Connections and influences in Turkish literary history, or situating Köprülü’s method in Chartier’s review of mentalités.
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano
University of Washington
Introduction
These questions are not easily answered, but in order to envision them properly, we need to turn back and look to those bridges that others established before us. Since only through these bridges we can achieve our object of study.
Selim S. Kuru[1]
In his introduction to the second volume of Modern approaches to Old Turkish literature (Eski Türk edebiyatına modern yaklaşımlar), Selim S. Kuru stresses the need to look back to those intellectuals that first studied Turkish literature and attempted to make of it a modern discipline of historical enquiry. What larger social project did they have in mind? What led them to systematically study the literary products of the Turkish peoples? By asking these questions, Kuru decided to approach those sources that informed us about the literary tradition of the Turkish peoples as objects of study in themselves, thereby recognizing the historicity of those bridges that were established between past and present.
In a similar vein Gabriel Piterberg clearly summarized[2] how the recent development of hermeneutics and the arrival of the linguistic turn to historiography necessitated a different approach to Ottoman histories. While traditionally the Ottoman document was seen as a container of information, it eventually became an object of study itself. Thus, Ottoman chronicles were transformed and studied not as mediations between the past and the present, but as material objects where language was in itself past. Whether they slotted them into a broader historiographical corpus (as is the case of Cemal Kafadar’s Between two worlds), or through the multiple narration of a single event (Gabriel Piterberg’s An Ottoman tragedy), or as the outstanding product of a single mind (Cornell Fleischer’s Bureaucrat and intellectual in the Ottoman Empire), historians became aware of the historicity of their sources, no longer mere sources, but actors –as it were- that could enter in dialogue with those who study them.
In this sense, regardless the infinite information that his research offers us from pre-Islamic times to late Ottoman culture, Mehmet Fuad Köprülü must be considered not as a mediator between past and present, but as part of the past himself, the result of it and also an active participant of this literary production – I use “literary” here in a broad sense. Henceforth, his work, rather than a simple source (fountain, spring) of historical data, must be considered as a subject and object of historical enquiry, literary study and scientific interest.
For instance, in his Storia della Letteratura Turca, Alessandro Bombaci recognizes Köprülü’s contributions and uses them as a constant reference to discuss or expand upon his own observations. Bombaci also introduces Köprülü, however briefly, in his survey of Modern Turkish literature. In less than a paragraph, Bombaci tells us that he was “a dominant figure of the Turkish cultural life, disciple of Ziya Gök Alp, and gifted with better scientific attitudes than his mentor. He continued with the work of reconstruction of the Turkish culture in its entirety, without exclusion or preconception. Thus revealing himself as a master of historical study.”[3] Moreover, Bombaci dedicates four pages to comment Gök Alp’s literary production and influences, thus offering a context from which Köprülü’s work emerged.
One of the less popular works of Köprülü is his method for the study of Turkish literary history. Along the lines of other European intellectuals, Köprülü aimed to develop a scientific method for the study of Turkish literary history, discussing the limitations of its European counterparts and proposing a major intellectual project for Turkish history and literature. This self-aware text offers us the possibility to reconsider Mehmed Fuad Köprülü not only as an authority and source of Turkish history, but as an intellectual who was developing a particular approach to history, literature and language, whose research agenda has to be understood and included within the broader intellectual milieu of the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the early days of the Turkish Republic.
In the following lines I offer a brief reading of Köprülü’s methodological proposal for the study of Turkish literary history,[4] and situate it within Chartier’s review of the Annales School.[5] With this, I aim to contribute to a larger discussion of the formation of Modern Turkish scholarship. I aim to put forward questions that problematize the relationship between European and Turkish scholarship as that of between a stronger scientific tradition (European) influencing a nascent pre-Modern one (Ottoman Turkish), and propose a new approach to it that includes concepts of creativity, invention and connected histories, rather than the direct influential impact of an active and superior epistemological tradition upon a passive receptor.
The appropriation of mentalités or connected intellectual awareness
In his Method for Turkish Literary History, Köprülü engages with his contemporaries’ research agendas. He carefully surveys the major works of intellectual and literary history that were being produced particularly in France and England. It was written almost at the same time that Febvre and Bloch were launching their proposals for what later became to be known the Annales School or the history of mentalities. Köprülü, having lectured in and travelled to France and England, shared the intellectual milieu that were to give birth to the different scholarly responses to positivism and intellectual history. Thus, Köprülü’s method appeared just when social history, cultural history and history of mentalities were being concocted in Europe.
