“Move Forward and Ascend!”​​​​​​​ Temporality and the Politics of Form in Turkish Modernist Literature

© 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press

This article addresses a phenomenon which literary critics frequently suggest might not exist: the Turkish modernist novel. In an article on modernism and the Turkish novel, Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk programmatically claims: in Turkey, “we did not have modernism in the true sense of the word.”[1] Emphasizing stream of consciousness techniques, fragmented narratives, and a limited period of emergence, he points to a laundry list of modernism’s standard definitional features, all of which he claims are not appropriate for understanding the development of the Turkish novel. However, a deeper look into the Turkish novel of the early twentieth century reveals that these features are, in fact, present in the fiction Pamuk is addressing. Not only is novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s writing full of stream of consciousness techniques and fragmentary narratives, but novelists writing in earlier decades such as Peyami Safa (1899–1961) experiment with representations of temporality and visual culture in their fiction.[2] This discrepancy between the presence of aesthetic features understood as modernist elsewhere in conjunction with critical readings of the Turkish modernist novel as an absence or lack offers up a new way to engage questions of modernism’s relation to modernity following the field’s global turn.

This article first takes up the disputed existence of the Turkish modernist novel as a means of exploring why it is described as lacking in the Turkish context despite a persistent recognition of Turkish modernity within historical and sociological scholarship. I am interested in how this discourse surrounding the lack of a Turkish modernist novel illustrates the ways in which the history of modernization as a state-sponsored project in Turkey shapes how literary scholars and authors have defined the modern, and consequently literary modernism, in the Turkish context. In particular, I explore how practices of defining modernism in relation to modernity, namely as the cultural or “aesthetic domain of modernity” make apparent the ideological stakes of reading certain authors as modernist—or not—within Turkish literary criticism.[3] Turkish literary criticism, written by poets, novelists, and scholars, offers a compelling insight into the ways in which literary modernism has been conceived globally beyond the Anglo-European academy. As such, critical writing is particularly useful to the project of global modernisms as it reveals the ways in which the state-sponsored processes of modernization have shaped discourses around literature and literary modernism in locations where modernity was defined and cultivated self-consciously through state initiatives.

The article explores how early twentieth-century government directives regarding the teleology of modernity in Turkey have created tension between two characteristics central to modernism’s definition, namely the opposition between the concepts of modernism-as-rupture and modernism-as-connected-to-the-literary-tradition. I focus on two sets of literary criticism, the first written by Turkish poets Nazım Hikmet (1902–63) and the Garip poets, and the second by novelists Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62) and Peyami Safa. These debates from the early decades of the Republic, which was founded in 1923, contest the proper relationship of Turkish literary production to the literature of the Ottoman past. In comparing these literary critical debates to the scholarly reception of these poets and novelists across the twentieth century, it emerges that authors whose literary theories parallel state-sponsored theories regarding history and literary production are more likely to be termed modernist.

In other words, authors whose literary critical writing calls for a radical break from the past are more likely, within the framework of Turkish literary studies, to be considered modernist by later generations of literary scholars than authors whose literary critical writing advocates for temporal connections to the Ottoman past via the literary tradition. The reason for this, I argue, is that certain authors, which in the Turkish context happen to be overwhelmingly authors of novels, are not perceived as wholly committed to the teleologies of modernization espoused by the Kemalist Republic.[4] These authors have been precluded from being understood as modernist until very recently because their version of modernity is perceived as insufficiently similar to the ideological premises of Kemalist modernization, regardless of the author’s actual political affiliations. This discrepancy is especially visible in the distinction between the poet Nazım Hikmet, whose political commitments to communism rendered him an opponent of the Kemalist regime yet is frequently upheld as Turkey’s first modernist poet, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, who served as an MP for the Republican People’s Party following Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s death, but whose modernist credentials are frequently depicted as undercut by his muhafazakar, or conservative aesthetics.

This sociocultural focus on rupture and progressive teleologies privileges certain kinds of modernist practice while casting suspicion about the existence of the others in Turkey. Perhaps one of the most established definitional aspects of modernism following the global turn emphasizes literary modernism’s critiquing function in its relationship to political modernity, in that modernism “helps create that modernity; it reflects it; it responds to it; it challenges it; it reformulates it” (Friedman, Planetary Modernisms, 4). Turkey’s modernist poets, in their calls for iconoclasm and rupture from the past, have helped to “create” and “reflect” a literary discourse shaped around a larger, state-sponsored understanding of modernity as a rupture from the Ottoman past. Yet, if, as scholars claim, Kemalism—the nationalist, Westernizing, reforming principals put forward by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his government—is “Turkey’s project of modernity,” in what ways might the trope of modernism-as-embedded-in-tradition espoused by Turkish conservative novelists offer aesthetic strategies to demystify, challenge, and reformulate Kemalist modernity?[5]

By contrast, this literary critical space which challenges or demystifies Kemalist modernity has been understood as a counterpoint or challenge to the modern in Turkey. In asking how the literary criticisms of early twentieth-century novelists critically engage with Turkey’s project of modernity and how they challenge those narratives of modernity, a vision of literary modernism emerges that is both similar to its Anglo-European counterparts in its interest in temporality and the literary tradition, while simultaneously concerned with reworking and exposing the myths of modernity and of progress that are unique to the Turkish Republic.

What I am interested in exploring through this article then are the ways in which Kemalist thought has functioned as an ideological underpinning, or following Stuart Hall, as a pervasive “mental framework” for defining modernity within the institution of Turkish literary criticism.[6] Although these definitions of modernity within Kemalist ideology never resulted in the suppression of modernist aesthetic practices—with the exception of Nazım Hikmet’s later writing, all of these authors were able to publish both their polemical and literary works during the Kemalist era—Kemalism’s hegemonic power has nevertheless been formative for how these works have been understood, both historically and in contemporary scholarship. As Laurent Mignon, quoting Mehmet Çetin’s Tanzimat’tan Günümüze Türk Şiiri, has noted, “‘the supremacy of ideological preferences, feelings of sympathy and antipathy have continued to dominate the [Turkish] artistic world’ and made anthologies, literary criticism, and historiography that reflect the ideological pluralism of the literary world the exception, not the rule.”[7] In other words, what I am arguing here is that Kemalist ideology’s perception of modernity has diffused throughout the institution of literary criticism. In turn this demonstrates that state-sponsored modernity can shape our understandings of literary texts. My aim is to account for the ways in which concepts like modernism travel unevenly, refracted through prevailing political ideologies.

