Ottoman Culture and the Project of Modernity

Reform and Translation in the Tanzimat Novel

Monica M. Ringer, Etienne Charrière, Monica M. Ringer, Etienne Charrière

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780755616688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Literary
• Index: Literature

Central to the nineteenth-century Ottoman Tanzimat reform project, the novel originally developed outside of Ottoman space, yet was adopted as a didactic tool to model and generate new forms of Ottoman citizenship. Essays in this book explore the appropriation of the novel as a literary genre and its deployment in the late Ottoman cultural project of constructing an Ottoman modernity. Analyzing key texts and authors, from the works of Ahmet Midhat Efendi to Mizanci Murad and Vartan Pasha, among others, the book's chapters explore the novel genre as far more than a case of importation of Western and non-Ottoman cultural productions, but rather as a vehicle for the cultivation of indigenous modern subjectivities.

1

Thinking in French, writing in Persian: Aesthetics, intelligibility and the literary Turkish of the 1890s

Zeynep Seviner

On 22 March 1897, the prolific writer, literary critic and journalist-entrepreneur Ahmet Midhat Efendi (1844–1912) published a controversial article in Sabah, featuring a story of dubious credibility where a well-read friend reports to him in frustration that he has great difficulty understanding the latest literary publications. He asks Ahmet Midhat, ‘is it my inability to grasp the meaning of what I read, or is it their inability to say what they mean?’ to which Midhat responds reassuring him of his cognitive faculties and iterating that there really is something fundamentally wrong with the current trends in literature. He joins his ‘friend’ in accusing young writers of employing highly peculiar language impossible to comprehend for a great many well-educated people, and likens them to French decadents, a group of contemporary writers and artists known for their adherence to an aesthetic of artificiality.

Ahmet Midhat’s article seems to have opened a can of worms, as a series of articles appeared in response, collectively forming what is now widely known as the ‘dekadanlar tartışması’ (decadents controversy), which spun for about four years and featured various discussions on language, the representation of reality and the general function of literature. This debate was so central to the history of late Ottoman literature that, in his memoir, Hüseyin Cahit (1875–1957) remarked, ‘to summarize the whole commotion on decadents would be to write our recent literary history.’¹

Midhat’s take on the latest trends in literature does indeed represent a moment of collective anxiety about the written register of the Turkish language, now disseminated more widely than ever before.² If an increasing number of people were to read these texts, not only in groups and in social settings but also in the solitary comfort of their rooms, how could their impact on readers be controlled? Worse still, how could one prevent potentially harmful misunderstandings when clarity of meaning was not something authors were interested in ensuring?

Further into the article, Midhat presents the reader with a ‘sample sentence’ written in what he argues to be unnecessarily ornate and opaque language in the fashion of the Servet-i Fünun writers he seeks to criticize. Written in extremely ornate prose, the sentence advises those who are afraid of the sound that the rollers of a sailboat make to simply abstain from getting on a sailboat in the first place: ‘Those who are frightened of the rattle of rollers with a blue-coloured fear should refrain from hauling the load of their humanly materiality onto a rocking vehicle with open wings.’³ Highly metaphorical language and complex syntax deliberately paired with the trivial nature of the given advice renders the statement hilariously absurd. The translation into English fails to do justice to some of the semantic peculiarities and extreme neologisms deliberately embedded into the text by Ahmet Midhat, who argues that the very same idea can be rendered in a much simpler and more intelligible language like this: ‘Those who are afraid of the rattle of the rollers should abstain from getting on a boat.’ (‘Makara hırıltısından pek korkanlar yelkenli gemiye binmekten içtinap eylemelidirler.’) He then advises his ‘friend’ to read in a Persian-heavy Turkish but think in French in order to comprehend the article he has been frustrated with. The friend responds, ‘Reading in Turkish and thinking in French? What a disgrace! […] While we are striving to simplify the language, these [young writers] keep ruining it. What kind of language is this? What kind of expressions are these? They make us long for Veysi and Nergisi!’⁴ He concludes his rant by mockingly adding that, because of these young writers, Emile Zola’s vulgar descriptions of disgraceful conditions of humanity will begin to count as literature, which he compares to the work of an eighteenth-century Ottoman poet by the name of Sururi (d. 1814), and claims that the new ‘nonsense’ would surpass even that in its absurd irrelevance.

