İndir - Çankaya University Journal of Science and Engineering

Transkript

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences
9/2
Kas›m 2012
November 2012
Copyright © 2013 Çankaya Üniversitesi. Tüm haklar› sakl›d›r. Bu yay›n›n hiçbir bölümü Çankaya Üniversitesi’nin yaz›l›
izni olmadan fotokopi yoluyla veya elektronik, mekanik ve sair suretle k›smen veya tamamen ço¤alt›lamaz, da¤›t›lamaz,
kayda al›namaz. Dergide yay›nlanan makaleler kaynak gösterilmeden kullan›lamaz. Bu dergide yay›nlanan yaz›larda ileri
sürülen görüfller yazarlara aittir. Her ne kadar yaz›larda olabilecek olgusal hatalar konusunda dergi yönetimi gereken
ilgiyi gösterse de bas›lan makaleler Çankaya Üniversitesi’nin düflünce ve politikas›n› yans›tan metinler olarak
de¤erlendirilemez ve üniversite söz konusu olgusal hata ve/veya görüfllerden dolay› sorumluluk kabul etmez.
Copyright © 2012 Çankaya Üniversitesi. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored,
transmitted, or disseminated, in any form, or by any means—electronic, mechanical, xeroxing, recording, or otherwise—
without prior written permission from Çankaya Üniversitesi, to whom all requests to reproduce copyright material should
be directed, in writing. Çankaya Üniversitesi and its agents make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the
accuracy, completeness or suitability for any purpose of the content and disclaim all such representations and warranties
whether expressed in this publication are the views of the authors and are not the views of Çankaya Üniversitesi.
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Arastirmax Bilimsel Yay›n Indeksi ve
ASOS Index veri tabanlar›nda taranmaktad›r.
Dergiye gelen tüm eserler Benzerlik ‹ndeksi aç›s›ndan iThenticate program› ile incelenmektedir.
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences is indexed by
Arastirmax Bilimsel Yay›n Indeksi and ASOS Index databases.
All submitted articles to the journal are checked out with iThenticate program for Similarity Index.
‹letiflim Çankaya Üniversitesi, Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Genel Yay›n
Yönetmeni, Ö¤retmenler Caddesi No.14, 06530, Balgat, Ankara. Telefon (312) 284 4500/266; e-posta
[email protected]; web sitesi http://cujhss.cankaya.edu.tr/index_en.php. | Communication Çankaya Üniversitesi,
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Publishing Manager, Ö¤retmenler Caddesi No.14,
06530, Balgat, Ankara. Telephone (312) 284 4500/266; e-mail [email protected]; web site
http://cujhss.cankaya.edu.tr/index_en.php.
Dizgi Zeta Reklamc›l›k, Arjantin Caddesi, Borazan Sokak No.13A, 06700, Gazi Osman Pafla, Ankara. Bas›m Fersa
Ofset Bask› Tesisleri, OST‹M, 36. Sokak No.5/C-D, 06370, Yeni Mahalle, Ankara. | Typeset by Zeta Reklamc›l›k,
Arjantin Caddesi, Borazan Sokak No.13A, 06700, Gazi Osman Pafla, Ankara. Printed and bound by Fersa Ofset Bask›
Tesisleri, OST‹M, 36. Sokak No.5/C-D, 06370, Yeni Mahalle, Ankara.
ISSN 1309-6761
Temmuz 2013 / July 2013
Çankaya University
Çankaya Üniversitesi ad›na Sahibi | Owner on behalf of Çankaya University
Ziya Burhanettin GÜVENÇ, Rektör/Rector, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Editör | Editor
Alaeddin T‹LEYL‹O⁄LU, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Sorumlu Yaz› ‹flleri Müdürü | General Manager
S. Cem KARADEL‹, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Genel Yay›n Yönetmeni | Publishing Manager
Aykut KANSU, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Genel Koordinatör | General Coordinator
Eda A⁄AfiÇIO⁄LU, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Kitap Elefltirileri Editörü | Book Review Editor
H. Bahad›r TÜRK, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Yay›n Kurulu | Editorial Board
Aykut KANSU, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Aysu Aryel ERDEN, Çankaya Üniversitesi
S. Cem KARADEL‹, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Mustafa KIRCA, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Ertu¤rul KOÇ, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Tolga OMAY, Çankaya Üniversitesi
H. Bahad›r TÜRK, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Dan›flma Kurulu | Advisory Board
Fikret ADANIR, Sabanc› Üniversitesi
Feroz AHMAD, Yeditepe Üniversitesi
Tüzin BAYCAN LEVENT, ‹stanbul Teknik
Üniversitesi
Gülsüm BAYDAR, ‹zmir Ekonomi Üniversitesi
Yorgos DEDES, School of Oriental and African Studies
Hasan Ifl›n DENER, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Seçil DEREN VAN HET HOF, Akdeniz Üniversitesi
Aymil DO⁄AN, Hacettepe Üniversitesi
Gürkan DO⁄AN, Ardahan Üniversitesi
Nejat DO⁄AN, Erciyes Üniversitesi
Dilek DOLTAfi, Do¤ufl Üniversitesi
Burçin EROL, Hacettepe Üniversitesi
Olcay ‹MAMO⁄LU, Orta Do¤u Teknik Üniversitesi
N. Vedit ‹NAL, Yeditepe Üniversitesi
Huricihan ‹SLAMO⁄LU, Bo¤aziçi Üniversitesi
ve/and University of California at Berkeley
M. As›m KARAÖMERL‹O⁄LU, Bo¤aziçi Üniversitesi
Filiz KARDAM, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Hasan KAYALI, University of California at San Diego
Vangelis KECHRIOTIS, Bo¤aziçi Üniversitesi
Cemil KOÇAK, Sabanc› Üniversitesi
Ahmet fi. KUYAfi, Galatasaray Üniversitesi
David W. LOVELL, Australian Defense Force
Academy
Bedross DER MATOSSIAN, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Mehmet OKYAYUZ, Orta Do¤u Teknik Üniversitesi
fievket PAMUK, Bo¤aziçi Üniversitesi
Eugene ROGAN, University of Oxford
Fikret fiENSES, Orta Do¤u Teknik Üniversitesi
‹senbike TOGAN, Orta Do¤u Teknik Üniversitesi,
emekli/emeritus
Galip YALMAN, Orta Do¤u Teknik Üniversitesi
Ahmet YALNIZ, Çankaya Üniversitesi
Onur YILDIRIM, Orta Do¤u Teknik Üniversitesi
Arus YUMUL, ‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi
Erik Jan ZÜRCHER, Universiteit Leiden
9/2
Kas›m 2012
November 2012
BU SAYININ ED‹TÖRLER‹ / EDITORS FOR THIS ISSUE
AYSU ARYEL ERDEN
ERTU⁄RUL KOÇ
MUSTAFA KIRCA
‹Ç‹NDEK‹LER / TABLE OF CONTENTS
MAKALELER / ARTICLES
239
KARUNA WARRIER
A Comparison of Translation Styles of
Suzanne Jill Levine and Gregory Rabassa
251
REYHAN ÖZER TANIYAN
A Heteropian Novel: Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale
261
PRADEEP SHARMA
Archetypal Mothering: D. H. Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
273
SEYYED HABIB MOUSAVI
and MEISAM MOHSENI
Satrapi’s Persepolis: a Post-Colonial
Work or Not?
295
YA⁄MUR DEM‹R
The “Morally Ideal Woman” in Middlemarch
311
fiEBNEM DÜZGÜN
The Study of Mourning in Female Elegy
ARAfiTIRMA NOTLARI / RESEARCH NOTES
325
RAH‹ME ÇOKAY
The Process of Reconstruction in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
333
ESRA ÖZ‹LHAN
Bartleby, The Epitome of Passivity:
An Elegy For Humandkind
341
ÖMER Ç‹FTÇ‹
Speech and Silence within Limits:
Conversation in Henry James’s “Brooksmith”
355
B‹RCAN ÇA⁄LAR
The Stoic Mothers, Violence and Human
Condition in Union Street
365
METE ÇAL
A Chronotopic Analysis: Bakhtinian Review
of Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
373
YEfi‹M MERS‹N
Who Ignores Women: Not Only Man
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR / NEW BOOKS
379
TEMMUZ–ARALIK 2011
Türkiye’de Yay›nlanan Yeni Kitaplar
A Comparison of Translation Styles of
Suzanne Jill Levine and Gregory Rabassa
Karuna Warrier
University of Delhi
ÖZET Her çevirmenin kendine özgü bir çeviri yöntemi oldu¤u bilinmektedir. Günümüzde, pek çok çevirmenin bulunmas›, kullan›lan çeviri yöntemlerinin karfl›laflt›rmal› çal›flmalar›n› da tetiklemektedir. Suzanne
Jill Levine ve Gregory Rabassa, ‹spanyolca ve ‹ngilizce olmak üzere ayn› iki dilde tercüme yapan çevirmenlerdir. ‹spanyolca-‹ngilizce çeviriler yapan Amerika vatandafl› Suzanne Jill Levine, The Subversive
Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction adl› kitab›nda, kaynak ve erek kültürleri yak›nlaflt›rmak ve
okurun kendini rahat hissetmesini sa¤lamak için kullan›lan çeviri yöntemine de¤inmektedir.
Gregory Rabassa, ‹spanyolca ve Portekizce’den ‹ngilizce’ye çeviriler yapan bir di¤er ünlü Amerika vatandafl› çevirmendir. If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents adl› kitab›nda görüldü¤ü gibi, Rabassa’n›n çeviri yöntemi, okuyucuyu zorlamas› bak›m›ndan Levine’in yönteminden çok farkl›d›r.
Bu çal›flman›n amac›, Suzanne Jill Levine ve Gregory Rabassa’n›n kendi kitaplar›ndan hareketle, al›nt›lad›klar› örnekler üzerinden farkl›l›klar› öne ç›kararak çeviri yöntemlerini karfl›laflt›rmakt›r. Çeviride en yayg›n olarak baflvurulan yöntemlerden olan “benimseme” ve “yabanc›laflt›rma” yöntemlerinin anlamlar› araflt›r›larak, bu iki stratejinin çal›flman›n konusunu oluflturan çevirilerde nas›l uyguland›¤› ve okuyuculara çeviride karfl›l›k olarak ne sunuldu¤u incelenecektir.
ANAHTAR KEL‹MELER benimseme, yabanc›laflt›rma, metne ba¤l› çeviri, özgün çeviri, Skopos, y›k›m.
ABSTRACT Each translator has his/her own style. Today, the presence of many translators encourages a comparative study of the various translation styles adopted. Suzanne Jill Levine and Gregory Rabassa are two
translators who work between the same two languages- Spanish and English.
Suzanne Jill Levine, a US translator, translates from Spanish to English, in her book The Subversive
Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction talks about the translation style adopted to bring the source and
the target culture closer and to make the target reader feel at home.
Gregory Rabassa is another famous translator from the US translating from Spanish and Portuguese to
English. However, we see a drastic difference in the translation style adopted by Rabassa, reflected in his
book If this be treason: Translation and its dyscontents, which takes the target reader abroad.
In this paper I intend to compare the translation styles of Suzanne Jill Levine and Gregory Rabassa with
the help of the two books written by the two translators respectively, highlighting the differences through the
various examples cited by the translators themselves. I will explore the meanings of the most commonly used
methods in translation- domestication and foreignization- and also how these two strategies have been applied
in their translations and what is being presented to the target readers with the help of examples taken from
their respective written books mentioned abov.
KEYWORDS domestication, foreignization, liberal translation, literal translation, Skopos, subversion.
The presence of many translators means the presence of various styles of translation.
The different styles of translation come as a result of the different perspective that each
translator may have about the act of translation and its purpose. Some would translate
with the intention of transferring the meaning whereas some would put more emphasis
on the narrative style used and the form whereas some would transmit just the plot to
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 9/2 (Nov. 2012), pp.239–249.
© Çankaya Üniversitesi ISSN 1309-6761 Printed in Turkey
240
KARUNA WARRIER
another culture by adapting it to the receiver culture. The choice of what to translate
depends on the source text and the source culture but largely on the translator’s choice and
interpretation of the source text. This choice is the skopos i.e. the ‘purpose’ of translation
that every translator should keep in mind while translating. Among all the skopos also
include the target readers, those for whom the translator is directing the translated version.
He/she directs the text to an imaginary target reader and with the expectation of an
imaginary reaction from the target reader before the translated text actually reaches one.
Thus, every translator’s skopos being different would definitely justify the difference in
the styles used for translation.
Here I have two very famous translators working with the same languages- Spanish
and English- but with conspicuous distinctions between their translation choices and thus
the translation styles, Suzanne Jill Levine and Gregory Rabassa.
Suzanne Jill Levine is a US translator who has translated Latin American authors
like Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig and Severo Sarduy. This year she won the
P.E.N. Centre USA’s Translation Award for her translation of the Chilean author Jose
Donoso’s book The Lizard’s Tale. Her book Escriba Subversiva: Una Poética de la
Traducción (Translation: The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction)
focuses on the three Latin American authors mentioned above. This book deals with the
cultural differences with their obvious influences on the language, which in turn affects
translation and how she manages to bring them over to her own language. But besides the
task of bringing the source text to the target readers her main intention of translation is
to subvert the source text and the author of the source text to bring to the forefront the
translator and make visible his/her job. She highlights the challenges faced while translating
the work of the three authors mentioned above, focusing in detail on all the aspects, like
the title, the language, the characters’ names and their contextual significance. Each unit
talks about the profound investigation that has been undertaken to arrive at the translated
version. In an interview to María Constanza Guzmán published in the website by Word
Without Borders, Jill Levine reveals what inspired her to write the book,
I was responding among other things to a comment by one of the first writers I translated, Cabrera
Infante, that I had “too much ego” to be a translator—he said this, in part, because he was an egocentric author who wanted to control the text from cover to cover and in all its translations. I wrote
the book mainly, however, because I felt translating involved a rich thought process of which the
reader of the finished translation would never be aware.1
1. Maria Guzman, An interview with Suzanne Jill Levine, retrieved from: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/an-interview-with-suzanne-jill-levine.html, on 6th September, 2012.
A COMPARISON OF TRANSLATION STYLES OF
SUZANNE JILL LEVINE AND GREGORY RABASSA
For example, in the chapter Tres Tristes Traducciones (literally: Three Sad
Translations), Jill Levine talks about the Spanish title Tres Tristes Tigres (literally: Three
Sad Tigers) by the author Guillermo Cabrera Infante, which she translates as Three
Trapped Tigers. Jill Levine explains that the translated version of the title tries to maintain
the sound of the alliteration tr-tr-t produced by the original title and compromises with
the literal meaning, although the word trapped does symbolize the sadness highlighted
by the Spanish title. Another chapter La Traición de Rita Hayworth (literally: The
Betrayal of Rita Hayworth) deals with the translation of the title of the novel by the same
name by the author Manuel Puig which she translates as Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. She
says that she chooses the verb to betray rather than the noun betrayal because of the bigger
impact that the verb in English has than the noun. The rest of the chapters too continue the
similar way. This book takes us into the labyrinth inside the minds of a literary translator
while he/she translates.
Gregory Rabassa, also a US translator, has translated the work of various Latin
American as well as Portuguese authors like the famous Gabriel García Márquez, Julio
Cortazar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Clarice Lispector etc. He made his mark as a professional
translator in the field of Latin American prose. It was his work as a translator of literary
texts that led to the emergence of translation as a respected profession. Rabassa’s career
as a translator went to a head start with the successful translation of Julio Cortázar’s, the
Argentinean writer, Rayuela, translated into English as Hopscotch. Rabassa was awarded
two of the most prestigious awards in the field of translation. For his translation Hopscotch
he was awarded the National Book Award for Translation in 1967 and he bagged the
P.E.N. American Centre Translation Prize in 1977 for the exceptional translation Autumn
of the Patriarch, the original in Spanish by the famous author Gabriel García Márquez.
However, it was the translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude
that actually earned him a worldwide recognition as one of the most successful literary
translators. The perfection of his work even led the author of the original text García
Márquez to declare the translation as a better and clearer piece of work than his own
original.
But it was not just translation that he confined himself to. With the actual practice
of translation comes the theory. He used his work as examples for justifying his many
critical comments on the recreative work carried out by translation for it to be showcased
as a piece of art. These theoretical comments were taken as guidelines by the young
translators to get an insight into the creativity involved in translation. If this be treason:
Translation and its dyscontents is one such book.
241
242
KARUNA WARRIER
This book gives just a brief idea about his take on translation and the method used
for translation. The major part of this book concerns itself with the authors and their work
that Rabassa has translated. For example, in the chapter on García Márquez, Rabassa
talks more about his experience on translating his novels, expect little bit of explanation
on the translation of the title and the first sentence of the García Márquez’s novel Cien
Años de Soledad (literally: Hundred Years of Solitude). Nevertheless, it is through these
examples quoted can an aspiring translator get an insight into Rabassa’s perspective of
translation. However, Rabassa puts it very clearly that for him translation is a reading as
closed as possible of the original text.
Both these translators have worked with Latin American authors and have projected the work of these Latin American authors to the world. However, Suzanne Jill Levine
has intended to take up translations of works of the marginalized authors in order to bring
them on the same platform as the rest, the so-called cannon in literature. She, being a
woman translator is often questioned of her usage of the woman’s voice in her during her
translations of mostly male authors. But it is evident that her translations have an ironical marginalization as though she translates fewer women authors, most of the male
authors are homosexuals, which is another marginalized section.
The brief introduction given above itself would be enough to understand that the
perspective that Jill Levine and Gregory Rabassa have on translation are poles apart. The
different methods utilized by both the translators show that their point of view of treating
the target readers is different. The target readers of both the translators go through an
experience different from each other while reading their respective translations. On the
basis of the examples that I will be mentioning in my paper, it will be evident that the
respective target readers are either made to feel at home and are made to read the text
with their own domestic culture as the background or are taken abroad and familiarized
with a foreign culture. These two binary experiences are achieved through the strategies
of domestication and foreignization. However, these two strategies do not just define
how the target readers are made to read the translation, but they also show which culture
is exactly being elevated by the translator. But doesn’t the translator’s choice of culture
to be given importance to defeat the very purpose of translation itself? Is it not the source
culture that should actually be projected in the target text as well? Also, doesn’t the very
essence of the source text get lost in the target text if the source culture is replaced by the
target culture? In this paper I would highlight the main points where Jill Levine’s and
Rabassa’s perspectives on translation diverge and how these divergences affect the trans-
lated text and the perception by the target readers. Through the comparison of some
examples taken from both the books mentioned above, I intend to look into the application
of the strategies of domestication and foreignization and study the final translated version
presented for the target readers through which I will be able to study the skopos behind
the translation. This kind of research will help in understanding the loss that can occur
with domestication and foreignization. It is very important to understand this because it
is imperative for every translator to know what exactly to translate and what should
he/she intend to communicate through the target text. A comparison between domestication
and foreignization also helps in assigning a position for the source text and the target
readers i.e. of the two which one gets more importance.
The most glaring difference is seen in the author-translator collaboration that takes
place during a translation. In the interview mentioned above given by Jill Levine, she clearly
states that she agrees with what Alastair Reid has to say about translation. He says that an
ideal translation is the result of a face to face discussion where two or more people
exchange their perspectives and come up with a translated version, since every translator
has a different interpretation of the text and hence a different translation. Thus, Jill Levine
translates with the author, but in a way asking for permission to change words in conformity
with the sound of the target language and the target culture. For example, in the novel
Cobra by Severo Sarduy, in the following sentence she changes opio (literally: opium) in
Spanish to cocaine just to maintain the rhythmic sound produced by the original sentence.
Original versionO en la operación, sientes que se te inclina la mesa. Oyes un chorro caer en una vasija de aluminio.
Te dan opio para que resistas.2
Translated versionOr in the operation you feel that table slopes. You hear a stream falling into an aluminum container.
They give you cocaine so that you can stand it.3
In this example we see that the highlighted words produce a certain sound in both
the versions. To have precisely this effect Jill Levine changes the word opio to cocaine.
But it is very much visible that in the process she changes the meaning of the sentence,
after all opium and cocaine are two different drugs.
2. Suzanne Jill Levine, Escriba Subversiva: Una Poética De La Traducción [translated by Rubén Gallo]
(Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998), p.71.
3. Suzanne Jill Levine, Escriba Subversiva.
243
244
KARUNA WARRIER
Similarly she translated the novel Tres Tristes Tigres by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
by reading aloud the sentences till it satisfies the sound in English. For example, she
translated a title Ella cantaba boleros (literally: She danced boleros) as I heard her sing
because of the absence of an equivalent word in English for bolero, music of a popular
Caribbean dance form. In my view Jill Levine does not limit the collaboration with the
author to mere consultation and query sort of collaboration. Instead, it is quite evident in
the book written by her that she changes the source text sitting with the author to make
the target readers comfortable with the text.
On the other hand, Rabassa does not translate with the author; instead he only
consults the author. He translated Rayuela by Julio Cortázar, with the help of some
suggestions by the author. His so called collaboration with the author is restricted to
mere consultation and clarifications of unclear doubts in the original text. In The
Translator’s Voice: An Interview with Gregory Rabassa by Thomas Hoeksema, Rabassa
was asked about the direct involvement of the authors in his translations. He gave examples
from various such collaborations. In case of translations of works of Mario Vargas Llosa, the
famous Peruvian author, Rabassa said that Vargas Llosa was involved in the translations
of his own work only to the extent of giving the translator the “real” meaning of certain
phrases. Surprisingly, in the same interview he denies any collaboration with Gabriel
García Márquez, the author of whose translations Rabassa became known as a worldwide
successful translator. For Rabassa there are hardly any encounters with any illegible
expression that may bring about the requirement to rope in García Márquez. Thus,
Rabassa’s author-translator relationship is confined to a simple exchange of suggestions.
In fact, he says, ‘I translate as I read the book for the first time’.4
In the quote below Jill Levine makes clear the purpose of her translations,
“Mi” idioma (en el cual soy también un pasajero) nunca podrá expresar las palabras del español
original, pero aun así intento traerlas “a casa”, intento expresar al “otro” en mi propia versión del
inglés estadunidense, ya que todos tenemos nuestro vocabulario privado e incluso una gramática
personal.5
“My” language (in which I too am a traveler) will never be able to express the words of the original
Spanish, but still I try to bring them “home”, I try to express the “other” in my own version of US
English, since all of us have our own vocabulary as well as a personal grammar. (my translation)
She searches for equivalent words for the untranslatable words in the target language
and even equivalent sources for searching appropriate words in the target language. For
4. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents (New York: New Directions
Book, 2005) p.27.
5. Suzanne Jill Levine, Escriba Subversiva. p.24.
example, she translated the title De donde son los cantantes (literally: From where are
the Singers) by Severo Sarduy to the US culture taking inspiration from James Bond
movies, i.e. as close a source to the US culture as Hollywood. She translated it as From
Cuba with a Song.
On the contrary Rabassa believes that words of one language have a close relation
to the culture to which they belong because of which there are some words which are
untranslatable. He leaves them as it is, without translating. As an example he takes his
translation of the novel Rayuela in which the word paredro keeps appearing again and
again, used to refer to the protagonist. The word paredro is a greek word which means
double. Because of the lack of a translation in English, Rabassa keeps the word as it is, not
substituting by any equivalent. He intends to keep the translated version as is the original
version i.e. giving importance to those elements of the source text which demand importance
and attention in the target text. In The Translator’s Voice, we come across another example
pointed out by Rabassa which shows the point of reference for translation being
attributed to the source text,
Mostly, with these authors, region comes to bear with certain local terms scattered throughout the
book. Since these words are not exotic in the context they are used in, there is no need to keep
them so in translation. Indeed, Vargas Llosa often worries about this last possibility, a seeming
over-exoticism in the English version where there is none in the Spanish, or at least the Peruvian
version.6
Thus, we see that Jill Levine uses the target culture as the base for translation, while
for Rabassa the dominant culture in translation is the source culture. In the book, If this
be Treason: Translation and its Dyscontents, Rabassa says that,
‘He cannot and must not set himself apart from the culture laid out before him. To do so would
indeed be treasonous. He must marshal his words in such a way that he does not go counter to the
author’s intent’.7
According to the quote, the differences between the two authors that we have seen
till now are very clear. With the help of an example I will explain the difference. In
almost all her translations, Jill Levine has translated the names of the characters of the
novels, trying to preserve the contextual sense of the names. One of the characters in the
novel La Habana para un Infante Difunto (Translation: Infante’s Inferno) is named
Dulce Espina (literally: Sweet Thorne). It is pseudonym given to one the women seduced
6. Thomas Hoeksema, The Translator’s Voice: An Interview with Gregory Rabassa, retrieved from:
http://translation.utdallas.edu/Interviews/Rabassa-by-Hoeksema.html, on 3rd September, 2012.
7. Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason. p.7.
245
246
KARUNA WARRIER
by the narrator. She translated it as Honey Hawthorne, with the word Honey symbolizing
the sweetness and Thorne of the surname symbolizing the espina. She justifies this as,
‘Este nombre conserva las connotaciones dulces y espinosas del original y bien podrá ser el seudónimo de una mujerzuela estadunidense’.8
‘This name conserves the sweet and the thorny connotations of the original and can very well be a
pseudonym of an American prostitute’. (my translation)
But at the same time we must also take notice of the fact that Jill Levine does not
hide that it was Cabrera Infante who actually proposed the name, which means that she
is not ‘treasonous’ if we follow Rabassa’s quote because she does not go against the
author’s intent.
On the other hand one does not see any change in the translated version by Rabassa
of the name Rosario Tijeras (literally: Rosario Scissors) in the novel by the same name
written by Jorge Franco Ramos. He maintains the name as the original because of the
cultural significance that the Spanish name carries. Tijeras is a nickname attached to the
name Rosario due to her use of scissors as a weapon for her protection. Also, in the
translation of the novel Cien Años de Soledad (literally: Hundred Years of Solitude) by
García Márquez, Rabassa does not change the names like José Arcadio Buendía while
translating into English and this way he takes the source culture to the target culture.