Turkish Modernity and the Literary Critical Establishment

Turkey’s particular experience of modernity offers the opportunity to investigate modernism’s aesthetic dimension in relation to the sociopolitical modernization projects undertaken by the Kemalist government after the establishment of the Republic in 1923. The renewed stress on the connection between modernism and modernity brought about by modernist studies’ global turn has illuminated a paradox at work in Turkish literature of the early twentieth century: while scholars of history, sociology, economics, and political science have long agreed that a period of modernizing reform took place in Turkey beginning in the late nineteenth century and rapidly accelerating after the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Turkish literary critics frequently question the existence of a literary modernism contemporary with this period of extensive modernization.

To briefly provide historical context: Turkish modernity has frequently been described as a “unique” and “profoundly eccentric” project unprecedented not only in the Middle East but worldwide.[8] While modernizing reforms were introduced well before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the political and cultural reforms led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who has been described as a “radical modernizer and westernizer [and] the greatest nation-builder of modern times,” extended and enshrined such policies as the foundations of Turkish nationalism.[9] Taking place between 1923 and 1934, these reforms codified an effort to replace Ottoman-Islamic cultural and political loyalties with modern, Western values taken from Enlightenment rationalism and positivist and materialist notions of progress. This series of radical reforms encompassed nearly every aspect of life, including legal, political, cultural, economic, and social policy. Exaggerated exceptionalism aside, Turkey’s modernizing reform program does constitute a historical trajectory different from either the Western European or colonial contexts in its emphasis on state-led, top-down Westernizing reform as the primary driver of modernization.

To return to the Turkish literary critical scene, I want to emphasize that Pamuk is by no means alone in his suspicion regarding the Turkish modernist novel. Indeed, the discourse of a lacking or nonexistent Turkish novel is a well-established genre within Turkish scholarship. Nurdan Gürbilek has explored how this “criticism of lack,” as evidenced by statements which claim the Turkish novel does not exist, surrounds the Turkish novel in general as a means of preserving the authority of the literary critic in Turkey.[10] However, while a generalized criticism of lack has largely tapered off in recent years, the criticism of a specifically modernist lack has emerged as a central conjecture concerning Turkish literature in the wake of the field’s global turn. What pervades these literary critical discussions is a sense that while modernity and modern literature are undeniably central to accounts of twentieth-century Turkish literary history, modernism as question of aesthetics is not. Furthermore, there is a critical slipperiness between these terms as they move back and forth across languages and theoretical groundings, which makes it difficult to see the absence in practice. When the qualifier modernist is applied to authors whose writing might best be described as written with the intent of instilling modernity in their readers, it gives the illusion of participating in one discussion about modernism, while actually participating in another.[11]

Nergis Ertürk’s contribution on Turkish modernism for The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms describes the impact of a literary critical field that emphasizes the absence of modernism from the Turkish literary tradition:

The problem presented by the idea of “Turkish modernism” is not merely that of the recovery of an excluded object. Rather, it involves the very possibility of addressing the absence of an “authentic” Turkish modernism within national-critical discourse itself. For the fact is that while Turkey certainly has generated various recognizably modernist aesthetic practices, those practices have certainly not coalesced into a contemporaneous, continuous modernist movement that can neatly be aligned with transnationalized modernisms derived from European and Euro-American orbits of influences.[12]

Ertürk’s description of the literary critical discourse highlights a constellation of issues at the heart of discussions of literary modernity in Turkey: absence, authenticity, contemporaneity, continuity, belatedness, and comparison with Europe. As an account of the field, Ertürk’s assessment also reveals the ways in which scholars of Turkish literature understand aesthetic modernism: as something primarily happening within Europe’s borders; confined to a specific period; written by authors who are part of a coterie or express affiliation with a particular movement; writing that crosses inter-European national borders. In other words, it is a definition of modernism drawn from literary critical practices that do not necessarily reflect the global turn modernist studies has taken in recent years.

Yet, these earlier understandings of modernism as defined by its European timelines and locations, alongside Kemalist ideology’s prescriptions regarding literature, have had a substantial impact on the critical understanding of literary modernism as an absence or lack in Turkey. Besim F. Dellaloğlu has claimed that “in our country the job of the modernist is impossible” due to what he sees as different attitudes towards modernity that emerge in states undergoing modernization (Modernleşmenin, 57). When modernism is recognized, its belatedness is a commonly repeated aphorism in Turkish criticism. Yıldız Evecit has claimed that modernism and postmodernism emerged in tandem in Turkey, heralding the appearance of “visibly modernist aesthetic practices” with the publication of Oğuz Atay’s 1972 novel Tutunamayanlar (Those who can’t hold on).[13] This timeline of emergence is reinforced by Hilmi Yavuz’s claim that “nearly fifty years after Ulysses was written Modernist Turkish novelists followed Joyce. Belatedness, yes! This is the distinguishing feature of our novel tradition.”[14] While Yavuz and Ecevit grant the existence, albeit belated, of Turkish modernist novels, the emphasis on the belated adoption of modernist aesthetic practices in the Turkish novel effectively denies the possibility of a literary modernism emerging alongside Turkey’s period of rapid, state-sponsored modernity in the early twentieth century. If modernism is not recognized as existing in Turkish novels until the 1970s, then there is no literary modernist novel to be found in the period in which Turkey was most fully experiencing state-sponsored modernity.

