting within themselves not because they lack a unique voice but
because there is no such thing as a unique voice. The self is constantly re-inscribed through
hauntings. To exorcise the ghost would mean to kill the self. The obsession with the past is
portrayed in such a way that as the Turkish readers read it, it strikes them as an unchangeable
fact that the ghostly past which bears the shameful secret is an irreplaceable object of fetish
without which they are deprived of their identities. The constant intervention of the past into
the daily lives of Turgut and Selim (before his death) is a means of reconfiguration of their
position in relation to the past as well as the society they live in at present.
Conclusion: A True History or Farce?
Oğuz Atay’s configuration of the past in The Disconnected serves to create a fixed point of
reference for those who have a common sense of disconnectedness. This is probably the main
reason why the book has become popular in the last decade. There is also another aspect to
the portrayal of history in the novel: It constantly changes in its representation. The novel
produces a historical discourse which is both juxtaposed against and derived from an official
historical understanding.
The Disconnected transforms the sublime experience of the past into an absurd narrative form.
While doing this the text makes use of parody, irony and other comical elements. As I have
posited before, this is a two-fold narrative form. On the one hand, it articulates a sense of
pathos – the pathetic life of Selim makes the reader sympathize with his pain and yet there is
no actual physical suffering he goes through. On the other hand, there is a great tendency to
make fun of, satirize and mock this sense of pathos. Here it is necessary to remember an
interesting observation made by Hans Kellner. He points out the distinction between two
notions of history:
An optimistic or pessimistic history always precedes the farcical. It is the appearance
of differences within the vision of the past that calls its form into question… It is
only the second appearance that creates the perspectival contours necessary to create
historical significance. (1989: 318).
Similarly, Selim narrates his tragic past only by transforming it into comedy. He creates his
farce because he is exposed to tragedy. The readers both laugh at and sympathize with the
59
suffering he goes through. The history that is re-written on the one hand becomes an object
for revenge and hatred; it creates a sense of resistance to the discourses of official history, to
the sources of knowledge, to the knowledge itself and how it is produced. On the other hand,
it also destroys the content of what Selim writes as history because of its ironic tone.
Therefore the writing of Selim’s personal past loses its significance because of its constantly
self-degrading, ironic tone. In her theorization of parody, Hutcheon claims that “The mock
epic did not mock the epic: it satirized the pretensions of the contemporary as set against the
ideal norms implied by the parodied text…” (1985: 44). This is how Atay uses parody in The
Disconnected. While on the surface there is a parody/mockery of the official or the epic,
beneath it is a mockery of the self. By a self-satire which at the same time mocks and
questions historical knowledge and its representation the novel does create an alternative
historical discourse without privileging any specific discourse. It is debatable whether the
readers are faced with a true sense of history writing in The Disconnected. However, we can
conclude that this is a cynical text which has the ability to mock even the discourses that it
creates.
60
FACT OR FICTION? THE DOCUMENTARY NOVEL
AND LYING DOWN TO DIE
“The hand that made history again, is making you”51 is a noticeable quotation from Adalet
Ağaoğlu’s Lying Down to Die (1973) which signals history as a powerful instrument in the
hands of those that “make” it and impose it on people (2006: 94). It also signifies history as a
form of discourse which is continuously made and re-made through the hands of different
groups. In this sense, history is constantly made; that is to say, retrieved and brought to the
present so that an encounter with the past becomes possible. Such a designation of history is
significant for an understanding of the notion of mediation within a historical framework.
Adalet Ağaoğlu started her writing career as a playwright. After 1970, she gravitated towards
fiction writing. She is particularly known for incorporating the political and historical into her
novels. She reflected certain historical periods, social conditions within individual contexts in
her works. She has been in search for different modes of writing and has experimented with
writing styles. Apart from her career as a writer, she took part in social movements and cofounded the Human Rights Association in Turkey. She is still actively writing. Lying Down to
Die has been the point of focus among critics because of its historical content. It has been
acclaimed by many for its daring attempts at the illumination of a historical process
experienced in Turkey. It has also been analyzed as an example of modernist fiction in Turkey
and Adalet Ağaoğlu is a very important figure for incorporating her own politics into
modernist fiction in Turkey.
The mediation of history is one of the first striking elements that constitute Lying Down to
Die’s narrative because it both inserts the subjective historical experience into the depiction of
history and it repeats official historical representation. It installs historical context through the
representation of newspaper accounts, documented history writing and individual narrative
forms. Lying Down to Die is a rather problematic text in the sense that different narrative
forms are applied to install historical context in such a way that each of them is intertwined
with the other. Every other “chapter” constitutes the protagonist’s tracing of time in a hotel
room while contemplating the past, while the rest of the novel focuses on the ways in which
51
“Tarihi yeniden yapan el seni de yapıyor.”
61
this contemplation opens up to the present. It presents the general atmosphere of the past era
while it is willing to give a brief description of the historical condition. What is happening to
the characters determines what is happening in history.
From the Private to the Public: Mediating History
Lying Down to Die foregrounds the consciousness of Aysel, the protagonist, in its efforts to
mediate the past. Aysel is a middle-aged university professor who escapes one day to a hotel
room in order to die. We as readers are never quite sure whether she actually wants to commit
suicide. Throughout the novel it seems that she escapes to her imagination and memory to
take leave from the real world for a while. Undressing herself completely, Aysel practically
lies down on the bed to die. However, because of her memory’s incessant interruptions, she
could never really concentrate on the act of dying. She remembers her past in that small hotel
room. Through her consciousness the readers get to learn not only about her past but also
about the past of the first generation of a new regime: the youth of the newly-found republic.
Through her mental journeyings Aysel realizes that as a woman, she has always been the
subject of repression, of pressures and as a good citizen, of duties and obligations. In this
context, her history, which is not just her history but the history of a generation, comes across
rather as a site for re-evaluation. Interestingly, the book seems to bear a tension between a
lack of and a strong desire for history. The lack is marked in the novel by an intentionally
“objective” narrative of documented history which is juxtaposed with the subjective
interpretations of each of the characters through their letters and diaries. The novel starts with
Aysel’s arrival at a hotel, going up to her room, getting naked and lying on the bed. The
chronological description of events that take place is significant to the essential character of
the story which attempts to write history: “We ascended to the sixteenth floor on the elevator.
We got off on the sixteenth floor…[The porter] stopped in front of a room. I stopped too. He
opened the door. We went inside” (1).52 The novel starts predominantly with the simple past
tense which gives the impression to the reader that Aysel is objectively telling a story, any
story. Right after this brief introduction both to the story and Aysel’s psychological mood
comes another chapter that takes the reader back to Aysel’s childhood school days in which
school children are seen preparing for a school play. The mediation of a past experience as
such is given not only through Aysel’s own individual memory but also – because of the shift
“Asansörle tam on altı kat çıktık. On altıncı katta indik…Bir odanın önünde durdu. Ben de durdum. Kapıyı
açtı, içeri girdik.”
52
62
from the first person narration to the third person narration – through social memory, through
what is being remembered by the society who lived that past. On the one hand, there is a
scene from an individual’s childhood memory about the rehearsals of a school play. On the
other hand, this scene is specifically an element from the social memory of the first generation
of the new republic. Through such elements, the history of the nation is traced as well. The
school play is pictured as part of the big modernization process in which boys and girls are
bid to hold hands, wear shorts and the like. We both witness Aysel’s individual efforts of
mediating the past by remembering this scene from her childhood and the novel’s efforts of
reinforcing social memory by making her remember such a specifically Turkish case. A
reading devoid of any contextual background makes it possible to see the novel as the story of
an individual past while a contextual reading makes it obvious that the novel also analyzes
collective past within a critical framework.
What Aysel’s remembering of past times does is to create a pseudo-oral history. This
reflection upon the past helps reveal what happened within the light of a collective
consciousness. Aysel analyzes what happened in the past by the workings of individual
memory while the text which seems to reflect that individual memory incorporates the
collective memory within it. The so-called remembrance of Aysel actually includes a
narrative which consists of a (hi)storytelling by many different voices. All these individual
storytellers in the text establish a space of both conflicting and consistent ideas about the past.
A collective memory, is then, established by the accumulation of the different voices
represented in the text. In this respect, each private remembering opens itself up to the
formation of a public remembering. For instance, the text provides us with many characters as
different agents of the historical period Aysel remembers. One of them is Aydın, an elite
Francophone who despises the uneducated village people. Aysel’s remembrance of Aydın, on
the one hand, signifies an individual childhood memory; on the other hand it stimulates public
memory precisely because of the social class Aydın represents. It is specifically striking that
the people Aysel remembers are historical “types” in the Lukacsian sense. It is probably this
way of history writing that Lukacs promotes when he claims that the historical situation is
established in and through the so-called adventures of the insignificant people. All the other
types like Namık, İlhan, even Aysel help mediate the past in and through each individual
memory that opens itself up to the bigger picture. The distinction Ağaoğlu establishes in her
historical novel is that she does not produce her history writing by only describing these types
63
but she also gives voice to each one of them to create a multilateral, polyphonic understanding
of history.