According to Lawrence Venuti, ‘domestication refers to an ethnocentric reduction
of the foreign text to the target language cultural values, bring the author back home’ and
‘foreignization refers to an ethnodeviant pressure on those (cultural) values to register the
linguistic and the cultural differences of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad’.9
Domestication and foreignization are two strategies used in practically all the
translations. A translator always finds himself in this dilemma of which of the two
strategies to apply during his task of translation. His/her choice of source culture or the
target culture as the base will help him/her get out of the domestication/ foreignization
dilemma. It is the skopos i.e. the ‘aim’ or the ‘purpose’ that decides the translation and
its strategies. But it is important to note what these two strategies result in. Domestication
makes the target reader more comfortable with the language and the culture of the target
text but a loss takes place in the process as the essence of the source text is lost. On the
other hand, foreignization would make the target readers uncomfortable but would also
help them get closer to the foreign culture without any loss in the source text.
9. Yang Wenfen, Brief Study of Domestication and Foreignization in Translation, retrieved from:
ojs.academy publisher. com/index.php/jltr/article/download/01017780/151, on 15th March, 2012.
On analyzing all the examples that I have mentioned of both the translators, it
becomes very clear that Jill Levine’s translation can be categorized under domestication,
for which she herself gives the justification,
‘Lejos de la idea tradicional del traductor como un escriba servil y anónimo, el traductor literario
debe considerarse un escribano subversivo. Su labor destruye la forma del original a la vez que
reproduce el sentido en una nueva forma. En este proceso, la traducción emerge como la extensión
del original que al re-crear siempre pretende alterar la realidad’.10
‘Unlike the traditional idea of the translator as a servile and an anonymous writer, a literal
translator should consider him/herself as a subversive scribe. His/her task destroys the original
form at the same time reproducing the meaning in a new form. In this process, the translation
emerges as an extension of the original which on re-creating always tries to alter the
reality.’(my translation)
The method of domestication and foreignization also overlaps the techniques of
liberal and literal translation.11 Liberal translation technique allows the translator to let
himself/herself get away from the confines of the source text and translate it liberally. But
at the same time literal translation allows the target reader go closer to the source culture.
However, liberal and literal translation is a technique at the linguistic level while domestication and foreignization are at the cultural level.
Based on all the examples given by Jill Levine in her book it becomes clear that she
has translated liberally, not restraining herself to the source text and the source culture.
Instead, as can deciphered from the quote above, she has subverted the role of the translator
as a mere reproducer and has made immense efforts to make the text belong as much to
the translator as to the author.
On the other hand, it is foreignization that Rabassa resorts to while translating
because according to his opinion,
‘In even the best of examples a translation cannot get to the marrow of what has been said in the
original. A piece of writing cannot be cloned in another language, only imitated’.12
Through the strategy of foreignization of which literal translation, not meaning
word-by-word though, is a part, Rabassa is actually trying to make the readers familiar
with a foreign culture and language. He is transmitting the ‘foreignness’ of the text and
maintaining the difference between the source and the target culture. Friedrich
Schleiermacher’s main motive of translation was to celebrate the difference between the
11. Yang Wenfen, Brief Study of Domestication and Foreignization in Translation.
247
248
KARUNA WARRIER
two cultures. He had said that ‘the reader should be able to guess the Spanish behind a
translation from Spanish, and the Greek behind a translation from Greek.’13 Similarly, in
my opinion, the skopos behind Rabassa’s translation seems to be the same: make the target
reader point the Spanishness i.e. the source behind the text. Despite the target text being
an imitation, all the examples we have seen of his translations are differentiating the
source culture and the target culture.
After reading all the theories and analyzing all the examples of the two translators
quoted using these theories, it surely comes out as an important study on the different
techniques a translator can adopt in his/her task. We have seen that the relevant technique
to be adopted all depends on the skopos or the purpose of the translation and also on how
the translator wants the target reader to react to the target text. As per Eugene Nida, the
translator should translate the text in a way that he/she is able to maintain the reaction
among the target readers as that of the original readers of the source text. Nida suggests that
this goal can be attained by searching for dyanamic equivalence in the target language.
Domestication and foreignization are exactly about searching for equivalences or keeping
the foreign material as it is respectively. Jill Levine is precisely looking for equivalences
in the target language; however, on the basis of my study of the examples mentioned I
believe that the reactions of the original readers and the target readers remain different. On
the contrary, Rabassa, instead of looking for equivalences, he maintains the foreignness of
the text and hence, even the reaction of the target readers. Thus, we can conclude that a
loss does occur in either of the two strategies, but we can also see that the loss occurred
is greater in case of domestication as it is the source culture shown in the source text
which is being replaced by the target culture due to which the target readers remain ignorant
of the source text. Thus, the strategies of domestication and foreignization as used in the
examples cited surely raises the question of whether the motive of translation is to bring
two cultures closer and diffuse them or is it to recognize and celebrate the differences
between them.
REFERENCES
Guzman, Maria. An interview with Suzanne Jill Levine, retrieved from: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/an-interview-with-suzanne-jill-levine.html, on 6th September, 2012.
Hoeksema, Thomas. The Translator’s Voice: An Interview with Gregory Rabassa, retrieved from:
http://translation.utdallas.edu/Interviews/Rabassa-by-Hoeksema.html, on 3rdSeptember, 2012.
Jill Levine, Suzanne. Escriba Subversiva: Una Poética De La Traducción [translated by Rubén Gallo]
(Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1998).
Rabassa, Gregory. If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents (New York: New Directions Book,
2005).
Yang, Wenfen. Brief Study of Domestication and Foreignization in Translation, retrieved from: ojs.academypublisher.com/index.php/jltr/article/download/01017780/1511, on 15th March, 2012.
249
A Heteropian Novel:
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Reyhan Özer Tan›yan
Pamukkale University
ÖZET Margaret Atwood, Dam›zl›k K›z›n Öyküsü’nde1 bask›n›n hem totaliter (bütüncül) hem de bask›ya direnen do¤as›n› betimlemek için belirgin postmodern stratejiler kullanm›flt›r. Atwood’un eseri kad›nlar›n
kendi kiflisel bilinçleri için uyand›¤›, ataerkil sosyal düzen ile bafla ç›kmaya çal›flt›¤› ve kendi aralar›ndaki
iliflkileri biçimlendirdi¤i hayali bir ülkeyi ele almaktad›r. Di¤er bir deyiflle, Atwood kendi ütopyas›n› göz
önüne sermifltir. Bu, feminist bir söylem olarak, onun (kad›n›n)-topyas›d›r. Bir bak›ma, Atwood’un kitab›nda kurdu¤u düzen, Foucault’nun tan›mlad›¤› gibi, uzam› iliflkisel, heterojen ve ucu aç›k olarak yeniden
kavramsallaflt›ran bir heterotopyad›r.2 Ütopya ve distopya (karfl› utopia) ile k›yasland›¤›nda, heteropik romanlar göz ard› edilmifl konular› veya mükemmel bir flekilde düzenlenmifl bir toplumun hicivsel tersten
okunmas›n› ifllerler. Kad›nlar›n bak›fl aç›lar›ndan tarif edilen feminist heterotopik metinler, kad›nlar için
ideal olan ve ayr›ca s›n›fland›r›lm›fl, ›rkç› ve kültürel ötekiye yer vermeyen toplumlar› ça¤r›flt›rmaktad›rlar. Bu yaz›nlar, “ütopya ve distopyay›…farkl› iki kutuptan ziyade etkileflimli yar›m küreler olarak birlefltirerek ve melezlefltirerek” (Mohr 50) okuyucular›n› beslemektedirler. Bu da, Mohr’a göre, bu yaz›nlar›n
“s›n›rlar› afl›lm›fl, yeni boflluklar› ve karfl›l›kl› iliflkileri olan alternatif bir dünya” yaratmak için “ütopya ve
distopyan›n kurulu olan çift mant›¤›n›” elefltirdi¤i, baltalad›¤› ve s›n›rlar›n› bozdu¤u anlam›na gelmektedir
(50). Dam›zl›k K›z›n Öyküsü’nde, heterotopik roman biçiminde, Atwood birbirleriyle z›tl›k içerisinde olan
cinsiyetçi bak›fl aç›lar›n› ve yaklafl›mlar›n› tek bir çat› alt›na toplayabilmek için ütopya ve distopya aras›ndaki farkl›l›¤› çözümlendirmifltir. Bu çal›flman›n amac› da Dam›zl›k K›z›n Öyküsü adl› roman› heterotopik
bir roman olarak incelemektir.
ANAHTAR KEL‹MELER Heterotopik roman, Dam›zl›k K›z›n Öyküsü, Margaret Atwood, kad›nlar
ABSTRACT Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale uses explicit postmodern strategies to characterize
both the totalitarian nature of oppression as well as the resistance against it. Her writing deals with an
imaginary land where women wake up to their self-consciousness, to struggle with the patriarchal social
order, and to forge connections among themselves. In a way, Atwood envisions her utopia. This her-topia
(a feminist discourse) is in fact a heterotopia which is the term used by Foucault to re-conceptualize space
as relational, heterogeneous, and open-ended. 3 Compared with utopia and dystopia, heterotopian novels
1. Kitab›n Türkçeye çevrilmifl olan bafll›¤›d›r. Çeviri 1992 y›l›nda Afa Yay›nlar›ndan çevirmenler Sevinç
Kabakç›o¤lu/ Özcan Kabakç›o¤lu taraf›ndan piyasaya sürülmüfltür.
2. Bu terim Mart 1967’de Michel Foucault taraf›ndan verilen (“Des Espaces autres”) “Of Other Spaces”
bafll›kl› bir konferansta kullan›lm›flt›r. ‹ngilizce çevirisi Diacritics (Aksanlar) (Bahar, 1986) adl› kitab›n Metinler/‹çerikler Bölümünde yer alm›flt›r. Foucault’ya göre, heterotopyalar “orta ça¤›n hiyerarflik
“yer topluluklar›n›” alt üst eden ve Galileo taraf›ndan son derece geliflmifl“genifllemenin uzam›” ve ölçüsü olan erken modern döneme aç›lan “yerleflmenin uzam›”n› kapsayan modern dünyan›n nitelikli
uzamlar›d›r. Diacritics ss.16-17.
3. (“Des Espaces autres”)”Of Other Spaces”, which a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967.
English translation appeared in the Texts/Contexts Section of Diacritics (Spring, 1986). According to
Foucault, heterotopias are “the characteristic spaces of the modern world, superseding the hierarchic
‘ensemble of places’ of the Middle Ages and the enveloping ‘space of emplacement opened up by Galileo
into an early-modern, infinitely unfolding, ‘space of extension’ and measurement.” Diacritics, pp.16-17.
252
explore issues neglected or satirical reversal of a perfectly regulated society. Depicted from the perspective
of women, feminist heterotopian texts call for societies that are ideal for women and also not the classed,
racial, and cultural other. They motivate their readers by “merging and hybridizing utopia and dystopia…as
interactive hemispheres rather than distinct poles.”4 That is to say, they “criticize, undermine, and transgress the established binary logic of classical utopia and dystopia” to create “an alternative world of transgressions, of new interstices and interrelations.”5 In The Handmaid’s Tale, in the form of the heterotopian novel, Atwood dissolves the division between utopia and dystopia to incorporate conflicting gender perspectives and concerns and the main aim of this paper is to analyze The Handmaid’s Tale as a heterotopian novel.
KEYWORDS Heterotopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood, women
This paper reads Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale
as a representative of heterotopian feminist writing (écriture féminine) that challenges the
phallogocentric symbolic system and encapsulates various social interrelations and interactions in its fictional space, the space of heterotopia. Atwood produced her novel, The
Handmaid’s Tale, in the form of the heterotopian novel, which dissolves the division
between utopia and dystopia as two literary sub-genres to incorporate conflicting gender
perspectives, concerns, and claims. Corresponding to the two genders, she writes to challenge
the existing patriarchal social system and to change the existing gender construction. Atwood’s
writing is set in an imaginary land where women wake up to their self-consciousness, to
struggle with the patriarchal social order, and to forge connections among themselves. In
a way, Atwood envisions her utopia, which is as usually considered a feminist dystopia,
as a heterotopia. The question that needs to be answered here is what heterotopia is and
what differences it bears when compared to the term of utopia and dystopia.
Heterotopia is the term used by Foucault to reconceptualize space as relational,
heterogeneous, and open-ended.6 Like utopia, heterotopia is a place/space which has the
property of being outside of the society which produced it, while at the same time carrying
a relation to all the other remaining external spaces. A heterotopia suspects, neutralises
or inverses the relations which it signifies, mirrors or reflects. The difference between
utopia and heterotopia is that heterotopia possesses a material reality. If one says that the
reflection in the mirror is a utopia, then the mirror as the object and as the medium is a
heterotopia. Or, to be more precise; the mirror is a heterotopia when it reconstitutes the
object standing or looking at itself being reflected. Foucault suggests some principles of
heterotopia which can be easily matched with the novel of Atwood. First of all, in
4. Dunja M. Mohr, Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias
(Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2005), p.50.
5. Dunja M. Mohr, Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias, p.50.
6. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”: Texts/Contexts Section of Diacritics, 16/1 (1986), pp.16-17.
A HETEROPIAN NOVEL: ATWOOD’S THE HANDMAID’S TALE
heterotopias, there are “privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals
who are in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live in a state of
crisis,”7 in this case the house of Commander, the area of Unwomen and the room of
Commander are the best examples: “I raise my hand, knock, on the door of this forbidden
room where I have never been, where women do not go.”8 The second principle is that “a
society, as its history unfolds can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different
fashion.”9 As understood from the novel, the state of Gilead is a new version of America:
We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? It was in the air; and it
was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had been set up in
rows, with spaces between so we could not talk. We had flannelette sheets, like children’s, and
army-issue blankets, old ones that still said U.S.10
Ever since Central America was lost to the Libertheos, oranges have been hard to get: sometimes
they are there, sometimes not. The war interferes with the oranges from California, and even Florida
isn’t dependable, when there are roadblocks or when the train tracks have been blown up.11
The third one is that heterotopia “is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place
several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible”12 such as gardens and carpets
because these have the capacity of juxtaposing in a single real place different spaces,
species that are incompatible with each other.
The carpet bends and goes down the front staircase and I go with it, one hand on the banister, once
a tree, turned in another century, rubbed to a warm gloss. Late Victorian, the house is, a family
house, built for a large rich family….13
I look at the one red smile. The red of the smile is the same as the red of the tulips in Serena Joy’s
garden, towards the base of the flowers where they are beginning to heal. The red is the same but
there is no connection. The tulips are not tulips of blood, the red smiles are not flowers, neither thing
makes a comment on the other. The tulip is not a reason for disbelief in the hanged man, or vice
versa. Each thing is valid and really there. It is through a field of such valid objects that I must pick
my way, every day and in every way.14
The fourth one is that “heterotopias are often linked to slices in time”15 such as
museums and libraries: “The street is almost like a museum, or a street in a model town
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” p.24.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage Books, 1996), p.120.
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, p.13.
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” p. 25.
253
254
constructed to show the way people used to live. As in those pictures, those museums,
those model towns, there are no children.”16
His laughter is nostalgic, I see now, the laughter of indulgence towards his former
self. He gets up, crosses to the bookshelves, takes down a book from his trove; not the
dictionary though. It’s an old book, a textbook it looks like, dog-eared and inky. Before
showing it to me he thumbs through it, contemplative, reminiscent; … the Venus de
Milo, in a black-and-white photo, with a mustache and a black brassiere and armpit hair
drawn clumsily on her. On the opposite page is the Colosseum in Rome, labeled in
English, and below, a conjugation: sum es est, su-mus estis sunt. … written in the same
ink as the hair on the Venus. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum. “It’s sort of hard to
explain why it’s funny unless you know Latin,” he says. “We used to write all kinds of
things like that. … Forgetful of me and of himself, he’s turning the pages.17
The fifth principle deals with “the system of opening and closing that both isolates
them and makes them penetrable”18 like prisons or dormitories. In this case either one is
forced as in the case of prison or one must submit to rites of purification, but in both one
can only enter and exist by special permission.
Now the gates have sentries and there are ugly new floodlights mounted on metal posts above it,
and barbed wire along the bottom and broken glass set in concrete along the lop, No one goes
through those gates willingly. The precautions are for those trying to get out, though to make it even
as far as the Wall, from the inside, past the electronic alarm system, would be next to impossible.19
The last principle of heterotopias is that “they have function in relation to all space
that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles.”20 Either their role is to create
a space of illusion that exposes every real space, or else on the contrary their role is to create
a space that is other, another real space as perfect or ill constructed. For this situation
Foucault gives the examples of brothels and colonies. When applied to the novel, again the
house of Commander, colonies of Unwomen and Jezebel’s bar can be the best examples.
However it is Tom Moylan who applies this Foucauldian term to a literary genre
of “the postcapitalist, post-modern, and post-Enlightenment society,”21 which not only
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and Utopian Imagination (New York:
Methuen, 1986), p.161.
persists in pursuing visions of better society after the bankruptcy of utopias and the
disillusionment of dystopias but also begins to question, subvert, and dissolve the artificial
distinction between utopia and dystopia as, discrete subgenres. Interweaving utopian and
dystopian narrative strands, heterotopian novels re-envision ideal society as a heterogeneous
space of diversity and dynamism. Heterotopian novels warn against any simplistic
dichotomization and offer themselves as sites of conflict “where a wide range of discourses
can be negotiated and tested against the backdrop of the strictly hierarchized closed-system
model that usually informs our notion of the static uniformity of utopian or dystopian
societies.”22 In brief, heterotopian novels explore issues neglected or satirical reversal of a
perfectly regulated society and this, in a way, overlaps with the perspective of women writers,
especially those of feminists. So, there emerges another term named feminist heterotopia
calling for societies that are ideal for women and also the classed, racial, and cultural
other.
Feminist heterotopia takes women’s place in the ideal society as its central concern
and focuses on everyday life, views and depicts from the perspective of women. They
motivate their readers not in an either encouraging or appalling, but by “merging and
hybridizing utopia and dystopia…as interactive hemispheres rather than distinct poles.”23
They “criticize, undermine, and transgress the established binary logic of classical utopia
and dystopia” to create “an alternative world of transgressions, of new interstices and
interrelations.”24
In her book, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (1996), Lucy Sargisson explicates
transgression, which is regarded as one of the defining features of feminist heterotopias, as
“the critique and displacement of meaning ‘constructed by a complex and hierarchical system
of binary opposition’ and the suggestion of an alternative approach aimed at proclaiming
difference and multiplicity.”25 Following Sargisson, Dunja M. Mohr argues that
transgression is the innovative potential of postmodern utopian/dystopian texts (that
is, heterotopias), especially when such texts are feminist. She contends that in order “to
refuse logic of sameness, dissolve hierarchized binary oppositions, and embrace difference,
multiplicity, and diversity,”26 it is necessary to start from the hierarchy of gender as the
most fundamental binary opposition. It is the irruption of the ‘woman question’ into
22. Ralph Pordzik, The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel
in the New English Literatures (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), p.5.
25. Lucy Sargisson, Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (New York: Routledge, 1996), p.4.
255
256
utopian/dystopian literature that inserts dynamism into the static social hierarchies and
the essentialistic polarization of good places and bad places.
In this light, given its portrayal of a heterotopian space, exploration of power struggles
manifested in the form of control and transgression, as well as its feminist concerns,
Atwood’s novel, which has often been defined as a dystopia, is a typically heterotopian
one. The fictional space of The Handmaid’s Tale is heterogeneous and “an alternative
world of transgressions, of new interstices and interrelations,”27 because the narrative
strands of dystopia and utopia merge and hybridize with each other whereas there is
women struggle to re/constitute their female or, feminist selves. The Republic of Gilead
is patriarchal, where there is an absolute control over the female body. In fact, absolute
control over women, their bodies, and their procreativity is the foundation of this state,
which implements patriarchal order towards the end of population increase.
In the case of Gilead, there were many women willing to serve as Aunts, either because of a genuine
belief in what they called “traditional values,” or for the benefits they might thereby acquire. When
power is scarce, a little of it is tempting. There was, too, a negative inducement: childless or infertile or
older women who were not married could take service in the Aunts and thereby escape redundancy,
and consequent shipment to the infamous Colonies, which were composed of portable populations
used mainly as expendable toxic-cleanup squads, though if lucky you could be assigned to less
hazardoustasks, such as cotton picking and fruit harvesting.28
In fact, the nightmare of Gilead shadows every one’s life especially that of women
because it is women that are forced out of job and imprisoned at home, with their money
frozen and transferred to male relatives. They are categorized into Wives, Marthas,
Handmaids, Aunts, or Econowives, if they are lucky enough not to be labelled Unwomen
and sent to the Colonies to die from cleaning nuclear wastes.
In this regard, another critic, J. Brooks Bouson comments that “through its imposition of a rigid system of hierarchical classification, the Gilead regime effectively robs
women of their individual identities and transforms them into replaceable objects in the
phallocentric economy.”29 However, much more is going on under this dystopian surface,
in that within the iron-cage of Gileadian space, transgression and resistance are not only
rampant but also, more importantly, intricately bound up with women’s pursuit of their
own writing, or, more specifically, tale-telling.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who
can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I
28. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, p.274.
29. J. Brooks Bouson, Brutal Choreographies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p.137.
have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after
it. I can pick up where I left off. It isn’t a story I’m telling. It’s also a story I’m telling, in my head;
as I go along, Tell, rather than write, because I have nothing to write with and writing is in any case
forbidden. But if it’s a story, even in my head. I must be telling it to someone. You don’t tell a story
only to yourself. There’s always someone else. Even when there is no one.30
About this topic, in her essay “The Laugh of Medusa,” Héléne Cixous stresses that
“women must write themselves,”31 that is, to put themselves, the unthinkable and
unthought-of the symbolic system of patriarchy and phallocentrism, into writing. Women
have to tell their own stories, and, by doing so they constitute themselves, and create their
own worlds. Under Cixous’s influence and adding a spiritual dimension to écriture féminine,
in her book Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest Carol Christ
claims:
Women live in a world where women’s stories rarely have been told from their own perspectives.
The stories celebrated in culture are told by men. Thus men have actively shaped their experiences
of self and world, and their most profound stories orient them to what they perceive as the great
powers of the universe. But since women have not told their own stories, they have not actively
shaped their experiences of self and world nor named the great powers from their own perspectives.32
Although readers are only offered a limited view of the Gilead house from a
Handmaid’s perspective, spaces such as the locked box (with the Bible in it) and the
Commander’s study (an oasis of forbidden books and magazines) are male spaces forbidden
to female access. It is significant that male space is related to the control of texts, while
female space is reserved for bodies under control. The separation of male and female is
at the same time the separation of text and body. That is why the spatial fusion of body
and text is so subversive that the female hand will be cut off if it reaches for the male
text: “But all around the walls there are bookcases. They‘re filled with books. Books and
books and books, right out in plain view, no locks, no boxes. No wonder we can’t come
in here. It’s an oasis of the forbidden. I try not to stare.”33
In order to investigate how the novel attempts at generating a textual body or a
bodily text against the Gilead principle of spatial segregation, it is necessary to start with
tracing Offred’s daily activity to observe the spatial structure of a Gilead house. Every
31. Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” Critical Theory Since 1965 (Florida: Florida State
University Press, 1986), p.309.
32. Carol Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon Press,
1986), p.10.
257
258
morning after breakfast, Offred leaves her room and walks through the hallway, down
the stairs, past the sitting room and dining room, into the kitchen, where she steps out
through the back door and then the garden in the back of the house, to do her shopping in
town. If the mere concern is her route within the house, with the exception of shopping,
public prayer, or birth party at some other household, her activity is not only restricted to
the house, but also the female part of the house: the interior, the domestic, and the back.
Then, the female space is further divided, hierarchically, into several spaces.
During her daily walk, which covers a very limited distance and lasts for a very
brief time, inside the Gilead house, there are at least three female spaces travelled by
Offred: that of the Handmaid (her own room), of the Wife (the sitting room and dining
room), and of the Marthas (the kitchen). Every woman has her own territory, or, to put it
more bluntly, every woman is doomed to her prison cell. What’s more, these constraining
spaces are pushed onto the female body as a second skin, in the form of coloured uniforms.
Wives can only dress in blue, Marthas green, Handmaids red, Aunts brown, Econowives
patched-colour, while Unwomen gray. Not just women, in the male world, Commanders,
Angels (soldiers) and Eyes (secret police) are strictly ranked and uniformed too. In this
sense, within the boundary of Gilead which sticks to the essentialist notion of fixed and
bounded place against the threat of cultural hybridization, the body, rather than being
treated as a concrete and particular place, is reduced to a mere region, without identity,
let alone individuality, in the hegemonic, absolute space of Gilead.
Overlapping utopian and dystopian sides of the feminine writing, Atwood creates
a heterotopian perspective in The Handmaid’s Tale, since it is not only a tale told by a
Handmaid but also a tale of conflicting perspectives and voices, a confrontation of both
men’s and women’s story. For this reason, there are two narrators in this novel, Offred
the handmaid who records her tale on videotapes and a professor of Gileadian history
who transcribes and edits her story. Therefore, in this way, even competing discourses
are not represented as binary oppositions but an entwined and entangled network, with
multiple trajectories overlapping, merging, and contesting with one another. On a much
larger scale, Gilead as a country is a gigantic uniform that constrains and truncates the
bodies of Gileadians. This is a country of grim walls, museum-like towns, and heavily
guarded borders.
To conclude, in its thematic space, as a heterotopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale
encapsulates various social positions as well as their interrelations and interactions. The
ambiguity, undecidability, and complication in the thematic space are reflected in the formal
space, which is a fragmented, mixed, and an open-ended process of textual diversion,
differentiation, and de/re-construction. To summarize with the words of Foucault, mirror
is the novel as the heterotopia, the object standing or looking at it, the real object in the
real space is U.S.A as a whole and the illusion reflected is Giledian society and its
imposed rules. So, Atwood in her heterotopian novel explores issues hitherto neglected
in the whole-hearted celebration or satirical reversal of a perfectly regulated society, such
as the position of the gendered or ethnic other in the non-existent bad place.
REFERENCES
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage Books, 1996).
Bouson, J. Brooks. Brutal Choreographies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).
Christ, Carol. Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon Press,
1986).
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa” Critical Theory Since 1965 (Florida: Florida State University
Press, 1986).
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces”: Texts/Contexts Section of Diacritics, 16/1 (1986), pp.16-17.
Mohr, Dunja M. Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias
(Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 2005).
Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen,
1986).