Yet, when we shift our attention from prose to poetry, a very different critical stance on modernism emerges. Not only is modernism seen as a valid category of analysis for twentieth-century Turkish poetry, but a wide range of dates, poets, and movements are proclaimed to be the initiatory moment of Turkish modernism.[15] One possible moment is the 1910 publication of a manifesto by the Fecr-i Ati (Dawn of the Future) poets whose motto that “art is personal and sacred” echoed the call of art for art’s sake declared by the French Symbolists. Hilmi Yavuz, who reads the Turkish novel as belated, affirms poet Yahya Kemal (1884–1958) as a “guiding light” of modernist Turkish poetry (Yavuz, Edebiyat ve Sanat, 163). Highlighting a different strand of experimental aesthetics, Hasan Bülent Kahraman argues that “Nazım Hikmet’s poetry of the 1920s is Turkey’s first modernist poetry” and “Futurism is his greatest influence.”[16] Yet others see a belated modernism emerging with the advent of the Garip (Strange) movement in the early 1940s and the İkinci Yeni (Second Renewal) in the 1950s, as evidenced through the scholarship of Yalçın Armağan and Semih Gümüş. Regardless of debates over the exact period of emergence, critics affirm the existence of a modernist Turkish poetry as emerging in the early twentieth century and intellectually connected to similar currents of thought in Europe.

One possible answer to the question of why a modernist poetry but not a modernist novel lies in the possibility that, in its emphasis on movements, contemporaneity, and visible markers of modernism, the definition of modernism which circulates in Turkish literary criticism also reflects a largely poetic, rather than novelistic, account of how modernism brought itself into being. The programmatic manifestos of Futurism, Dadaism, and Imagism articulated a coterie identity and their border-crossing aesthetic practices remain some of the field’s most visible aesthetic markers. This hypothesis that certain definitional aspects of modernism are more connected to the poetic, rather than novelistic, experiences of modernism certainly seems to hold true in Turkey.

Yet, I want to explore a different answer. Turning to Chinese history and literature, Shu-mei Shih strikes at the paradox of discussing a modernity without an attendant modernism:

If we have deployed the discourse of modernity and modernization in the Chinese context and claimed the experience of modernization as having universal valence, then why not “modernism”? What this rejoinder asks is, again, not whether modernism is a legitimate category, but what gets legitimized by the absenting of modernism.[17]

While critics of modernism’s global turn have argued that merely connecting modernism to modernity flattens out particularities of aesthetics, context, and function in an accumulation of potentially endless modernisms, the question of why modernity but not modernism seems particularly useful in the Turkish context. If such an overwhelming academic interest in Turkish modernity, why not Turkish modernism? Yet, this question engages obliquely with the fact that there is already a robust debate on the emergence of modernist aesthetics in Turkish poetry and a critical consensus that modernism is an appropriate paradigm for understanding developments in Turkish poetry in the twentieth century. To reframe Shih’s question in the Turkish context is not to ask what gets legitimized by the absenting of Turkish modernism writ large, but what gets legitimized by the specific absenting of Turkish modernist novels in the early twentieth century?

The answer I want to explore as I turn to the literary critical writing of early twentieth century Turkish poets and novelists is: regardless of whether or not a given writer’s political commitments supported the Kemalist regime, it is Turkish nationalism’s temporal mythologies that get legitimized by the absenting of the Turkish modernist novel in the early twentieth century. This temporality of modernity is predicated upon a rhetoric of historical rupture to claim that the Ottoman past was not a suitable foundation for modern Turkish identity, and in order to be modern Turkey had to both break with the Ottoman past and subscribe to a teleological vision of development. While scholars in recent years have demonstrated that this rupture was more of a discursive fact than a historical one, the rhetoric of rupture between past and present was mapped onto the Ottoman Empire-Turkish Republic binary, in ways that continue to inform literary values.[18] This is particularly true in the case of the novel, because early state-led initiatives surrounding the novel, including government-sponsored translation and publishing programs, depicted the genre and its attendant realist aesthetic practices as unambiguously furthering the modernizing agenda of the early Kemalist Republic.

Reasons for this legitimization are threefold: first, in conjunction with Republican reforms, there was an emphasis on literary realism to achieve the temporal ideologies of the Kemalist government and bring about Turkish modernity.[19] This emphasis on literary realism as the supreme aesthetic of Turkish modernity had a delegitimizing effect on alternative aesthetic practices in the Turkish novel, particularly nonchronological and fragmentary narrative structures. In other words, aesthetic practices became another arena in which Kemalist values could be inscribed and the valuing of certain aesthetics at the expense of others within literary criticism reflects these pervasive ideological structures. Second, poets and authors who enshrined the break between Ottoman past and Turkish future as a necessary precondition for the creation of art—even if the politics which underlie their poetic practices differ from Kemalist nationalism—are more likely to be discussed as modernist within Turkey because their literary values conform to Kemalist conceptions of what the modern was.

Both these ideas influence the third factor, which was a literary critical stance of using Kemalist principles as criteria in adjudicating whether a literary work is good, authentically Turkish, or even existent. In critical discussions a paradox emerges: if Turkish modernism is not authentic then it is consequently not Turkish and by extension does not exist. However, the concept of authenticity at work here pushes back against essentialist ideas of the authentic as that which is irreducibly personal, cultural, or belonging to a prior moment in time. Authenticity, in this account, is not positioned as a way of resisting progressivist accounts of modernity or understood as a refuge from modernity in which the authentic inhabits a temporal realm that runs counter to the developmental logic of modernity. Instead, what is authentic modernity in the Turkish context is positioned as irreducibly Turkish only as far as modern Turkishness in the Kemalist era is synonymous with a modern, Westernized, national identity. In the Turkish context, authenticity becomes an account of finding the true national self through modernization and progress which is predicated on an understanding of the West as further along the axis of civilizational development and higher in the relative power structure of nations.

What I want to insist on here is the relationship between modernity and civilizational power in this account of the authentic: authenticity in the Turkish context functions not as a search for the genuine expression of a given culture, but rather as a statement of Turkey’s relative position in the hierarchy of world power. Within this scheme certain temporal paradigms are figured as the only way to achieve cultural production that is authentically Turkish and in doing so, reclaim cultural and civilizational power on the world stage. The history of the novel in Turkey also partakes in this attempt to define Turkishness in relation to Western power structures, with the novel being conceived primarily as a vehicle to bring about modernity. What is at stake, then, in the discussions of the Turkish modernist novel is nothing less than an understanding of modernization as a bid for power on the world stage. What I explore in the following sections reveals that in the case of Turkish literary criticism, the epithet “modernist” was not so much a comment on an author’s particular aesthetic practices as it is a way of signaling that their literary works participate in the ideologies of Kemalist modernizing reform.