Each chapter from the novel is presented with a title which expresses a case from a particular
time period. These are sometimes derived from the dominant discourses of the time, almost
slogan-like, such as “The Illuminating Path of the Republic” [Işık Yolu Cumhuriyet] or “An
Orchestra for Every Village” [Her Köye Bir Orkestra] and sometimes they express the
feelings of the characters as we see in the title “Surprised and Merry” [Şaşkın ve Şen] These
chapter titles give us hints as to the theme of each story told and they also imply how each of
the different characters as individual historical figures interpret as well as are affected by the
certain story being told. It is remarkable that these titles are supposedly chosen from anthem
names, songs, parts of historical speeches. In other words, they seem to be taken from the
history that is “taught” to people. In this sense, the novel subverts the specifically absolute
sense of history, history which is taught, by the stories the novel narrates within a framework
of individual historical experience. For instance, the chapter entitled “Relief” [İç Rahatlığı]
(131) begins with the so-called objective newspaper accounts and how Dündar the teacher is
pleased with all the developments. However, soon after this the book implies the poverty
Dündar lives in. It is through these contradictory images of the past that the novel
simultaneously presents us documented history (that is to say the past that is reported) and the
past that is and has been lived.
How does this historical narration within fiction function then? How is such a historical
narration that derives itself from a contradictory collaboration of two distinct forms of
representation configured? To a certain extent, what Lying Down to Die does is to create a
public historical consciousness out of personal experiences of that history. However, it does
not necessarily mean that by depicting the so-called objective history through documentation,
the novel tries to propagate an official sense of history. Nor does it mean that the novel’s
ultimate motive is to assert a subjective experience of history as valid or to articulate its own
sense and interpretation of the past. By foregrounding a dual sense of historical
consciousness, the novel problematizes both of these consciousnesses and tries to show the
ways in which private experience affects and contributes to the formation of a public
experience of history and vice versa. What is meant by this dual consciousness is the coexistence of a sense of history perceived through the myth (that is, an already given history)
and of the one perceived through individual memory. In the very first pages of Lying Down to
64
Die a performance by school children is depicted. The novel implicates an ideological sense
of history through its inscription of certain symbolic national anthems that the children sing:
Volga Volga!.. Volga Volga!..
Comrades we set out for the journey
Let our victory be merry
Let our hearts be filled with joy
Come now, come come
We set out for the journey.(9)53
The insertion of this piece exemplifies the ways history functions in the novel. It should be
noted that the novel does not aim to directly articulate a holistic, progressive, what Jenkins
calls “history in the upper case” sense of history (Jenkins 1997: 5). The various possible ways
of representing the past are inscribed and they create a ground for possible different
interpretations. The piece signals the fact that history has been written in anthems, songs,
manifestos, and the like. To remember this piece as part of the way we remember the past, to
write it in history acknowledges both this sense of “history in the upper case” and the novel’s
determinism to show us the differing ways we present the past.
Contrarily, the other sense of history is implicated in the novel as well. One of the ways is to
write an individual history. Here young Aydın decides to keep a journal:
I was born as the son of an educated father and a very beautiful mother from Yanya
in a room which takes in the wind from every side of a dilapidated mansion that
belongs to my grandfather… I like my father very much and I am always proud of
him… I have always tried to be a student that my parents and teacher are proud of
and I think I have succeeded in that. (32)54
This subjective and biased piece, as an example of narrative history reveals the kind of
historical consciousness that is individual in the way it remembers the past. It does not offer
any holistic notion of history but, as narrative history (either as a report on historical events or
a creation of one’s own history like The Disconnected’s Selim), this piece appropriates the
past with its own individual causes and effects, deletions and inclusions. The incorporation of
“Volga Volga!.. Volga Volga!.. Arkadaşlar çıktık yola, zaferimiz şen olsun, gönülle neşe dolsun. Hayda da
hayda, hayda da hayda, arkadaşlar çıktık yola!..” Volga is said to be the largest river in Europe. This celebratory
song out of many others like this is a typical one sung as a celebratory anthem for the independence war and the
establishment of the Turkish Republic. It is either chosen from a list of many others like this or is specifically
invented by Ağaoğlu herself.
54
İstanbul’da, dedeme ait harap bir köşkün her yanından rüzgar alan bir odasında, okumuş bir baba ile Yanyalı
çok güzel bir anneden doğmuşum…Babamı çok severim ve onunla hep iftihar ederim…her zaman büyüklerimin,
öğretmenlerimin iftihar ettikleri bir talebe olmaya gayret ettim ve bunda da muvaffak oldum sanıyorum.”
53
65
documented/official history55 as well as subjective versions of history into the fictional
narrative is essential to the understanding of a dual historical consciousness inscribed in the
minds of the readers. First, it acknowledges documentation and the objective tone as
frequently used methods not only by historians but also by writers of historical novels. It also
signals the novelist’s pretensions to verifiable fact and a tenable historical context. Wesseling
suggests that “[historical novels] … still contain signs that point toward the possibility of
valid, authentic historical knowledge, however hesitantly” (1991: 134). A sense of history is
inserted within the fictional narrative in order to establish the possible connections between
history and fiction. Secondly, this dual historical consciousness creates a dichotomy between
two conflicting perceptions of the past. This helps problematize history and assert history
writing as fiction writing (by erasing the hierarchical borders between the two fields and
enabling them to exist side by side). It also refers to fiction’s partial dependence on historical
context – either through subjective histories or through documented history – to re-present
past time and space. To insert Aydın’s naïve attempt to write about himself and his past is yet
another way of creating a ground for us to see the different possible appropriations of the past.
We will see how these two paradoxical modes of historical consciousnesses are articulated in
the novel and the possible outcomes of such an articulation for the reconfiguration of the
notion of historical novel.
Subjective and Documentary Representation of History: The Paradox of
Lying Down to Die
Perhaps it is not incorrect to say that Lying Down to Die bears certain qualities of the
“modernist historical novel” based on Wesseling’s definition. She argues that “the modernist
innovation of the historical novel can … be regarded as an expansion of the inquiry into the
ways in which the personal past can be retrieved and integrated into the individual’s
consciousness as carried out in the roman-mémoires” (1991: 75). Lying Down to Die
dramatizes Aysel’s personal past in the face of the whole nation’s past and is therefore trying
to integrate the personal past not only into the individual’s consciousness but also into the
general historical consciousness of the people. This is being done in the novel by putting
historical experience into individual contexts. In the light of such a definition the novel, to a
certain extent, could be considered a “roman-mémoire.” Both factual and fictional data are
55
This also includes a mythical understanding of history, which teaches history to the crowds as legends, grand
achievements in an exalted and celebrated manner as in the example of the Volga song.
66
merged and presented to the reader simultaneously and within individual frameworks so as to,
in a way, confuse the reader’s mind as to what is fictional and what is not. However, through
such an ambivalent use of both documented and subjective history the novel creates a ground
for presenting historical context and then by juxtaposing subjective history against that
context, it develops a critique out of the ground it first establishes. In other words, it contests
that which it establishes and because of this it is not incorrect to say that it conforms to Linda
Hutcheon’s definition of the “historiographic metafiction” which both “installs and subverts”
the historical context it makes use of (1988: 222).