Pordzik, Ralph. The Quest for Postcolonial Utopia: A Comparative Introduction to the Utopian Novel in
the New English Literatures (New York: Peter Lang, 2001).
Sargisson, Lucy. Contemporary Feminist Utopianism (New York: Routledge, 1996).
259
Archetypal Mothering: DH Lawrence’s
Lady Chatterley’s Lover1
Pradeep Sharma
Northern Border University
ÖZET D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’in Sevgilisi’nin yay›mlanmas›ndan sonra anlat›daki iki de¤iflik izlek nedeniyle geliflime aç›k bir yazar olarak kabul gördü. Bu izleklerden ilki kad›n cinselli¤i ve evlilikleri
baflar›s›z olan kad›nlar›n cinsel tatmini konusundaki özgür seçimleri, di¤eri ise üst s›n›fa ait bir erke¤in kar›s›yla cinsel aç›dan tatmin edici olmayan bir iliflki yaflarken, iflçi s›n›f›ndan bir erke¤in aristokrat bir kad›nla yaflad›¤› cinsel iliflkidir.
Fakat 1970’lerin önde gelen feminist elefltirmenleri D. H. Lawrence ve roman›n›, kad›n cinselli¤ini görmezden gelip cinsellik konusunda erkek bak›fl aç›s›n› yans›tt›¤›, duygusal anlamda tek tatmin edici iliflki
türü olarak heteroseksüel iliflkiyi kabul etti¤i ve kad›nlar›n annelik yoluyla tatmin olmalar›n› öne sürdü¤ü
için elefltirmifllerdir.
Arketiplerin insan kiflili¤i üzerindeki etkilerini göz önünde bulunduran Jung elefltirisine göre, roman›n ana
erkek karakteri olan Mellors, ana kad›n karaktere göre ne daha üstün ne de daha afla¤›dad›r. Ama yazar,
erkek ana karakterin kad›n›n gözünde onu tanr›sallaflt›ran özellikleri oldu¤u ve evlilikte karfl›l›kl› mutlulu¤un yaln›zca kad›n›n erke¤inin hayranl›k uyand›r›c› özelli¤ine uyum sa¤lamas›na ba¤l› oldu¤u düflüncelerini okura dayat›r.
ANAHTAR KEL‹MELER annelik, babal›k, psikanaliz, feminist kuram, arketipler
ABSTRACT DH Lawrence was hailed as a progressive writer after the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover
as the theme of the narrative suggests a shift in emphasis through (a) giving expression to women’s sexuality, speaking for their freedom of choice in sexual fulfillment if their marriage fails, and (b) depicting a
working class man having sexual relations with an aristocratic woman, when the ruling class man fails to
have sexually fulfilling relations with his wife.
But, in the 1970s prominent feminist critics launched a tirade against DH Lawrence and Lady Chatterley’s
Lover saying that (a) the novel undermines women’s sexuality, endorsing male-centered view of sexuality, hailing heterosexual relationship as the only emotionally satisfying relationship, and (b) it advocates
women seeking fulfillment through motherhood.
From Jungian perspective on the effects of archetypes upon human personality the principal male character
in the novel, Mellors, is hermaphrodite, therefore, neither superior, nor inferior to the principal female
character. However, the writer imposes upon the reader the belief that (a) the male protagonist possesses
traits that make him a demigod to be looked at with awe by the female protagonist, and (b) conjugal
happiness in married life solely depends upon the adjustments a woman needs to make owing to the aweinspiring prowess of her man.
KEYWORDS mothering, fatherhood, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, archetypes.
1. DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (London: Wordsworth Classics, New Edition, 2005). All subsequent references to the book are to the same edition.
262
PRADEEP SHARMA
INTRODUCING THE PROBLEM
DH Lawrence’s novels have attracted public attention for two basic reasons: initially
as outrageously immodest, (s)explicit, rather pornographic, depiction of sex and thus
branded unfit for the consumption of the “decent” reading public, and later as old modeled attempts to talk about sexuality and its relation to human happiness, even religiosity. Later on, feminist scholars picked up the issue of endorsement of patriarchal (traditional/ Victorian) thinking with regard to female sexuality in Lawrence. They condemned
Lawrence for favouring the idea of woman seeking pleasure in submission and motherhood.
In fact, furthering the feminist scholars’ views on Lawrence’s negative theorization on
women’s sexuality, especially in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and taking into consideration
the critiques of the novel from the perspective of psychoanalytic literary criticism, I wish
to add that the novel is interspersed with signs revealing the impacts of archetypes on the
personality of Mellors which may be interpreted that the author supported and
deliberately created the myth that “superiority” of man (in the novel the male character
Mellors) is the basis of conjugal happiness. The idea of collective unconscious affecting
the behavior of the male protagonist is still unexplored, even by feminist critics, and a
critical analysis through Jungian perspective lays bare the deeper issues in Lawrence’s
work, like the notion of human happiness, explored and subtly emphasized by Lawrence
in Lady Chatterley’s Lover based on the belief that women’s happiness lies in subscribing
to the idea of male superiority, seeking fulfillment living under male domination and
through motherhood, with the underlying assumption that it is the male sexual prowess
that matters most in conjugal happiness.
Most of the critical studies on Lawrence are generally based on Freudian perspective
of human sexuality.2 Freud’s theory of sexuality was based on strong patriarchal norms.
Freud even denies women a complete body – his theory of women’s behaviour is based
on the notion of a certain lack as cause in women which affects women’s psyche.
2. The most impressive study of DH Lawrence from Freudian perspective is Alfred Booth Kuttner’s
review of Sons and Lovers (Alfred Booth Kuttner, ‘Sons and Lovers’: A Freudian Appreciation,’ The
Psychoanalytic Review, 3/3 (1916), accessible from http://ecmd.nju.edu.cn; some notable works on
the same lines are: Mark Kinhead-Weakes, “The Marble and the Statue: The Exploratory Imagination
of DH Lawrence,” in Gregor, Ian and Maynard Mack (eds.) Imagined Worlds: Essays in Honour of
John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968); L.D. Clark, The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in
DH Lawrence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980); Sheila Macleod, Lawrence’s Men and
Women (London: Heinemann, 1985); Daniel J Schneider, The Consciousness of DH Lawrence: An
Intellectual Biography (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1986); Ronald Granofsky,
“His Father’s Dirty Digging”: Recuperating the Masculine in DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers,
Modern Fiction Studies, 55/2 (2009) pp.242-264.
ARCHETYPAL MOTHERING: DH LAWRANCE’S LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER
OBJECTIVES
The primary objective of the present study is to look at the character traits of the male
and female protagonists in DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover with a view to trace
the effects of the ‘collective unconscious’ and archetypes (like, mother, hermaphrodite,
etc.) on their personality as discussed by C. G. Jung. This is aimed to show that the superior
status accorded to man over woman in “civilized” societies is a cultural product, not an
outcome of some natural, essential trait bestowed upon him by nature as some people
believe, and which even DH Lawrence appears to endorse in the novel to be analyzed
here. The collective unconscious of human race hints at the hermaphrodite nature of men
and women, a state where there is no way of one being superior to the other. Similarly, the
mother archetype visible in human behavior in various forms hints at a common source of
the desire to nurture and nourish as well as to receive nurture and nourishment, dismantling
the myth that nurture and nourishment are the essential natural traits of only females, leading
to the idea that women have fulfillment through motherhood and it is natural to them.
WHY JUNGIAN PERSPECTIVE?
Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of psychoanalysis with his emphasis on the effects of
collective unconscious on human personality is quite helpful to understand the nature of a
narrative and its underlying motives. Subjection of women is sought in civilized societies
and is often justified through numberless alibis. Feminist scholars have shown through
analyses that male writers have been actively engaged in such exercises, and DH
Lawrence was no exception to this. One of the prominent features of his Lady
Chatterley’s Lover that draws attention is that at the conscious level DH Lawrence projects
a different picture of the central figure in the novel from the one he paints at the unconscious
level. At the conscious level he depicts a male-dominated picture of sexuality that seeks
subjugation of women in awe of male prowess (this may be because Lawrence, though
offered a strong critique of his contemporary British society for its predominantly capitalist
mode of thought and class prejudices and even advocated for women’s freedom, could
not get over the male prejudice against women hidden in the same capitalist mode of
thought), but unconsciously he draws the picture of a hermaphrodite as his hero, neither
male nor female. This aspect of the novel is open to analysis from Jungian psychoanalytic
perspective.
263
264
PRADEEP SHARMA
DH Lawrence makes a connection between the past events as causes of the present
events in the novel to justify his narrative as, perhaps, he wished to avoid a strong criticism
from the elite society for showing an elite woman in sexual complicity with a working
class man. This fits in well with Jung’s analysis since Jungian psychoanalysis also finds
explanation of our present actions in our (collective) past. Also, Lawrence generalizes the
source of happiness for mankind while Jung hints at a common source in our past which
surfaces in visible human behavior now. The idea gives enough reasons to believe we
know why Man looks for what he looks for.
SIGNIFICANCE AND SCOPE OF THE STUDY
There are misconceptions in the academia as regards the position of DH Lawrence
as a writer – ranging from charges of obscenity against him to male chauvinism in his
writings. Studies from psychoanalytic point of view also tilt towards one of these positions
– identifying various complexes in the writer’s psyche and in his productions, like,
Oedipus complex and inferiority complex owing to his “low” origins, and the likes. The
major significance of this study lies in the hypothesis that the existing studies haven’t
exhausted the possibilities of looking at Lawrence from a psychoanalytic perspective;
especially looking at Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the perspective of Jungian archetypes
revealed through human behavior and symbolism.
The present study is limited in scope to the interpretation of only one novel by
Lawrence, i.e., Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover is interpreted
only from psychoanalytic perspective of archetypes, like, mothering and hermaphrodite,
etc. in human individuals as discussed by C. G. Jung, and to unravel the contradiction
creeping in Lawrence’s narrative owing to the stand taken by him at the conscious level
and what he unconsciously weaves in the fabric of the characters drawn by him. So, the
conclusions drawn apply only to Lady Chatterley’s Lover and are not to be generalized
for his other works.
ANALYSIS
FEMALE: THE GOAL OF MALE ASPIRATION
In “The Art of Appropriation: the Rhetoric of Sexuality in D.H. Lawrence,” Gerald
Doherty, using Jakobson’s binary rhetoric in narratives, analyzes how metaphor and
metonymy, the two major tropes discussed by Jakobson, are handy in construction of
masculinity and femininity in erotic narratives too, through substitution and contiguity.
“In his essays,” says Doherty, “Lawrence develops his own theories about the dynamics
of the sexual exchange, theories that reverberate in his narratives.”3 Lawrence’s narratives are clear testimony to his underlying wish to use metaphor and metonymy to serve
his desire. To quote Doherty again,
Although they both dispose of the female as merely the object of male aspirations and goals, each
trope locates her within a specific male plot of appropriation: each tells the story of her subjection
with its own special emphasis. While in theory Lawrence sometimes celebrates the perfect polarization (or balance) of sexual roles, his narratives in fact project the male as the source of the erotic power that transfigures the female.4
I would like to extend the argument further and say that there are inner contradictions in Lawrence’s narratives. For instance, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover he builds the
mystique of masculine sexuality which, according to him, must be accepted unquestionably superior by the female character. But, the representative of dominant male sexuality in the novel, the gamekeeper Mellors, betrays character traits that in symbolic form are
an expression of the so-called “feminine nature,” traceable everywhere in the novel. That
leads to indeterminacy and to the unresolved nature of the binaries – male and female
sexuality.
FEMALES: EQUAL TO MOTHERS
All the major characters in the novel appear to be used as mere pawns to the working of a systematic preaching about tender love in which the man should be the dominant
force, never the woman. So, not surprisingly, no other important role is assigned to
Connie in the novel except seeking and surreptitiously enticing partners, and she is
shown to love her position. One significant character in the novel, Connie’s sister Hilda
holds a contrary opinion about the role of women in society, and therefore, she is
denounced as a trouble maker. Connie is depicted as having relationship with one young
man before marriage, after marriage with her husband for a while, then with Michaelis
and finally with the gamekeeper Mellors. The significant point is that after establishing
relationship with Mellors she stopped looking for other man/men. And there is no hint in
3. Gerald Doherty, “The Art of Appropriation: The Rhetoric of Sexuality in D.H. Lawrence,” Style, 30/2
(Summer 1996), p.289.
4. Gerald Doherty, “The Art of Appropriation” p.289.
265
266
PRADEEP SHARMA
the novel of her pregnancy in any other relationship other than with Mellors, as if she was
waiting only to be a mother.
Marlene Zuk’s (2002) argument in her interesting book Sexual Selections: What We
Can and Can’t Learn About Sex from Animals that “the maternal instinct, as a behaviour that
arises absolute and predetermined from its primordial genetic roots, is a myth”5 is quite
intriguing. Her particular emphasis, especially as title of a section “Females are not the
Equivalent of Mothers,” on the idea that if one is freed from the idea of the maternal instinct,
the belief that mothering is necessarily “natural,” one is also freed from equating being female
with being a mother, as if no other role was possible or important,’ led me to think that that
mothering instinct is found strong among males of the species too, once again leading to
indeterminacy of gender roles based on certain “natural” traits. Marlene Zuk continues:
females are, of course, mothers, and behave as mothers, and female animals from many different
species care for their young in many different ways. Yet the assumption that female equals mother
is wrong on two counts, both of which limit our appreciation of what animals can show us. Females
do many other things besides act as caregivers to offspring. They may even behave in ways that are
not characteristically feminine, which may be difficult for observers even to register if they are
expecting nothing from females besides nurturing maternal behavior.6
WOMEN’S SEXUALITY: NEGATIVE THEORIZATION
Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics finds, among others, DH Lawrence’s Lady
Chatterley’s Lover as a deliberate attempt at theorizing women’s sexuality negatively,
i.e., based upon the feelings of narcissism, masochism and passivity7 (which goes very
well with Freud’s views on women’s sexuality as well, and some people laud Lawrence
as “so perfect” on women’s psychology, even without being acquainted much with
Freud!); that it endorses the idea of women seeking completeness through the agency of
males, implying that otherwise they are not complete at all, there is always felt a lack
somewhere; and that it endorses the patriarchal idea of completeness of women only
through motherhood.
5. Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn About Sex from Animals (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), p.51.
6. Marlene Zuk, to support her argument, cites the results of experiments conducted by two ornithologists John Marzluff and Russ Balda, who studied the sociality behavior in pinyon jay (a member of the
crow family) and they noted that plenty of aggression occurred in jays and it just didn’t occur among
males. Instead, females engaged in vigorous battles which the scientists acknowledged “was the most
aggressive behaviour observed during the year.” Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections, p.52.
7. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), pp.237-245.
My argument, supported through the observations by Marlene Zuk (2002) that
“maternal instinct arising predetermined from genetic roots is a myth”, is that it is
scientifically established through experiments in birds and some beasts that females do
behave contrary to their expected behavior.8 The same applies to male behavior as well.
The observation supports Jung’s theory of hermaphrodite nature in humans. So, depiction of
women as passive receptacles and men as active agents, whether with regard to sexuality or
social activities, is strongly debatable. There are instances in Lady Chatterley Lover that
subvert the superficial male dominance advocated by Lawrence in sexual matters, which
are the clear symptoms of the way in which female sexual experience is devalued and
female subjugation is justified in the novel. The novel shows bisexual nature of the
characters,9 with special emphasis being on Mellors’ character who reveals being
hermaphrodite. The archetypal mothering in the novel is prevalent in the character of
Mellors and it diffuses the initial patriarchal notion of male superiority completely.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover weaves an ideological network that tries to prove that
man/woman happiness in married life (or a life of sexual partnership) is solely based on
a mutually fulfilling sexual relationship, or a life of purely bodily, or rather animalistic,
sensuous satisfaction for each other. But the underlying thread in the narrative is that it is
only a strong, sexually powerful man that provides the source of stability in the relationship.
The other aspect of the story is that in his narratives Lawrence laments about men’s
weakness and women looking for “real men” implying that seeking is natural to women
as providing is natural to men, obviously building a case of dependence. Let me quote
Doris Lessing here, who says,
From the start of Lawrence’s work, to the end, we find men described as inadequate, weak, unmale,
feeble, and women are always looking for “real” men. In Women in Love, in “St. Mawr,” in stories
8. This may not have been proved through scientific experiments, yet a very common occurrence on
farms is that buffaloes and cows “forget” their newly-born calves; they don’t recognize them as their
young foals and don’t allow them suckling; they do lactate but don’t offer their milk either to the calf
or to their owners. In sum, they don’t care for nurture, nourishment, protection or love for their newborn. In villages some quack animal behaviourists apply some crude techniques and artistry to bring
back the “memory” of the animal back to the calf since otherwise the animal wont yield any milk to
the owner leading to financial loss to him/her.
9. Mellors displays bisexuality in the sense that he too, like Constance Chatterley, looks for fulfillment
through begetting, i.e., he awaits for the arrival of the baby with equal eagerness as does Connie;
Hilda, Connie’s sister, shows strong “masculine traits” in the same degree as Michaelis displays “feminine traits” like submissiveness; Mellors’ estranged wife Bertha Coutts displays ‘masculinity’ as she
wishes ‘to grind her own coffee’ which is hated by Mellors since he cannot tolerate her assertiveness
in sex; Mrs. Bolton is ‘feminine’ in her submissiveness to Mr. Chatterley but she has managed her life
boldly ‘like a man’ after the death of her husband.
267
268
PRADEEP SHARMA
like “The Captain’s Doll” men are mocked, derided, women ride away in search of “real” men, look
for gamekeepers, gypsies, Indians, all the time cruelly jeering.10
For a stable marriage a woman should be ready to worship her man, look at him
with awe and make all the necessary adjustments in her life to make way for the demands
of her man. If that does not happen, the relationship breaks down. Man and woman had
better live separate lives in such cases like, Bertha Coutts and Mellors do. It is worth noting
here that Mellors cannot imagine any relationship with Hilda, the elder sister of Connie
because she speaks of equality and the rights of women. He is very happy with Connie
as she is always silent and undemanding; she worships him like a demigod, and she even
complies with his desire for anal sex.
Another important aspect of the novel is that Connie is shown to be desperate to
bear a child, and she is extremely blissful conceiving one as it “fulfills her desire” to have
completeness of her “self” through motherhood. Constance Chatterley wants a baby; she
is desperate to be a mother; all her yearnings are centered round that wish. The mothering
archetype is the prime moving factor here; all else, for instance, sex and lust - sacred or
profane – are only contributory factors. The point is that there is nothing wrong in it,
and there is nothing degrading in that wish-fulfillment. It is not that she is looking for
fulfillment only through mothering, and that otherwise she is afraid that she would fall
from the grace she enjoys now. The other aspects of her personality are equally significant:
she enjoys her full freedom; she even revolts against the bourgeois ideal of mothering for
the sake of providing an heir to the clan; she does not comply to the capitalist control of
means of production, including women as means of production, commodifying the body
of women; she enjoys the freedom of the choice of her man and finally she chooses to
lead a life to her satisfaction, away from the name, fame, power and comforts of
Chatterley home. So, Connie is not like some women ready to be sacrificed for the sake
of patriarchal rules and made submissive to comply with the demands of authority of
man. Connie cannot be subjugated.
MOTHER ARCHETYPE
Mother archetype is the collective unconscious Mellors is symptomatic of. Mother
archetype is visible not just in the behavior traits of males; it is a universal human behavior
trait visible in males and females both since the collective unconscious of the human race
10. Doris Lessing, “Testament of Love” The Guardian (15 July 2006).
is overpowered by the desire for protection, nourishment and sustenance. And it is not
just seeking but also giving that is a visible trait of mother archetype. So, in women it is
not a wish-fulfillment to be complete through giving birth, or to plug a psychological
hole in the psyche of women that makes them acutely aware of being incomplete without
motherhood. Moreover, the desire to give (like, nourishment, protection), supposed to be
a female trait, is equally visible in males. This desire, to give, an expression of mother
archetype, is possible to be fulfilled without motherhood as well, through various other
means – through being in a relationship that seeks satisfaction just in being in a relationship,
social work, self-sacrifice for others, etc. That is what we realize in the behavior of
Connie. There are instances in their sex scenes when Connie feels Mellors was just a little
child, a helpless naked creature seeking comfort and protection, and her heart goes out
for him.
Negative theorization of women’s sexuality implies that women are passive recipients:
women are seekers and men are givers. Jung’s archetypal mothering challenges this state
of affairs. Men also seek. The mother archetype appears in human behavior in various
symbolic forms, like in the notion of motherland, Mother Mary, female deities in other
cultures, etc, where men seek, not give. Mellors in Lady Chatterley’s Lover finds solace
and satisfaction in living in the woods with his dog, hens and other forest creatures. From
Jungian perspective seeking solace in woods or forest is a symbol of mother archetype –
the great mother – protective, nurturing, feeding, comforting and sheltering. Connie, on
her first encounter with the man, finds him mysterious, silent, frightening, like “the sudden rush of threat out of nowhere.”11 “He was a curious, quick, separate fellow, alone,
but sure of himself.”12 He appears to be moving guided by some other greater design than
just sex and lust, something mysterious and beyond his comprehension, which I prefer to
read as mother archetype in human race – men and women.13
HERMAPHRODITE NATURE
“Anima” and “animus” are complementary to each other. In other words, the concept of “hermaphrodite” human beings is helpful in overcoming the complexities arising
11. DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, p.37.
12. DH Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, p.38.
13. My reading is guided by Jungian suggestion of mother archetype being a mysterious force we humans
inherit as collective unconscious, which is mysterious, silent, frightening and at the same time nurturing, protecting and life-sustaining. In almost all world cultures this mother archetype is worshipped in
various forms of female deities.
269
270
PRADEEP SHARMA
out of essentializing the characteristic features of men and women, that is, stating what a
man is or what a woman is. A hermaphrodite, if man, possesses all the characteristics essentialized as the characteristics of women, and if woman, possesses all the characteristics
essentialized as the characteristics of men. This is not merely about social roles and gendered activities of people but about the established link between the fetus in its developing stage (prior to its determined sex as a male or female child) and the later behavior of
grown up men/women. Social roles and gendered expectations frame us into a single role
but human personality is a matter of striking equilibrium between the two, usually foregrounding the traits of one’s expected gender roles at the cost of suppression of other
traits. Mellors and Connie are no exceptions to this, so, it would be a futile exercise
fraught with essentialization of traits to say that one displays the traits of the other in
his/her behavior. Suffice it would be to state that both Mellors and Connie are good
examples of hermaphrodite nature in man and woman. Mellors, on close psychoanalysis
and taking into consideration the archetypes, betrays hermaphrodite traits, not a unitary
male (and supposedly superior) persona. Similarly, Lady Constance Chatterley also displays
hermaphrodite nature (predominantly male-oriented) persona. This is the characteristic
of the humanity in general, not of just individuals. In this scheme of things there is no
scope for the dominance of one over the other. Of course, Lawrence also realized this but
because he strongly supports the theory of male supremacy, he presents the events and
ideas the way we find in the novel. What he reiterates again and again, that is, peaceful and
harmonious existence of man/woman through blissful love-life, is a realizable possibility
only if we recognize and respect our hermaphrodite nature, not through submission of
woman to the co-called sexual prowess of man, endorsed by Lawrence.
SELF-ACTUALIZATION: TRANSCENDING THE OPPOSITES
Jung’s hypothesis is that with gradual realization (with age, accumulation of
knowledge and experience, etc.) of their hermaphrodite nature men/women overcome the
prejudices against their “other” selves. They learn to live with what appears to be alien
to their own self: transcending the opposites. This is the phase of self-actualization when
the distinction between self/other dissolves. DH Lawrence appears to have touched upon
this note when he speaks of pure animalistic love that transcends bounds of the material
world which hinders the tender passion. Lawrence may be understood to be hinting at
appropriating the unconscious through defying the conscious structure of psyche which
always functions through distinctions, like, nature/culture, primitive/civilized,
passion/reason, etc. But, Lawrence fails to realize that the unconscious level (which
psychologists believe is not available for appropriation) transcends sexuality, sexual orientation
as well as wish-fulfillment through motherhood or fatherhood. Lawrence wished for the
appropriation of the unconscious but messed it up with the conscious behavior of man
which seeks subjugation of “other” for the protection of the “self.”
CONCLUSION
1.
2.
3.
To summarize, in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lawrence advocates –
Submission of women in love if they wish to have a loving, long-lasting relationship;
women “grinding their own coffee” are despised and slighted;
Submission of women in social relations as well if they wish to have a loving married
life; outspoken women, for example, Hilda, are disfavoured; feminists of the day
are despised;
Submission of women in awe of male sexual prowess; phallus oriented marriage is
the only way to satisfaction and peace at home; phallus in Lawrence, as in Freud,
stands for male superiority, power, and authority; so, ultimately, it is the male
authority which must rule the roost.
All the major arguments in the novel are built around the notion of female satisfaction
achieved through male prowess; all the erotic scenes in the novel are woven around this
single premise.
But, the character of Mellors, symptomatic of male prowess, symbolizes in many ways,
what Jung calls, being under the impact of archetypal mothering and displays hermaphrodite
nature. Not only he displays in his character the traits that are characteristically attributed
to females: passivity, softness, tenderness and receptivity, and all those characteristics he
advocates for women to have long-lasting loving relationship with men, but also he reveals
his built-in ability to seek, recognize and build a relationship of “mothering,” projecting
this abstract archetype onto Connie who is so comforting, cooperative, protective and
giving, in contrast to his estranged wife Bertha Coutts who behaves just the contrary to
what he expects from his “archetypal mother.”
Thus, a psychoanalytic interpretation of the novel reveals that the argument in support
of male sexuality and degrading female sexuality are built upon mutually contradicting fluid
character traits in persons, and therefore, they lead to indeterminacy and unstable nature
of the argument.
271
272
PRADEEP SHARMA
REFERENCES
Clark, L.D. The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in DH Lawrence (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1980).
Doherty, Gerald. “The Art of Appropriation: The Rhetoric of Sexuality in D.H. Lawrence,” Style, 30/2
(Summer 1996), pp.289-304.
Granofsky, Ronald. “‘His Father’s Dirty Digging:’ Recuperating the Masculine in DH Lawrence’s Sons
and Lovers,” Modern Fiction Studies, 55/2 (2009), pp.242-264.