The similarities of Köprülü’s methodological proposition with those of his French colleagues, has usually been considered within the influence-influenced scheme. That is to say, Köprülü’s work has been reduced to be the result and application of European ideas to the study of Turkish literary history, rather than an original piece of work that dialogues and connects with a broader academic production in the time of its creation. It is my contention that Köprülü’s work has to be seen as one another expression of connected contexts of scholarship in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, that is to say, as different spaces of academic production linked by the constant traffic of people, ideas and experiences.
Köprülü’s method (written in Ottoman) is not only a direct translation of French ideas applied to Turkish literature. It was an equal-to-equal response to the recent historical debates and thus a new contribution. The egregious presence of French and English scholarship in the first part of the article should be considered as an introduction that situates Köprülü’s proposal within a larger international dialogue. In this sense, it is a literature review that discusses the state of the question proposed in the essay in order to make clear the response that aims to solve it.
Being Köprülü’s text an academic elaboration that discusses, criticises and responds to on-going discussions about the nature of historical knowledge and its different methods, it is imperative to look back to it not as the result of French scholarship but as its Ottoman counterpart, both of them belonging to a larger international scholarly exchange of ideas.
Afterword: towards a conclusion or further questions on Turkish literature.
Together with Köprülü, it is imperative to look back and reconsider those secondary sources for Ottoman and Turkish literature that were developed in the twentieth century and that constitute a relevant and important object of study. In the same way that Chartier reviews the history of the Annales School (together with many other histories of this school, such as Le Goff’s classic article[6] on history of mentalités to the most recently published work of Burguière[7]) Ottoman and Turkish intellectuals should be surveyed in a comprehensive historiographical analysis.
Questions related to their methodological and theoretical elaborations remain to be done, but also how and to what extent these were actually present in their works. For instance, Köprülü’s propositions seem to be ignored in his major survey of Turkish literature (Türk edebiyatı tarihi) but strongly present in his Early Mystics in Turkish literature.
How did these ideas and intellectuals dialogue, interact and connect with other Ottoman, Turkish and European scholars? Many of these questions are still to be answered, but before and more importantly, they still remain to be asked.
Cited Works
Aynur, Hatice. "Eski Türk Edebiyatına Modern Yaklaşımlar II : 27 Nisan 2007 : Bildiriler."Turkuaz, 2008.
Bombaci, Alessio,. Storia Della Letteratura Turca Dall'Antico Impero Di Mongolia all'Odierna Turchia. [Milano: Nuova accademia editrice, 1956.
Burguière, André. The Annales School : An Intellectual History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
Köprülü, M. F. and Gary Leiser. "Method in Turkish Literary History." Middle Eastern Literatures 11, no. 1 (2008).
Le Goff, Jacques, and Pierre Nora. Constructing the Past : Essays in Historical Methodology. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York; Paris: Cambridge University Press ; Editions de la maison des sciences de l'homme, 1985.
Piterberg, Gabriel. An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
[1] Selim S. Kuru, “Giriş” inHatice Aynur, "Eski Türk Edebiyatına Modern Yaklaşımlar II : 27 Nisan 2007 : Bildiriler" Turkuaz, 2008). Translation mine.
[2] Gabriel Piterberg, An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). p. 31-36
[3] Alessio Bombaci , Storia Della Letteratura Turca Dall'Antico Impero Di Mongolia all'Odierna Turchia. ([Milano: Nuova accademia editrice, 1956). , p. 472. Translation mine.
[4] See M. F. Köprülü and Gary Leiser, "Method in Turkish Literary History." Middle Eastern Literatures 11, no. 1 (2008).
[5] This discussion was originated as a result of a seminar session organized by Selim S. Kuru. University of Washington, Seattle, WA. 16th of December 2011.
[6] Jacques Le Goff. “Mentalities: a history of ambiguities” in Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora, Constructing the Past : Essays in Historical Methodology (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York; Paris: Cambridge University Press ; Editions de la maison des sciences de l'homme, 1985).
[7] André Burguière, The Annales School : An Intellectual History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).
