Week 4/4. Hafta: Questions: Answers

Here are my answers two of the questions that Zeynep raised.

What do you make of Tanpinar’s conceptualization of the change in question? Is imitation seen as a defective response to Western influence or a necessary step to attain a new (and ideal) condition? Or neither of those, for that matter?

I would argue that Tanpinar’s conceptualization of change is a “necessary” step for the condition of Western “modernization” that leads to an imitation of the West, which is defected because of the ambiguity of the West and East duality. The condition of Eastern intellectual under Westernization (or in colonialization), is disrupted by his own ambivalence between the ghost of the past and the unforeseeable future. The past is not only dead but also its content is emptied and what is left for the “modernizing” intellectual to figure out is to how to make it possible to transform from that past into a future. That is how the intellectual that is indeed the Orientalist while facing his own Oriental past barrows the language of the West. “In the Eastern Islamic civilization, the person does not change, he shrinks among the values, which loses their liveliness.” (p 82) says Tanpinar while cheering for Tanzimat intellectuals who breaks this “fixity” of unchanging pattern. However, Tanpinar neglects pre-Tanzimat conditions in terms of change in the empire. He limits his arguments of pre Tanzimat period and the mode of change (implying change towards modernization/westernization) in Tanpinar’s case is the commercial relationship with the west. On the other hand, he does not underline how political and social changes in Europe are reflected in the Ottoman Empire before this period due to the fact that such an argument would not fit in his claims on “unchangeable” Eastern subject of the west. When he starts arguing about the 19th century Turkish literature he is determined to show this “unchanging” mentality exhausted the old literature, the need for change in order to recover from this decline is the “mission” of Tanzimat intellectuals. The cure for Tanpinar comes from the West, imitation of it. But how to imitate West will be the biggest problem of Tanzimat writers who are torn apart between the East and the West.

What do you make those chapters in terms of their relation to the discipline of literary history? Do they occasionally seem to be a history of Ottoman Empire in the 19th century rather than a history of Turkish literature? Should the shift towards literature for the post-1856 period tell us something about Tanpinar’s underlying assumptions?

The period before 1856 appears to be a history of Ottoman Empire rather than literary history due to the fact that Tanpinar argues that the literary movement up until this point as a part of a dead object of old literature. The references he makes show the examples of old literature’s decaying. That is why Tanpinar’s argument regarding pre-Tanzimat period is limited to the relationships with the west and its political and military dimension. Tanpinar’s historical approach to the connections between Ottoman Empire with the West pre-1856 is limited with commercial relationships, yet there are travel books and memories of high rank officials who are enslaved during the 17th and 18th century, which reflects the observations of Europe back in time. However, Tanpinar does not necessarily take these into account because they belong to a past time where he wants to draw a line with today and the problem is that past haunts today; that is why Tanpinar’s underlying assumptions of that past is stabilized through such a discourse, which would not let his readers have such access. Tanpinar’s selection of people to exemplify his claims seems to reflect what he wants to prove accordingly to the way he views the old literature. As a result he makes generalizations out of small examples.

M.