Lawrence, DH. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, New Edition (London: Wordsworth Classics, 2005).
Lessing, Doris. “Testament of Love” The Guardian (15 July 2006).
Kinhead-Weakes, Mark. “The Marble and the Statue: The Exploratory Imagination of DH Lawrence,” in
Gregor, Ian and Maynard Mack (eds.), Imagined Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Butt (London:
Methuen, 1968).
Kuttner, Alfred Booth. “Sons and Lovers: A Freudian Appreciation,” The Psychoanalytic Review, 3/3
(1916), retrieved from: http://ecmd.nju.edu.cn.
Macleod, Sheila. Lawrence’s Men and Women (London: Heinemann, 1985).
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Schneider, Daniel J. The Consciousness of DH Lawrence: An Intellectual Biography (Kansas: University
Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1986).
Zuk, Marlene. Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can’t Learn About Sex from Animals (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002).
Satrapi’s Persepolis: A Post-Colonial Work or not?
Seyyed Habib Mousavi and Meisam Mohseni
Pasargad Language Institute
ÖZET Azar Nasifi’nin Reading Lolita in Tehran adl› eserinin baflar›s› sayesinde son zamanlarda diaspora
an› yaz›lar›n›n say›s› artmaya bafllam›fl ve sonucunda Neo-Oryantalizm, Oryantalizmin güçlü ayaklar›ndan
biri haline gelmifltir. Diaspora edebiyat› yazarlar›, Hamid Dabashi’nin belirtti¤i gibi “yerli kaynaklard›r”:
Kendi ülkeleri hakk›nda “bilgi” üretirken asl›nda Bat›’n›n gözünden Do¤u’yu inceleyerek kendi halk›na
zarar veren kaynaklard›r. Ürettikleri, herhangi bir de¤erlendirmeye tabi tutulmad›¤›ndan diaspora an› yazarlar›, Do¤u’nun gerçek yüzünü aç›¤a ç›karan objektif, do¤ru ve tarafs›z yazarlar olarak kabul görürler.
Bu görüfle paralel olarak, ‹ranl› baz› diaspora yazarlar› ‹ran halk›n› ilkel, gülünç, erotik, fliddet yanl›s› Oryantal stereotipler olarak betimlemektedir. Bu çal›flmam›zda, ‹ranl› Diaspora yazarlar›ndan Marjane Satrapi’nin Persepolis adl› eserini inceleyece¤iz. Satrapi, ‹ranl›lar›, tam da Oryantalist söylemin Do¤ulular› tarih boyunca aktard›¤› gibi betimlemeye çal›flan bir ‘yerli kaynakt›r’. Bu çal›flmada, Sardar, Said ve di¤erlerinin kuramlar›ndan hareketle Oryantalist söylemde yer alan varsay›mlar ortaya konmufl ve bu varsay›mlar ›fl›¤›nda eser incelemesi yürütülmüfltür.
ANAHTAR KEL‹MELER an› yaz›m›, Oryantalizm, yerli kaynak, diaspora, stereotip
ABSTRACT During the recent past years, chiefly due to the triumph of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in
Tehran, diasporic memoirs have popped up, and consequently the phenomenon of neo-Orientalism has
been converted into one of the most well-fortified pillars of Orientalism. The authors of such diaspora writers are, in Hamid Dabashi’s terminology, ‘native informers’ who try to produce “knowledge” about their
own homeland, and actually ruin the face of their countrymen by scrutinizing Orientals through Western
looking-glasses. Without any evaluations of what they proffer, the diaspora memoirists are regarded as
truthful, prudent and impartial ones who unveil the real East. Following this lane, some of the Iranian
Diaspora authors move heaven and earth mostly to portray Iranians, as Oriental stereotypes, primitive,
ludicrous, erotic, violent and etc.
This paper is going to fulfill a close reading of one of the Oriental works of Iranian Diaspora writer,
Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis. Satrapi is our concerned ‘native informer’ who seeks to portray Iranians precisely as what the Orientalist discourse has been promulgating down the history lane. Here, first of all, very
briefly, using Sardar and Said and others, the presuppositions existent in the Orientalist discourse are put
forth, and then they are traced in the work to give substance to the Orientalist identity of it. Direct sentences from the book are brought force to prove beyond doubt how this work tries to fortify Orientalist discourse regarding Iran and Iranians.
KEYWORDS memoirs, Orientalism, native informer, close reading, diaspora, stereotypes
THE ORIENT UNVEILED: REAL OR FABRICATED
Though resting somewhere far from the madding crowd, the Orient is a territory
full of sound and fury. It is “the location of the Garden of Eden”1 and offers “exotic, sin1. Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), p.9.
274
HABIB MOUSAVI and MEISAM MOHSENI
ful, sexual delights all wrapped in an ancient, mystical and mysterious tradition.”2 It is
the land of fabulous fictions and is associated with ‘the escapism of sexual fantasy’. To
see more to it, one should remember that an Oriental is “a passive, childlike entity that
can be loved and abused, shaped and contained, managed and consumed.”3 Those human
beings roaming the Earth to the east of the West are ‘inevitable liars’, ‘lethargic and suspicious’ and “in everything oppose the clarity, directness and nobility of the AngloSaxon race.”4 The Oriental “generally acts, speaks and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European.”5 To know more of their identity, a Westerner should bear in mind
that “accuracy is abhorrent to the Oriental mind”6 and that their brainpowers, like their
“picturesque streets” are “eminently wanting in symmetry.”7 They are ‘gullible’, ‘devoid
of energy’ and “irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, different.”8 The Orientals are
“half devil half child”9 and whence absolutely untrustworthy; they are “customary, passive, non-participating, endowed with a ‘historical’ subjectivity, above all, non-active,
non-autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself.”10 Their societies are ‘despotic by
nature’11 and lack of legal institutions is quite conspicuous there. There is no real science
and scientist on this part of the globe. The Orient is realized through “its eccentricity, its
backwardness, its silent indifference, its feminine penetrability, its supine malleability.”12
The Orient of Orientalists is never without ‘its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its
aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness’.13
Ruminating on what passed here, thanks to dear Orientalists, one can get to a
disheartening fact: the Easterners lack enough traits to be proved human. It seems that
all of the negative traits which one can find under the wide blue yonder are to be probed
within the margins of the eastern hemisphere. Being exotic, sinful, passive, childlike,
lethargic, suspicious, inaccurate, asymmetrical, irrational, depraved, fallen, gullible,
devoid of energy, half devil half child and non-active, puts too much a burden on one’s
shoulder to claim that an Oriental also can be a human being too. It is quite strange that
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism, p.6.
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1994), p.39.
Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt (New York: MacMillan, 1908), p.164.
Edward Said, Orientalism, p.38.
Anouar Abdel-Malek, ‘‘Orientalism in Crisis’’ Diogenses, 44 (Winter, 1963), pp.104-12.
Sardar Ziauddin, Orientalism, p.7.
SATRAPI’S PERSEPOLIS: A POST-COLONIAL WORK OR NOT?
scholars remarking on the Orient have put the concept of ‘change’ into the trash of their
minds. Marshall and Williams introduce the Orient as “a continent of bizarre religions,
fanatically adhered to and it was a continent whose people changed very little” and then
continue that “the one stereotype explained the other as it was their religions that required
Orientals for ever the same.”14 To Orientalists, time, unfortunately, did not convey a sense
of alteration and hence it became attainable for them to stereotype the Orientals.
Illustration of the Islamic or Oriental character caused the production of some markers
such as the Oriental personality and the Islamic spirit and also to the notions of the
supposedly mental retardation and instinctive inertia as common features embedded in
all Muslims.15 The picture of the Oriental, specifically Muslims, through the watching
glasses of the Westerners, from the primary days of encounter up to the moment, has
changed very little. Friedrich Nietzsche in his Human, All Too Human argues that the
‘world of appearance’, quite apart from the ‘thing-in-itself’, emanates from the fecund
imagination of human beings. He censures philosophers for their tendency to “confront
life and experience (what they call the world of experience) as they would a painting that
has been revealed once and for all, depicting with unchanging constancy the same
event.”16 Nietzsche argues that life ‘has gradually evolved and is still evolving, and
therefore should not be considered a fixed quantity’.17 Human generation has been
altering and transforming during the dark tunnels of history from the day of Adam and
definitely will go on evolving. How is it within the realms of possibility for Orientalists
to generalize on the Orient, an entity which embraces a massive domain brimful of individuals from divergent social circumstances, heritages, and milieus? For Nietzsche, the
world of appearance is a direct result of ‘illogical thoughts’ and projection of ‘mistaken
conceptions onto the things’. Granting a speck of attention to what Nietzsche maintains
leads the Orientalists towards a danger zone. It is quite incontrovertible that they have
shrugged this fact off that people are changing each second and it is certainly taboo to
generalize on such a vast notion as ‘Orient’. The findings of the Orientalists, among
many other issues, stimulated Nietzsche to state that “now the world of experience and
the thing-in-itself seem so ordinarily different and separate that it rejects any conclusion
about the latter from the former”.18
14. P. G. Marshall and G. Williams, The Great Map of Mankind (London: Dent, 1982), p.158. (emphasis added.)
15. Elzain Elgamri, Islam in the British Broadsheets: The Impact of Orientalism on Representations of
Islam in the British Press (Lebanon: Ithaca Press, 2008), p.30.
16. Fredriche Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p.23.
17. Fredriche Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p.23.
18. Fredriche Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, p.23.
275
276
Taking a trip down a history lane, we are in no way but to accept that the Orientalist
discourse has exploited numerous ways to stereotype Orientalists, and for sure Iranians
as a subcategory. During the past two decades a mass of Iranian life narratives have
rushed into the European and North American book markets. Considering the antiIranian sentiments, the aftermath of 9/11 and Islamophobia, such memoirs have gained a
large readership within the region. Such modern Bibliotheques, chiefly recorded by
Iranian diaspora writers, do their utmost to portray the savagery, brutality and mental
derangement of Iranians and are, consequently, good commodities for the consumption
of the Westerners who hanker after the veiled face of the real Iran and all the injustices
practiced there.
Iranian Memoirs emerged in the late 1980s, and surged into the market since 2001
coinciding with the inception of the ‘war on terror’. Regarding Iranian memoirs to the
moment, they can be divided into two broad categories: one consists of the life narratives
which concern Iran before 9/11 and the other after the atrocious event. And hence: preand post-9/11 memoirs. Pre-9/11 memoirs reflect on Iran immediately before and after
Islamic revolution of 1979. Such works can be considered as examples of ‘scar literature’
or ‘literature of the wounded’. Scar literature zooms in on trauma and oppression during
the Cultural Revolution of China, but more broadly, as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith
have extended the concept, it refers to any work which casts a retrospective stare at the
yore days and all the agonizing experiences the author undergoes. One of the early such
memoirs is Betty Mahmoody’s best-selling Not without My Daughter. Mahmoody relates
her appalling ordeal in a supposedly two-week trip to Tehran which turns out to last 18
months. Once the putative fortnight is over, Seyyed Bozorg Mahmoody, Betty’s Iranian
husband, declines to return to America and even does not let the other two to leave the
country. Consequently, Betty gets ensnared in a country she is not fond of, and, seemingly,
everyone hates her there. During this course of forced stay in Iran, she is tortured and
downgraded in numerous ways, and even threatened to be killed by her husband if she
schemes to make her getaway. Finally, she manages to break free through the backing of
some people by crossing the borders of Turkey.
Post-9/11 memoirs are those which portray Iran after 9/11 abominations. Some
of recent such life narratives contemplate mainly on Iran after the tenth presidential
election which was held on 12 June 2009. Roxana Saberi’s Between Two Worlds: My
Life and Captivity in Iran can be brought as an example of such memoirs. Saberi outlines from the outset when she is forced from her Tehran apartment by some agents of
the government to the prison up to the time when after months of hardship she is
released. She skillfully manages to attribute buffoonery to Iranian government and its
authorities.
Chalmers Johnson, in his book The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and
the End of Republic, exhibits how the phoenix of American republic dies and a raptorial
empire rises from its ashes.19 This metamorphosis having had happened, memoirs have
also transformed into a genre in the service of such an empire. American imperialism and
its right-wing liberal discourse of humanism which hankers after emancipating Muslim
women from Muslim men have provoked a new interest in Iranian life narratives for the
Westerners. Minoo Moallem, professor of gender and women’s studies at UC Berkeley,
states that “the West is now claiming once again the liberation of the rest of the world as
its responsibility,”20 and as a result, we can spot piles of such memoirs written by subaltern
classes validated and authorized through ‘the legitimate and civilizational tropes of the
West’. Following what was touched upon, the subaltern non-white third-world woman
authors cannot give voice to thems elves unless the West bestows them with a ‘space’ to
sound off. As it comes quite clear-cut, the ‘imperialism of anti-imperialism’ would
smother any subaltern voice which tries to shatter, or even debilitate, the bases of its
empire. On the other hand, any work which castigates and censures Islamic and thirdworld countries would receive western license, and numerous epitexts on it would be
pushed on in the markets.
As Leili Golafshani argues, Westerners are fascinated to the non-white Iranian
memoirs “not only because they want to gain knowledge of women’s lives in that particular
region of the world but to also because they are unsure of how to respond to the increasingly
cold war between America and Iran.”21 Those who submit themselves to these memoirs,
as Gillian Whitlock states, stress two things: “First, their need for knowledge about Islam,
the desire to reach beyond stereotypes by gaining access to the other, and to be able to
think critically through independent reading. Second, the tendency of life narrative to
produce a humanist and ethical response that stresses shared humanity over and above
differences of culture and religion is repeated.”22 Hence, knowledge production is just a
19. Hamid Dabashi, “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire” Al-Ahram Weekly
Online, (1-7 June 2006), retrieved from: <http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm> on 2nd
January, 2012.
20. Lord Golafshani, Politics and Culture, retrieved from: <http://www.politicsandculture.org/2009/10/02/
leili-golafshani-‘iranian-exilic-memoir’-a-review-of-shirin-ebadi-iran-awakening-azar-nafisi-reading‘lolita’-in-tehran-azadeh-moaveni-lipstick-jihad/> on 3rd January, 2012.
21. Lord Golafshani, Politics and Culture.
22. Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2007), p.62.
277
278
part of the life narratives; the other part being about the process of taking sides. The
heinous and ghastly worlds which such memoirists illustrate strengthen Westerners in
their decisions against Iran as an Islamic country.
One of such memoirs which is our concern now is Satrapi’s Persepolis. Here, our
aim is to look deep into the work to see the Orientalist discourse moving in the artillery
of the book and, we will see how Satrapi tries to fortify the supposed discourse.
SATRAPI AND ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE
‘Manichean Heresy’ is a concept which flourished in the third century AD and
postulated a ‘dualistic theology’. This doctrine maintains that Satan is co-eternal with
God and that the two provinces of matter and spirit are like poles of a magnet. When we
enter into the borders of postcolonial world, Manicheanism indicates the binary structure
of imperial discourse. This term was popularized by Abdul JanMohammad.
JanMohammad gives a rundown of the process through which the colonial monsters
polarize the entities of the colonizer and colonized into Manichaean spheres of good and
evil. Civilized colonial cultures are the embodiment of whatever is good and pure while
the colonized world is uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable and ultimately evil.
Some Iranian diaspora writers of memoirs bring Manicheanism into play to
construct an intense binary opposition between Iran and West. So as to realize this,
native informers get inclined towards essentialism – that is, for example, they ascribe a
feature to all Iranians which is mostly a negative one and stands against the clashing positive
characteristic of Westerners en masse. This mission, also seemingly burdensome, is
utterly plain sailing for memoirists. The reason lies within the boundaries of Orientalism
which has already supplied the Western collective unconscious with their favorite archetypes:
The Oriental “generally acts, speaks and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the
European.”23
Marjane Satrapi assumes that Iranians are by nature passive which stands against
the dynamicity of the Westerners. In Persepolis, chapter entitled ‘The Key’, Marji quite
astonished from the increasing number of Iranian war martyrs pays a visit to her mother
and demands her stance on war casualties. Marji’s mother quotes from her father that
“when a big wave comes, lower your head and let it pass!”24 This leads Marji to conclude
23. Lord Cromer, Modern Egypt, p.164.
24. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1, p.94.
that: “that’s very Persian, the philosophy of resignation.”25 There is a very delicate touch
of irony palpable here. The very act of ‘resignation’ and submission stands totally
conflicting with what Satrapi herself portrays of Iranians who, so as to safeguard their
country from the hands of transgressors, made their way to the front. Marjane Satrapi
herself has observed and experienced Islamic Revolution and the days such as Black
Friday in which thousands of people laid down their lives for their Iranian and Islamic
ideals. It is too vague to fathom out how a human being who has eye-witnessed such
events is to pronounce this nation passive. But, on the whole, Satrapi is quite at liberty
with such things since she has got the long and deep-rooted discourse of Orientalism at
her disposal to back her. Getting back to the first paragraph, we can see that previously
Orientalists have introduced an Oriental as a “passive, childlike entity that can be loved
and abused, shaped and contained, managed and consumed.”26 Owing to this Orientalist
discourse, Satrapi does not stumble across a problem while attributing passivity to a
whole nation! The Orientalists betrayal to the Orient stands fully clear-cut in a scene
while Marji is struggling in a war of words with a nun. The Reverend Mother tells her
that: “It is true what they say about Iranians. They have no education.”27 By education,
she does not allude to the knowledge one secures in schools and universities. She is, in
reality, attacking Iranian culture. The nun is claiming that Iranians are not civilized and
cultured people and are not conscious of a humane behavior. Unquestionably, Satrapi is
trying to evoke the Oriental uncivilized and uncultured archetypes of the Middle Ages
which are obvious in Mandeville’s Travels: demonic races, cannibals, troglodytes and
dog-headed people.
This Orientalist discourse does its utmost to come up like Janus who is endowed
with two faces: one face is always heavenly and pleasant; the other brings the Hades and
underworld to light. In reality, one is lightness and the other darkness. Such a dichotomy
is to be seen in the Orientalist discourse of Iranian exilic writers. Once considering the
rumors about the long-range missiles that can reach Tehran, Marji says that “we Iranians
are Olympic champions when it comes to gossip.”28 The reason might be summarized in
the words of Marji’s grandmother in Embroideries: “to speak behind others’ backs is the
ventilator of the heart.”29 Once again, she comes up with a crude essentialization. Satrapi
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 1, p.94.
Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism, p.6. (emphasis added.)
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), p.23.
Marjane Satrapi, Embroideries (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), p.20.
279
280
in many places tries to trivialize religion (Islam) and consequently, forgets that Iranians are
mostly Muslims and backbiting in Islam is considered as a deadly sin. Quran considers
backbiting as the equivalent of eating the flesh of one’s dead brother (Refer to Chapter
Hojorat, ayah 12). Even if we forgo the cares and concerns of religion on the issue, it is
too reckless, baseless and irrational to consider a whole nation of seventy million people
as gossiping creatures.
She also considers Iran as a country where the strains of religion restrict people. On
the other hand, Europe is her land of free and the realm of happiness, a place where she
can water the bush of her flairs and, as an upshot, she won’t go waste. In Persepolis 2,
Marji states that she has travelled to Austria “with the idea of leaving a religious Iran for
an open and secular Europe”30 Satrapi is quite prudent and headful in terms of word
selection. Here, she is opening two Manichaean pictures into the reader’s mental eye:
religion / open and secular, and religious Iran / open and secular Europe. The logical
premises of this sentence are as follows: Firstly, being religious equals not being open or
actually being restricted. Secondly, Iran is religious and hence not an open country. And
thirdly, considering freedom, Iran comes directly against Europe.
On her return back to Tehran Marji says that “after four years living in Vienna, here
I am back in Tehran. From the moment I arrived in Mehrabad airport, and caught sight
of the first customs agent, I immediately felt the repressive air of my country.”31 Pulling
focus on what is uttered here gets us once more to our previous debates. She claims that
the moment she hits upon Mehrabad airport, she feels ‘the repressive air’ of her country.
The uttered sentence furnishes evidence that her previous lodging (Europe) was not
repressive that now she can smell a new atmosphere to experience, actually a repressive
air! Maybe Europe was not repressive in Marjane Satrapi’s definition of freedom, but at
least she herself shows how the European society she lived in aimed at corrupting her.
Markus, to come up with just one example here, a shakedown artist, and the one whom
she became a friend with, had deliberately involved Marji in trafficking fixes. It might
have lead Marji to the depth of a mire an escape from which might have been a sheer
wish.
Even Marji’s father is aware of such ‘repressive air’ which would ruin her daughter.
Once, while talking with Reza, his future son-in-law, and the one whom he does not trust
in as a match made in heaven for his daughter, Marji’s father says that “my wife and I
have raised our daughter with complete freedom. If she spends her whole life in Iran, she
31. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2, p.92. (emphasis added.)
will wither.”32 Like other instances which we pored over, this one, also, unveils the
essential difference between Iran and the West. For Marji’s father Iran is not a free land,
and since Marji has been brought up ‘in complete freedom’, she will wither if she lingers
in Iran for good. In another case, when Marji’s marriage is on the way, her mother tells
her that “I want you to leave Iran, for you to be free and emancipated”33 Again Iran is
portrayed as a close land which those (women) who hanker after emancipation have got
no other choice but to leave the existent repressive air of the country.
Marjane Satrapi strives to show some external elements which hatch such a despotic
air in Iran. One of which is the Iranian Big Brothers. Once, while holding conference
with two of her friends, Marji begins to enunciate on the Iranian counterparts of the skinheads. She says: “… they are everywhere? You think that there aren’t any where I come
from? They are ten times more fearsome than yours. In Iran, they kill the people who
don’t think like the leader!”34 Marjane does not fail to portray Sepahi soldiers such as the
Big Brothers of 1984, or even worse. Sepahi forces are the ones whom seemingly Marji
hates and tries not to have eye-contact with. Satrapi finds almost all of the Iranian
authorities, not only Sepahi forces, intolerable. That’s why when she gets into Mehrabad
airport and catches sight of the first Iranian customs agent, she feels the repressive air of
her country.
This repressive air finds its way even in the family and familial relations.
Considering European and Iranian men; and here another category in the dichotomous
discourse of Orientalism would heave in sight. Iranian men are utterly different from the
European counterparts. Oriental men and their discourse of suppressing women is not
something new for the Westerners whom, thanks to the dear Orientalists, have a vast
realm of Orientalist archetypes in their minds. Satrapi, as well, would not fail to remember to rattle on this despotism and tyranny running in Iranian families. Once while in a
car with a friend, Gila, Marjane thinks of Behzad, a graphic artist of a journal who was
a hero to her for twenty days. She mentions that Behzad “didn’t even let his wife say one
word;”35 and then swiftly comes up with an exclamation of sorrow: “Ah, Iranian men!”36
Satrapi is again floundering in the sea of essentialization. She believes that Iranian men
are totally suppressive creatures who do not even let their wives to talk, to ‘say one
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
281
282
word’. It is so interesting that Satrapi ends up at this idea on ‘Iranian men’ just by taking
Behzad into account. This sort of reduction to essentials seems cruder than one can think
of from a mature literate woman! It is worthy to mention that her driving friend says that
“don’t say that! It is not Iranian men, but men, period. Two years ago I was going out
with a Spanish diplomat. On the surface he behaved better, but deep down, he was the
same thing.”37 Even though her friend is trying to break her loose from the hollow and
futile shackles of essentialization, for Marji the case is fixed and way closed. She plays
her own tune without paying attention to what passes around her.
Marjane Satrapi attempts to manifest that the country is boring for most of the
Iranians, not only for women whose liberty has been confiscated but also for regulated
children. Marji’s parents while touring Turkey conclude that: “It is so hard for kids in
Iran. The poor things.”38 But it would not terminate at this point and Satrapi moves on to
spell out that not only the peripheral environment of society foils tiny children’s exuberance,
but also the internal factors of familial forces. She indirectly suggests that mothers in Iran
are intolerant and strict which obviously stands against the permissive mothers of the
West. Once, when Marji wants to get out of the house in order to buy some stuff for and
by herself, while being a little kid of thirteen, she points out that: “for an Iranian mother
my mom was really permissive. I only knew two or three other girls who could go out
alone at thirteen.”39 It is too strange that Satrapi fails to see thousands of other little
Iranian children who go to school even before the age of thirteen alone.
In a letter to his friend Paul Deussen in January 3, 1888, Nietzsche tells Deussen
that he hankers after a ‘trans-European eye’ (greisenhaftenkurzsichtigkeit) which would
save most of the people from ‘European short-sightedness’. What we see in the character of Marjane Satrapi is a graphic artist endowed with a European eye rather than a transEuropean one. Considering her with such viewpoint, it is not queer to hear from her a
stereotyped version of Iran, an Oriental territory.
In the closing portion of Persepolis, Marji’s parents had already set their sights on
sending Marji abroad. It is not a sturdy mission to be undertaken since even previously,
before Islamic Revolution, they had sent her on a tour to France alone. Marji gets downright cheerful since to make her way alone to West is ‘real independence’. The heavywith-meaning point is that Marji’s parents while talking over with her to clarify and, at
the same time, legitimize their resolution say that: “we feel its better for you to be far
away and happy than close by and miserabl.”40 This aphorism, once more, opens the door
of Orientalist dichotomy to our debates. The West is the realm of ‘far away’ and ‘happy,’
but Iran, the ‘close by’ land, is and makes the subjects ‘miserable’. Iran is rendered and
depicted as an inferno from which an escape is a must. Marjane Satrapi’s mind is totally
obsessed with the West and whatever is Western. When her parents tell her that they have
their hearts set on Turkey, she gets too crestfallen and woebegone and says:
“Bah…Turkey is for the birds. Only uncool people go to Turkey. If you are taking a trip,
why not go to Europe or the United States!”41 It is fair and pleasant to mention that
Turkey has been one of the headquarters of the Orientalist focus. That might be a reason
why the occidental-minded Marji gets repulsed at the word of Turkey.