The idea of history in the novels of Adalet Ağaoğlu is an area of conflict and crisis. However,
unlike many historiographic metafictions, Lying Down To Die does not specifically deal with
any theoretical concern for the problem of historical representation. As I have observed, one
of the most interesting aspects of the novel is the juxtaposition of several modes of
reconstructing the past. Especially by opposing so-called objective documented history to
subjective memory, it subtly engages in the problem of historical representation. By
presenting the different modes, it questions the absolutism of either. In the very first pages of
the novel, the narrative presents us with a scene from a preparation for a school play as part of
the celebrations of the new republic. As opposed to the elevated purpose and the exalted tone,
many absurdities take place at the actual show. During the performance, the curtains do not
open when they have to; the spectators see the moving feet at the backstage behind the short
curtain, misrepresentations occur on stage. Finally all the children, including Aysel, sing an
anthem and the show ends. The narrative continues:
Thank God. Many things have been achieved. And many others could not be
achieved but, both teacher Dündar and of course the children heartily believed that
you could survive any war with a clear conscience. After all, whatever happens, we
are Turks, we are the Republic, our bosoms a bronze shield… (20)56
Here we see the beginnings of a kind of tension between a sense of consciousness which is
being gradually developed and a set of ideals to believe in. Throughout the novel Ağaoğlu
historicizes this duality embedded in the historical consciousness of the generation. In this
“representation,” history, instead of signifying a sense of unity and integrity, signifies a sense
of dismemberment and emptiness for the main character. The past experience evokes distinct
“Çok şükür. Çok şeyler başarılmıştı. Çok şeyler de başarılamamıştı ama, Dündar Öğretmen de, elbet çocuklar
da, her savaştan açık alınla çıkıldığına ta yürekten inanmışlardı ya: Nasıl olsa, ne olsa, Türk’üz, Cumhuriyet’iz,
göğsümüz tunç siperi…”
56
67
emotions in each person which eventually lead to different constructions of that past. The idea
that they have not succeeded, even if it is true, is not to be pronounced or even reflected upon,
for after all the children are made to believe that they always succeed. A well-known
historical scene which is embedded in the individual’s mind and presented to the readers
through that mind signifies a challenge to the traditional, biased ways of representing that
historical scene. On the other hand, Ağaoğlu takes up an example of a celebration which is a
common picture for those who lived at that time in an effort to tie Aysel’s fictional narrative
to a factual world. This common picture is inscribed in the minds of the people through
narrative history as well as individual and public memory. As an element of public memory,
the notion of celebration, of celebrating the existence of the republic surpasses generations
through media. These celebrations have always been associated with an atmosphere of a
festival which is meant to circulate a great amount of hope and optimism. Another aspect of
these celebrations is that they are transformed into an almost sacred ritual. They, at the same
time, could be said to signify an official, authoritarian representation because October 29th is
not only celebrated as the day the Republic was founded but it also comes across as a space
for the official (historical) discourse to prevail. Fiction’s insistent connection to a factual
world creates a sense of bewilderment as to the verisimilitude of the events that take place
within the narrative. This sense of bewilderment, interestingly, takes shape both in the reader
and the characters. It is an inevitable reaction to the ambiguous narrative which makes use of
historical context, but does it only through individual frames. The fact that the text actually
does refer to a historical context creates the illusion that the characters are supposed to refer to
real historical beings. The kind of bewilderment experienced by Aysel for instance is a result
of the critical consciousness she develops by evaluating the things that happen around her. A
comic scene in which Aysel is embarrassed that Aydın will see her sewing fabric illustrates
this still naïve bewilderment:
She always recalled Aydın in the least expected times. She didn’t like his slanted
eyes, the looks in his eyes which promoted a little bit of tolerance, a little bit of
cynicism. But it was as if whatever she did, she did to live up to his expectations. It
was as if our Great Leader had appointed Aydın as a watchman. “What would he say
if he saw me sewing!..” (195)57
“Aydın, hep en beklenmeyen zamanlarda aklına düşüyordu. O çekik gözlerini, gözlerinin hoşgörüyle alay
karışımı bakışlarını sevmiyordu. Ama sanki ne yapsa ona inat, ne yapsa onun gözüne girmek için. Sanki Ulu Ata
Aydın’ı başına bekçi koymuş gibi bir şey. ‘Bir de çocuk bezi oyulgarken görse ne demez!..’”
57
68
The many ridiculous scenes and statements like this illustrate, in the first place, that the kind
of absurd discrepancy between what is idealized and what is practiced is questioned.
Although Ağaoğlu does not specifically choose to ridicule historical context, she presents her
readers the ridiculous in and through the juxtaposition of the ideal against the real, of the
official against the subjective. The fact that such people within precisely the same web of
relations as it is shown in the novel can and do exist in real life gives the narrative an even
more problematic status. In each case, the notion of the fictional is the basic provocative
element. The reader tries to distinguish the fictional from the factual while the main character
as she remembers the past, distinguishes between the fictional, mythic, legendary account of
history from the account which focuses on what really happened in her life to her. For
instance, the novel shows Aysel and other women as being still the victims of repression and
prejudice while official history also records that Turkish women are the first to be entitled the
right for suffrage. In this respect, Lying Down To Die makes the reader question not only the
abstract conception of history but it also makes her/him question and reflect upon the real
things that actually happened. This is the kind of paradoxical existence of the narrative.
Barbara Foley argues that the genre of the documentary novel constitutes a distinct fictional
kind: “It locates itself near the border between factual discourse and fictive discourse, but it
does not propose an eradication of that border. Rather, it purports to represent reality by
means of agreed-upon conventions of fictionality, while grafting onto its fictive pact some
kind of additional claim to empirical validation” (1986: 25). The writing of documented
history within the fictional discourse of Lying Down to Die represents such a claim to
empirical validation. It seems that one of the main motives of the novel is to establish a
verifiable connection to the historical context it represents. Therefore it creates a sense of
ambiguity in the connection between fact and fiction. The novel is both characterized by
Aysel’s story of her past and herself which constitutes the fictional narrative and the
representation of the nation’s history which constitutes the factual narrative. Certain strategies
such as the incorporation of real historical figures and newspaper accounts are specifically
deployed so as to blur the borders between fiction and non-fiction.
The way the past is documented in the novel is by reporting events. This is being done,
especially by quoting from the newspaper Ulus. It is an actual newspaper published between
1935 and 1953. These reports help to historicize the fictional context of the novel as well as to
problematize it. The reports create a sense of documented history in the reader as they are
69
being read. It is interesting that while the quotations constitute a serious report on what
happened in the politics, the unquoted parts in between the quoted ones still use a sober,
serious tone but report the less known, less heard, more insignificant events and people:
The people of Ankara listen to “Radyo Temsil Saati” on Fridays between 20.10 and
21.10.
“Russians rejected Germany’s offers of military aid.”
The distinguished ladies of the capital make a lot effort to be more glamorous than
ever for this year’s costume ball. (82, 83, 86)58
As we see, all the news items are reported in the same manner, one after another which makes
it harder for the reader to follow and to distinguish between the usefulness of the news. The
significant is reported simultaneously with the insignificant in the same narrative form. No
matter what the content is, the form creates the same effect in the reader. Here is a similar
example of documented report:
Cafe Tilla in Büyükada covered its terrace with canopy. The young people of
Büyükada know that they could dance on the terrace even on windy and rainy days.
Sweet smells spread from the teas in porcelain cups on the tables of Tilla. One is
surprised to hear other people say “tea is unavailable”. (113)59
The pseudo-objective tone with which the piece is written reminds one of the pseudoscientific tone of Süleyman’s explanatory notes in The Disconnected. Obviously, Atay mocks
the whole notion of scientificity by giving one of his most eccentric characters a scientific
tone. Similarly, we sense mockery in the way Ağaoğlu presents us the documentary report on
Café Tilla. At first sight, the reader does not detect the significance and the relevance of such
a piece. However the significance of the piece is its insignificant content. Furthermore by
reference to the factual context of World War II when basic commodities were not in
abundance, she makes an obvious critique of the so-called elite.
Interestingly, the novel makes use of historical references but only within a fictional
framework. One of the many examples of such a use is the existence of the character Erdal.
The character Erdal clearly designates a real person, Erdal İnönü, the son of the second
president of Turkey. It gives us interesting insights into the application of the factual within
“Ankaralılar cuma geceleri saat 20.10-21.10 arasında ‘Radyo Temsil Saati’ni dinlemektedirler”, “Ruslar,
Almanya’nın askeri yardım teklifini reddetmiştir”, “Başkentin güzide bayanları yılın kostümlü balosunun her
zamankinden parlak olması için büyük çaba harcamaktadırlar.”
59
“Büyükada’daki Tilla Pastanesi, terasını tentelerle örtmüştür. Büyükadalı gençler artık rüzgarlı ve yağmurlu
havalarda bile orada dans edebileceklerini bilmektedirler. Tilla’nın masalarındaki porselen fincanlarda güzel
kokulu çaylar tütüyor. İnsan, ‘Çay bulunmuyor’ diyenlere şaşıyor.”
58
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the fictional. The presence of a real-historical character (who is still alive) within a fictional
discourse emerges as a considerable instrument for the eradication of the borders between fact
and fiction. This reference also poses a question on the veracity of the character Erdal;
whether this reference constitutes biographical content or a representational strategy within
fiction which serves to problematize historical representation.60 Whichever it is, we should
bear in mind that such a reference is significant because it still invites the reader to read it
within a fictional framework. Lying Down to Die, as an example of a documentary novel, is in
Foley’s words “characterized by its adherence to referential strategies associated with nonfictional modes of discourse but also demanding to be read within a fictional Gestalt familiar
to contemporaneous readers” (1986: 41). Although Adalet Ağaoğlu, as the author, does not
use any source references and/or footnotes, it is an indisputable fact that the content of the
novel does refer to many historical events and personages one of whom (Erdal) actually holds
the status of being a character in the novel.
