Muslim Literature, World Literature, Tanpınar Emrah Efe Khayyat Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Emrah Efe Khayyat All rights reserved Abstract Muslim Literature, World Literature, Tanpınar Emrah Efe Khayyat Turkish humanist, literary historian, novelist, essayist and poet Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s work (23 June 1901 - 24 January 1962) provides us with a unique opportunity to reframe the major questions of contemporary literary historiography, particularly those relating to the politics of literature and the history of religion. This dissertation surveys Tanpınar’s writings in a variety of genres (fiction, poetry, literary history and theory) with a particular attention on his masterpiece, namely the novel The Time Regulation Institute. It demonstrates how Tanpınar’s humanistic sensitivities, together with his dedication to social scientific scrutiny, results in a quest for an original, cross-disciplinary position for the critic, or at least an alternative “mood” in writing and representing. Alternatively, his is a quest for a new “method” for literature, literary criticism and cultural study. Among his company in this quest are nineteenth century Ottoman-Turkish revolutionaries, poets and novelists – such as the nationalist Namık Kemal, pious Ziya Pasha, populist Ahmet Midhat Efendi and suicidal Beşir Fuad, to name some of the figures I discuss in this dissertation – alongside French symbolists, Paul Valéry in particular, but also philosophers such as Henri Bergson and even Martin Heidegger, alongside eminent sociologists August Comte and Emile Durkheim. Yet one would only do injustice to Tanpınar’s thinking and writing unless one takes into consideration his reception of modernist writing at large, against the background of Melville’s, T. S. Eliot’s or Kafka’s works; or his literary- historical and political position in contrast to Erich Auerbach’s or Maurice Blanchot’s. Tanpınar’s account of the late Ottoman intellectual legacy and modern Turkish and European letters is most instructive today in understanding the social and political relevance of modern literary activity and its position vis-à-vis religion, particularly in the non-West. Accordingly he must also be read against the background of sociology of religion and art. Tanpınar’s original “mode” of writing or “method” redraws the contours of the global expansion (or “globalization”) of a particular “regime” of sensibility –– a particular way of seeing and saying, making and sharing, writing and reading –– i.e. an “aesthetic” regime, as Jacques Rancière has it. Tanpınar’s elaborations on the social, cultural, theological and philosophical implications of this expansion –– particularly in the Ottoman world and later the Turkish republic, but also in what he calls the “Muslim Orient” at large –– leads to the discovery of certain zones of indistinction or ambivalence (“duplicitous” spaces, as Tanpınar has it) not only between religion and literature, but also between literature and social sciences. This enables him to “critique” social scientific writing literarily, i.e. through specifically literary writing in the novel The Time Regulation Institute. But he also critiques literary and philosophical writing with social scientific scrutiny not only in The Time Regulation Institute but also in his theoretical writings and his history, in his essays and his Nineteenth Century Turkish Literature. He thereby postulates a concept for the political history of literature on a global scale that in turn scrutinizes the relationship between writing beyond genres and religion. Tanpınar the literary historian was hired in the late 1930s to establish Turkish philology at Istanbul University, together with Auerbach who was hired to establish Romance philology at the same institution. Auerbach, whose literary historiography displays a similar attention to the history and politics of representation in the Judeo- Christian tradition, wrote his most influential works during his Istanbul exile. Given Tanpınar’s alternative focus on the question of verbal arts and representation in the “Muslim Orient,” reading Tanpınar and Auerbach together produces a more complete picture of the stakes of a world literature in this dissertation. Finally, to address the relevance of Tanpınar’s writings to contemporary scholarship with clarity, this dissertation recontextualizes Tanpınar’s thinking and his unvoiced disagreements with Auerbach, among others, against the background of the productive tension between Jacques Rancière –– “the humanist” of the dissertation who often traces back his literary thinking to Auerbach –– and Pierre Bourdieu –– “the social scientist” here whose thought is very much imbedded in the sociological tradition extending from Comte