People might be proud of their origin, but to Marji, it is tout au contraire. She believes
that to be an Iranian is a ‘burden’. Once during a party at school, Marc, a graduated
student, approaches her and asks her of her name. Marji answers that: “Marjane. I’ve
been here a year.”42 Then Marc asks her of her origin. And she answers that she is French
and then, quite downhearted, leaves Marc. In the meanwhile, she thinks that: “Iran was
the epitome of evil and to be Iranian was a heavy burden to bear.”43 She totally puts her
grandmother’s words of wisdom into oblivion: “always keep your dignity and be true to
yourself.”44 But for her “it was easier to lie than to assume that big burden” of coming from
a country which was “the epitome of evil.”45 Satrapi tries to construct a very authoritative
discourse by unveiling herself as an author who does not advocate the Islamic Republic
of Iran and like, imperialism of anti-imperialism, which is claiming the liberation of the
rest of the world and specifically Muslim women, she is concerned with the emancipation
of women in Iran (and totally Muslim countries).
Subsequent to giving a rundown of the distressing situation of women in Iran,
Satrapi says in a bold and bigger font, “I want to leave this country!”46 It imparts the
traumatic status of women in Iran that does not leave women a choice but to take themselves off from Iran. Men are crushing all women down while “all laws are on their
side.”47 That’s why Marji’s mother assures her that “you are a free woman. The Iran of
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
283
284
today is not for you. I forbid you to come back!”48 The ‘Iran of today’ is so upsetting that
presses Marjane’s mother to consign the mother-daughter emotion to oblivion and to forbid
her to return to Iran again.
The issue of suppression can become transparent in the course of Satrapi’s work
too. For example, once while Gila is giving her a ride, Marjane thinks of Behzad, a
graphic artist like herself, whom she respected for 20 days before. she comes to understand his real self and hidden id. Marjane and Gila visit Behzad when they hear that he
has been arrested for a drawing which depicted a bearded man. There they visit Behzad,
Mandana and their child, Nima. What occupies Marjane’s mind on the way back is that
whenever Mandana wanted to utter a word, Behzad interrupted her. As an instance,
Marjane poses a question to Mandana there: “so, what do you do?” 49 And the instant she
says “well, I…;” Behzad interrupts her and answers that: “She studied pharmacology, but we
had Nima very quickly after getting married. So now she is a housewife.”50 Once Marjane
asks Mandana of Nima’s age, the moment she say ‘he’s…’, again Behzad punctuates her and
says that “eight and a half. In July, he’ll be nine!!!”51 This act of interruption moves on
and on in that session. It lodges in Marjane’s mind to discompose and perturb her to a
great deal. Marjane states that “to think that he was my hero for twenty days! His whole
spiel about freedom of expression, while he didn’t even let his wife say a word! Ah,
Iranian men!”52 Satrapi is attributing this structure of censuring the wives to all Iranian
men! She takes merely Behzad into consideration and comes up with an immensely
astonishing value judgment on all Iranian men. She is suggesting that in Iran men do not
let their wives talk and, in point of fact, bereave them of freedom of expression. After
some other words, Marjane decides to leave the country. Definitely, her destination
would be Europe. It suggests that this freedom of expression that she is talking of is freebie
in Europe while quite expensive in Iran. It has a real price in Iran, she indicates. It seems
that Marjane has forgotten her parents. If her father only allows her mother to talk, which
is so, she should not propose such a stereotypical essentialization.
Gerard Genet, in his Narrative Discourse, presents five central categories of narrative
analysis. They are ‘order’, ‘duration’, ‘frequency’, ‘mood’ and ‘voice’. The category of
‘mood’ can move a further step forward by being subdivided into ‘distance’ and ‘perspective’.
What we want to fix on here is the subclass of ‘distance’. By distance we mean “the relation
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2, p.183. (emphasis added.)
of the narration to its own material.”53 Distance is actually a question of recounting the
story (‘diagesis’) or representing it (‘mimesis’). In other words, diagesis, in E. M.
Forster’s terminology, is ‘telling’ and mimesis ‘showing’. Within the course of the story,
the author can convey the meaning he or she is looking for to the reader whether through
addressing it directly or by coming up with a set of conditions and ideas which implies
what he or she wants to address directly. In other words:
In showing (also called the ‘dramatic method’), the author simply presents the characters talking
and acting, and leaves it entirely up to the reader to infer the motives and dispositions that lie behind
what they say and do… In telling, the author intervenes authoritatively in order to describe, and
often to evaluate, the motives and dispositional qualities of the characters.54
Such a ‘showing’ technique is the matter with Marjane Satrapi’s style of writing.
She does not need to say directly and openly that, for example, “we Iranians are Olympic
champions when it comes to gossip;”55 instead, she can come up, in T. S. Eliot’s terminology, with an ‘objective correlative’ and provide a ring of ladies who sit somewhere and
start telling about themselves and others in order to ventilate their hearts. She embellishes
her characters with some traits and leaves it to the reader to infer what she aims at.
Marjane Satrapi simply puts forward some stories in order to indoctrinate what she harbors
in mind.
In numerous cases, Persepolis portrays how Iranian people take it on themselves to
be dishonest in their affairs. Once we encounter Marji’s father back at home. He says that
he has been to Rey Hospital and there he has spotted people coming out while ‘carrying
the body of a young man killed by the army.’ Just after this martyr, they notice another
cadaver getting out of the hospital. Straight away they shout: “Here is another martyr.”56
The supposed martyr is an old man and all of those who fell short of following the
first martyr came over to this one. While they are carrying the old man and shouting
revolutionary slogans, an old lady appears and roars: “Please! Stop it! Stop it!” 57 When
they ask her of her identity, she replies that she is his widow. Then she continues that:
“my husband died of cancer.”58 The rest of the story suggests that they take the dead old
man as a martyr and continue demonstrating against Shah and his regime.
53. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1989), p.105.
54. M. H., Abrams, & G. G., Harpham, A Glosary of Literary Terms (Boston: Wadsworth Cengage
Learning, 2009), p.43.
285
286
Marji tells of her teacher who once used to say that Shah was chosen by God, but
now orders them to “tear out all the photos of the Shah from” their books59 Or, once we
spot Marji and her parents while visiting their neighbors. The lady neighbor says:
“Hello! All those demonstrations were really tiring but we finally succeeded.”60 Then
her husband continues: “look! A bullet almost hit my wife’s cheek. Liberty is priceless.”61
Nonetheless, Marji’s mother reveals the other way around: “what nerve! She always had
that nasty spot. If we weren’t neighbors, he would have said she’s a martyr raised from
the dead.”62
Persepolis accents on the false information Iranian government broadcasts. For
example, once Marji goes to his father and Anoosh and says that: “on TV they say that
99.99% of the population voted for the Islamic republic.”63 When she utters this, her
father retorts irately that: “Do you hear that, Anoosh? Do you realize how ignorant our
people are? The elections were faked and they believe the results: 99.99%!! As for me, I
don’t know any single person who voted for Islamic republic. Where did that figure come
from?”64 It is a pleasant trick Satrapi is coming up with. She can, in reality, kill two birds
with one stone. First of all, she is portraying the government as the one which broadcasts
false information: a dishonest one. Secondly, she is questioning the authority of the
Islamic Republic.
Once while Marji and her parents are watching the TV, they hear from the 8:00
news that: “140 Iranian F-145 carried out bombing raids on Baghdad tonight.” Marji
takes it as a sign heralding the powerful army of Iranians forces, but his father, who is in
Marji’s terms ‘defeatist’, does not put his faith on it and commences on foraging for his
radio in order to check on BBC, British Broadcasting Company. Once more we are with
the old banal Orientalist dichotomy: Iranian news agency versus BBC. Without any
doubts and irrefutably, BBC would get the upper hand in this competition. Marji’s father
says that: “you can’t always believe what they say. 8 o’clock. The BBC is broadcasting
too. Where’s the radio?”65 He does not give credence to Iranian news agency and is
found wanting to corroborate the authenticity of the heard news from BBC. He takes the
radio from Marji and tunes the radio to BBC. The radio news agency airs that “140
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
Iranian bombers attacked Baghdad today”66 At this point in time, they get really on cloud
nine. But it is not the end. BBC also proclaims that “president Banisadr has ordered the
release of the military pilot jailed after the failed coup. They agreed to attack Iraq if the
government broadcast the national anthem.”67 The rest of the news was not so cool for
them: “Iranian losses were very heavy… half of the planes in mission have not
returned.”68
Marjane Satrapi does not lag behind in this competition of revealing erotic Iranians
too. But, unlike others who follow the ‘telling’ technique of writing the memoir, she, just
as before, adheres to her ‘showing’ style. Persepolis 2 takes us to a rendezvous between
Marjane and her childhood friend, Farnaz. There, Marjane talks of suing for a divorce to her.
But Farnaz replies in negative and so as to corroborate herself, she comes up with an
exemplum. She relates the story of her own sister which has left her husband. Farnaz
pronounces that “from the minute she had the title of divorced woman, the butcher, the
pastry chef, the baker, the fruit and vegetable seller, the itinerant cigarette seller, even
beggars in the street, all made it clear they’d like to sleep with her.”69 This story, quite
conspicuously, speaks for itself. It manifests lustful Iranians who desire a divorcee very
lasciviously. It engraves the foregone Orientalist tales considering female slavery.
In Persepolis, we hear Marji’s father who, while listening to the news, says:
“incredible! They think all men are perverts!!” Taji, Marji’s mother, replies: “Of course!
Because they really are perverts!!”70 Marji’s mother is going a stage further on so as to
parade that the ones who curb the sexual freedom are themselves sexually ‘pervert’!
Such is the case with Azar Nafisi as well who believes that all religious men are sexually
‘pervert’.
Mohja Kahf’s enlightening work on Western rendition of the Muslim women
manifests that Western representation of them has not been static down the temporal tunnels
of history. He finds Muslim women portrayed as ‘termagant’ in the Medieval and
Renaissance texts; however, notices them being depicted as ‘odalisque’ in Enlightenment
and Romantic texts. And hence, “although the Muslim woman emerges as a powerful figure
in early Western narratives, she metamorphoses into a symbol of oppressed, enslaved
womanhood in the age of Enlightenment.”71 While Western women are crushed down
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
Nima Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran (London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007), p.35.
287
288
during the 17th and 18th centuries in the context of masculine enlightenment, they strive to
define themselves as ‘progressive’ in the 19th century by honoring them as the ‘progenitors
of their race’. They placed themselves in the discourse of ‘individual liberty’ by posing
themselves as ‘white’ ones and Eastern women as non-white ones. One of the great
examples of such a discourse constructing a binary opposition between Western and
Eastern women in 19th century English literature is rendered in Jane Eyre. Ultimately, in
the 20th century, this discourse of dichotomous womanhood penetrates well into the
collective unconscious of Western women’s narratives. What manifested this polar
contradiction between the two parties was (and even currently is) ‘veil’. Naghibi states
that:
“Western women mobilized to their advantage the popular significations of the veil as evidence of
women’s subjugation and claimed the unveiling, hence liberation, of Muslim women as their prerogative. In Western discourses, the practice of veiling was represented as tantamount to imprisoning women; it was enforced by the male patriarchy and symbolized a dogmatic faith that enlightened Europeans had discarded in favor of a democratic and secular system of government.”72
Satrapi’s world is not free from the cares and concerns of such Western woman.
She, just like Western sisters, raises her sword of opprobrium against the veil so as to don
an attire of ‘whiteness’. In Persepolis, she illustrates a playground in which little children
rather than wearing the veils are playing with them. One girl claims that it is too hot to
wear it; another is applying the veil as a harness for her horse while calling ‘giddyap’.
We notice another girl who is metamorphosed into a monster by casting the veil over her
head. This scene is too informative to Satrapi’s aim. She is actually changing the identity of veil by scrutinizing it through the viewpoint of little children. Considering the veil
from these little children’s view, “it is after all a piece of cloth, and its fetishization by
adults can seem strange.”73 The scene implies that this so-called ‘veil’ is nothing but a
‘piece of cloth’ and it is too crude to fetishize it as an essential constituent of a woman.
Iranian diaspora exilic memoirs endorse and buttress each other. They are a vast
moor of intertexuality swapping materials among each other. Like the Orientalists of the
centuries ago who employed massive materials piled up in the city library in order to pen
their travelogues, memoirists of the present age take liberties with the other handy memoirs. It strikes us as if no documentation is called for what they are claiming to be shear
facts. They also do their utmost to convince the Western readers of the existence of some
non-existent materials in Iranian culture.
72. Nima Naghibi, Rethinking Global Sisterhood, p.35.
73. Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons, p.190.
One of the principal topics which the hands of neo-Orientalism trifle with is the
idea of the ‘Golden Key’, a key which would get its owner to the paradise. This non-existent
element finds its way in the memoirs of many writers such as Molavi, Hakakian, Nafisi
and Ebadi.74 This is actually the intertextuality of the memoirs which take a non-existent
element from one memoir and then expand it. Satrapi is also to flirt with this illusion.
Once we observe Mrs. Nasrin in Satrapi’s house. She is utterly woebegone as if the rain
of sorrow is dribbling from her face. When Marji and Taji call for the cause, she unveils
a ‘plastic key painted gold’. Then she carries on and says: “they gave this to my son at
school. They told the boys that if they went to war and were lucky enough to die, this
key would get them into heaven.”75 She then bursts into tears, since she is under the
impression that “they want to trade this key for my old son.”76 But Satrapi would not
bring it to a halt. She needs to represent Iranians more and more irrational in the eyes of
the world. Mrs. Nasrin proceeds: “they told him that in paradise there will be plenty of
food, women and houses made of gold and diamonds.”77 Women made of gold and
diamonds can be one of her most crude assertions. Taji decides to indoctrinate the boy
the way she has in mind; nonetheless, he does not take an interest in what she says, and
instead declares that he will marry Marji in the future.
Then Satrapi tries to trivialize the imposed and holy war. So as to actualize this, she
brings Shahab, another cousin to Marji, to the scene. Shahab is back from the front. He,
also crestfallen, opens the gates of his gloomy heart:
“It’s awful. Every day I see busses full of kids arriving. They come from the poor areas, you can
tell… First they convince them that the after life is even better than Disneyland, then they put them
in a trance with all their songs… It’s nuts! They hypnotize them and just toss them into battle.
Absolute carnage.”78
Then, Marji herself continues that “the key to paradise was for poor people.
Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with their
keys around their necks.”79 First of all, the shear claiming of such a thing comes quite
queer. If there were anything of the sort, the BBC, the news agency that they admire a
lot, would have aired tens of hours of program considering the irrationality of Iranians
74. Seyyed Mohammad Marandi and Hossein Pirnajmuddin, “Constructing an Axis of Evil: Iranian
Memoirs in the ‘Land of the Free’” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 26 (2009),
pp.23-47.
289
290
through mentioning such golden keys. In addition, seemingly Satrapi is not wise enough
to distinguish between a plaque and a golden key. All the Iranians, the moment they cast
a look at the sketch Satrapi has drawn, and which you would see next page, would laugh
at its eccentricity. They all are conscious of the real identity of the supposed Golden
Keys. They are in reality the plaques which are worn by the soldiers so that if they are
killed, one might recognize their identity. When the adult Marjane observes the mothers
of the martyrs on TV who are happy exclaims: “I can’t figure out if it’s faith or complete
stupidity.”80 Satrapi is seemingly keeping the incident under the surveillance from her
own standpoint, a simulacrum of the Western point of view. The spiritual elements do
not find a way in her thoughts. What she reflects on as ‘stupidity’ might be shear rationality;
nonetheless, she is not equipped with the trans-European eye to figure that out. All the
mothers about whom she is prattling get unhappy without any doubts the moment they
hear of their sons’ demise. However, they are also happy since their sons breathed their
last in the way of defending their country and religion from the hands of the invaders.
Satrapi’s performances of whiteness becomes ‘white’ where she does her utmost to
construct an Iranian identity clashing with Iran which is being defined as primarily
‘Middle Eastern’ or ‘Muslim’. Marjane, in the ring of her friends, considers all of them
as traditionalist, since they consider her a ‘whore’81 By distancing herself from traditional
Muslims, Satrapi plays a part in diffusing the pervasive racialization of Muslims. Little
Marji also tries to show lady guardians as irrational when she says: “it was obvious that
she had no idea what punk was.”82 One of the other weird and queer assertions of Marji
pops up when she asserts that “the religious leaders are very stupid.”83 It is not clear by
what criterion Satrapi is coming up with such a value judgment. She also talks of ‘nuptial
chamber’ and claims that according to Shiite tradition when a man is cut down in prime,
a nuptial chamber is raised for her and “that way, the dead man can symbolically attain
carnal knowledge.”84 It seems that she is too free in her claims and does not need to come
up with any sort of documentation. Her implied readers would accept her as a ‘native
informer’, and consequently she would not be pressed for any authentic writings. First of
all, the tradition she is babbling about is by no means one of the orders of Shiite sect.
However, as was aforementioned, she does not need to put forward any documents for
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
what she utters as facts. Secondly, the tradition does not suppose that with getting the
‘nuptial chamber’ raised, the deceased would, symbolically or in reality, ‘attain carnal
knowledge’. This tradition just mourns a dear one cut down in his or her primes and
signifies that this ‘nuptial chamber’ could be for his or her merriment, not loss of life.
One of the most imbecilic maneuvers Satrapi carries out to secure her sought-after
objectives is the trivialization of culturally valued issues. They all seemingly root from a
deep-rooted antipathy towards the cultural constituents of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The little Marji, as an instance, does not fail in ‘making fun’ at martyrs.85 It can not
be deciphered why she is undertaking such a task. What is wrong with the martyrs that
leads her to ‘making fun’ at them is not to be puzzled out. These martyrs have offered
their priceless lives in order to let us live a life without mental disturbance emanating
from intruders. In the anniversary of the victory of Revolution, she also pokes fun at the
Islamic Republic and its ideals by decorating the classroom with toilet papers.86 She also
attributes whatever dictatorial to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Once when her mother
reproaches her for ditching the school classes, she says: “dictator! You are the guardian
of the Revolution of this house!”87 Taji plays dictatorial, in Marji’s viewpoint, and as a
result, she considers her as a ‘guardian of the Revolution’ since she takes her mother as
a ‘dictator’. Hence, every ‘dictator’ is affiliated, in a way or another, with this regime!
Previously we saw that how even he plays down the voluntary organization of Basij by
manifesting one Basiji serviceman who takes bribes.
Marjane is recently back from Europe, and hence she goes sightseeing Tehran.
When her father returns to home, after some initiatory tittle-tattling, he poses a question:
“did you walk around a little? What did you think of Tehran?”88 Marjane only gives
voice to one word: ‘sordid.’ The reason is somehow irritating: “I was shocked. At least
one street in three is named after a martyr.”89 Marjane’s mind gets too occupied with the
streets being named after martyrs or the ‘sixty-five-foot-high murals representing martyrs’.
She also compares the image of martyrs on the walls with sketches reading ‘best sausages
for 20 shillings’ in Austria.90 The backdrop and milieu is too ‘unsettling’ and ‘unbearable’ for her; Marjane feels as though she is walking in a cemetery; and as a result, she
hurries home so as to evade the scene.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis 2, p.98,
291
292
Satrapi, furthermore, tries to trivialize the local religion and regard it as a restricting
factor. When Marjane and Reza are done with their sketch of the mythological park,
Marjane takes it to the municipalities in order to proffer it to the mayor. In the first two
times, she is denied an appointment with the mayor because of her coverings. However,
on the third try, she gets the permission to visit the mayor. But she turns to be dismayed
and disillusioned when the mayor tells her that: “I am going to be frank with you. The
government couldn’t care less about mythology. What they want are religious symbols.
Your project is certainly interesting, but it is unachievable.”91 In this case, ‘religion’ foils
her sketch of a period of non-stop toil and troubles. Taji also loathes the local religion
enormously. Once when Marji wants to come up with a wild pretext so as to justify her
ditching school, she asserts that she has had a ‘religion’ class.92 Satrapi even tries to
trivialize namaz, the act of saying prayers. We observe little Marji in the ring of friends,
when one of them, quite proudly, says that he prays five times a day. Marjane retorts:
“me? Ten or eleven times…sometimes twelve.”93 In this way, she is portraying namaz as
a religious symbol which has split up from its initial meaning and value and is used just
for bragging about and hypocrisy.
CONCLUDING REMARKS ON AN ORIENTALIZED ORIENTAL: PERSEPOLIS, ORIENTAL OR NOT
Satrapi does not notice anything of value in the ‘repressive’ sphere of an Islamic
Iran. She takes each and every aspect of indigenous Iranian culture to be ‘backward’,
qualified for being unloaded onto the trash of history. Seemingly a collective amnesia
and a selective memory have pooled resources in her process of memoir writing. She
avails herself of such a collective amnesia and strives to brush off the precious values and
cultural products of an Islamic Revolution from the face of history. Satrapi’s greedy
longing for assimilating into Western culture spells out a defaming and vilifying attitude
towards local Iranian history and culture. However, we must not neglect the fact that
memoirs just present subjective discursive mappings of the world. Gore Vidal, in his own
memoir Palimpsest, asserts that memoirs are written from the way one remembers ones
own life, and not what is in reality out there recorded. Satrapi applies her own life narrative
to scrutinize and engender new forms of Islamic identity, to strive for ‘social justice’ and a
democratic layout of the society. So as to fulfill such a task, the Western public discourse
might come indispensible to her. Peter Novick, considering such a discourse, asserts that:
“public discourse doesn’t just shape private discourse, it is its catalyst; it sends out the
message ‘This is something you should be talking about’.”94 American imperialism acts out
as a ‘catalyst’. It simply presents the memoirists with a message, a quite dictatorial one: you
must articulate what ‘we’ crave for. So as to accomplish this, the collective amnesia and
selective memory join forces to let Satrapi submit to the passions of imperialism. An orderly
deprivation of a collective memory paves the way for her to paint an imposed and holy
war, for example, as a black scene of carnage which was undertaken for nothing. It
strikes us as if, in Francis Fukuyama’s terms, we are hitting ‘the end of history’. It seems
as if no one has ever recorded the heroism that Iranians manifested during the imposed
war; or, as if no one has chronicled the ultimate sacrifices the young soldiers, about
whom Satrapi speaks copiously, made in the arena of an unequal war. Satrapi is under
the impression that no one has ever heard or recorded anything about Hossein Fahmide,
Behnam Mohammadi Rad and many other young soldiers who made the backdrop of
war charged with the accounts of heroism and sacrifice. Her strategic location, in Said’s
terminology, lays in the bizarre accounts she relates considering an Islamic Iran.
The Iran she is portraying is far from real Iran as a vast nation of more than seventy
million people. Considering all the things passed about Satrapi’s works in the preceding
sections, it is perfectly bizarre for Satrapi to claim her Perspolis is not anti-Iranian. To
sum up all others, Satrapi is in reality an Orientalized Oriental who is defined by Soguk as:
“one who physically resides in the ‘East’, and sometimes in the West, yet spiritually feeds on the
West. S/he announces her/himself to be ‘post-Oriental’, or ‘postcolonial’, yet is a practicing
member of ‘orientalising’ praxis in its daily operations in the interpenetrating realms of art, aesthetics,
folklore, media, education, and so on. S/he is the non-Western subject who makes her/himself largely
in the image of the West, its experiences, designs, and its expectations . . . for her/him the West is
always more intelligible and fulfilling, and thus more attractive than East.”95
REFERENCES
Abdel-Malek, Anouar. “Orientalism in Crisis.” Diogenses, no. 44 (Winter 1963): 104-12.
Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glosary of Literary Terms, 9th edition (Boston: Wadsworth
Cengage Learning, 2009).
Cromer, Lord. Modern Egypt, 2 (New York: MacMillan, 1908.)
94 Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p.197.
95 Ziauddin Sardar, Orientalism, pp.85-86.
293
294
Dabashi, Hamid. “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire.” 2006. retrieved from:
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm, on 2nd January, 2012.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1989.
Elgamri, Elzain. Islam in the British Broadsheets: The Impact of Orientalism on Representations of Islam
in the British Press. Lebanon: Ithaca Press, 2008.
Golafshani, Leila. Politics and Culture,retrieved from:http://www.politicsandculture.org/2009/10/02/leiligolafshani-‘iranian-exilic-memoir’-a-review-of-shirin-ebadi-iran-awakening-azar-nafisi-reading-‘lolita’-in-tehran-azadeh-moaveni-lipstick-jihad/, on 3rd January, 2012.
Marandi, Seyyed Mohammad and Hossein Pirnajmuddin. “Constructing an Axis of Evil: Iranian Memoirs
in the “Land of the Free”” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, 26 (2009,) pp.23-47.
Marshall, P. G., and G. Williams. The Great Map of Mankind (London: Dent, 1982).
Naghibi, Nima. Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Western Feminism and Iran (London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007).
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human (London: University of Nebraska Press, 1984).
Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
Said, Edward W. Orientalism, (New York: Random House, 1994).
Sardar, Ziauddin. Orientalism, (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999).
Satrapi, Marjane. Embroideries [translated by Anjali Singh] (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005).
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 1: The Story of a Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003).
Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004).
Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2007).
The “Morally Ideal Woman” in Middlemarch
Ya¤mur Demir
Çankaya Üniversitesi
ÖZET Viktorya Dönemi yazar› olarak Eliot, Middlemarch adl› roman›nda 19. yüzy›l ‹ngiliz toplumunu ve
bu toplumun de¤erler sistemini, s›n›f yap›s›n› göz önünde tutarak, anlat›r. ‹ngiliz toplumunun üç ana sosyal s›n›f› olan aristokrasi, orta s›n›f ve iflçi s›n›f›, üç kad›n karakterin yard›m›yla detayl› olarak betimlenir.
Eliot okuyucunun olaylarla ve karakterlerle ilgili sonuçlara ulaflmas›na, toplumla ilgili gerçekçi tasvirleriyle yard›m eder. Okuyucu, toplumsal s›n›flar›n de¤er yarg›lar›yla bir tan›fl›rken, ayn› zamanda Eliot’›n üstü
kapal› etik ö¤retilerine de ulafl›r. Bu çerçevede, Dorothea, Rosamond ve Mary kendi s›n›flar›n›n (s›ras›yla
aristokrasi, orta s›n›f ve iflçi s›n›f›) ahlaki de¤erlerinin ürünü olarak resmedilmifltir.
ANAHTAR KEL‹MELER Middlemarch, ahlaki de¤erler, sosyal s›n›flar.