Turkish Poetry and the Kemalist Temporal Regime

The Kemalist government’s directives in history were foundational to establishing the temporal regimes that dominated the aesthetic practices of Turkish literature in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1930 Atatürk established a “Committee for the Study of Turkish History” which was tasked with writing a comprehensive history of the Turkish people for state history textbooks and history curriculum. The committee developed what came to be known as the “Turkish History Thesis” (“Türk tarih tezi”). The Thesis was an attempt to establish a “myth of origins” that bracketed the Ottoman past as an aberration in the history of the Turks by expanding the Turkish presence into the pre-Ottoman and ancient historical civilizations of Anatolia. In doing so, the authors of the Thesis could both distance Turkish national history from the perceived civilizational failures of the Ottoman past and establish the Turks as a founding force in the civilizations of the ancient world, thus proving that they belonged to the Aryan race. The aim of the Thesis as presented in the Prolegomena to an outline of Turkish history (Türk tarihinin ana hatları: Methal kısmı), an abridged version of the 600-page Historical Thesis published in 1931, was to “remind the Great Turkish Nation of its dignified past,” while also acknowledging that “this nation has been very unfairly slandered and its service and labor in the formation of the earliest civilizations has been persistently denied.”[20] The Prolegomena’s introduction published an excerpt of a speech by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:

Turkish Nation! . . . History is full of praise and eulogies to the civilizations you have founded. Although your march has been stalled and interrupted for a few centuries by the political and social factors threatening your existence, the intellectual and cultural inheritance of ten thousand years continues to dwell in your soul as an unsullied and inexhaustible force. Carrying the memories of thousands and thousands of years, history points towards the place you deserve in the ranks of civilization. Move forward and ascend! This, for you, is both a right and a duty!” (Prolegomena, 61)

In this schema, the Ottoman past “stalled and interrupted” a fundamental onward march of Turkish civilization. This achieves two things: first, it casts the Ottoman state as a “threatening,” non-Turkish entity in opposition to national existence, and second, it represents the essence of Turkish civilization as forward oriented in its “unsullied” form. Ottoman rule is blamed for Republican Turkey’s perceived civilizational lag, rather than the orientalist narratives which blamed ethnic or religious character, as asserted in the “sick man of Europe” discourse prevalent in the contemporary European press. Not only does Mustafa Kemal’s speech configure historical time as a linear march forward, it also establishes the Turkish people’s duty to “ascend” in the “ranks of civilization” in order to reclaim their historical destiny. In other words, the future of the Turkish Republic was conceived teleologically as both above and beyond the existing hierarchy of civilizations in which Turkey merely uses the tools of the Western modernity to rediscover its true nature and re-establish its forward march.

These ideas imbued how the Kemalist regime depicted the recent Ottoman past and are reflected in almost every level of the reform process. These ideas are especially clear in the vocabulary of modernity. While modernite has become the Turkish word denoting modernity in contemporary language, an earlier vocabulary captures the idea of modernization as something that would allow Turkey to inhabit the same temporal zone as Europe. The vocabulary of Turkish modernity in the early twentieth century features muasırlaşmak, a verb whose root word muasır means contemporary or coeval; asri, meaning “up-to date” or “of the century”; ilericilik, meaning “progressiveness,” but also “forward” or “future-ness”; and finally çağdaşlık, meaning literally living in the same age.[21] In this linguistic schema, modernity is seen as a process which bridges what was and what will be, allowing Turkey to effectively jump up to the level of civilization perceived to be achieved in the West and leap across the gap that separated the Ottoman past from the Republican present. This idea places the concept of temporality, specifically a temporality that imagines modernity as that which permits the nation to move forward in time, and in doing so resume their rightful place above other civilizations, at the root of Turkish definitions of modernity.

If this discourse figured the Ottoman past as a time of stagnation and repression in history, the Ottoman canon was similarly positioned in literary discourse as an aesthetic tradition which subjugated and constrained the true expression of Turkish creativity. In the 1930s and 1940s a rhetoric of forced rupture between the Turkish literary future and the Ottoman literary tradition became increasingly prominent feature of poetic debates. Here I turn to two exemplary incidents in Turkish poetic culture, namely the “Putları Yıkıyoruz” (We are toppling idols/we are iconoclasts) campaign of 1929 led by the journal Resimli Ay’s staff writers, including poet Nazım Hikmet, and the publication of the “Garip Önsözü” (“Garip Preface”) by poets Orhan Veli, Melih Cevdet, and Otay Rifat in 1941. These two incidents are notable not only for their shared commitment to enshrining a discourse of rupture from the past into Turkish poetic modernism, but also for the fact that their contributing authors have been each named as originators and practitioners of Turkish poetic modernism.[22] Despite their different political affiliations and differing commitments to Kemalism as a political ideology, this shared emphasis on a break with the past as necessary for the development of Turkish literature’s future illustrates how temporal rupture functioned as one of the key metaphors for literary modernity in Turkey, and helped to “create” a literary parallel with the modernity of rupture called for in Kemalist historiography.