A referent from the verifiable historical world is depicted in the novel only through the
mediation of that referent in the individual forms of writing such as diaries, letters, etc. Letters
and diaries, in this respect, not only constitute a formal strategy within fictional writing, but
also an alternative area for the representation as well as the evaluation of the historical
referent. Most of the time, such forms of writing in the novel work as representational
grounds which display the characters’ psychological worlds. They, at the same time, sustain a
sense of link to a verifiable historical world by constantly addressing certain political,
historical issues and characters. The French admirer Aydın as a teenager writes in his diary:
Actually I like the French. Our teacher at Galatasaray used to tell us that the “French
are a very cultured nation who enjoy life.” Apparently I like the French because I
like culture and life. But since everybody is on the side of the Germans I can’t say
anything. I suppose the elderly do not support the Germans anymore… Today there
were the general rehearsals. But I could not see Aysel among the girls. I wasn’t
expecting her father to let her participate in the celebrations wearing mini shorts.
Eventually she has lost, too. She would grow in my esteem if she had participated in
the gymnastics movements… I fought with Namık. Since we wouldn’t be seeing
60
In his argumentation for biographical fiction, Jerry Varsava claims that fictional biographies present both
“history and his own story” which inevitably encompasses the simultaneous indication of past and present and
different genres like the documentary and the fiction: “In building up histories through the integration of various
genres, [such] novelists make a modest assault on our notions of historical truth and generic limit”. History and
Post-War Writing. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990 (221-222).
71
each other for the whole summer I wanted to part with him in a friendly manner. He
would go to his village. He yelled at me saying “I will work in the fields and you
will be lying on your backs!” He said things against Erdal too… I strongly resented
his lack of appreciation. I told him that to say something against Erdal means to say
something against our National Chief.61 He laughed at my face. His teeth were all
yellow. He should first learn to brush his teeth. If it goes on like this, we can’t
develop. (169-170-175)62
These quotations from Aydın’s diary are significant for their subtle incorporation of historical
as well as social context within the personal experience. Because certain real historical
references and referents demonstrate the accuracy of the historical context the fictional
narrative uses, it leaves in the reader a sense of doubt as to whether there is any desire for
creating fiction. There are references to historical figures not only as an external framework
but also within a fictional framework as we have seen in the character Erdal. Aydın’s tone and
his naivety acknowledge a similarity with a common discourse used by many people from the
same generation. The kind of elitist consciousness Aydın develops even as a child as a
French-admirer, luxury-loving Westerner as opposed to the kind of image Namık gives (antiWest nationalist) symbolize two distinct features of society. The idea of the development of
characters that bear a certain pretension to actuality within a historical framework enables the
readers to consider the novel, in a sense, biographical. However, the overt accuracy of some
of the characters and referential events also point out to the fact that an atmosphere of
alienation is being created. By inserting certain real characters into the fiction Ağaoğlu could
be said to attempt to insert a sense of incredulity on the fictional side of the narrative and at
the same time attempt to create fiction which is aware of its fictionality. Seen in this light, it
could be argued that the novel creates a metafictional ground for its reading. All these point to
the fact that whichever representational framework is used, the novel, in its integration of the
historical into the individual and vice versa, allows for, first the demarcation and then the
National Chief is a popular title given to the second President of Turkey, İsmet İnönü.
“Doğrusu ben Fransızları severim. Galatasaray’daki bir hocamız bize hep, ‘Fransızlar çok kültürlü ve hayatı
seven bir millettir’ derdi. Anlaşılan ben de kültürü ve hayatı sevdiğim için Fransızları seviyorum. Fakat herkes
Almanları tuttuğu için tabii sesimi çıkaramıyorum. Galiba büyüklerimiz artık Almanları tutmuyorlarmış…
Bugün de bizim genel provalar vardı. Fakat kızlar arasında Aysel’i göremiyorum. Zaten babasının, onun böyle
şortlu falan olarak bayrama girmesine izin vereceğini hiç ümit etmiyordum. O da sonunda yenildi işte. Jimnastik
hareketlerine katılsaydı gözümde daha büyüyecekti… Namık’la yine kavga ettik. Bütün yaz birbirimizi
görmeyeceğimiz için onunla arkadaşça ayrılmak istedim. O köyüne gidecekmiş. Mektepten çıkarken rastladım.
Ona güler yüz gösterdim. Fakat Namık, ‘Biz tarlada çift süreceğiz, beylerimiz sırtüstü yatacak!’ demesin mi?
Erdal aleyhine de atıp tuttu. Halbuki bir zamanlar en yakın arkadaşıymış. Bu kadirbilmezliği için ona çok
içerledim. Erdal’ın aleyhinde bulunmanın Milli Şefimizin de aleyhinde bulunmak olduğunu söyledim. Yüzüme
güldü. Dişleri sapsarı. Önce dişlerini fırçalamayı öğrense ya. Böyle giderse biz adam olmayız.”
61
62
72
eradication of the borders between fact and fiction. Such a reading of the novel could be
applied to the definition of the “pseudofactual novel” proposed, as we have seen, by Barbara
Foley: “such works of fiction characteristically possess an ‘overt frame’ proclaiming the
text’s veracity and a ‘covert frame’ admitting to the text’s fictionality” (1986: 112).
Adalet Ağaoğlu’s configuration of the past and of history is, then, through exhibiting the
narratives of history within particular cases instead of making parodies and distortions of it or
charging the narrative with ironic meanings. Lying Down to Die’s appropriation of the past
creates interpretive lines for the readers to reconfigure what we call “history” and while doing
this it particularly historicizes the past in a narrative form. It is important for readers in such a
case to realize that our relationship to the past, in one way or another is within a narrative
form through which meanings are created. In this respect, Lying Down To Die distinguishes
itself from the postmodern historical novel as defined by Hutcheon and Elias. However, the
novel still, to some degree, exploits what we know as history, in that it replaces the grand
narratives with the individual cases which from time to time display an absurd sense of
discrepancy with respect to the narrative. In a way, the novel transfigures the ideal into the
practical; thus fragmenting the integral into pieces. We all know and learn that in the first
years of the new republic there had been efforts made to ensure equality between men and
women, and to implement policies concerning the “enlightenment” of society but Ağaoğlu
attempts to historicize this period by underlining each and every individual suffering, joy,
confusion, fear and so on. As Aysel contemplates:
Our Great Leader once said that, ‘Whatever is on earth, is the work of the woman’. I
wonder if the statues in Ulus Square and Güven Park are put up by women, too. I
haven’t learned that yet. (101)63
This very naïve comment by Aysel while she is still going to secondary school acknowledges
that the novel is not only an attempt at reflecting on the idea of history theoretically. It still
questions official history and its contradictions but it does not perform this through the voice
of the postmodern narrator who subverts and reverses while fictionalizing. What is unfolded
in Lying Down to Die in the end, however, is an unconscious critique of the past by the people
who have lived that past. This is not altogether a pre-planned return to history to problematize
it but a return to history which takes shape indispensably in the course of the flow of the
narration. Particularly through the characters Ali and Aysel, Ağaoğlu creates a counterUlu Önderimiz demiş ki, ‘Bu dünyada ne varsa, kadının eseridir’ demiş. Acaba Ulus Meydanı’ndaki ve Güven
Parkı’ndaki heykelleri kadınlar mı yapmış? Bunu daha öğrenemedim.”