ABSTRACT As a Victorian novelist, George Eliot depicts the 19th century English society and its system of
values with respect to class stratification in her novel Middlemarch. Three main social classes of English
society- aristocracy, middle-class, and working class- are rendered in detail with the help of three women
figures representing the classes. With realistic representations related to society, Eliot lets the reader reach
conclusions about the events and characters. The readers are introduced to the moral values of the classes,
and the implicit moral teachings of Eliot. In this frame, Dorothea, Rosamond, and Mary are portrayed as
the products of their classes’ moral values, aristocracy, middle class and working class respectively.
KEYWORDS Middlemarch, morality, social classes.
As a realistic novelist and as an individual living in the 19th century England,
George Eliot had the opportunity to make critical observations about the social and individual developments affecting her age. Her characters in Middlemarch, Dorothea,
Rosamond, and Mary represent the social classes. These women are compared and contrasted
with one another and with the male characters. It is suggested that women are morally
stronger than men, and if the women characters are given the chance, they will have
developed their already existing moral sense more, pioneering meanwhile a new understanding of morality independent of class culture.
In the 19th century paradigm, the roles of men and women were fixed: middle class
men strenuously worked to earn money, whereas the middle class wives did nothing but
consume the earnings of their husbands. Men were the head of their families; women
were bound to them in every sense: they were to sit at home and raise their children.
Except for dealing with children and household, the women did not have much to do.
However, life standards of families changed along with the changes in the socio-economic
structure. The general changes in social order such as “the economic factors, and the rise
296
YA⁄MUR DEM‹R
of the middle classes which radically altered the means of production, the politics, the
customs, and culture and literature of a nation,”1 brought about the specific changes in
the family structure.
After establishing their own standards, the middle class family life emerged. Men
were supposed to work and earn money. Unlike men, the middle class women had no
relation to the working life, and they were not paid much attention in terms of education,
law, and politics. England was still a male-dominated society in the 19th century, and
the place of women in society had been taken for granted; being wives, mothers, and
helpmates were their master statuses. In the 19th century, the duties of women were as
follows:
women were expected to center their lives on home and family; they were expected to conduct
themselves, in modesty and propriety; they were expected to find the commands of duty and the
delights of service insufficient, in fact ennobling, boundaries of their lives.2
A middle class woman was considered “the angel in the house,” and she had to
direct the servants dealing with the chores, while taking care of her husband and children.
However, middle class women spent limited time with their children who were taken
care by a nursemaid or a governess. They spent their time with other middle class
women: “Much of a middle-class woman’s day was spent in the company of other
women from similar households. An elaborate set of social customs involving ‘calls’
and ‘at homes’ was established in European middle-class society.”3 Their houses were
generally decorated heavily because of their efforts to imitate the houses of aristocracy.
They tried to increase their social respectability by showing off. The rooms of middle class
houses “were certain to be crowded with furniture, art objects, carpets, and wall hangings.”4
They thought their belongings would show them as if they were from the aristocracy.
When compared to middle class females, working class women and children suffered
more. At home, they did all the household work on their own: cooking for the family,
cleaning the house, washing the clothes, and shopping for food. These women had to
keep the house running with little amount of money. They went to the markets to buy the
cheapest food since most of them did not have gardens for growing their own food. Many
1. Ertu¤rul Koç, The Victorians and the Novelists from Dickens to Hardy (Ankara: Bar›fl Books, 2010),
p.10.
2. Hilary M. Schor, Gender Politics and Women’s Rights. Brantlinger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p.173.
3. Edward McNall Burns, Western Civilizations (New York: Norton, 1984), p.746.
4. Edward McNall Burns, Western Civilizations, p.749.
THE “MORALLY IDEAL WOMAN” IN MIDDLEMARCH
women working in the 19th century belonged to the working class. Unlike aristocratic and
the middle class women, they had to work. They worked in factories, mines, in the houses of middle class families. Lower standards of living and shortage of money were the reasons of why they needed work. “Working class included the men, women and children
who together worked in mines and quarries... cleaning women and the like.”5 Unmarried
working class women generally worked in the houses of middle class families as domestic
servants. Middle class people looked upon working class women as “lesser breeds” of
woman.
Eliot, aware of the social and political issues of her period, focuses on women’s
evolution through time. She criticises the inadequacy of female education, the ignorant
marriages, the exclusion of women from science and new forms of knowledge, and legal
restrains. With the characters she creates, she shows the other way in which women can
succeed. For Eliot, the transformation of a heroine is “a form of evolutionary change, a
world-historical moment in itself.”6 Evolutionary acts for the social improvement are
either initiated or supported by women in her novels. In the male dominated society,
women had very little opportunity to prove themselves and to speak out. The women
characters of her novels, however, have the potentiality to help and achieve the betterment
of the society.
Regarding Eliot’s attitude to the classes, she feels respect for aristocracy, whereas
she disdains middle class on account of their “rising” values. She appreciates the efforts
of working class people. Both capitalist patriarchal male characters and oppressed submissive female characters are found in her novels. Eliot addresses both men’s oppression
on women and the existence of woman problem. She herself tried hard to take part in the
masculine social order; hence, she talked about gender issues in her novels. She believed
that
women by virtue of their sex [could] play an important role in the progress of the human race, since
they [were] by nature endowed with a larger capacity for feeling, which [had] been discovered to
be intellectually and morally valuable.7
Eliot attracts the attention of her audience to the woman question. For Eliot, the
evolution of women influence the development of the human race, and women should be
5. Edward McNall Burns, Western Civilizations, p.750.
6. Hilary M. Schor, Gender Politics and Women’s Rights. Brantlinger, p.182.
7. Lloyd Fernando, “New Women” in the Late Victorian Novel (University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1977), p.31.
297
298
YA⁄MUR DEM‹R
given more opportunities in the capitalist system. Thus, she focuses more on women
characters in her novels; particularly in Middlemarch, the major characters are daughters,
wives, and mothers. Male characters, on the other hand, are occupying minor roles, and
they are mentioned only when they are in relation to the women characters. Male figures
also serve as the foils of the females, and women characters’ dialogues outnumber men’s
speeches in the work. According to Hutton, Eliot
indulges more neutrality of feeling in relation to men than she does in relation to women. She does
not regard them as beings whose duty it is to be very much in earnest, and who are almost contemptible or wicked if they are otherwise.8
Her novels are usually concerned with women. Rather than heroes, Eliot’s novels
have heroines, and women’s stories are rendered. For example, her heroines Maggie in
The Mill on the Floss, Dorothea in Middlemarch, and Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda do
not have the opportunities for education and employment; however, they strive for the
realization of their potential. They all need to make crucial moral choices when they face
up challenges.
Eliot supported the idea that “Women ought to have the same store of truth placed
within their reach as men have . . . the same store of fundamental knowledge.”9 Her heroines
are strong characters, and they try strenuously to get out of the borders defined for
women. Dorothea in Middlemarch, Dinnah in Adam Bede, Romola in Romola, and
Maggie in The Mill on the Floss all have dedication to life, and they have strong will and
altruistic motives. “Her heroines are not merely lovers of men or objects of their adoration,
as in the previous novelists [such as Defoe, Fielding, and Richardson]; they are women
of intellect and feeling, capable of taking their share in the progress of society.”10 For
Defoe, woman is a commodity; a cargo of goods including women arrives at the island
in Robinson Crusoe. For Richardson, woman is a virtue rewarded as described in
Pamela; for Fielding woman is a help-mate, source of inspiration and enthusiasm for
men.
Dealing with women’s issues in her time, Eliot focuses on the representative individuals of different social strata, and she analyses their lives and relationships within the
classes they belong to. Yet, she is in favour of the society rather than the individual. She
8. qtd. in Dorothea Barrett, Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines (New York: Routledge, 1989),
p.23.
9. qtd. in Josie Billington, Eliot’s Middlemarch (London: Continuum, 2008), p.14.
10. S. M. Jamil Wasti, George Eliot as a Novelist (Karachi: Syed and Syed, 1961), p.11.
seeks to have organic unity in her novels. For her, the union of society and individual is
essential; hence, she makes a criticism of the separate spheres of the men and women in
the English society. Although “The female novelists before George Eliot rarely step
beyond the intimate circle of domestic and social relationships,”11 she goes beyond the
predefined limits by denunciating the notion of separate spheres because for her, “women
are to find in novel-writing a literary field peculiarly adapted to their capacities, and that
the novel should be a true portraiture of life.”12 Wives, sisters, and daughters take the
initiative, and support the society, whereas fathers, husbands, and other male characters
have faults and imperfections. Women characters are morally superior to men in
Middlemarch. Since they are able to change in the course of the novel, they are round
characters, yet male figures remain flat. Her protagonist and antagonist in the work are
also female.
Eliot deals with three main women figures from the three main classes: Dorothea
Brooke, Rosamond Vincy, and Mary Garth. These women occupy different societal
roles. Dorothea, for instance,
was regarded as an heiress; for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents,
but if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr. Brooke’s estate, presumably
worth about three thousand a-year—a rental which seemed wealth to provincial families.13
She is from aristocracy whose male members were educated and occupied high
positions in the society such as the rector of a town, doctor, and lawyer. The women,
however, were not given much chance to develop themselves intellectually. They could
only arrange meetings, dinners, receptions and visits which kept them busy. George Eliot lets
her readers observe the aristocracy with her characters, especially with Dorothea Brooke.
Dorothea’s refined taste, moral values and enthusiasm for learning set her apart
from the other women in Middlemarch. Dorothea is a “genuine creation and a most
remarkable one when we consider the delicate material in which she is wrought.”14 She
is the first character introduced in the novel. She has a pure beauty supported by her plain
dressing and garments. She is resembled to “the Blessed Virgin,”15 and her impressive11. S. M. Jamil Wasti, George Eliot as a Novelist, p.13.
12. George Willis Cooke, George Eliot: A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy (Montana:
Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p.127.
13. George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Wordsworth, 2000), p.7.
14. Henry James, “George Eliot’s Middlemarch” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 8 (3). (1953: 161-170), p.16.
15. George Eliot, Middlemarch, p.5.
299
300
YA⁄MUR DEM‹R
ness to “a fine quotation from the Bible.”16 She is seen as “remarkably clever17 by the
townspeople, and she knows the passages of Pascal and Jeremy Taylor. Despite her “narrow
and promiscuous” education “first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss family
at Lausanne,”18 her education is inadequate as it was not systematically programmed.
Dorothea “seeks to know more than her meagre education has so far allowed her, and
thereby to do more than her society designates as appropriate to her.”19 She has high
aspirations for self-improvement through which she can help the betterment of the society.
Her theoretic mind is after
some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule
of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever
seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractions, and then to incur
martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.20
At the very beginning of the novel, Dorothea’s willingness to achieve something
great for the world is stated. She is not a girl of mediocre expectations and tries to get rid
of the bondages of being a woman despite “the meanness of opportunity”21 in the world
of Middlemarch. Though Dorothea develops plans, she has ambivalence about what to
do because of her lack of certainty on the necessary actions for upheaval in the society,
which could be provided with a proper education. She is trying to find a great cause for
the sake of which she could make necessary self-sacrifices, but she does not know what
that cause would be and how she should act. She craves to accomplish something but she
does not know what and how to do it, which reflects the common problem of women at
that time: aimlessness. They did not know what to expect and what to do because of the
lack of opportunities and the societal oppression for women. Likewise, the social environment of Dorothea does not support her intellectual development because “women
[are] expected to have weak opinions . . . that opinions [are] not acted on.”22 The common
belief in the society is not in favour of women, and women’s ideas are not seen as valuable.
“Open and ardent” young Dorothea’s ideas clash with the society’s notions. The rural
opinion inferred from Dorothea’s eyes is that she is unusual and striking.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, p.5.
Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Great Britain: Indiana Universtiy Press, 1962), p.172
Rosamond Vincy, on the other hand, is the representative of the middle-class
women. She is the daughter of Mr. Walter Vincy, the mayor of Middlemarch, and a middleclass manufacturer. She is held up as the best example of her class by her school teacher
because she has developed herself in terms of social graces and manner. She gives
importance to furniture, clothes, jewellery, trinkets and the other ornaments, for she
desires to live in a “romantic” world. She is after rising in the class ladder, hence she
waits for the right man to come and marry her. She marries Dr. Tertius Lydgate as he is
an outsider, and he has good family connections. Even after marriage, she needs constant
attention of male suitors, and she enjoys being flattered. She is the product of Victorian
bourgeois society; through her the reader traces how a society affects an individual. As
Marx and Engels state,
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the
material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking,
the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour .
. . we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of,
imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at corporeal man, rather we proceed from the real, active
man . . . Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.23
In the town of Middlemarch, people are classified in accordance with their material
lives, which in turn affect their spiritual lives. Hence, like the other characters, Rosamond’s
mercenariness is moulded by her environment, and she is the product of her class.
Mary Garth is the oldest daughter of the Garth family from working class. Her
personality traits, especially her being fair, are mentioned frequently in the novel. She is
twenty two years old, and single. She has an ordinary appearance, with “a broad face and
square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certain expression of amusement
in her glance which her mouth keeps the secret of”. When angry “she would not raise her
voice, but would probably say one of the bitterest things you have ever tasted the flavor of,”
and when she encounters a kindness “she would never forget it.”24 With these examples,
her personality traits are revealed. She is not as ambitious as Rosamond; rather, she is a
plain girl of humble expectations. She works to support her family financially. Mary and
her family have the moral virtues that the middle class people lack. They are honest, fair,
and hardworking.
23. qtd. in Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (Los Angeles: Universtiy of California Press,
1976), p.4.
301
302
YA⁄MUR DEM‹R
Eliot’s view of life affects the development of the characters in Middlemarch. To
Eliot, “morality is resolved into sympathy,”25 and
there is no isolation of human lots. No life but is bound by numberless ties to every other, none so
paltry and remote that it has not its share in the common history and its genuine interest to all sympathetic souls. 26
Her ideology is compatible with the idea that
Nothing . . . exists in isolation including our social life. Everything must be understood to exist in
dynamic historical process. . .Everything is interrelated and exists in dynamic relationship with a
variety of social forces. 27
Hence, she is not relentless towards her characters. She evaluates the events in
cause- effect relationship by giving the background information, so that the readers come
to sympathize with the characters. When a character commits a mistake, the readers
know why he/she behaves in that way, and understand the underlying reasons of his/her
attitude. In other words, the readers of Eliot make their decision about the characters
based on those characters’ experiences in a society.
Eliot lived in the Victorian age, and “the Victorian age lacked that supreme moral
consciousness in which greatest ages of human history express themselves. Honesty was
best only as a policy. Vulgarized by expanding prosperity, the age judged everything by
quantitative standards.”28 Thus, she felt the necessity of implying what is true and what is
not through her novels. Either implicit or explicit, the audience find the moral teaching of
Eliot. Similar to her other novels, Middlemarch also includes moral lessons, for she
wrote her stories “to impress moral conclusions derivable from them upon the minds
of readers.”29 Although there are messages which can be received through novel, they
are hidden in between the lines because Eliot is neutral towards her characters and the
situations they are in. She does not take side with her character, and “she neither praises
nor condemns them for their moral or immoral behaviours.”30 The classes the people
belong to are the determinant factors in their attitude, behaviour, and viewpoints.
25. John M. Robertson, George Eliot: Moralist and Thinker (Edinburgh: Folcroft, 1972), p.7.
26. John M. Robertson, George Eliot: Moralist and Thinker, p.9.
27. Charles E. Bressler, Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (New Jersey: Pearson,
2007), p.202.
28. S. M. Jamil Wasti, George Eliot as a Novelist, p.16.
29. S. M. Jamil Wasti, George Eliot as a Novelist, p.40.
30. Ertu¤rul Koç, The Victorians and the Novelists from Dickens to Hardy, p.137.
The women had hardly any legal rights at the time the novel depicts which is the
early 19th century. In this sense, Dorothea exemplifies the aristocratic morality. In an age
when money has the highest value, Dorothea ignores it. Though she is wealthy, she does
not have the sole control of her belongings because any property or money women owned
when single became the possession of their husbands on marriage. Dorothea and
Casaubon’s case exemplifies the situation: “as Mrs. Casaubon, she is bent to her husband’s
wishes and prejudices; as his widow she is amusingly but firmly hectored by her brother-inlaw, sir James. She has no property on her property.”31 When Casaubon dies, the codicil in
his testimony comes up saying that whatever she has is all to go away from Dorothea if
she marries will. Even after his death, Casaubon tries to control Dorothea. She is offended
by the insulting codicil about her relationship with will; however, she does not act with
the fear of losing money left from her husband. Money is of no significance for her;
nevertheless, Casaubon tries to punish her through money.
In Middlemarch, Dorothea is the trusted and honest figure; she stands by the ones
needing help as an unprejudiced supporter. For instance, she supports Lydgate’s cover-up
when he is engulfed in a scandal. Mr. Bulstrode, a wealthy banker, has secrets related to
his past relationships and the illegal means of acquiring his wealth. When an old friend
of him, Mr. Raffle, comes to Middlemarch, and blackmails him, Bulstrode seeks ways to
get rid of him. Mr. Raffle falls ill, and Bulstrode requires Lydgate’s help. Lydgate has
financial problems at that time, and he borrows money from Bulstrode. Meanwhile, Mr.
Raffles dies under the care of Lydgate. When the townspeople hear this, they think that
Lydgate has taken bribe from Mr. Bulstrode. Although the men of Middlemarch rely on
the rumours, Dorothea believes in Lydgate’s innocence, and she fights against the male
dominated society’s hypocrisy and immorality. She wants to find out the truth due to her
indignation for injustice. She asks Mr. Farebrother who seems to believe in the suspicion,
“what do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”32 and adds “I
cannot be indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in my trouble, and attended
me in my illness.”33 In a way, she invites him to support Lydgate in such a situation.
Most of the men in Middlemarch are morally weaker than Dorothea, and
Eliot portrays the main male characters of Middlemarch as moral weaklings and repeatedly manipulates her plot to exact vengeance on them, while at the same time portraying her female characters
31. Catherine Neale, Middlemarch: Penguin Critical Studies (London: Penguin, 1989), p.152.
32. George Eliot, Middlemarch, pp.603-604.
303
304
YA⁄MUR DEM‹R
as victims of a male dominated system who somehow triumph inwardly even as they practice submission and renunciation in their limited society.34
Mr. Bulstode’s illegal ways of gaining money, Mr. Featherstone’s illegitimate
child, Mr. Vincy’s indifference to his children, Mr. Casaubon’s efforts to disinherit and
limit Dorothea, Fred’s bad habits such as gambling, Mr. Tyke’s taking the position of
chaplain though Mr. Farebrother deserves the position, are the examples of male competitive
behaviour, demonstrating meanwhile that capitalist social structure and ideology have
already permeated to the norms of all classes.
Mrs. Bulstrode is depicted as a morally strong character compared to her husband
who is one of the embodiments of the male dominated society’s corruption. Nicholas
Bulstrode seeks power through money, and gains it by immoral means. His past is not
known by Middlemarchers, for he is “a man not born in the town, and altogether of dimly
known origin.”35 He is respected by Middlemarchers, because he has not done anything
wrong in the town. Nonetheless, he causes the death of his blackmailer John Raffles, who
threatens him to reveal his unpleasant past and destroy his reputation. Although Harriet
is devastated upon learning the reality, she does not desert her husband like Dorothea.
Although Dorothea realizes that Casaubon is not the man she has dreamed of, and
his study “the key to all mythologies” is “labour all in vain,”36 she still has sympathy
towards her husband. In that time duty meant morality, and Dorothea has a strong sense
of duty, which does not let her leave Casaubon. Her performing duties as a wife to
Casaubon is the proof of her morality. She is rather empathetic towards his behaviours.
She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest
perception; and now when she looked steadily at her husband’s failure, still more at his possible
consciousness of failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became tenderness.37
This devotion and tenderness results from her morality, for “Dorothea’s moral sense
compels her to obey moral law, which is absolute within the limits set by experience.”38
34. Patricia Lorimer Lundberg, George Eliot: Mary Ann Evans’s Subversive Tool in Middlemarch
(University of North Texas, 2002), p.272.
38. K. K. Collins, G. H. Lewes Revised: George Eliot and The Moral Sense, Victorian Studies, (2002),
p.482.
After the honeymoon, she realizes that she has been disillusioned. She also comes to
know and understand her husband better. However,
Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the
chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the
ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight. 39
Though Casaubon sets limits to Dorothea, such as not seeing will, she tries to fulfil
her duties as a wife. When she learns that he suffers from health problems, she seeks the
advice of Lydgate to comfort and ease her husband’s life.
Eliot depicts Dorothea as stick to the moral code of her time. However, her being
ethical in her marriage does not prevent her being disillusioned. For she marries
Casaubon with the hope of being more “educated,” she lives in a dream world she herself created in her mind. She faces up to reality in the honeymoon, but continues to be
Casaubon’s wife. Dorothea marries after his death and gives birth to a child. Her lofty
aspirations come to a standstill point, which testimonies that Dorothea is far from reality
and she does not know what she really wants. Through her marriage she becomes more
reasonable and more mature.
The representative of the middle class, the Vincys attach importance to worldly
pleasures. Mrs. Vincy deals with furniture, clothes, and plate. When their son Fred refuses
to continue his clergyman education, Mr. Vincy gets angry because he has spent so much
money on Fred’s education. He does not ask what Fred wants, he just sends Fred to a
school he himself likes. He does not support his son and daughter when they are in debt.
Raised in such a family, Rosamond thinks “if [I] had known how Lydgate would behave,
[I] would never have married him”40 when her husband is burdened with debt. Instead of
asking Lydgate about the matter and helping him, Rosamond thinks: “[I] had innocently
married this man with the belief that he and his family were glory to [me]!”41 She does
not feel sympathy for her husband who needs support; she just feels pity for herself, for
she is an egoist. When the Lydgate couple are at bad terms, Dorothea helps them. She
goes to visit Rosamond and asks her “how can we live and think that any one has trouble—
piercing trouble—and we could help them, and never try?”42 to persuade her to be more
39.
40.
41.
42.
305
306
YA⁄MUR DEM‹R
supportive to her husband in his hard times. Rosamond has limited moral values compared
to Dorothea. That is why; Dorothea goes to their house and gives advice to her.
Eliot compares Rosamond’s values with Dorothea’s, for the reader to spot the
differences between these characters with an attribution to their classes. Their classes
determine their values and behaviour. Although both Dorothea and Rosamond get disillusioned, they behaviour is not identical. Rosamond thinks of a separation right away;
however, Dorothea stays with her husband in his hard times. By so doing, Rosamond
reveals her moral cowardice, whereas Dorothea has the moral courage to resist the masculine doctrines.
Mary Garth is the virtuous daughter of the working class Garth family presented as
the heart of the novel in terms of morality. Mary “rather than Dorothea, is closest to the
moral centre of the novel.”43 She does not interfere in the affairs of others. For instance,
she refuses old Featherstone’s attempt to involve her in altering his will because “honesty,
truth-telling fairness, was Mary’s reigning virtue.”44 When he insists, she answers “I cannot
touch your iron chest or your will. I must refuse to do anything that may lay me open to
suspicion.”45 Featherstone offers a sum of money to her for changing his testimony,
which will make her rich and her beloved Fred inherit his money. Yet, Mary declines
because money is not as valuable as morality. This scene is a “testimony of the ultimate
impotence of cash over those who have a higher standard within.”46 Having moral values
supersedes money in the case of the Garth family.
Mary’s strong sense of morality is also illustrated in her selection of vocation.
Though she and her family need money, she does not want to earn money through a job
that she cannot perform properly. While conversing with Fred she says that
I have tried being a teacher, and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own
way. I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing
it.47
She wishes to earn money honestly, and in a decent way. Similarly, her mother also
refuses to be “a useless doll”48 like the middle class women of Middlemarch. Mrs. Garth
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
David Daiches, George Eliot: Middlemarch (London: Edward Arnold, 1973), p.29.
George Eliot, Middlemarch, p.262 .
Simon Dentith, George Eliot (Great Britain: the Harvester Press, 1986), p.87.
is a modest woman “while her grammar and accent [a]re above the town standard, she
[wears] a plain cap, cook[s] the family dinner and darn[s] all the stockings,”49 tough she
has been educated. The father is also admirable, for he is “one of those precious men
within his own district whom everybody would choose to work for them”50 because he
does his job well. Caleb Garth is such an honest man that when he learns the truth about
Mr. Bulstode’s past, he quits working for him although he needs money.
The Garths are poor; however, “they [do] not mind it”51; they have other virtues
than money. When they lose the sum of money they saved because of Fred, none of them
gets unhappy, for they do not base their expectations on money. In the early 19th century,
the working class people were exploited by the middle class people in every sense; thus,
incurring losses was normal for them. Likewise, for Garth family, money does not matter,
and life goes on without it; they do not make any changes in their life just because they
have lost the money. Nor their attitude to Fred changes, Mrs. Garth has “a motherly feeling,
and [has] always been disposed to excuse his errors.”52 They even do what his father does
not do for him: they support him and help him establish a job and lead a settled life.
The Garth family represents a strong positive version of working class values such
as self-respect, hard work, thrift, modest worldly success, and this family “establishes the
criteria to which most other actions are referred.”53 Either they are poor or rich; they do
not change, for they possess moral virtues that are deficient in middle class people. The
readers have the chance of making comparison between the middle class people and
working class people, and comprehend the differences in terms of morality with the help
of Middlemarch. For instance, when Lydgate gets into debt, Rosamond leaves him;
whereas Mary and her family accept Fred in any case.
Mary never experiences the disillusionment that Rosamond and Dorothea undergo,
for she is a realist person. She knows what she wants, and she tries to achieve her aims
with her limited opportunities. She is not after showing off her beauty or knowledge; she
makes great effort to realize her objectives. She survives with her labour in the world of
men. She is reasonable from the beginning to the end; however, Dorothea comes to reason
after some certain events whereas Rosamond lacks the reasoning abilities even after her
experiences. Hence, the class consciousness, classical education, or the class do not play
a role in being reasonable.
49.
50.
51.
52.
307
308
YA⁄MUR DEM‹R
The characters are faced with a moral dilemma in the works of Eliot. Their choices
shape their lives. Through their mistakes in life, they reach the better frame of mind.