The way Ahmet Midhat used the term decadent – to imply both a synchronic move towards the immorality of French literature and a diachronic one towards the transgressions of Ottoman classical literature – points to a general concern about these young writers’ disarrayed borrowing from multiple sources rather than a fear of excessive literary westernization. More significantly, however, Ahmet Midhat saw the real danger, not so much in the appropriation of the morally offensive nature of both literary traditions, as in the free-style recontextualization of the borrowed signs of Divan literature that once made a particular kind of sense. The new similes, formed using words from Arabic and syntax from Persian (i.e. the reservoir of Divan poetry), had been in a sense the zombified versions of their classical counterparts; they looked like them to an extent but were nevertheless something else entirely. Midhat’s choice of term also reflects this disturbing semi-intelligibility: a term difficult to define, decadence was, in a nutshell, ‘appealing but dangerous, liberating but perhaps too much so, pleasurable but self-indulgent, exciting yet perverse and destructive.’⁵ Elements of decadence, albeit acceptable to a certain extent, would pose serious danger were they to become the operative principle of textual production, thus would need to be pathologized and discouraged. This tendency of pathologizing in excess was not only in line with late-nineteenth-century positivism as exemplified in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, sexology and criminology, but also exemplified elsewhere in Ahmet Midhat’s writing, the most telling of which was his novella co-written with Fatma Aliye, Hayal ve Hakikat, where the female character is diagnosed with hysteria by the author himself.

As troublesome as it was for a figure like Ahmet Midhat, who saw no point in engaging with the classical tradition in any shape or form, this experimental play with words played a vital role in the creation of a new aesthetic, which, in its subversive engagement (which was more than Ahmet Midhat’s deriding indifference), traversed a longer distance towards modern literature, not despite but because of this very interest. The lack of an appropriate training in classical literature gave these young littérateurs both blind courage to awaken its dormant phraseological possibilities and an earnest recognition of its continued – albeit vilified – presence in their midst. This is perhaps best exemplified in Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s Araba Sevdası (A Carriage Affair), published in 1896 but written in the preceding decade, the story of a young bureaucrat who is parodied for his inability to correctly encode and decode speech acts to communicate with his environment. His self-claimed expertise in French and eagerness to experiment with Divan poetry drives him so far from spoken language that it causes him to mistake a prostitute for a high society lady. Yet, in the farcical persona of the protagonist, Bihruz Bey, Ekrem notably turned the mirror towards himself and his immediate environment, in one of the first and most notable acts of introspection of modern Ottoman literature. It is from this place of self-examination, both as an individual and a member of society with a certain kind of (however unlikable) historical baggage, that these writers opened a space for the possibility of dissimilar elements from past and present coming together, mixing and mingling in various ways.

This is not to say that these elements were to be conserved exactly as they were, but that one would find new modes of existence in their convergence. According to Charles Bernheimer, the term ‘decadent’ also contains this contradiction. ‘Decadence appears on the one hand to erode meaning, on the other to insist on its value and relevance,’ he argues, ‘[a]esthetically and politically, the first tendency is modern, disruptive, experimental, whereas the second is conservative and nostalgic.’⁶ This contradiction has allowed Nergis Ertürk to read this as Ekrem’s indirect gesture towards the ‘promise of non-identitarian, egalitarian writing,’ which was inspired by the mid-nineteenth century practice of writing Turkish using non-Turkish writing systems such as the Armenian and Greek alphabets, a promise that was ultimately left unfulfilled, as nationalist forces steered literary production towards a mono-scripted and monolingual direction in the following decades.⁷ This aborted bit of literary history, however, allowed for the emergence of the modern Turkish novel, characterized by non-judgemental depictions of diverse psychological states rather than cautionary lessons told via two-dimensional characters.

The short-lived proliferation of this new type of interaction with language was closely connected to important changes in the field of education. The standardization efforts in education aiming to train a new bureaucratic class had started during the reigns of Abdülmecid (r. 1839–1861) and Abdülaziz (r. 1861–1876), with the foundation of the Ministry of Public Education in 1857 and the coming into effect of The Regulation of Public Education (Maarif-i Umumiye Nizamnamesi) in 1869, and culminated during the reign of Abdülhamid II when education was truly turned into a tool of government control over the moral education of its citizens. W...