63
73
discourse in her history writing. We not only read the description of different “types” in the
novel but we also hear their voices. With each perspective, history is written as a multilayered space of intervention and integration. Ali and Aysel establish a sense of discrepancy
as to the dominant perspectives represented through other characters. The novel not only
creates different narrative forms for the representation of the past but it also highlights
different perspectives through these representations. These perspectives give us certain clues
as to the social and cultural politics of the past out of which the critique mentioned before is
created. In this framework, different narrators represent different images. While Ali and Aysel
represent critical, intellectual, open-minded citizens, İlhan represents nationalists, ethnocentrists and Aydın represents the elite. It is only when Ali meets people like him that he
starts questioning the discourses that the others, like İlhan use:
Ali didn’t know what to say or what to think. He realized how he was unaware of
everything. He recalled the faces he met at the restaurant last night. They were
complaining about the politicians, too… But there was a big difference between the
way İlhan complained about the politicians and the way they did. What really was
this difference? Where did it come from? With a warm heart, Ali was thinking about
the way the people in the restaurant talked, posed, made jokes, discussed… It gave
Ali both a sense of fearfulness and a sense of laughter now to see İlhan shouting,
crying, shaking his fist and talking as if he is giving a speech. (148-149)64
Foley observes: “Analogous configuration is … a process of mediation, through which the
universal aspects of the referent are replicated in the individual features of the mimetic text”
(1986: 65). This way of mediating the universal – or rather the general historical context –
through the individual experience indicates the mimetic aspect of the text, it also disrupts the
reflection of the universal the text displays by establishing a sense of discrepancy between the
general and the individual. The integrity of the referential historical world whose accuracy is
asserted each time the text refers to a historical context is continuously dismembered by the
intervention of different voices within the narrative. It not only acknowledges subjective
representation as a ground for the production of different interpretive lines for the same
historical referent but it also enables two forms of representation to exist side by side. It
“Ali ne diyeceğini, ne düşüneceğini şaşırmıştı. Her şeyden ne kadar habersiz olduğunu anlıyordu. Akşam
lokantada tanıdığı yüzleri anımsadı yeniden. Onlar da büyüklerimizden yakınıyorlardı…Ama onlarla İlhan’ın
yöneticileri beğenmemesi arasında büyük bir ayrılık vardı. Neydi bu ayrılık acaba? Nerden geliyordu?
Lokantadakilerin konuşmalarını, duruşlarını, şakalarını, tartışmalarını yüreğinde bir sıcaklıkla düşünüyor Ali…
İlhan’ın şimdi bir yumruk sallayıp, bir haykırıp, bir ağlayıp, bir nutuk çeker gibi konuşması ise Ali’ye hem biraz
ürkeklik, hem de için için bir gülme duygusu veriyordu.”
64
74
prepares a ground for the emergence of mutual critique. This kind of narrative soon
transforms itself into a naïve narrative in which the “heroes” of a certain era create an
unintentional critique out of the narration of their history. Aysel says:
Nobody inflicts missions upon the kids today. If they choose a mission by
themselves, they can choose it. Or they live the idea of a lack of mission.
Faithlessness. Yes, but what would they believe? Who? Who knows maybe even
Tezel is right. What about my brother, İlhan? He was a kid, too. Me, too… (189)65
Lying Down to Die retains the quality of a documentary. It arouses in the reader a sense of a
documentary in which the unknown “heroes” of those years are being interviewed. After
years Aysel could look back at her past in a critical way and observes that the so-called heroes
of those times who are being interviewed because they are believed to believe in something –
anything – are actually only those that are “made by the hands of history.”
History vs histories
Lyotard defines the postmodern as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (1984: xxiv). This
incredulity is seen in postmodernist historical fiction’s challenging attacks on the idea of
official history and on certain social and ideological assumptions which are produced by those
metanarratives. Both The Disconnected and Lying Down to Die possess an aptitude for such a
challenge. However, it should be noted that both works of fiction constitute their narratives
through an incorporation of such metanarratives. In this respect, particularly Lying Down to
Die establishes its narrative through the various forms produced out of the official one instead
of against the official one. In other words, what the novel does through its subjectivization of
history is, as I have discussed, to appropriate historical data with the help of the various
distinct figures depicted and the multiple focalization used. It highlights the historical past of
the most obscure characters among the great leading roles of History. Through such a
depiction, we are faced with the problematization of the idea of History as opposed to
histories.
One of the main issues “historiographic metafiction” aims to convey is that of multiplicity and
the creation of a condition to evaluate the past from diverse and dissimilar perspectives.
“Şimdiki çocuklara kimseler görev yüklemiyor. Bir görevi kendileri seçerlerse seçiyorlar. Ya da görevsizliği
yaşıyorlar. İnançsızlığı. İyi ama, neye inansınlar? Kime? Kimbilir, belki Tezel bile haklıdır. Ya abim, İlhan? O
da bir zamanlar çocuktu. Ben de…”
65
75
Hutcheon argues, “The eighteenth-century concern for lies and falsity becomes a postmodern
concern for the multiplicity and dispersion of truth(s), truth(s) relative to the specificity of
place and culture” (1988: 108). In this respect, the desire for the past in The Disconnected
becomes a desire for truth(s) in Lying Down to Die. If Selim’s main concern is to narrate –
even though ironically – an integral sense of a past from mainly his perspective, the main
concern of the characters of Lying Down to Die is to split into pieces a sense of the past which
is presented to us as an organic whole; therefore desiring to create a bunch of histories/truths
from it. The notion of “sublime desire” defined by Elias has a lot to do with an obsession with
the past. In The Disconnected, the readers always sense the presence of the past through its
characters’ voices. It both signifies longing for the past which is not nostalgic and a sense of
hatred towards the past. The sublimity of the past comes from this traumatic relationship to it.
In Lying Down to Die, the obsession is not particularly with the past as such, but with our
appropriations of it; with histories; in other words, with different truths. The novel
problematizes the notion that the past is inaccessible as well the creation of history out of the
past. In The Disconnected, the past is sublime, unreachable and unpresentable because of our
traumatic relationship to it, whereas in Lying Down to Die, it is sublime because there is too
much of it represented through histories. The subjectivization of history – and therefore the
creation of separate individual histories –, in this sense, gives way to a condition for
multiplicity and thus the impersonality of History.
The historical development of the country is continuously given to the readers in alternative
versions. The novel portrays the political situation of the early forties, fifties and sixties by
both imagining possible conversations between state officials which constitute a so-called
official version of history and that which it imposes on the citizens and by portraying the kind
of confusion each of the characters experience because of the discrepancy between what they
see in real life and what they are taught to believe. If we compare these two modes; we will
see the sort of effect which is created by such a notion of juxtaposition. In a section entitled
“The War is Over Now, Merry Friend” the documented historical records presumably taken
from the Ulus newspaper follow:
The students of Ankara University got together in Ulus Square, they complied with
the call of the head of the union and shouted out “Down with the Reds!”… The
76
Parliament declared that with a historical decision we have joined the United
Nations and therefore held our place among the free and civilized states. (232)66
A different perspective is evident in an Ali’s memory:
Ali resisted the cold and lifted up his head. He glimpsed a sign on a building: The
hand that made history again is making you. Blessings upon you! He thought to
himself, blessings upon Namık, Aysel and İlhan… Ali smells a delicious soup. He
longs for it. But, there, in front of the cookhouse, he sees as the disgrace of the Turks
the crowd handing their copper or zinc bowls. He gets rid of his desire for the soup.
He could not understand how it is possible that the Turk is both so supreme and so
humiliated… and Ali forces himself to think about things more gracious. He
embraces the first words that come out: The hand that made history again is making
you. Blessings upon you! “Blessings upon us!.. Blessings upon us!..” (94-95)67
It would be rather simplistic to think that the author records the political situation of the times
in and through her character’s voices in an effort to relate to the historical moment that is
being depicted. The significance of such reminders of the historical past of the nation is
twofold. In the first place, the narrative desires to tell history only to the extent that it could
create a special effect out of the different modes of narrating that history. In this sense, it is
not relevant whether the readers know or have an opinion about the issues addressed in the
narrative. By witnessing Ali’s thoughts we get to see a different picture of the same historical
context. Through Ali’s depiction we also get to see the priorities of the insignificant people in
history. As opposed to the reported newspaper accounts which, in a way, historicize the
situation, Ali’s own experiences in history constitute not only an alternative to the documents
but they also develop a gradual critique of the times. Obviously, the two conflicting methods
of history writing mentioned before; one through objective documentation, the other through
subjective memory reveal a sense of disorientation within the understanding of history.
However, the novel does not particularly aim to present the discrepancy between two
“Ulus Meydanı’nda toplanan Ankara Üniversitesi öğrencileri, birlik Başkanı’nın çağrısına uyup hep bir
ağızdan, ‘Kahrolsun Kızıllar!’ diye bağırmışlar[dır]…Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi, alınan tarihi bir kararla
Birleşmiş Milletler Topluluğu’na katıldığımızı, böylece artık özgür ve uygar devletler içindeki yerimizi
aldığımızı açıklamıştır.”