Their altered worldview is associated with “a perspective on life that widens as the heroine
escapes what the novelist depicts as the ultimate imprisonment.”54 Dorothea, for
instance, awakens from moral stupidity, and the growth of her consciousness is observed
throughout the novel. Dorothea commits a mistake by marrying Casaubon. When she
realizes that he does not satisfy her lofty aspirations, she learns from her mistake. Eliot
comments on her situation: “we are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as
an udder to feed our supreme selves.”55 Fortunately, Dorothea begins to emerge from that
chaos in the early phases of her married life. Another aspect of Dorothea’s moral development is her willingness to achieve something great for the good of all. “Successful moral
development is presented as self-subordination, the replacement of self concern with a
concern for others,”56 hence Dorothea’s character is morally strong as she has concern
for others.
Unlike Dorothea, Mary is depicted as a flawless character, who has never done
anything wrong. She has positive characteristics such as being faithful, reliable, frank,
forgiving, honourable, and kind-hearted. She also considers the well-being of other
people more than herself. Mary’s existence in the novel provides the readers with criteria
to compare and contrast her with the other characters. She is the one to be taken as
exemplary figure: through her, the idealized image of woman in terms of morality is
emphasized.
Mary has a strong sense of responsibility; she does her best in the duties she has
overtaken, which results in maturity. She is the most mature woman of all the main
women figures in the novel. Both Dorothea and Rosamond are associated with the image
of “child,” for they are not mature enough and Rosamond is selfish like a child. Dorothea
slowly matures in the course of her marriage; nevertheless, Rosamond does not change
as she does not widen her perspective on life.
Mary is supportive in hard times, whereas Rosamond prefers to avoid being with
losers in life. In such cases, she reveals her actual self: an egoistic woman. “The most
important form of error, the distortion which not only the narrative conventions but the
53. David Daiches, George Eliot: Middlemarch, p.57.
54. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), p.517.
56. Peter K. Garret, The Victorian Multiplot Novel (London: Yale University Press, 1980), p.178.
structure of the novel works to correct, is the imposition of a single center,”57 characters
such as Rosamond, Casaubon, and Bulstrode are the victims of their egos. Their perceptions are flawed because of egocentrism. In short, Eliot gives the reader a chance to
compare and contrast the values of three different women from the main classes of the
society. As an aristocratic woman, Dorothea is moderate; the middle class woman
Rosamond represents the immoral characteristics of her class, and working class woman
Mary is perfectly moral in her behaviour.
REFERENCES
Barrett, Dorothea. Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines (New York: Routledge, 1989).
Beer, Gillian. George Eliot (Great Britain: Indiana Universtiy Press, 1962).
Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice (New Jersey: Pearson,
2007).
Billington, Josie. Eliot’s Middlemarch (London: Continuum, 2008).
Collins, K. K. G. H. Lewes Revised: George Eliot and The Moral Sense, Victorian Studies, 21/4 (2002),
pp.463-492.
Cooke, George Willis. George Eliot: A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings and Philosophy (Montana:
Kessinger Publishing, 2004).
Daiches, David. George Eliot: Middlemarch (London: Edward Arnold, 1973).
Dentith, Simon. George Eliot (Great Britain: the Harvester Press, 1986).
Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism (Los Angeles: Universtiy of California Press, 1976).
Eliot, George. Middlemarch (Great Britain: Wordsworth, 2000).
Fernando, Llyod. “New Women” in the Late Victorian Novel (University Park: Pennsylvania State UP,
1977).
Garret, Peter K. The Victorian Multiplot Novel (London: Yale University Press 1980).
James, Henry. George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 8/3 (1953), pp.161-170.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in The Attic: The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).
Koç, Ertu¤rul. The Victorians and the Novelists from Dickens to Hardy (Ankara: Bar›fl Books, 2010).
Lundberg, Patricia Lorimer. George Eliot: Mary Ann Evans’s Subversive Tool in Middlemarch.
(University of North Texas, 2002), pp.270-282.
McNall Burns,. Edward Western Civilizations (New York: Norton, 1984).
Neale, Catherine. Middlemarch: Penguin Critical Studies (London: Penguin 1989).
Robertson, John M. George Eliot: Moralist and Thinker (Edinburgh: Folcroft, 1972).
Schor, Hilary M. Gender Politics and Women’s Rights. Brantlinger, in P. & Thesing W. B. (eds). A
Companion to the Victorian (Novel Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p.173.
Wasti, S. M. Jamil. George Eliot as a Novelist, (Karachi: Syed and Syed, 1961).
57. Peter K. Garret, The Victorian Multiplot Novel, p.152.
309
The Sduty of Mourning in Female Elegy
fiebnem Düzgün
Ankara Üniversitesi
ÖZET A¤›t, tarihi boyunca erkek flairler taraf›ndan ortaya konulan kurallar›n etkisi alt›nda kalm›fl bir türdür. Bu nedenle, benzersizliklerini aç›¤a vurmak isteyen kad›n flairler için çok az bir alan b›rak›lm›flt›r. Fakat, kad›n a¤›t yazarlar›n›n bu türe olan katk›lar› inkar edilemez; çünkü yerleflmifl kurallara karfl› gelme çabalar› muazzam farkl›l›klar sunmufltur. Kad›n flairler, erkek flairlerin aksine, bir kifli öldü¤ünde düflüncelerin de¤il, bedenin yok oldu¤una inand›klar›ndan ölen kifliden ayr›lma düflüncesine karfl› ç›karlar. Bu nedenle, matemleri süreklidir ve bu gerçek, üzüntüden üzüntüye do¤ru hareket eden dairesel bir yap›yla gösterilir. Öte yandan kad›n a¤›t yazarlar›n›n ölünün yerini dolduracak bir fley bulamamalar›, Freud’un “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) adl› makalesindeki ifadelerinden esinlenen baz› elefltirmenler taraf›ndan
melankolinin belirgin bir göstergesi olarak yorumlan›r. Bir di¤er ayr›m da kad›n a¤›t yazarlar›n›n a¤›t› kendilerini ölünün varisi olarak iddia etmek için kullanabilecekleri bir araç olarak görmemeleridir. Bu çal›flma, kad›n flairler taraf›ndan yaz›lan a¤›tlarda görülen matemin bir incelemesidir. Mevcut çal›flma, ‹ngiliz
yazar Emily Brontë’nin “Remembrance” bafll›kl› fliiri ile ve Amerikal› yazar Elizabeth Bishop’un “North
Haven” bafll›kl› fliirini inceleyerek Anglo-Amerikan kad›n flairlerin fliirlerindeki matem temsilleri hakk›ndaki tart›flmalara katk›da bulunmay› amaçlamaktad›r.
ANAHTAR KEL‹MELER Sözcükler: a¤›t, Emily Brontë, Remembrance, Elizabeth Bishop, North Haven, özgünlük, melankoli, matem.
ABSTRACT Elegy is a genre which has been under the influence of the rules imposed by male poets throughout
its history. Therefore, only a little space is left for the female poets who desire to express their individuality.
However, female elegists’ contributions to the development of the genre cannot be denied because their
struggles to defy the established rules have offered tremendous varieties. Female poets, contrary to traditional
male poets, are against the idea of separation from the dead as they believe it is the corpse, not the thoughts,
which disappears when a person dies. Therefore, their mourning is continuous, which is demonstrated by
a circular structure moving from sorrow to sorrow. On the other hand, the fact that female elegists cannot
find a substitute for the deceased is interpreted as a distinct sign of melancholia by some critics inspired
by Freud’s statements in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917). Another distinction is that female
elegists do not regard elegy as a tool to claim themselves as the inheritors of the deceased. This study is an
examination of mourning in female elegies. In examining “Remembrance” and “North Haven”, the present
study aims to contribute to the discussions about the representation of female mourning in Anglo-American
women’s poetry.
KEYWORDS elegy, Emily Brontë, Remembrance, Elizabeth Bishop, North Haven, individuality, melancholia,
mourning.
Elegy is a genre whose conventions have been largely determined by male writers.
Although this fact has restricted the artistic sphere of women writers, female elegists
have managed to reveal their individuality through writing elegies which deviate from the
traditional patterns of the genre, characterised by lamenting the loss of a loved person and
312
fiEBNEM DÜZGÜN
seeking some comfort in the belief regarding the afterlife.1 The aim of the present study
is to examine Emily Brontë’s “Remembrance” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “North Haven” in
order to show that unlike such traditional elegies as Spencer’s Astrophil (1586), Milton’s
Lycidas (1637) and Shelley’s Adonais (1821), which associate mourning with a brief
feeling of sorrow and draw consolation from the idea that “death is the beginning of
life,”2 “Remembrance” and “North Haven” display a modern attitude towards the notion
of mourning through prolonging the process of mourning by resigning themselves to
revealing the moments spent with the lost one.
The first issue to deal with is that a modern female elegy, which refuses a final
reconciliation with the idea of death, has a cyclical structure, that is to say, it starts and
ends with sorrow. It is well known that the conventions of a traditional elegy “require it
to move from grief into consolation, to come out of the darkness and away from the
pain.”3 The mechanism moving from sorrow to happiness, on the other hand, cannot be
detected in an innovative female elegy,4 and Brontë’s “Remembrance” seems to be the
embodiment of this principle as it starts and ends with mourning. The poem opens with
the lament of Rosina,5 the speaker, for Julius, her lost love: “Cold in the earth – and the
deep snow pilled above thee / Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!”6 The opening
lines clearly portray a lamentation scene described in a conventional funeral elegy in that it
is bleak (“cold”, “the deep snow”), a setting which dramatizes the sense of loss (“far
removed”, “the dreary grave”). However, the end of the poem breaks with the conventions:
“Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish [of death], / How could I seek the empty
world again?”7 The tragic question asked in the last line shows that the speaker’s mourning
has not been completed yet because it leaves no space for hope, joy, or consolation. For
the female mourner the earth has been emptified by the death of her beloved. Thus, the
poem moves in a circle: from desolation to desolation. This “circular structure,”8 in turn,
1. J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin Books, 1999), p.254.
2. J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. p.254.
3. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, retrieved from: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/
english/naal7/ contents/B/authors/bryant.asp. on 15 March, 2012.
4. Celeste M. Schenck, “Feminism and Deconstruction: Reconstructing the Elegy,” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature 6 (1986), p.20.
5. It should be noted that “Emily Brontë [...] changed its [the poem’s] title from R. Alcona to J. Brenzaida
(the initials evidently standing for Rosina and Julius) to Remembrance, no doubt in the belief that this
would give the poem a more general meaning” (Peeck-O’Toole 1988: 33). Therefore, from now on the
speaker will be referred as Rosina and the dead lover as Julius.
6. Emily Brontë, “Remembrance”, in Joseph Black et al (eds.), The Broadview Anthology of British
Literature: Concise Edition, Volume B, (Ontatio: Broadview Press, 2008), II. 1-2.
7. Emily Brontë, “Remembrance,” II.31-32.
8. Celeste M. Schenck, “Feminism and Deconstruction: Reconstructing the Elegy,” p.19.
THE STUDY OF MOURNING IN FEMALE ELEGY
points to the fact that the female elegist is in “a continuous mourning,”9 that is, she
cannot be consoled in any way, and she will continue to mourn for the lost one till her
last day.
Another distinctive quality of a modern female elegy is that it refuses separation. Unlike
a conventional elegy which “include[s] the separation of lovers and the disintegration of
love,”10 “the female elegy is a poem of connectedness.”11 Female elegists, who refuse to
be separated from the deceased, and to move on to new ventures, struggle to keep the lost
individual’s memories on earth through writing an elegy which “re-creates, breathes life
back into, the dead loved one.”12 The speaker in Brontë’s “Remembrance” is also
involved in such a struggle to keep her lost lover alive. Although fifteen years has passed
since her lover’s death, she still thinks about him, thus giving the dead a chance to live
in memories:
Cold in the earth – and fifteen wild Decembers,
From there brown hills, have melted into spring;
Faithful, indeed is the spirit that remembers
After such years of change and suffering!13
Drawing upon the above lines, it can be stated that Rosina has been mourning for
Julius’s death for fifteen years, and the image of “the brown hills never changing under
the melting snow of successive springs points up the endurance of Rosina’s character.”14
In that sense, she can be regarded as a martyr who dedicates herself to remembering the
lost lover so that his memory can linger in the world. Moreover, the fact that she has a
“burning wish to hasten/ [d]own to that tomb already more than [hers]”15 can be read as a
sign of her desire to remember the deceased. Hence, Rosina, an unconventional mourner,
regards forgetting as a crime since it means separation, and, she pleads with her lost love
to forgive her if she gives up remembering him:
Sweet Love of youth, forgive, if I forget thee,
While the world’s tide is bearing me along;
Other desires and other hopes beset me,
Hopes which obscure, but cannot do thee wrong!16
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Celeste M. Schenck, “Feminism and Deconstruction: Reconstructing the Elegy,” p.20.
John B. Vickery, The Modern Elegiac Temper (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), p.155.
Emily Brontë, “Remembrance,” II.9-12.
Maureen Peeck-O’Toole, Aspects of Lyric in the Poetry of Emily Brontë (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), p.36.
313
314
fiEBNEM DÜZGÜN
It is clear that Rosina is afraid of being attracted by earthly pleasures, and thus being
detached from her lover. However, the following lines show that she does not actually
intend to forget Julius since her feelings for him are intense:
No later light has lightened up my haven,
No second morn has ever shone for me;
All my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given,
All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.17
The above lines suggest that it is as if Rosina has based her happiness upon Julius’s
existence, and as he is dead now she is also dead: she has lost her “bliss” of life, and she
does not see any reason to be happy any longer.
The unwillingness of female mourners, like Rosina, to leave the lost one behind them
is recognized as a clear sign of melancholia, a tendency which is considered a mental illness
by Freud. In his essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud makes a distinction between
these two terms, stating that in melancholia, the person refuses to forget the loved one
and loses his/her happiness in life.18 Actually, this unhappiness results from “an inward
turn that cuts the subject off from the world around her.”19 In this inward turn, the lost
object is withdrawn from consciousness and absorbed into the ego.”20 This act, on the
other hand, leads to “a double identification” in which “[t]he ego takes over the qualities
of the ‘object of desire,’” and the subject claims, “I have not lost the object because I am
it.”21 Thus, “the subject may know well whom he or she has lost, but not what is lost,”
because the lost object whose loss is unrecognised “cannot be mourned as gone.”22 A
further point is that in melancholia the past is not “declared resolved, finished, and dead,”
but it “remains steadfastly alive in the present.”23 In other words, the moment of the loss
of the object remains fixed, and the passing of time makes no sense for the mourner who
does not care about the present or the future. Mourning, on the other hand, “is regularly
the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has
17. Emily Brontë, “Remembrance,” II.17-20.
18. Sigmund Freud, On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia, [translated by Shaun Whiteside] (London:
Penguin Books, 2005), pp.201-219.
19. Ann Pellegrini, “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive,” in Janelle Reinelt and Joseph R.
Roach (eds.), Critical Theory and Performance: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Michigan: The
University of Michigan Press, 2007), p.424.
20. Ann Pellegrini, “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive,” p.423.
21. Martin S. Bergmann, “Introduction”, in Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski and Sergio
Lewkowicz (eds.), On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” (London: Karnac Books, 2009), p.7.
22. Ann Pellegrini, “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive,” p.423.
23. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” in David L. Eng and David
Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California: The University of California Press 2003), p.4.
taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”24 The signs of
mourning are the same with those of melancholia with the exception of “a lowering of
the self-regarding feelings.”25 Mourning has “the same painful frame of mind, the same
loss of interest in the outside world- in so far as it does not recall him- the same loss of
capacity to adopt any new object of love [...] and the same turning away from any activity
that is connected with thoughts of him.”26 However, once the mourner realizes that “the
loved object no longer exists,” he/she feels the necessity “that all libido shall be withdrawn
from its attachments to that object.”27 The process of breaking with the lost object, however,
is not as easy as it may seem at first sight because it is “carried out bit by bit, at great
expense of time and cathectic energy.”28 While this painful process is taking on, “the
existence of the lost object is physically prolonged” through bringing up “each single one
of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object.”29 As a result,
“detachment of the libido is accomplished”, and “the ego becomes free and uninhibited
again.”30 The idea that mourning is overcome over the course of time makes Freud
believe that it is not a mental disorder.31
Inspired by Freud’s statements about mourning and melancholia, female elegists’
refusal to diverge themselves from the deceased and to resort to various means of consolation are interpreted as the symptoms of melancholia, a mental illness.32 However,
this interpretation ignores the fact that mourning is also a process of attachment only
followed by detachment. To claim that every kind of attachment to the deceased can be
associated with melancholia would be a misinterpretation of this process since an
attachment between the mourner and the dead also exists in the process of mourning,
which is described by John Bowly in terms of four phases: “numbness”, “yearning”,
“disorganisation” and “reorganisation.” That the mourner in “Remembrance” does not
suffer from melancholia, but she is just in the process of mourning can be proved by
referring to these four phases enacting the mechanism moving from attachment to
detachment.
24.Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski and Sergio
Lewkowicz (eds.), On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (London: Karnac Books, 2009), p.19.
25. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” p.20.
29. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” pp.19-20.
32. David Kennedy, Elegy (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), p.90.
315
316
fiEBNEM DÜZGÜN
Numbness is “[a] period of shock” and it “often occurs immediately after a loss.”33
Bowlby claims that numbness is a means of protecting the mourner from overwhelming
grief, thus “allowing the truth to sink in slowly.”34 Rosina also goes through the phase of
numbness. Before she protests against the reality of death with tears and laments, she
thinks about the loss in silence:
Now, when alone, do my thoughts no longer hover
Over the mountains, on that northern shore,
Resting their wings where heath and fern leaves cover
Thy noble heart forever, ever more?35
Thinking about “the mountains”, “that northern shore” and “heath and fern leaves”
covering the dead body of her lover prevents her from focusing on the concrete form of
death, and enables her to make an imaginary visit to the grave of the loved one, which
prepares her to pay the deceased an actual visit. Therefore, the state of numbness has a
vital importance in protecting the mourner against violent mourning and helping her to
face harsh reality slowly but safely.
The second phase is yearning and “[i]n this phase the reality of the loss is
acknowledged, leading to a desperate longing for the deceased.”36 Although the mourner
knows that the loved object is lost, he/she desperately searches for it looking everywhere
to find something reminding him/her of the lost one. He/she “may call out, begging [the
deceased] not to leave, or pleading with them to return.”37 The mourner also tries to deny
that the loss is real, and when he/she confronts anyone confirming the reality of death,
he/she gets angry.38 Bowlby thinks the cry of protest is a sign of struggle “to recover
what has been lost, to be reunited with the deceased.”39 The act of yearning is closely
associated with attachment as the mourner does not want to be detached from the lost
one. Brontë’s mourner also protests against the idea of detachment by shedding “tears of
useless passion” and “yearning after [the soul of Julias].”40 Crying and expressing a
desire to be reunited with the soul of the lost one indicate that Rosina wants her lover to
turn back, and she does not want to believe he is not alive anymore.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
James Moorey, Living with Grief and Mourning (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p.24.
James Moorey, Living with Grief and Mourning p.24.
James Moorey, Living with Grief and Mourning, p.24.
James Moorey, Living with Grief and Mourning.
When mourners understand that there is no way to bring the deceased back into
life, they enter the phase of disorganisation.41 Feeling “devastated and disorientated”,
“deep sadness” and “withdrawal into a state of apathy and helplessness” are among the
symptoms of disorganisation.42 Mourners may feel so desperate that they may not find a
reason to live.43 Moreover, “[t]heir sense of who they are and their place in the world
may be completely overturned.”44 It is also possible for them to “feel they are ‘falling
apart’, and that they will never be able to pick up the pieces.”45 As Rosina undergoes this phase,
she is so overwhelmed with an acute sorrow that she loses her joy of life, condemning
herself to death-in-life. Following this, Rosina accepts that her lover is dead, she feels
helpless and desolate: “No later light has lightened up my haven, / No second morn has
ever shone for me.”46 Her blissful life filled with love becomes wretched with the death
of the loved one. The loss is so dreadful that she cannot find a reason to be happy: “All
my life’s bliss from thy dear life was given, / All my life’s bliss is in the grave with thee.”47
She feels too shattered to lead a blissful life without the aid of love. It is important to note
that in this phase the mourner devastated by the loss of the lover is more dead than alive
as she lets her life energy lie in the cold grave.
The last phase is reorganisation, and in this phase the mourner tries to learn how
to continue his/her life without the deceased by “developing new skills and taking on new
roles.”48 The desirable goal is to rebuild “a new ‘secure base’; a new sense of safety from
which the mourner can once again go out into the world and engage with the pressures
and demands of everyday life.”49 The process of detachment may be hard and long, but
it is vital to recover the loss.50 Rosina enters the phase of reorganisation when she realizes that she cannot live eternally in a dream world full of lovely memories from the past,
but she has to survive despite the deprivation of love:
But, when the days of golden dreams had perished,
And even Despair was powerless to destroy,
Then did I learn how existence could be cherished,
Strengthened, and fed without the aid of joy.51
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
317
318
fiEBNEM DÜZGÜN
These lines are far from depicting a patient suffering from melancholia whose
symptoms contain “a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside
world, loss of capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding
feelings.”52 The lines above portray a strong and realistic woman who has accepted the
reality that although her lover is dead, life still goes on, and who has learnt to live without
the joy of love. Rosina becomes aware of the fact that she cannot lull her sorrow by diving
deep into nostalgic memories, and that she cannot continue with her death-in-life experience
as she still has the breath of life. After fifteen years of mourning, she develops the skill
of living without love, and takes the role of a survivor who has decided to “cherish” and
“strengthen” her existence.
Her decision to build a new life without the deceased, on the other hand, is the very
sign of detachment. Therefore, focusing merely on the long process of mourning would
undermine Rosina’s struggles to detach herself from the deceased. The fact that Rosina
has been mourning for fifteen years cannot be considered as an indicator of an eternal
attachment or melancholia because mourning may also last quite a long time. As “[t]here
are very significant individual differences in the time it takes for the process of mourning
to be completed,” “[f]or some it may take months, others may require several years,” and
variations in the duration of the mourning period are considered “normal” since there is
not “a fixed timetable, any deviation from which must mean something is wrong, or the
person is in some way abnormal.”53 With respect to the differences in the length of
mourning, the long process of detachment experienced by Rosina can be considered “normal”.
The fact that female elegists are put in “the inferior melancholic subject position”54
by assuming that mourning should be completed once the mourner finds a new channel
to which he/she can transfer his/her love results from the misinterpretation of Freud’s
statements about mourning and melancholia, because although Freud “privilege[s]
mourning over melancholia,” he nonetheless argues that the loved object cannot be really
substituted as it is unique, and “[m]ourning can therefore never be completed: it can only
subside.”55 No matter how passionately the mourner may claim he/she has forgotten the
deceased, he/she cannot “return to a position identical to that experienced before the loss”
because “[t]he loss is never recovered.”56 Yet, the process of mourning can be considered
52. Sigmund, Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in Pamela Thurschwell, Sigmund Freud, (Oxon:
Routledge, 2009), p.88.
53. James Moorey, Living with Grief and Mourning, p.31.
54. David Kennedy, Elegy (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), p.102.
55. David Kennedy, Elegy, pp.99; 102.
56. James Moorey, Living with Grief and Mourning, p.31.
completed if “the person can talk about their loss without tears and without intense pain and
grief, and when they can speak of the good and bad times, and can invest emotionally in
others.”57 In other words, mourning can never be fully completed, but its intensity can be
alleviated. This is what happens when Rosina starts to forget her lover after “fifteen wild
Decembers.”58 However, her mourning is not over since “[n]o later light has lightened up
[her] heaven” and “[her] life’s bliss is in the grave with [Julius].”59 Nevertheless, it is
essential to note that although her mourning is continuous, it is subsided. When she faces
the reality of death, she learns to “check the tears of useless passion”, and to discourage
“[her] young soul from yearning after [Julius’s].”60 All the same, the dead lover remains
unique for Rosina, who questions herself about the possibility that her emotions may
have changed over years: “Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee, / Severed at last by
Time’s all severing wave?”61 As her lover is not alive any more, she cannot feel the same
intense feelings, but she does not detach herself from him completely either as she has
not forgotten him: he is her “only Love.” Thus, it might be argued that Brontë’s writing
functions as a “strategy for prolonging attachment”62 rather than depicting a neverchanging mourning. Brontë is obviously aware that no mourning can last forever in the
same intensity as human beings tend to change and move forward all the time without
clinging too much to the past.
Another point about a modern female elegy, which refuses to depict a final reconciliation
with the loss of the dead, is that it is not a tool used for claiming inheritance. Since
ancient times, several male poets (i.e. Edmund Spenser and W.H. Auden) have written
elegies to become an heir of their predecessors.63 In so doing, “the elegist often places
himself in a superior relation to his subject.”64 For instance, W.H. Auden’s “In Memory
of W.B. Yeats” emphasizes Yeats’s weakness for Maud Gonne, an Irish nationalist for
whom he felt passionate love. In his poem Auden highlights Yeats’s patriotic poems, and
indicates that Yeats’s poems did not make any contribution to the emancipation of
Ireland, an idea which showcases Auden’s superiority over the subject, whom he considers
melancholic and unrealistic.
56.
57.
58.
59.
61.
62.
63.
64.
Emily Brontë, “Remembrance,” I.9.
Emily Brontë, “Remembrance,” II.17; 20.
David Kennedy, Elegy, p.30.
319
320
fiEBNEM DÜZGÜN
Another strategy to claim inheritance is “the deification of the dead one in a
process that lifts him out of nature, out of the poem, and out of the successor’s way.”65
Spenser’s depiction of Sir Philip Sidney as the son of a nymph in his poem “Astrophel”,
and his transforming Sidney into a flower subsequently are examples of this convention.
Spenser’s intention to transform Sidney from a successful poet into a supernatural creature
can be attributed to his desire to make the dead poet a passive figure, lacking the ability
of writing, as well as to his desire to take his place. Therefore, it might be assumed that
“[t]he masculine elegiac is [...] a gesture of aspiring careerism.”66
Different from the male poets’ attitude towards inheritance, Elizabeth Bishop in her
poem “North Haven” deals with the issue of inheritance within an unconventional female
elegy. The poem is written in memory of Robert Lowell, and it resembles a pastoral elegy
in that it laments the loss of a loved one and it has such images of nature as “buttercups”,
“red clover”, “purple vetch”, “daisies” and “the white-throated Sparrow.”67 However, it is
distinguished from a conventional pastoral elegy whose conventions include transformation
of the dead into a shepherd, “an invocation to the Muses and refer[ence] to diverse
mythological characters”, nature “involv[ing] in mourning the shepherd’s death,”
reproaching “the guardians of the dead shepherd” for not protecting him from death, “a
procession of mourners,” “reflect[ion] on divine justice and contemporary evils,” “a ‘flower’
passage, describing the decoration of the bier, etc.” and “a renewal of hope and joy, with the
idea expressed that death is the beginning of life.”68 Bishop challenges these conventions by
not transforming Lowell into a paranormal figure protected by angels, but instead she
behaves as if Lowell was still alive and she speaks to him about their days spent on North
Haven, an island in America:
Years ago, you told me it was here
(in 1932?) you first “discovered girls”
and learned to sail, and learned to kiss.