In the June 1929 edition of Resimli Ay (Illustrated Monthly), an article written by poet Nazım Hikmet titled “Putları Yıkıyoruz Abdülhak Hâmit: No 1” (“We are toppling idols, number 1: Abdülhak Hâmit”) appeared. In the left corner near the title, a short explanation signed “from the head writer’s desk” proclaims, “In this edition we are starting a new struggle (mücadele). Although our goal is worthy, we will strip the sacred cover from some who we have made idols and worshipped.”[23] The article’s use of the word mücadele, or struggle, is the same word that is used to describe Turkey’s National Struggle (Milli Mücadele) following the first world war, linking the journal’s “declaration of war against the old” in literature to a larger battle for national sovereignty. Taking aim at the previous generation of poets, the article claims that, while poet Abdülhak Hamit (1852–1937) was known as the dahii azam, or “people’s genius,” he had no right to that title for two reasons. First, his poetry had never been translated into another language which is the “greatest test” of every writer, and second, because the language he used was Ottoman, not Turkish (“Putları Yıkıyoruz,” 24). Second, the article goes on to declare that it is dangerous to see him as the people’s genius because “in the minds of the mass of readers who today do not know the Ottoman language and for tomorrow’s readers who will not know it, he the essence of an individual distorted with history and in the end falsifies our literary history” (25). The follow up article in the campaign, which appeared in the July 1929 issue similarly attacked poet Mehmet Emin (1869–1944), who was known as the milli şair or “national poet.” Again, the writers take issue with his language, calling it foreign, fake, and contrived. The denunciation of Abdülhak Hamit and Mehmet Emin on the grounds of their language illustrates that the rejection of Ottoman poetry did not simply encompass a turn away from traditional poetic forms, but also included the very language and metaphor that such poetry entailed.

In addition to the articles singling out the two poets and giving reasons for their rejection, the same July 1929 issue contained an article entitled “Why are we destroying idols?” written by Nazım Hikmet in which he claims, “In destroying idols, we are doing nothing other than toppling old, decayed, petrified idols and opening the path for new ideas, new currents.”[24] Asking what conditions should bring about the new ideas and new movements necessary for Turkish society to progress, the article affirms that “[i]n order to create opportunities for new ideas and movements to develop, the need arises to clear away these petrified idols of ideas and art. In those moments, people topple fake idols which they are convinced cannot represent their ideas and dreams and open the way for new ideas” (Toprak, “Nâzım Hikmet’in,” 37). In the same issue the journal’s editor Zekeriya Sertel also enumerated similar ideas regarding the relationship of the past to the present state of creation in his editor’s column:

We don’t believe in the past. The thing we call past is a force which binds us to that which is behind us. We don’t even want to look back. Our eyes are on the future. For us, even the hour before this moment is the past. Nations which honor the past are not those that are busy with the future. The new generation’s defining attribute is that they do not know the past. We don’t want to take pride in our own past, we praise what we will do. The mission of the young generation is not to worship the past, but to destroy it. (quoted in “Nâzım Hikmet’in,” 35)

This idea of destroying the past via a campaign to topple the influence of late Ottoman poets highlights how language use, aesthetic practices, and poetic forms were positioned in Turkish poetic discourse as deeply connected to concepts of futurity and literary newness in Turkey. From this collection of articles, we can grasp an ideological paradigm regarding the temporality of Turkish poetry that connects directly how the modern was defined and circumscribed at the time. Ottoman poetry, particularly the poetry and language used by the generation of poets who wrote before World War I, is not suitable as the predecessor or originator of contemporary Turkish poetry. Indeed, it is both a foreign and fake language that oppresses and restricts the emergence of a true Turkish poetry, much as Ottoman rule was figured as oppressing to the Turkish nation within the Prolegomena.

Turning to another landmark of poetic modernism in Turkey, the publication of the Garip Preface in 1941, we see that the discourse of rupture from the Ottoman past in order to bring about a Turkish literary future again becomes enshrined as a quintessential modernist moment in Turkish poetry. Written by poet Orhan Veli with input from Melih Cevdet and Oktay Rifat, the preface served as an introduction to the coterie’s eponymous collection published by Resimli Ay Publishing and declared the Garip poets’ intention to break completely from the poetic forms of the Ottoman poetic tradition.[25] This amounted not only to discarding the formal rhyme schemes and traditional metaphors of Ottoman divan poetry, but also championed the use of simple language and a focus on everyday experience. The Preface valorizes the “relative oddities in the new poetry,” because it “concerns itself more closely than traditional poetry with the realities of everyday life” (Veli, “Preface,” 200). Far from emphasizing the importance of a poetic tradition, Orhan Veli disparages the concept of the literary canon, requesting its total destruction:

The structures should be changed completely. In order to get away from the prosaic and suffocating influence of literatures that have for centuries shaped and ruled out our will and aesthetics, we must reject everything those literatures have taught us. If possible, we should discard the language itself that limits our creative activity. (Veli, “Preface,” 201)

Much like the Putları Yıkıyoruz campaign, the Garip Preface constructs the Ottoman past as a limiting factor not only for Turkish poetic expression, but the language of “suffocating influence” and “rule” makes clear the connection between aesthetic form and political power. That the Ottoman literary tradition is figured as the aesthetic and political oppressor of Turkish poetry illustrates how the Garip movement’s aesthetic claims are aligned with the Republican reformist agendas which posited the Ottoman past as limiting Turkey’s civilizational power. In reading Garip as a dismantler of the Ottoman literary tradition and a founder of the new Turkish poetry, their aesthetic ideology is similarly revealed to be closely related to the historical teleologies of Kemalism, which sought to dismantle Ottoman state and social institutions in the founding of the Turkish Republic as a means of reclaiming Turkish power on the world stage.

This idea that new aesthetic movements could bring about a new poetic paradigm by destroying and rejecting canonical elements of poetry is visible in both the Putları Yıkıyoruz campaign’s call to destroy the past by toppling idols and in the Garip Preface’s rejection of the Ottoman literary canon. In both accounts, the only way to create new literature that is both Turkish and new is to “discard,” “reject,” or “topple” the hegemony of previous art forms and authors. The literature of the past, rather than functioning as a repository on which contemporary writers can build, is to be discarded and rendered meaningless for creation in the present moment.

Yet, what is interesting in the case of both Nazım Hikmet and the Garip poets is the way that their critical writing about poetry occasionally contradicts the aesthetic practices of their poetry in that they write poems that reference, incorporate, and attempt to come to terms with the Ottoman tradition.[26] For example, Nazım Hikmet’s Simavne Kadısı Oğlu Şeyh Bedreddin Destanı (The Epic of Sheikh Bedreddin, 1936) reworks the fifteenth-century Sheikh Bedreddin rebellion in free verse using elements and imagery from divan poetry. This disjuncture between theory and practice makes it clear that the rhetoric of modernism-as-rupture is primarily a rhetorical device they are using to take a position in literary discourse, rather than dedication to a specific artistic practice. What I am most interested in here is not to adjudicate the extent to which their art conforms to their own literary ideals but rather to highlight the ways in which these poetic theories of literary progress and the Kemalist modernization projects share a theory of the modern as that which enacts a desired rupture between past and present.