67
“Ali soğuğu göğüsleyip başını kaldırdı. Bir yapının üstünde gözüne bir döviz ilişti. Tarihi Yeniden Yapan El
Seni de Yapıyor. Ne Mutlu Sana! Ne mutlu Namık’a, ne mutlu Aysel’e ve İlhan abisine diye geçirdi
içinden…Ali’nin burun kanatlarına bazen bir çorbanın buram buram tüten kokusu çarpıyor. Hevesleniyor. Ama
orada, aşevinin önünde öyle, çinko ya da bakır taslarını uzatarak duran kalabalığı Türklüğün yüzkarasıymış gibi
görüyor. Hevesini içinden de, burnundan da kovuyor. Türk, hem bu denli yüceyken, hem nasıl bu kadar
küçülmüş olabiliyor; buna akıl erdiremiyor…Ve Ali kendini daha yüce şeyler düşünmeye zorluyor. Hemen de
önüne ilk çıkan güzel sözlere satılıyor: Tarihi Yeniden Yapan El Seni de Yapıyor. Ne Mutlu Sana! Ne mutlu
bize!.. Ne mutlu bize!
66
77
perceptions of history. It also presents individual demands, suspicions and questionings about
what is really going on – Ali’s confusion is a good example of this. The so-called historical
types do not just remain as types throughout the novel. A thick description is presented to the
readers by way of an inscription of each of the character’s consciousness into the narrative.
That is, we not only see the characters as representatives but we also get to see their reactions.
For instance, in a letter to Aysel from her friend Semiha, the readers get to learn about
Semiha’s reactions to the fact her parents do not allow her to continue her education:
While reading [what you wrote], believe me I cried a lot, too. Both for the death of
our Great Leader and for my own destiny… For me, life is over. (55)68
It is interesting to see that the characters and in this case Semiha, wish to write and talk about
their own individual lives and yet they cannot completely do it. Here, Semiha relates her own
misfortune to the greatest misfortune that the nation is faced with, the death of Atatürk. It is
only within a specified historical event that Semiha could also talk about her own problem.
She inserts her own individual discomforts. Also, by way of Semiha’s letter Ağaoğlu inserts
into the narrative her own questioning of the problem of women’s education. Out of the
creation of Semiha and her fictional world, the novel addresses a specific issue. Its specific
dealing with issues as such breaks it away from a tradition of historical novels which only
theoretically deal with history.
Perhaps, none of the characters are as prominent as Aysel is. She is the one to “lie down to
die” for the purpose of remembering, of going back to the past. However, even though she
chooses nothingness, she cannot be a nothing without purifying herself of the burden of the
past. Since Aysel is the one to remember, her own struggle is central. In this sense, Ali’s or
Semiha’s questionings express something only if they are handled within the particular
historical situation they are in. However, Aysel does not just question the workings of history.
She is in constant questioning of herself, her life, her job, her marriage, her way of being
raised, etc. Overall, she questions everything that happened in her life:
All those pedicures, manicures, the application of a soft crème on my face every
night and a moisturizer every morning, spreading powder under my arms and here
“Bunları okurken inan, ben de hıçkıra hıçkıra ağladım. Hem Ulu Önderimizin ölümüne, hem kendi
kaderime…Benim için hayat bitti.”
68
78
and there were all jobs disconnected from my womanhood and done for health and
comfort since that morning. Had I ever been myself? (183)69
If death is to get rid of all life practices, lying down to die is to shake off one’s habits. In
Aysel’s eyes, the past remains a habit as long as the things happened and that are done in the
past are repeated. Precisely at this point, Aysel wants to reverse these habits. However, just as
she does it, she cannot free herself from her habit of thinking about the past. That is why the
book is specifically a questioning about what happened in the past and generically about the
past itself.
In fact all the different voices represented in the text; those of Ali, Aydın, Semiha, Namık, are
a part of Aysel’s own critical remembering. Perhaps the keyword of the text is “critical.”
Aysel remembers and contemplates critically, history is given critically. Thus presumably,
critique becomes one of the purposes for this book to be written. And this feature of the
narrative contributes to the configuration of Ağaoğlu’s novel as partly “documentary.” In this
respect, it could be argued that Lying Down to Die breaks away from the strategies practiced
in the creation of postmodernist historical fiction. Perhaps we could define the novel as
“critical historiographic fiction.”
An interesting aspect of the way documentation and reporting are used in the novel is that
they become an instrument for the rewriting of history for those who do not hold a place in
the documented records of history. Such a usage points out to the notion of selectivity in
history writing. The insignificant lives of Aysel and the other children are given to us in a
journalistic style in an effort to create a historical memory out of the recorded history. This
method disrupts the continuity of the dominant discourse in the recorded history and it only
does this by applying a dominant method practiced in the writing of history; that of recording.
Such historical statements as “When Aydın went to café Tilla in Büyükada for the first time
America had not published the White Book yet” (115), “Ertürk learned how to walk with
tough steps, to look tough and to sleep on tough beds in Bursa Military High School” (128),
“When Aysel read the fine arts page of Ulus paper, the price of onions and potatoes were 24
cents per kilo and leek was 16 cents per kilo” (191) “Sugar entered our country. And before
that…roosevelt boots and montgomery jackets. That was how the feet of the eldest son of
“Bütün o pedikürler, manikürler, geceleri yüzümü iyi bir kremle silişim, sabahları yüzüme hafif bir
nemlendirici sürüşüm, kollarımın altına, orama burama talk pudraları serpişim, o sabaha değin sanki hep
kadınlığımdan kopuk; sağlık, rahatlık için yapılmış birer görevdi. Acaba hiç kendim olmuş muydum?”
69
79
Rıza from Çayeli who worked in the İstanbul Glass Factory knew about strong boots” (258)70
all are efforts of insertion of others’ histories into the historical records. The fact that
subjective insignificant pasts are articulated in an objective manner within a documented form
of history writing creates a striking effect of conflict. The pasts of the people are always given
in bigger historical contexts and in reference to certain historical happenings of those times.
Intertextuality plays an essential role in the creation of this diversification as to the
representation of historical context. It enables the characters to rewrite the past from their own
perspectives. What is more, such personal forms of writing as the diary, letters and so on
reveal methods of selection, appropriation and exclusion in the construction of the imagined
past. Hutcheon argues that “historiographic metafiction plays upon the truth and lies of the
historical record” (1988: 114). What Lying Down to Die achieves on the other hand, is to
constitute the narrative as an area of multiple perspectives and voices to create an effect of
multiplicity in the construction of the past, to eliminate the dominance of a homogeneous
historical discourse. It does not specifically play upon the truth and lies of the historical
record but it embarks upon a project of intervening into the so-called truth and adding to it by
pointing out certain conventions of exclusion in history writing. Therefore the fictional
characters rewrite the past in a new context to refer to the “selective nature of the historical
records” (1991: 110). However, this project does not allow the emergence of a self-conscious
postmodernist fiction whose main motive is to assault ideologies and traditions. It animates
individual memories within fiction so as to insert them into the historical world. In a letter to
her close friend Behire, Aysel writes:
I have suffered enormously from my father’s ten-day guiltless imprisonment. You
know how devastated I was when you came from Konya. As this has just been
forgotten, now the words of the chemistry teacher… I don’t know why we are
encountered with injustice all the time. These conditions have changed me a lot, my
dear. One of the strings of the love I had for our National Chief has broken off inside
“Aydın, ilk kez Büyükada’daki Tilla’ya gittiği zaman Amerika henüz Beyaz Kitap’ı yayımlamamıştı”, “Ertürk,
Bursa Askeri Lisesi’nde sert adımlarla yürümeyi, sert bakmayı ve sert yataklarda yatmayı öğrendi”, “Aysel’in
Ulus’un güzel Sanatlar sayfasını okuduğu yıl, kuru soğanın ve patatesin kilosu 24 kuruş, pırasanınki 16
kuruştur”, “Memleketimize şeker geldi. Şekerden önce de…roosevelt postalları ve bol bol montgomery ceketi.
Çayeli’nden Rıza’nın İstanbul Şişe Cam Fabrikası’nda çalışan en büyük oğlunun ayakları sağlam bir ayakkabıyı
ilk böyle gördü.”
70
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of me. By the way, Ayten’s father died. Now her mother is trying to earn a living by
sewing clothes. (176)71
Like the selective nature of historical discourse, the text demonstrates that subjective
discourse is as selective as the former. Aysel’s letter is dominated by a sense of resentment
and disillusionment which is shown in the specific words and expressions she uses to describe
her situation. Through this description we get to witness her perception of what the past
means. Instead of a reference to the momentous happenings of the time of which we are
constantly informed by the documented writing of history such as “British jets above Berlin”
[İngiliz tayyareleri Berlin üzerinde], “Italy non-partisan” [İtalya bitaraf] (83), Aysel creates
her own priorities in her letter; the priorities of an insignificant person. The letters, diaries and
all forms of personal writing play a considerable role in the rewriting of history precisely
because they are written from the perspective of the so-called insignificant generation of
children. Their status is doubly crucial because they both constitute the insignificant peoples
of the time as well as the generation of kids who are given great missions and yet who are
being underrated. It is only through such writings that we get hints as to what kind of people
Aysel, her brother İlhan, Ali, Namık and so on are. Aysel reflects the kind of confusion and
the ways their experiences of life are in disaccord with the dominant discourses of the time.
