The Modernist Will to Totality: Dream Aesthetics and National Allegory By
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Modernist Will to Totality: Dream Aesthetics and National Allegory by Serhat Uyurkulak Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date: _______________________ Approved: _________________________ Michael Hardt, Supervisor ___________________________ Anne Garreta ___________________________ Catherine Reilly ___________________________ Fredric Jameson Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 ABSTRACT The Modernist Will to Totality: Dream Aesthetics and National Allegory by Serhat Uyurkulak Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Date: _______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Michael Hardt, Supervisor ___________________________ Anne Garreta ___________________________ Catherine Reilly ___________________________ Fredric Jameson An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright by Serhat Uyurkulak 2017 Abstract This dissertation argues that one of the distinguishing characteristics of modernist literature is its desire to represent the social totality and that some of the significant modernist narrative-formal experiments can be read as attempts to respond to the complex phenomenon of fragmentation witnessed in modernity. The crisis in the representation of totality is presented as a general framework within which different national situations and their literary works can communicate with each other, and the conventional definition of modernism can be broadened accordingly. This study focuses on the formal solutions offered to the mentioned problem in James Joyce’s Ulysses, A.H. Tanpınar’s A Mind at Peace, and Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. The forms it analyzes extensively are Tanpınar’s dream aesthetics and Hedayat’s allegorical and non-oriented narrative resembling a Möbius band. iv Acknowledgements I am sincerely grateful to all members of my dissertation committee for their support in dire times. I would not have been able to complete this study without the encouragement of my supervisor, Michael Hardt. I am especially thankful to him. v Table of Contents Abstract ………………………………………………………………………………….IV Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………………V 1. Introduction: Modernism and Totality ……………………………………………1 1.1 Modernism, Attitude, and Style ………………………………………………5 1.2 Ideology of Modernism ……………………………………………………...13 1.3 Alternative Modernities/Modernisms? ……………………………………...20 1.4 Totality, Fragmentation, and the Crisis of Representation ………………….26 2. Ulysses, Closure, and Structure …………………………………………………40 2.1 Reading Form into Ulysses ………………………………………………….44 2.2 Resilience of Form …………………………………………………………..52 3. A Mind at Peace: Revisionary History and Dream Aesthetics as Totalizing Forms ..........................................................61 3.1 (Post-)Imperial Trauma and Psychosis ……………………………………...64 3.2 “Setting a Zero Point in Time” ……………………………………………...70 3.3 A “Bergsonian” Historiography and Social Doctrine ……………………….76 3.4 Love, Wholeness, and Counter-Memory ……………………………………91 3.5 A World Shared by Freud and Bergson ……………………………………102 3.6 When the Mirror Cracks …………………………………………………...114 4. The Blind Owl: Narrative Möbius Band, Allegory, and the National Situation ..................................................................123 4.1 Overview of The Blind Owl ………………………………………………..129 4.2 Debate Around The Blind Owl’s Style and Structure ……………………...136 4.3 Narrative Time-Space and the Total Form …………………………………146 4.4 The Blind Owl as Allegory …………………………………………………168 vi 5. Conclusion: A Semi-Peripheral Modernism? ………………………………….205 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………...213 Biography ………………………………………………………………………………220 vii Introduction: Modernism and Totality In an essay on Turkish modernist literature and the novelist, poet, essayist, and professor of aesthetics Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1960), the Nobel Laureate author Orhan Pamuk states that “In my view, we have never had a genuine modernism” 1 and explains how he defines the term: By literary modernism, I understand not only the rejection of tradition but also moving away from the spirit of society and the mindset of community. Modernist literature has broken up the relationship of “representation” that was the strongest aspect of traditional literature. Literature no longer represented reality, writing was not a mirror of life. Writing became an activity against life, a distinct universe with its own structure, a new world. The texts produced by modernist writers were not sites where the existing world was reflected or its rules and secrets were explained. Modernist literary activity is not carried out to capture life as it is; modernist writing is an