Ideologies of Turkish Realism

In conjunction with a poetic discourse of rupture from the literary past as the only way to create new art and secure Turkey’s future, a hegemonic understanding of realism as the aesthetic mode which would propel the country forward into modernity also circulated in the 1930s and 1940s. While the new modernist studies has productively challenged the modernist/realist binary, I want to return to it here to explore how what I call the Turkish modernist novel emerged contra to a specific interpretation of realism as employed in early twentieth century debates surrounding the Turkish novel.[27] As mentioned previously, modernization discourse in Turkey saw the novel as both a technology of civilization which could instruct citizens in being modern as well as a vehicle to establish new national-cultural aesthetic practices. Much of this was based on an understanding of the novel as enabling social reform. It was also the literary genre most connected to developmental notions of history-as-progress. This historical emphasis on the Turkish novel as a realist form also feeds into critical narratives of modernism’s belated emergence in Turkey and explicit claims about there being no modernism in Turkey before the 1970s. Avner Wishnitzer has explored how connections between literary genre and temporal culture became solidified in the late Ottoman Empire. In particular, he depicts divan poetry’s fall from favor as rooted in the temporal culture of cyclic images that “lacked a clear sense of temporal directionality” as opposed to the novel’s perceived “linearity and simultaneity.”[28] The novel not only instructed citizens in the proper ways of modernization and inculcated a new historical and temporal consciousness.

This link between the realist novel’s teleological chronology and the modern was especially clear due to a state-sponsored emphasis on realism as a means to instill modernity within readers. Ahmet Evin, in his history of the Turkish novel, gives realism a place of prime importance in the cultural debates of the early twentieth century, articulating that it “was seen as an index and requisite of progress in literature. It provided the necessary discipline through which the imagination could be restrained and exaggeration could be avoided.”[29] As Veysel Öztürk notes, Kemalist principles not only espoused “realism in literature as a part of their understanding of modernization,” but literary critics also valorized literary realism as an integral part of modernity which “stigmatized Ottoman literature as one based on pure imitation and fantasy.”[30] The imperative for realist novels then not only pertained to the genre’s chronological, progressive, and rational aesthetic practices, but the valorization of literary realism also contained an implicit rejection of the representational and temporal practices of the Ottoman literary canon’s nonlinear temporal directionality.

In this modernization discourse, realist literary aesthetics were deeply connected to the two temporal paradigms of Kemalism, namely rupture between Ottoman past and Turkish present, and an understanding of future-oriented progress through modernization and Westernization. Kader Konuk has explored how realist literature in this period, both Turkish and translated, aided the Kemalist reforms in altering readers’ perceptions of the nation’s past from an Ottoman legacy focused on empire, to a purely Turkish history rooted in the ancient peoples of Anatolia. In doing so, Konuk argues that literature, particularly the novel “generated a new sense of reality” that radically altered “the sense of history and cultural legacy” which culminated “in the country’s new conceptualizations of space and time” (East-West, 11, 79). Yet, Konuk’s conception of the Turkish reform process as a “realist reform” which “fundamentally altered the way in which Turks perceived, and continue to perceive reality” illustrates that the Turkish discourse of realist practices in history and literature are slightly at odds with how the term is historically used in the realist/modernist binary (79). Rather than evoking realism’s mimetic function or reproduction of reality, the conception of literary realism at work in Turkey in the 1930s and 1940s encompassed a literary aesthetic that strove to alter the perception of reality and in doing so create a new Turkish reality.          

In other words, in the context of Turkish authors, describing a given author’s literary style as modernist is reserved for authors who are committed to a vision of literary modernity as best achieved through a rupture from the Ottoman past, even if the political basis of that rupture is different from that advocated by the Kemalists. Acknowledging this also exposes how an emphasis on a discourse of rupture as a shared “visible practice of modernity” between Turkey and the West creates a skewed sense of comparability across modernisms. The discourse of rupture in the Turkish context does very different cultural work in that it enshrines a conception of modernity closely aligned with the state’s self-conscious cultivation of modernity. While the aesthetic practices of these authors certainly fall into the “creates” modernity camp of Susan Stanford Friedman’s list, what gets left out of the discussion in Turkey is the aesthetic practices that “challenge” or “reformulate” Turkey’s specific modernity.

Muhafazakâr Modernists and the Literary Tradition

In what remains of this article, I want to shift attention to the literary criticism of two novelists writing during the early Republican era: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar and Peyami Safa. Both position the novel genre as a means of re-establishing historical continuity between the Ottoman past and the Turkish present and both advocate in their critical writing for nonchronological temporal aesthetics in fiction to precipitate that continuity. For both Safa and Tanpınar, connection to the past, rather than rupture from it, is represented as the foundation of Turkishness in which the past is an essential part of contemporary personal and national identity. This final section examines how chronology and historiography in the critical writing of Safa and Tanpınar is driven by a sense that the Ottoman past is a crucial cultural repository for the formation of modern Turkish identity, both cultural and personal. As such, their fiction and criticism inaugurate a modernism that is rooted in the “challenge” and “reformulation” of Kemalist modernization’s temporal ideologies. That their work also positions itself as articulating an authentic Turkishness predicated on historical continuity illustrates how central contestations of Turkishness are to the discourse of the modern in Turkish literary criticism.