Taking into account all that has been said so far, we can conclude that Lying Down to Die
conceives of history as an area to whose construction anybody could contribute by the diverse
use of discourses. At the same time, Aysel evaluates the past by her comments of “today,” by
judging yesterday from the perspective of today:
What is dying? Dying requires an awareness that you have lived. Oh my teacher
Dündar! Oh my newspapers, high schools, head officials, fathers, brothers. My
sometimes German-looking, sometimes American-looking soldiers, …, my “A Turk
is worth the world”s, my anthems, statues, German aunts and “Tout va tres bien
Madame la Marquise” songs! A little bit of everything that floats in the air. And the
war is over, dear merry friend! Let us sing the day of the great victory. Is this what it
“Babamın suçsuz yere tam on gün hapiste kalmasının acısını çok çekmiştim. Sen Konya’dan geldiğinde nasıl
perişandım, biliyorsun. Bu daha yeni yeni unutulmuşken şimdi de kimya öğretmenimizin sözleri…Neden
bilmem, durmadan haksızlığa uğruyoruz. Bu durumlar beni çok değiştirdi kardeşim. Milli Şefimize karşı
duyduğum sevginin tellerinden biri içimde koptu sanki. Bu arada Ayten’in babası öldü. Şimdi annesi dikiş
dikerek onları geçindirmeye çalışıyormuş.”
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means to love your country? To love your country, your people heartily? To love…
To love is to know. The best I learned, though, is to utter “sayings”. (260-261)72
The encounter with the past – or rather an inquiry into it – becomes Aysel’s encounter with
and an inquiry into her own condition and who she really is. She realizes that she dies to the
extent that she has lived. Starting from what she discovers in her encounter with the past, she
forecasts that her death will be as insignificant as her life and, therefore, at the end of the
novel, we see her surrender and walk out of the hotel room as if nothing has happened, as if
she has made some kind of practical joke upon the readers. Her last words “The misty April
morning of the capital” imply the fact that she is going to carry on with her routine life. This
anti-climactic ending is significant in the sense that it puts an end to the whole discussion of
history with an ironic turn. It is ironic to see that Aysel does not fulfill the last mission she
appoints herself with. It is also ironic that Aysel, who has analyzed the past with full
seriousness and sobriety throughout the novel, eventually finishes off in a joking manner. This
ending has the potential to subvert the whole narrative. It makes the reader question the
reliability of the narrator Aysel as well as her memory. Obviously the novel does incorporate
a factual world and critique history but the final episode declares that this is overall fiction.
Aysel, in her own fictional world, chooses to leave the hotel room. By finishing with Aysel’s
choice of leaving, Ağaoğlu seems to imply that the novel is not a mere critique of the political
and historical situation. On the contrary, Aysel’s fiction determines where to begin and end
the story. “The best I learned” indicates the cynic complaint of a woman who has spoken on
behalf of and in the voice of others, who has been given missions in the past and therefore one
who has not learned how to be herself. It also indicates that history, however much we
remember and judge it on our own, will always remain as a “thing” that has been built
through the hands of others. In this respect, Lying Down to Die contributes to the building of
that history by adding to it various other histories.
“Ölmek nedir? Ölmek, yaşamış olduğunu bilmeyi gerektiriyor. Ah benim Dündar Öğretmenim! Ah benim
gazetelerim, liselerim, kaymakamlarım, babalarım, abilerim. Kah Alman, kah Amerikan kılıklı askerlerim… ‘Bir
Türk bir dünyaya bedel’lerim, marşlarım, heykellerim, Alman yengelerim ve ‘Tout va tres bien Madame la
Marquise’ şarkılarım! Havada uçuşan her şeyden biraz. Ve savaş bitmiştir ey şen arkadaş! Büyük zaferin gününü
terennüm edelim. Bu muymuş yurdunu sevmek? Yurdunu, budununu özünden çok sevmek? Sevmek… Sevmek,
bilmektir. En iyi öğrendiğim şeyse ‘vecize’ söylemek.”
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Conclusion: “Can Fiction Assert Propositions?” The Politics of Lying Down
to Die
In order to come up with a hypothesis that fiction could create moral and political
propositions, perhaps we must first estimate the relation between the position of the reader
and the kind of representational framework the novel offers its readers. To what extent do the
readers become involved in the construction of (past) reality in the novel and to what extent
does the author allow such an involvement as well as take part in the development of an
assertion? Barbara Foley claims that we could only grasp the circumstances of reality which a
book intends to convey by assuming a contract between the author and the reader: “We will
grasp the Gestalt by means of which fictional discourse conveys cognition, …, only if we see
the fictional work as a contract designed by an intending author who invites his or her
audience to adopt certain paradigms for understanding reality” (1986: 43). Because there are
mainly two narratives overlapping (one of Aysel’s contemplations in the hotel room presented
by a method of stream of consciousness in which the readers are also informed of the specific
action that takes place in that hotel room; the other, the narratives from the past which are
hypothetically created by Aysel’s mind/memory), the biographical/historical content of the
narrative gets disrupted by the fictional one. This rather complex structure of the text
generates several different textual ontologies (Foley 1986: 43) which the text, to a certain
extent, plays with. Even though the content of the historical narrative draws on the actual
historical world, the potential to propose ethical/political assertions through such narratives is
impeded by an almost authorial intervention on the part of Aysel. It is as if Aysel, as a
fictional character, produces her own assertions but to take those assertions seriously is
another problematic practice since her own status as factual/autobiographical character is
problematic itself. The narrative offers the capacity to create a ground for the reader to make
his/her own critique. The presence of Aysel as the fictional narrator of the main storyline only
helps to question the accuracy of the other narrative lines.
Aysel’s encounter with her past is marked by a strong sense of fatigue. From Aysel’s
interruptive comments we see that her account with her past is also an account which is trying
to be settled with the kind of resentment her remembrance of the past creates in her. This is
the resentment of having had to live for others, for ideals that are imposed upon her as a
“woman,” a “good citizen,” a good “wife” without her consent. In this respect, perhaps
83
Aysel’s interventions constitute the backbone of the narrative and it is such interventions that
lead the reader into re-estimating the true nature of the historical context. Aysel’s main
narrative consists of such statements as:
In my eyes, I grow bigger and beautiful once again. Once again, I put on all the
rights that have been given to me, with these rights I reach out to new ones. Once
again, I become the enlightened privileged woman of Turkey. So I have chosen my
own death. I die for myself, too… Handing over my noble duty.
It is always too early for everything… Consequence: falling behind.
I always had to have serious duties. (111, 184, 185)73
To consider the novel merely as a critique of certain historical and political phenomena would
be to underestimate its power to artistically use political and historical content within a
fictional framework in an effort to highlight the problematic interaction of fiction with
history, politics, and the so-called “facts.” Instead of solely criticizing the sort of historical
context the novel depicts, it creates a sense of attachment to the thing being criticized through
each character’s perspective. Therefore the motive is not to demarcate two different
perceptions of history or of telling and writing history, but it is to portray the reflections of
such different perceptions upon the people. While Aysel thinks about the history of the
Republic (and during the time she is living that history) she both flounders and at the same
time sustains a pure belief in the ideals it spreads. In this respect, Lying Down to Die becomes
a narrative which articulates the lives of the people who accommodate two such opposite
notions unawares.74 It is in this sense that the narrative is still naïve; in this sense that it is
neither self-aware nor self-referential.
The power of the text comes from the fact that while it posits itself as fiction, it at the same
time always leaves a door open for factual narratives to enter into the fictional and it is
through this door that the text constitutes a relationship with its readers. The character of this
relationship is, furthermore, determined by neither the reader nor the author but the text itself.
“Kendi gözümde yeniden güzelleşip büyüyorum. Yeniden, bana verilen bütün haklarımı giyiniyorum; bu
haklarla yeni haklara uzanıyorum. Türkiye’nin ayrıcalıklı aydın kadını oluyorum yeniden. Ölümü kendim
seçmişim işte. Kendim için de ölüyorum…Devredip soylu nöbetimi”, “Her şey için hep erken… sonuç: Geç
kalmak”, “Hep ciddi görevlerim olmalıydı.”