to Durkheim. Table of Contents Prelude: Of Books and Shoes 1 Chapter 1: Words Enough and Time 23 Chapter 2: Setting the Times Right 66 Chapter 3: The Wine 101 Chapter 4: Novels, Goods, and Things 149 Chapter 5: Waste Product 205 Conclusion: The Desert 247 Bibliography 265 ! i! Acknowledgements I could not have successfully defended this dissertation without the wisdom, support and friendship of Gil Anidjar, my long lost brother, to use the expression he hates dearly. I have spent some six years under Gayatri Spivak’s mentorship before drafting this dissertation, who was generous enough not only to comment on hundreds of pages of my writing and to share with me her insights into my “positionality” and thinking, but also to employ me as her teaching, research, and writing assistant year after year. Bruce Robbins has been equally kind in creating for me the conducive space for intellectual activity. David Damrosch’s most dear faith in my projects and Aamir Mufti’s care; Orhan Pamuk’s, Marc Nichanian’s, Seyla Benhabib’s, Patricia Dailey’s and Stathis Gourgouris’ encouragement should be considered sine qua non of the outcome. Finally, I owe the name, i.e. Khayyat, with which I sign this dissertation, to Yasmine Mohammed Khayyat. Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. ! ii! To the long forgotten Shamach family ! iii! Prelude: Of Books and Shoes In a recent article, Hamid Dabashi, looks back at the perplexity caused by the events of December 14, 2008 at a press conference in Baghdad: “‘This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog,’ reportedly said Muntadhar al-Zaidi when he threw his shoes at the US president [...] Bush managed to dodge both shoes. So many mixed metaphors here: why would you want to dodge a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people you have just liberated, or what’s wrong with being a dog? Inquiring minds want to know.”1 The article describes how the “inquiring minds” of Western academia and the media landscape had to tackle an astonishing variety of mysteries concerning Arabs and their shoes after the press conference. As we know the anthropological and philosophical, theological and historical accounts of these curiosities competed with each other in the years that followed, the competition turning fierce in February 2013, when, this time a Syrian, threw his shoe at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Egypt. By then, sheer force of repetition over the years had made statements such as the following appear comprehensible, even relevant and 1 Dabashi, “The Arabs and their flying shoes,” Al Jazeera English, 26 Feb 2013, web, 17 May 2013. 1 meaningful: “Showing the sole of your shoe to someone in the Arab world is a sign of extreme disrespect and throwing your shoe is even worse”; “In Arab culture it’s considered rude even to display the sole of one’s shoe to a fellow human being”; “Shoes should either be left at the door of the mosque, or carried (preferably in the left hand with the soles pressed together)”; “Dogs are considered dirty by Muslims” etc. Dabashi focuses on the cultural anthropological attitude engrained in such bizarre statements and their conceptual vocabulary, suggesting that this also explains the reason why in addition to ivy league universities, it is the US military that hires topnotch anthropologists “to study social groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The similarity between this setting and Napoleon’s campaign with his scholars leading the way to mysterious Egypt goes without saying, and Dabashi easily uses the occasion to remind his readers of Orientalism. Moreover, refreshing the Saidian wisdom, he describes the scientific function, plus the pain such statements inflict upon people, by equating the “technique” with which such statements are articulated to another technique: Had it not been for this masterpiece of American cultural anthropology, the US military would have never known that we in the Arab and Muslim world are categorically and genetically lazy, sex-obsessed, owners of at least four wives and plenty of sex slave concubines, which anthropological insights were subsequently used in Abu Ghraib by the US military by way of enhancing the already enhanced interrogation techniques. No “Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology” can come even close to appreciating the significance of such anthropological services. It really took a great work of art like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty to show to the public at large the invaluable services that these techniques can provide in saving American lives. (ibid.) Dabashi asks a simple question to make sense of this overall “hermeneutic” attitude, as he would have it. Is it possible that a shoe is sometimes simply a shoe?