Both Safa and Tanpınar have been obliquely received in the Turkish literary canon largely because they are both cast in literary and cultural criticism as muhafazakâr, or conservative. A stance which posits the muhafazakâr as antithetical to modernist aesthetic practices permeates both the scholarly and the popular understanding of Tanpınar and Safa. In his foreword to Modernleşmenin Zihniyet Dünyası: Bir Tanpınar Fetişizmi (The Mindset of Modernization: A Tanpınar Fetishism), Besim F. Dellaloğlu describes an exchange that occurred while he was an undergraduate at Boğaziçi University in the 1980s and discovered by a friend to be reading Tanpınar’s novel Huzur (A Mind at Peace). The friend asked if he was really going to read the novel, dismissing Dellaloğlu’s interest in Tanpınar because “he is one of the representatives of Turkish conservatism” (1). While there has been a slow shift in recent years regarding Tanpınar’s canonicity, this stance is still visible in current literary criticism. Nergis Ertürk’s “Modernism Disfigured: Turkish Literature and the ‘Other West’” explores the relationship between modernism and muhafazakârlık (conservatism), arguing that Turkish modernism is “accompanied and undercut by traditionalism and political conservatism” (530). Ertürk reads the prevalence of conservative strands in Turkish literary modernism as evidence of its potential non-authenticity, suggesting that true modernist literature is founded on progressivist values. Basing her benchmark of modernism on this logic, she cites the muhafazakâr inclinations of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar alongside Islamic conservative writers İsmayıl Hakkı Baltacıoğlu, and Necip Fasıl Kısakürek to demonstrate the inherent non-modernist aspects of their work. Once again, we encounter a missing, or perhaps more accurately, a challenged and problematic, Turkish modernist novel.

Delving into the cultural discourse of conservatism in the early Republican era, the Kemalist regime’s self-proclaimed, exclusive proprietorship over the definition and concept of modernity has distinct links to the othering of muhafazakârlık in literary criticism. Tezcan Durna has demonstrated that, in the early years of the Republic, the Kemalist emphasis on purifying Turkey from the “traditional,” “Ottoman,” and “religious” elements of society meant that political life and thought was split into a dichotomy of “modern” and “muhafazakâr.”[31]  Furthermore, as Murat Belge has discussed, conservative challenges to Kemalism were judged to be muhalif, or opponents of the Republic, and their beliefs labeled as “enemy ideologies” which threatened the Republic’s success.[32] Because Kemalism’s reform program involved defining the modern through a series of binary oppositions based profoundly on the logic of progressive temporality, with the concepts modern, progressive, authentic, Western, and Turkish occupying one pole and traditional, backwards, inauthentic, Eastern, and Ottoman comprising the other. This binary logic worked to collapse the meaning of terms gathered on one side of the binary into one another, creating a great divide between what was considered modern and what was considered traditional. To be muhafazakâr, then, was not only to be in opposition to the government, but it also has larger repercussions for how aesthetic innovation is perceived within a given author’s literary works.

While Safa and Tanpınar are undeniably part of the modern Turkish canon, critics of their novels overwhelmingly focus on each author’s connection to the past, illustrating the ways in which rejecting certain aspects of Kemalist ideology came to be read as a marker (or lack thereof) of literary merit. While Safa’s work was described by his contemporary poet İlhami Bekir Tez as writing “such-and-such novels which are disorganized and lagging,” Tanpınar is similarly figured as a “bizarre, nostalgic Ottomanist living in the ashes of a lost era,” or accused of an “uncritical adoption of an orientalist approach,” due to his interest in the Ottoman past.[33] Yet, much as the Anglophone modernist tradition includes authors whose innovative force involves reckoning with the literary tradition such as T. S. Eliot or James Joyce, I argue that Turkish muhafazakâr novelists can be read in a similar light.

Turning first to Peyami Safa, his critical writing emphasizes the temporal possibilities inherent in the form of fiction as underpinning its potential for innovation. In an article “Roman Tekniğinin Bazı Esasları” (“Fundamental Principles of Novel Technique”), Safa articulates how the chronology of the novel differs from that of lived experience: “The novel, seeing that it is a choice and a composition between life’s possibilities, is endowed with a form which is different from life. The novel does not need to follow life’s chronology.”[34] Rather than realist fiction which reproduced the ever-onward chronological state of experience, for Safa the creative potential of the novel lay in its capacity to disrupt and experiment with narrative temporality. This play with fictional chronology is particularly evident in his early novels Şimşek (Lightning, 1923) and Bir Tereddüdün Romanı (A Novel of Hesitation, 1934). Full of flashbacks, temporal dislocations and stream-of-consciousness techniques, Safa depicts temporal experience in both Şimşek and Bir Tereddüdün Romanı as subjective, deeply reliant on an individual past which is differently experienced, and essentially unsharable and uncommunicable. In both novels he represents individual experiences within the recent past as a barrier to interpersonal communication and to establishing a harmonious community in the novel’s present.

Nazim İrem has argued that “conservative literature aimed to show how the present could be constructed as the extension of different pasts” in which a “multiplicity of experience in the present” contributes to “tension-ridden cultural forces manifested themselves as a clash between different forms of social existences.”[35] Şimşek in particular plays with these “tension-ridden cultural forces,” exposing how the characters’ different experiences of the past create a plethora of presents that are ultimately mutually exclusive and impossible to sustain. As such, the temporal aspect of Safa’s early novels can be read as playing with how different social identities in the Republican era emerged from different kinds of Ottoman pasts, both personal and cultural. In other words, the novel reflects how different personal experiences in the late Ottoman Empire have coalesced, through time into the present-day of the Turkish Republic, a situation which Safa felt was crucial to understanding the social striations and different uses of Ottoman history within the Republic.

In addition to Safa’s understanding of the different chronological possibilities inherent in literature, he also understood the Ottoman literary past as a necessary element for creation of the new. In an article titled “Sanat ne içindir?” (“What is art for?”) published on August 25, 1932, in Cumhuriyet newspaper, he asserts: “The new does not destroy, it modifies, and it adds.”[36] The rhetoric of destruction (yıkmak) here explicitly takes up the vocabulary of Resimli Ay’s Putları yıkıyoruz campaign, and figures that destruction as damaging, rather than furthering, the creation of the new. The article puts forward the formula: “the new = classic + 1.” For Safa, the “classic” is defined quite clearly as the Ottoman literary tradition, rather than classics drawn from the Western European tradition, while the “+1” is the addition of contemporary experiences.