74
In an essay entitled “Yürümek” [Walking] Elif Ekin Akşit traces the Republic’s history through the stories told
by women who witnessed the change from monarchy to democracy. The stories told by the fist generation of the
republic bears significant similarities with Aysel’s story. Akşit observes: “The women who witnessed the birth
of the republic sustain a sense of contradiction within themselves which has the potential to allow them to be
able to exist within the Great Turkish History and to be able to adopt it and which also has the potential to alter
such a narrative. Therefore, since an existence without contradiction means nonexistence, such a contradiction is
imperative”. Hatırladıklarıyla ve Unuttuklarıyla Türkiye’nin Toplumsal Hafızası. İstanbul: İletişim, 2006 (315).
73
84
Finally we can perhaps answer tentatively the question of whether fiction can assert
propositions by quoting Barthes: “historical discourse [and the literary discourse which uses
the historical] can do no more than signify the real” (1997: 122). It opens up traditional
history to the critique of the people that experienced it. As such, it continuously rewrites
history to explore what is left behind, forgotten, pushed aside, ignored and not given thought.
In this sense, the novel, through its own conventions of creating types like Aysel, Ali, Aydın,
etc in its representation of the past, at the same time withdraws traditional, stereotypical
elements from writing history and recovers other truths and histories. Hence fiction,
particularly within the framework of the analysis of Lying Down to Die, is not the ground for
the assertion of positions and alternative histories/truths but just a struggle for different
truths.75 The readers relate themselves to different accounts of history rather than believing in
one of them.
Appleby, Hunt and Jacob claim: “We are arguing here that truths about the past are possible, even if they are
not absolute, and hence are worth struggling for” The Postmodern History Reader. London and New York:
Routledge, 1997 (214).
75
85
CONCLUSION
To choose as its subject matter a certain historical time period and to construct a fictional
narrative around it while referring to the main historical “facts” was considered the aspiration
of the historical novel. Such a structure created a specific genre which paid less attention to its
characters than the historical phenomena it aspired to tell (Göğebakan 2004: 46). The
historical novel establishes a direct relationship to a particular historical period and aspires to
inform and entertain its readers through the types it creates. In fact, the historical novel is said
to be more “social” than “personal.”
Today, the historical novel – especially identified as either modernist or postmodernist
historical novel – no longer specifically focuses on historical phenomena. Rather, it aims to
question what we know as history – or what we “lived” as history – in terms of the way its
fictional characters imagine, remember, and perceive that history. The type in the historical
novel becomes a character in Lying Down to Die and The Disconnected. While both novels do
refer to the past, they aspire to show it through the consciousness of its characters. It is Aysel
in Lying Down to Die and Selim in The Disconnected who is foregrounded in these stories
about the past. In both novels, the encounter and the struggle with society and social history
take place through an encounter with the self. The problem the individual has with
him/herself, in both novels, is filtered through a social and critical account of public history.
Therefore the past is always told by reference to a predetermined configuration of identity
especially by deconstructing it. It is no coincidence that in both of the novels the protagonists
experience an ontological crisis because of a crisis of history. It is because of history itself and
the kind of pressure it has on Selim and Aysel, the fact that their past manipulates their lives,
it gives them names and obliges them to do tasks that the possibility of death appeals to them.
The return to history problematizes not only the conceptualization of history but it also aims
to develop a reconfiguration of the “self” through a remembering of the past. It is striking that
while the writers’ configuration of the past is distinct from each other’s, their configuration of
their protagonists is similar. Hence, in both novels we have an opening up to the public from
the private and vice versa. However, this does not necessarily mean that such novels should
86
be read as what Fredric Jameson terms “national allegory.”76 It would be rather reductive to
define the novels as national allegories. Rather, an individual analysis overlaps the social
analysis in the two novels. Aysel could be considered a “type” in the historical imagination,
but she is a character in the narrative whose inner development, dispositions, opinions, fears
and psychological condition are all highlighted.
In many ways, Ağaoğlu creates a truly historical novel in the Lukacsian sense. She
foregrounds insignificant people in her representation of history, creates a historical
consciousness by situating her fiction around historical facts. However, Ağaoğlu radicalizes
her text by intersecting two narrative lines and resolving only one of them and rejecting a
linear narrative. In contrast to The Disconnected, Lying Down to Die not only touches but
dwells on a description of real historical personages and events. It is different because it
critically analyzes a lived past instead of the past as a concept and because it could make the
reader internalize these so-called types it represents. In this sense, it undoubtedly creates a
historical consciousness. It emerges as spaces of struggle for different truths. As we have
observed, both novels present distinct representations of history without asserting any one of
them as the “correct” one. The text of Lying Down to Die becomes a liberalistic area in which
all characters struggle for articulating their truths.
However, it does not mean that The Disconnected fails to create this consciousness. It does
create such a consciousness by constructing an imaginative past by reference to historical,
social and scientific “facts.” While it does not fully reflect historical reality, by using it as the
original text for its parodic text, it makes the reader think upon the changing nature of the
historical text. The novel expresses that without telling a historical story one could create
historical consciousness.
History writing emerges as a dominant thematic motif in the two texts. The Disconnected
creates a self-conscious rewriting of history while Lying Down to Die bases its text on
fictional narrative fragments. Hence, a single person’s act of writing dominates the former
novel whereas a group of historically related people’s acts of writing dominate the latter.
What the former shows us that history could be destroyed by each re-writing and it could be
National allegory” is a term coined by Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson to designate texts from third
world literature. He claims such texts should be read as national allegories. Fredric Jameson “Third World
Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” in Social Text No. 15, 1986 (65-88).
76
87
reconstructed each time with a fresh perspective. Moreover, it show us that to write one’s own
history is an act of autonomy and of authority and it is represented in the text to insert the
disconnected’s consciousness within historical narrative. Similarly, Aysel’s and the other
character’s additions to historical narrative serves to epitomize an understanding of history
which is established by the perspectives of the insignificant. The historical novel is marked
precisely by this emphasis on the ordinary, insignificant people. The ordinary individual’s
perspective is supposed to be the perspective of the bourgeoisie especially in the typically
Western historical novel like Walter Scott’s (Göğebakan 2004: 18). It is quite interesting to
see that the perspective of the bourgeoisie transforms into the perspective of the marginalized
intellectual in the two examples I study. Hence it is not just the inscription of the insignificant
individual’s perspective but it is also the inscription of the intellectual in a conventional
society who oscillates in between his/her own ideals and social norms.
Even though the way the two novels represent history is quite different from one another, the
two representations are significant to the explanation of history’s relationship to the notion of
the sublime. In The Disconnected, history is sublime because the protagonist cannot control
and get rid of yet desire his own traumatic past. In Lying down to Die, history is sublime
precisely because there are too many versions of it and hence it is inaccessible. It fragments
historical reality, presents it through various forms of representation and inscribes a fictional
story in parallel to the historical representation. The Disconnected deconstructs official history
for its own purposes and re-situates in a new and fictional context.
Thus, how do these two examples represent history, then? First of all, it should be noted that
what is different in their representation from the Western innovative historical novel is that in
these two examples there is not only a problematization of the concept of history; there is not
a mere questioning of the official ways in which history is represented. These novels mediate
the past in order to deal with it in a socio-cultural Turkish context. Although they do not
specifically express their own perception of history, they create ways for the readers to
imagine and remember the past as they show them. While the examples from the Western
tradition of innovative historical fiction shows us that there is a theoretical and ideal criticism
of history in historical fiction, in Lying Down to Die and The Disconnected, we could talk
about a concrete and a “real political” criticism. While the novels create their critique of
history, they refer to specific political and historical events. They do not so much openly
criticize the political history of Turkey as they make the reader question it by presenting other
88
perspectives or by altogether subverting the historical content. The fact that certain political
and historical controversies are addressed in the novels implicates the writers’ own
engagement with such issues and discussions. Thus, although the novels do not openly
articulate any sense of history, they nevertheless are biased representations of history.
However, it is not so much a pre-planned ideological bias as it is the reflection of the writers’
position in life. Both novels draw a historical panorama of the country’s past in the face of the
dramatic stories of the characters.
What these two examples show us is that if the past is alterity, we could recover the alterity of
the past by putting it into form. The Disconnected does it by subverting it and therefore
emphasizing its provisional nature and Lying Down to Die does it by giving different voices to
the past; hence showing it perspectival nature. One’s use of parody and subversion and the
other’s use of fragmentation and pluralism while representing the past in a critical way
enables us to redefine the two novels based on earlier definitions and configurations of the
historical novel. In this respect, The Disconnected could be defined as “parodic historical
metafiction” whereas Lying Down to Die could be named under the category of “critical
historiographic fiction.”
89
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