activity by itself and its meaning is revealed by its inwardness.2 Modernist writers, in order not to represent life, invented numerous “techniques, methods, and narrative procedures,” (stream of consciousness, collage, long sentences, dissolution of the narrative center or narrator, non-linear narration, etc.) all of which were genuine “inventions,” “examples of intellectual creativity,” and “novelty.”3 Relying on “the richness and density of their inner structure,” modernist texts referred the reader not to the external world but to their own textual elements, and this procedure both distinguished them from other types of writing and displayed the fundamental attitude of 1 Orhan Pamuk, "Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Türk Modernizmi." Defter, no. 23, 1995, pp.31-45; 32. Unless otherwise stated, all translations from Turkish to English are mine. 2 Ibid., 32. 3 Ibid., 33. 1 modernist writers: “Here, the deeper literary invention is the discovery of a new attitude. Our modernist novelist seems to be saying, ‘I love writing, the inner possibilities it offers for textual richness, and the creative horizons it opens before me so much that I just cannot stand the idea of making direct references to life.’”4 Pamuk maintains that by disrupting literary representation or rejecting to represent the world, modernist authors acted in line with a new ethos; “they assumed an attitude against life. They did something against their community and society.”5 The reason why there has not been a literary modernism in Turkey was that the technical and stylistic novelties of “genuine modernism” could not be invented in Turkey mainly because the Turkish novelists did not assume the new modernist ethos of disconnecting themselves from society and not representing life: “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar is a man of community; as a novelist, he feels completely responsible for the community in which he lives.”6 Consequently, we witness in his novels deficiencies such as authorial intervention (“not even Stendhal would do it that way”), lack of irony, seriousness, references to collectivity (“he automatically talks about an ‘us’”), didacticism, and so on. Tanpınar and other novelists like him (presumably modern Turkish writers in general) were people in the service of community. “This identity [man of service] does not fit modernism’s principal attitudes and behaviors; it is not in accordance with the ethos and the mood that produce modernist texts. We cannot imagine Tanpınar high on opium, out of his head, as a furious 4 Ibid., 34. One suspects that in this statement, instead of talking about modernism itself, Pamuk might be projecting onto modernist works his own postmodern novelistic agenda, which is sheer textual production and the pleasure derived from textual playfulness. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 39. 2 man who curses everyone. (…) We cannot imagine Tanpınar as a man who flirts with the idea of sin and collaborates with Satan.”7 Arguably, if ridding oneself of tradition along with any kind of communitarian concern is a token of the modernist ethos, it becomes a bit difficult to position as modernist names like T.S. Eliot worrying about the deterioration of Western culture, W.B. Yeats engaging with the Gaelic revival, or Ezra Pound subscribing to corporatism. This dissertation views Tanpınar as a modernist author and analyzes his magnum opus A Mind at Peace (1948)8 from the perspective of international modernism. The other author that constitutes the main focus of my study is the Iranian novelist, essayist, and literary critic Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951). Pamuk does not consider Tanpınar as a modernist writer on the abovementioned stylistic and attitudinal grounds; nevertheless, these same criteria should doubtlessly make Hedayat the epitome of modernist style and ethos as he created one of the finest examples of literary surrealism and expressionism (for Pamuk, good non-mimetisms) with The Blind Owl (1936)9, which will be examined in the following pages. Moreover, Hedayat was an opium addict, an embittered social outcast, and a successful suicide attempter who wrote in one of his letters, “What an accursed, base and rotten country we’ve got, and what malevolent and infernal people it has! I feel that all my life I’ve been a plaything in the hands of whores and sons-of- whores.”10 7 Ibid., 42. 8 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, A Mind at Peace, trans. Erdağ Göknar, Archipelago Books, 2011. 9 Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl, trans. D.P. Costello, Grove Press, 1989. 10 Quoted in Homa Katouzian, "The Wondrous World of Sadeq Hedayat," in Sadeq Hedayat and His Wondrous World, ed. Homa Katouzian, Routledge, 2008, pp.1-14; 5. 3 One of the working