Representing the Ottoman past as a creative repository was also a large part of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s aesthetic program. In contrast to Republican and Kemalist narratives that read the Ottoman Empire as irrelevant, Tanpınar intellectually and aesthetically theorized the Kemalist reforms as effecting a civilizational crisis through forcing an artificial discontinuity between Republican present and Ottoman past. In an article titled “Civilizational Change and Inner Man,” he primarily presents the Republic’s enforced rupture from the Ottoman past as creating a loss for Turkish identity: “As the continual placement of stone over two or three generations eventually creates a building, so was it like this; people adopted an identity that was won over time. This is the thing we have lost in the years following the Tanzimat: the idea of this continuity and wholeness.”[37] For Tanpınar, this continuity not only shored up cultural production across time, allowing each successive generation to burn with “with a fire from the same hearth,” but the loss of artistic and cultural continuity created a psychological crisis for contemporary Turkish citizens (Tanpınar, “Civilizational Change,” 207). Articulating the question that drives his artistic practice, he states: “This is our greatest problem: where and how are we to connect with the past? We are all children of a crisis of consciousness and identity . . . as we own up to this question, we can also claim a more solid ownership of our lives and works of art.”[38] The appeal to resolve the crisis of national consciousness and identity illustrates Tanpınar’s concern for creating a body of literature that was distinctly Turkish because of its connection to the Ottoman literary tradition, rather than rejecting it outright.

For Tanpınar, this connection to the past could be kept most strongly alive in the literary tradition. Tanpınar’s novels work to embody this continuity. Looking to his novel Huzur, which combines the circadian novel structure of Ulysses or Mrs. Dalloway with of the use of Ottoman symbolic and structural elements drawn from divan and Sufi mystic traditions can be read within the context of English-language modernist engagement with the European literary tradition. This reveals an aesthetic practice deeply concerned with continuity within the national-literary symbolic order as necessary to achieve self-understanding. This juxtaposition of European and Ottoman literary conventions allows Tanpınar to pose questions regarding the proper relationship of the writer to the literary tradition; the continuity of the canon and its linguistic-symbolic order in the face of radical cultural change; and to work through the problematic of unity in which both traditions can be combined, yet remain singular. For Tanpınar, possible answers to these questions lie in the aesthetic relationship Huzur seeks between the Ottoman poetic tradition and the European canon, in which the symbolic and structural elements of the Ottoman literary tradition are recuperated, readjusted, and revalued in order to preserve the literary tradition’s status as a transmitter of knowledge.

As Erdağ Göknar has argued, many early Republican authors, including Tanpınar and Safa, both participated in the Kemalist government while “simultaneously critiquing and/or providing nuanced reactions to [the government’s] effects” in their fiction.[39] Göknar reads their novels as “complicit in critiques of the Turkish state” (“Reading Occupied Istanbul,” 333). Such a reading opens up the possibility of understanding the literary innovations in the representation of chronology and temporality undertaken by Safa and Tanpınar as partaking in this critique. Consequently, the muhafazakâr strand present in their novels can be read as a means of “challenging” and “reformulating” Kemalist modernity’s core temporal values of rejection of the Ottoman past and progress at the same time it works against the hegemony of realism as the proper aesthetic for Turkish novels. In other words, it can be read as evidence of a Turkish novelistic modernism which, like other modernisms across the globe, asserts its connection to the literary past as a means of working through the proper relationship between modernity and tradition.

Conclusions

Focusing on literary criticism as a category of analysis within global modernisms reveals the ways in which modernism has been conceived and defined from locations in which modernity was a state-sponsored project. The relationship between state-sponsored modernity and the creation and critique of that modernity is reflected not only in the production of literature and the innovative formal features that enact that creation or critique, but also in scholarship on literature. Reckoning with the ways in which the modernist novel has been constructed as other to Turkish literature by scholars and by authors reveals the ways in which state-sponsored conceptions of Turkish modernity from the early twentieth century continue to underpin the definitional practices surrounding literary modernism in Turkey and in doing so impact field-level discussions of how and where modernism exists.

These issues are rendered all the more important because of the ways in which contemporary interpretations of historical Kemalism structure the relationship of literature and politics in twenty-first-century Turkey. Kemalist discourse continues to have an ongoing cultural power, not only in its own right, but as the foil to an evolving “Erdoğanism” which is depicted in scholarship as the “populist mirror image” of Kemalism.[40] In this schema, the repression experienced by those espousing Islamist identities and values at the hands of the Kemalists in the early twentieth century is now being enacted upon Turkish citizens espousing Kemalism’s values of democracy, secularism, and human rights. This structural relationship between Kemalism and Erdoğanism is particularly visible in the discourses surrounding incarceration of authors like Aslı Erdoğan and Ahmet Altan, in which authorly commitment to human rights discourse has been figured as a threat to state power. At its heart, these are debates over literature’s political role. Given this dynamic relationship between Erdoğanism and Kemalism, contemporary power and state ideology, it is thus necessary to understand the ways in which Kemalism informs Turkish literary culture so that our eyes are more clearly open to the operational logic behind Erdoğan’s cultural politics.

Due to different cultural ideologies of modernity in Turkey and the Anglophone literary world, attending to these different cultural logics of modernism-as-rupture and modernism-as-connected-to-the-literary-tradition in the articulation of Turkish modernist aesthetics reveals not only tensions within Turkish literary criticism over who and what gets called modernist, but a larger discomfort with ascribing the term to authorial and aesthetic practices which are seen to work against the hegemonic understanding of modernity’s teleology as espoused by the early Kemalist state. Similarly, engagement with the literary tradition is understood as a conservatism which delegitimizes the innovations in temporal representation made possible by the novel genre’s chronological capabilities. If the break between the Ottoman past and the Turkish present functions as a grand narrative of Turkish modernity, rather than continuing to read the call for rupture’s presence as an uncomplicated “visible marker” of Turkish modernism, investigating the ways in which Turkish scholars and authors critique and reformulate this notion of modernity reveal alternative strands of literary modernism present in the Turkish novel.