You had “such fun,” you said, that classic summer.69
In the lines above, by imposing her artistic power on her fellow poet, Bishop puts
neither herself in a superior position nor Lowell into an inferior one. On the contrary, she
67. Elizabeth Bishop, “North Haven,” in Helen Vendler (ed.), The Anthology of Contemporary American
Poetry (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1978), II.12-13; 17.
68. J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin Books, 1999),
p.254.
69. Elizabeth Bishop, “North Haven,” II.21-24.
tries to establish a friendly relationship with Lowell through talking about “that classic
summer” and how “[he] first ‘discovered girls’ / and learned to sail, and learned to
kiss.”70 Moreover, she “[refuses] the conventional consolations of elegy, [namely], the
renewal of nature and the permanence of art.”71 In the poem, nature is unresponsive to
the death of the poet, that is, it does not go into deep mourning for him or regenerate itself
on finding solace in the idea that “death is the beginning of life.”72 Indifferent to the loss,
nature is still and peaceful, preoccupied with reproduction:
[...] I can count
the new cones on the spruce. It is so still
the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky
no clouds except for one long, carded horse’s tail.73
Drawing upon the lines above, it can be stated that “the new cones on the spruce”
show that nature is alive and fertile, and thus, images such as “the pale bay wear[ing] a
milky skin” and “the sky [having] no clouds except for one long, carded horse’s tail”
create a peaceful and serene atmosphere not disturbed by grief, pain or destruction. The
flowers which display their beauty in summer also do not give a hint about death and
sorrow:
This month, our favorite one is full of flowers:
Buttercups, Red Clover, Purple Vetch,
Hawkweed still burning, Daisies pied, Eyebright,
the Fragrant Bedstraw’s incandescent stars,
and more, returned, to paint the meadows with delight.74
The meadows full of “buttercups,” “red clover”, “purple vetch,” “[h]awkweed still
burning” and “the [f]ragnant [b]edstraw” are the heralds of joy and renewal because they
indicate that with the arrival of summer nature has restored itself and it has been filled
with animation.
Indeed, Bishop does not voice a hope for the eternity of art. On the contrary, she
expresses her concern about the fact that once poets are dead they cannot have an opportunity to revise their poems, and therein cannot remain fresh forever or avoid such labels
as “archaic”, “old-fashioned” and “conventional.” She points to this reality with drawing
70. Elizabeth Bishop, “North Haven,” II.24; 22-23.
71. Bonnie Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1991), p.213
72. J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, p.254.
321
322
fiEBNEM DÜZGÜN
a dramatic contrast between the sparrows which are able to change their tunes and the
dead poet who cannot make any change in his poems:
You left North Haven, anchored in its rock,
afloat in mystic blue ... And now—you’ve left
for good. You can’t derange, or rearrange,
your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.)
The words won’t change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.75
The tragic contrast between the sparrows changing their songs and the poet stuck
in North Haven by death, a situation which deprives him of the chance to revise his
poems, implies that neither Lowell’s works nor his body will achieve immortality in a
world of flux. As a consequence, at the end of the poem there is no rebirth or consolation
drawn from the fact that the poet may live through his works. Thus, Bishop does not
declare herself as the heir of the dead poet because she thinks there is no heritage to claim
for: the works of Lowell will die with him as they are mortal like their creator. In so
doing, Bishop prepares herself for the fate waiting for her: she knows she will also die
one day and be forgotten like her fellow poet. Therefore, it might be argued that unlike
a male inheritor whose elegy “rehearses an act of identity that depends upon rupture”, the
female inheritor “seem[s] to achieve poetic identity [...] in connection to the dead.”76
To conclude, Brontë and Bishop prove their individuality by breaking the conventions
of elegy encouraging detachment through creating a gap between the dead and the alive.
Unlike traditional love elegists, Brontë depicts a lover who preserves the integrity of her
identity by remembering her dead lover. She is well aware of the fact that the deceased
cannot offer her his love anymore. Nonetheless, the precious memories from the past
help her to cope with the loss of her identity as a lover. While the act of remembering
enables her to keep her past self from being shattered, the act of struggling to survive
without love strengthens her present self. Bishop, on the other hand, justifies her attachment
to the dead poet by pointing to the same tragic end awaiting all poets. Rather than considering
Lowell as a spiritual being having achieved immortality or considering him an obstacle
in her way to literary success, she focuses on the fact that as works of art are not immune
to the passing of time, the fate of every poet, as in the case of Lowell’s and hers, is to be
forgotten in a constantly changing world. Therefore, both Brontë and Bishop depict a
continuous mourning whose process is imitated through a circular structure moving from
sorrow to sorrow. Although their mourning is continuous, its intensity is alleviated not by
the idea of rebirth but by the belief that the lost one will continue to live in their memories.
In this way, “Remembrance” and “North Haven”, two female elegies challenging the
traditional structure of elegy moving from sorrow to consolation, offer a new insight into
the nature of mourning.
REFERENCES
The Norton Anthology of American Literature retreived from: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/naal7/ contents/B/authors/bryant.asp. on March 15 2012.
Bergmann, Martin S.. “Introduction”, in Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski and Sergio
Lewkowicz (eds.), On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia,” (London: Karnac Books, 2009).
Bishop, Elizabeth. “North Haven”, in Helen Vendler (ed.),. The Anthology of Contemporary American
Poetry (New York: I.B. Tauris, 1978), ll.12-13.
Brontë, Emily. “Remembrance”, in Joseph Black et al (eds.), The Broadview Anthology of British
Literature: Concise Edition, Volume B (Ontatio: Broadview Press, 2008), ll. 1-2.
Costello, Bonnie. Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1991).
Cuddon, J.A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (London: Penguin Books, 1999).
Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian. “Introduction: Mourning Remains,” in David L. Eng and David
Kazanjian (eds.), Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California: The University of California Press
2003).
Freud, Sigmund. On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia [translated by Shaun Whiteside] (London:
Penguin Books, 2005).
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Leticia Glocer Fiorini, Thierry Bokanowski and Sergio
Lewkowicz (eds.), On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (London: Karnac Books, 2009).
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Pamela Thurschwell, Sigmund Freud (Oxon: Routledge,
2009).
Peeck-O’Toole, Maureen. Aspects of Lyric in the Poetry of Emily Brontë (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988).
Kennedy, David. Elegy (Oxon: Routledge, 2007).
Moorey, James. Living with Grief and Mourning (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995).
Pellegrini, Ann. “Staging Sexual Injury: How I Learned to Drive,” in Janelle Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach
(eds.), Critical Theory and Performance: Revised and Enlarged Edition (Michigan: The University of
Michigan Press, 2007).
Schenck, Celeste M. “Feminism and Deconstruction: Reconstructing the Elegy,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s
Literature 6 (1986).
Vickery, John B. The Modern Elegiac Temper (Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2006)
323
ARAfiTIRMA NOTLARI / RESEARCH NOTES
The Process of Reconstruction in
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Rahime Çokay
Ankara Üniversitesi
History is under the control of people who understand and manipulate its
construction, which enables those in power to shape, invert and redirect it in accordance with
their own wills. As those in power have always been males, history has always been the
history of “the male sex”, “written by and about males” and, as such, tends to either
marginalize or co-opt women’s versions of history.’1 This tendency originates from the
otherness of woman: “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not with
reference to her, she is incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the
subject, he is the Absolute –she is the Other.”2 Through her otherness, woman has been
oppressed and reduced to an object by the subject himself. The woman’s side, which has,
thus, been the other side, is either ignored or constructed in the male-dominated society.
Since she is deprived of written language and has to play the silent role, she is not able
to write her story, the story of the other side, and exists only in the gaps of history.
Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale reveals a woman’s attempt to
place women’s history of oppression into history. The novel portrays a dystopian state,
Gilead, where women have no longer “freedom to”3 do anything, but duties assigned by
the society. They are relegated to several categories: Wives oversee household, Marthas
clean and cook, Handmaids serve for breeding purposes, Aunts train the Handmaids, and
women who refuse to obey this system are called “Unwoman” and sent to colonies where
their bodies disintegrate before their eyes. As Bouson (1993) states, “Gilead regime
effectively robs women of their individual identities and transforms them into
replaceable objects in the phallocentric economy.”4
1. Michael Magali Cornier, “The Gap between Official Histories and Women’s Histories’ in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), p.167.
2. Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Pan Books, 1988), p.16.
3. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage Books, 1996), p.34.
4. B. J. Bouson, Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of
Margaret Atwood (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p.137.
326
RAH‹ME ÇOKAY
The novel is narrated by one of the Handmaids, Offred, whose only duty is “to be
fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.”5 Like other women in Gilead, she is
forbidden to read, write and have any leisure activity but to do her duty. She is forced to
“play the virtous, silent and submissive,6 and to live in the ‘long paranthesis of nothing.”7
Her identity is defined as residing only in her body and her reproductive capability.
Offred is aware of the fact that she has become a construction and refuses to accept
her status as nothing but only “a two-legged womb.”8 She tries to find a way to maintain
her identity, which is obviously seen in her words: “I wait. I compose myself. My self is
a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made
thing, not something born.”9
Offred chooses to write with her voice, and storytelling becomes her only possible
way to rebel in silence and survive. As Howells (1996) indicates, her storytelling in a
society where women are forbidden to read or write or speak freely effects a significant
shift from ‘history’ to ‘herstory.’10 Through telling her story of oppression, she
challenges the official history that represents power, and she knows that she can liberate
herself by reconstructing it in the way that a historian does: “If it’s a story I’m telling,
then I have control over the ending, to the story and real life will come after it.”11 Her
story makes her become “I-woman escapee,” “breaking out of the snare of silence to
write herself.”12 As she tells her story, she comes to the terms with what is actually
happening to her. She realizes that not only her identity, but also her body and even her
speech are under the patriarchal oppression.
Through her storytelling, Offred continuously makes shifts between her past and
her present. In one of her memories, she remembers that she used to think of her body
“as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the
accomplishment of [her] will.”13 Yet now, she does not even want to look at her body
that “determines [her] so completely.”14 She realizes that she has “been driven away from
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
Eleonora Rao, Strategies for Identity: the Fiction of Margret Atwood (New York: Lang, 1993), p.18.
Carol Ann Howells, Margaret Atwood (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), p.126.
Mary Evans, Feminism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 4 (London: Routledge,
2001), p.117.
THE PROCESS OF RECONSTRUCTION IN
MARGARET ATWOOD’S THE HANDMAID’S TALE
[her] body” by the patriarchy as Evans states.15 Therefore, she aims to reconstruct herself
first by reclaiming her body. She no longer regards her body as a possession of Gilead
the only function of which is to give birth, but she calls it her own territory. Although it
is forbidden to make any contact with males, she once raises her head, and in another
time she moves her hips as she walks away so that the guards can see her, which enables
her to “enjoy the power; power of a dog bone, passive but there.”16
Through her body, Offred explores power and even satisfaction. Although it is first
upon the command of the Wife of the Commander to meet with Nick so as to get
pregnant, she often visits him without her knowing: “It wasn’t called for, there was no
excuse. I did not do it for him, but for myself entirely.”17 She enjoys serving just for
herself, not for the Gilead society. Enjoying her body, she gains her bodily awareness.
Her body is no longer “the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.”18 She even begins to
remember such forgotten feelings as love lack of which they die from.
While the relationship with Nick functions as a means of Offred’s physical liberty,
her relationship with the Commander serves for enacting her imagination and revival of
her language. Offred is commanded to make secret visits to the Commander’s office
where he wants her to play Scrabble with him, and allows her to read books. Playing
Scrabble with the Commander enables her to relearn the language she is about to forget:
“My tongue felt thick with the effort of spelling. It was like using a language I’d once
known but had nearly forgotten, a language having to do with customs that had long
before passed out of the world.”19
While practicing the language, Offred resembles herself to a patient “trying to walk
without crutches.”20 As she attempts to walk, she acquires power and knows how to take the
next step. She develops her understanding of language, and even notices several
meanings of a word, which reveals that she is regaining her ability to use the language as
she used to do:
I sit in the chair and think about the word _chair._ It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can
also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in _charity._ It is the French world for flesh.
None of these facts has any connection with the others.21
15.
16.
17.
18.
Mary Evans, Feminism, p.112.
Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton,
1976), p.55.
327
328
RAH‹ME ÇOKAY
In the Commander’s office, she not only plays Scrabble with him, but also enjoys
reading magazines and other books that he brings. She is so longing for language that she
reads:
...quickly, voracious, almost skimming, trying to get as much into [her] head as possible before the
next long starvation. If it were eating it would be the gluttony of the famished; if it was sex it would
be a swift furtive stand-up in an alley somewhere.22
In one of her secret meetings, she is even let hold the medium of language, a pen.
She asks the Commander the meaning of a sentence that she has seen in the closet of her
room: “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”23 She wonders the meaning of this
sentence carved by the previous handmaid having lived in the same room. As she cannot
spell it properly, the Commander wants her to write it down. Now she holds the pen
which they are not allowed to touch. She is quite aware of its power:
The pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words
it contains. Pen Is Envy, Aunt Lydia would say, quoting another Centre motto, warning us away
from such objects. And they were right, it is envy. Just holding it is envy. I envy the Commander
his pen. It’s one more thing I would like to steal.24
Offred has shifted from merely an “empty vessel” into a companion for the
Commander. She receives “pleasure, happiness, increased value, enhanced self-image”
for the first time:25 “I am thirty-three years old. I have brown hair. I stand five seven
without shoes. I have trouble remembering what I used to look like. I have viable ovaries.
I have one more chance.”26 She gets enjoying her life although she has been longing for
death in the beginning.
Through her story, she begins to win back “her womanly being, her goods and her
pleasures” which have been taken from her.27 She wants to win back her name that has
been stolen from her, as well. She cannot bear being called as Of-fred, which reminds her
that she is not a subject, but an object that belongs to someone else:
My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell
myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what
22.
23.
24.
25.
Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman [translated by Betsy Clement]
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.87.
27. Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of Medusa” in New French Feminisms (Cambridge: University
Massachusetts Press, 1976), p.250.
I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden,
some treasure I’ll come back to dig up, one day.28
Recalling her original identity through her story, Offred has become the speaking
subject that Cixous mentions in her “ecriture feminine”:
I am spacious, singing flesh, on which is grafted no one knows which I, more or less human, but
alive because of transformation. Write! And your self-seeking text will know itself better than flesh
and blood, rising…with sonorous, perfumed ingredients, a lively combination of flying colors,
leaves, and rivers plunging into the sea we feed.29
Her self-seeking text transforms her from a passive, obedient and coward
handmaid into a couregous woman who desires to gain her freedom, which is obvious
from her saying: “I intend to last”.30 Although she begins her story as a nameless woman,
now she longs for being called with her original name that represents her identity. From
now on, she tells her story not merely to rehabilitate herself to bear what she is
experiencing in Gilead, but to prove her existence and to recreate her sense of self. As
she writes with her voice, she feels alive and reconstructs her identity that she has begun
to recall. She is well aware of the fact that her existence is based on her narrative. As
Hogsette (1997) states: “writing, or in her case speaking out, validates an individual’s
existence; it proves the writer-speaker was, at some point, or still may be alive.”31 She,
thus, wants to believe the existence of someone listening to her as well as the existence
of her own self: “By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you, I believe
you’re there, I believe you into being. Because I’m telling you this story I will your
existence. I tell, therefore you are.”32
Offred realizes that she has acquired the power by penetrating into the world of
males with her reconstruction despite all its uncertainty and fragmentariness. She accepts
that she cannot present a complete account of what happened:
This is a reconstruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It’s a reconstruction now, in my head…
When I get out of here, if I’m ever able to set this down, in any form, even in the form of one voice to
another, it will be a reconstruction then too, at yet another remove. It’s impossible to say a thing
exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something
28.
29.
30.
31.
Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of Medusa,” p.260.
David S. Hogsette, “Margaret Atwood’s Rhetorical Epilogue in The Handmaid’s Tale: The Reader’s
Role in Empowering Offred’s Speech Act,” Critique, 38 (1997), p.269.
329
330
RAH‹ME ÇOKAY
out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean
this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on
the tongue, half-colors, too many.33
But it is doubtless that every reconstruction including history has the same problem
of fractured and paradoxical truths. This is because language itself is a discourse, which,
for Foucault (1974), constructs reality and, thus, reality changes in accordance with the
one who has an access to use language.34 Now Offred is the one who controls language,
and has authority in constructing her own story.
Now that she has language, she has power and does not have to last her passive role
in Gilead. Beneath her passivity, Offred, in fact, actively resists and criticizes the
patriarchy. She attempts to reconstruct her story by recalling her memories. It is her past
where she finds material to fill her current emptiness since she experiences nothing but
restrictions in her present. She realizes that the next generation of handmaid will not be
able to recover their identities as they “will have no memories.”35 Those handmaids will
not dare to change their fate as she does. That is why, she becomes the voice of all other
women in Gilead. She does not tell only her own story, but the stories of other women.
By the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred’s narration becomes not only a
reconstruction of her body, speech, and identity, but a reconstruction of Gilead’s history,
as well. She, as a female, embodies the ability to change history, and writes her version
of history, which enables her to challenge the official history of Gilead. She invades a male
territory by writing with her voice, and takes over the authority of males in history. She
gives voice to women’s histories absent in male-dominated history, and reveals how they
are marginalized by the patriarchy. In this context, Gilead is only one of the patriarchal
regimes where women are repressed and forced to be silent. By challenging Gilead’s
history, she proves that women are able to raise their voice, tell their stories, rehape their
world, and reconstruct their identity. She tells; therefore, others are heard.
REFERENCES
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale (London: Vintage Books, 1996).
Bouson, B. J. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of
Margaret Atwood (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).
34. M. Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1974), p.38.
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of Medusa” in New French Feminisms (Cambridge: University
Massachusetts Press, 1976).
Cixous, Helene and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman [translated by Betsy Clement]
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.87.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex (London: Pan Books, 1988)
Evans, Mary. Feminism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, 4 (London: Routledge, 2001)
Foucault, M. The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1974).
Hogsette, David S. “Margaret Atwood’s Rhetorical Epilogue in The Handmaid’s Tale: The Reader’s Role
in Empowering Offred’s Speech Act,” Critique, 38 (1997).
Carol Ann Howells. Margaret Atwood (London: Macmillan Press, 1996),
Cornier, Michael Magali. “The Gap between Official Histories and Women’s Histories’ in Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse: Post-World War II Fiction
(New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), p.167.
Rao, Eleonora. Strategies for Identity: the Fiction of Margret Atwood (New York: Lang, 1993)
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976).
331
Bartleby, the Epitome of Passitivity:
an Elegy for Humankind
Esra Özilhan
‹stanbul Kültür Üniversitesi
In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot discusses the concepts of disaster,
the Other, passivity, and responsibility. His aphorisms can help us to analyse the
relationship between Bartleby and the narrator-attorney in Herman Melville’s “Bartleby,
The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street”. This story presents significant insights into the
relationship with the Other, and how the Other is a burden that each person involuntarily
experiences. In this paper, I will discuss the reasons for, and the effects of, passive
resistance, in addition to the inextricable feeling of responsibility that is experienced in
the face of the Other.
According to Blanchot, disaster is not something that can be experienced as an
individual. It has the power to destroy everything, yet it is out of reach. Disaster can be
likened to an urban legend that we hear of all the time, but we cannot imagine what it is
like to be a part of a destructive incident. While describing the concept of disaster,
Blanchot often uses three words that enable us to comprehend the effects of disaster on
humanity. Those three words are “outside,” “to dissuade someone from doing
something” and “to be exposed to something.” If these words are closely examined, it is
not hard to see that all of them are external elements that have control over an
individual’s understanding of the unknown and unverifiable. The desperate curiosity to
grasp the knowledge of the disaster dominates the mind and the difficulty of picturing or
imagining the event leaves us with the inevitable conclusion. After being dissuaded from
thinking about the disaster, we are exposed to the thought of it, because now, we are
surrounded with the instantaneous presence of the disaster as if it would happen any time.
As Blanchot says “I am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. […] it is in this way
that the disaster threatens in me that which is exterior to me – an other than I who
passively become other.”1 We are on the verge of disaster, we try thinking and talking
about it, but we are not allowed to receive information about it, because as an experience,
it can neither be verbalised nor verified. For instance, if a person assumes death as a
1. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster [translated by Ann Smock] (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1995), p.1.
334
ESRA ÖZ‹LHAN
disaster, when he is dying, death ceases to be a threat to his being as he is experiencing
it at that moment. Therefore, when someone experiences the thing that he once called as
disaster, it will not be disastrous at all. In order to call an incident a disaster, it has to be
out of reach. It is unpredictable, unknowable, and unutterable, like a being on its own.
We cannot prevent disaster or prepare for it. We think that others experience the disaster,
so we assume that they gain access to the knowledge of the disaster. However, once it is
experienced, it is no longer called a disaster. There is no such thing as the knowledge of
the disaster; on the contrary, we can talk about the knowledge itself as disaster.
Awareness of the outside or the acknowledgement of the Other is disastrous. We are not
able to welcome the Other, yet we do not consider him as an enemy. At this point,
Blanchot asks “Then how can he become the one who wrests me from my identity and
whose proximity (for he is my neighbour) wounds, exhausts, and hounds me, tormenting
me so that I am bereft of my selfhood and so that this torment, this lassitude which leaves
me destitute becomes my responsibility?”2 We would not expect neighbourhood to have
such unbearable effects, but that does not mean the Other and “I” are enemies.
Nevertheless, according to Blanchot, the Other reminds us of the fact that we are not
unique or indispensable, and this knowledge as disaster restrains us from communicating
with the Other. Yet, we silently affirm the presence of the outside by losing our
“sovereignty” and “subordination.”3 Bereft of selfhood and subjectivity, we are forced to
take upon ourselves the responsibility of the Other.
Considering this brief summary of The Writing of the Disaster, we can now focus
on the relationship between Bartleby and the narrator, and how it is constructed in terms
of passivity and responsibility. “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” tells
the story of an inimitable man – a copyist who constantly utters the formula “I would
prefer not to” when required to make any decision that tends towards an action. As the
title makes clear, the story takes place on Wall-Street, in other words, at the heart of
capitalism in the financial centre of New York. The narrator is an elderly, experienced
attorney who runs an office in Wall-Street. “Being a man of peace,”4 he never takes risks,
nor does he strive for excitement or creativity. “Filled with a profound conviction that the
easiest way of life is the best,”5 the good-humoured narrator is tested with the arrival of
2. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p.22.
3. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p.18.
4. Herman Melville, Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street (Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, 2005), p.2, retrieved from: http://courses.washington.edu/art361a/readings/herman_melville.pdf, on 23th September, 2012.
5. Herman Melville, Bartleby, p.2.
BARTLEBY, THE EPITOME OF PASSIVITY: AN ELEGY FOR HUMANDKIND
the story’s chief character Bartleby, who is identified as “a motionless young man”6 by
the narrator in their first encounter. In need of supplementary help, the attorney hires
Bartleby as the third scrivener of the office – the other two are known by their nicknames,
“Turkey” and “Nippers,” along with one office-boy named “Ginger Nut”. Unlike
Bartleby, these three can be regarded as cut-out characters, representative types given
particular mannerisms. During his first days in the office, Bartleby works diligently on
legal documents, sticking to his job description. The narrator’s choice of words
explicates the scrivener’s ardent exertion in copying: “As if long famishing for
something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause
for digestion.”7 The attorney expects his newly-recruited clerk to duly perform his duties,
and we would think that his endeavour in copying legal documents justifies his
recruitment. However, the attorney is not fully content with hiring Bartleby because he
is not “cheerfully industrious.”8 He only writes “silently, palely, mechanically”9 without
communicating with others. Moreover, he is not so fervent in examining papers or
running an errand, and each time he is required to do something other than copying,
Bartleby disrupts the attorney’s expectation of obedience by uttering the formula, “I
would prefer not to”. In order to comprehend Bartleby’s silent passivity, it would be
beneficial to break the formula into pieces. “I would prefer” is affirmative, and “not to”
is negative. The state of being in-between is constructed with the utterance of this
formula. As Jaworski puts it “Bartleby does not refuse, but neither does he accept, he
advances and then withdraws into this advance, barely exposing himself in a nimble
retreat from speech.”10 Not only does Bartleby withdraw from speech, but he also
completely disregards the proprieties of social organization by dissociating himself from
any kind of voluntary communication. Bartleby’s firm yet calmly balanced formula is
pronounced approximately twenty-five times in the story, and this repetition arouses
curiosity and wonder in both ourselves as readers and the attorney-narrator, who does not
know how to take action towards the scrivener, being used to the routine of legal
transactions and etiquette. In order to understand the narrator’s perplexity and distress of
mind, we should take a general look at the incidents regarding Bartleby. At first, the
attorney asks Bartleby to examine a small paper with him. He gently refuses him. Then,
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Herman Melville, Bartleby, p.4.
qtd. in G. Deleuze, ‘Essays Critical and Clinical [translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco]
(London: Verso, 1998), p.70.
335
336
ESRA ÖZ‹LHAN
three clerks assemble to analyse lengthy documents, but Bartleby refuses to join them.
He does not even examine the papers he himself copied before. Apart from editing legal
documents, he also prefers not to run errands for the attorney, such as going to the Post
Office or telling Nippers to come and see the boss. What is worse, he resides in the office
seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and does not allow the attorney to enter the
premises when he is “occupied.”11 When the attorney asks about his family ties and
origins, Bartleby refrains from giving any information. In the end, he even abandons his
sole duty, copying without coming up with a common-sensical reason. When the attorney
questions his attitude, Bartleby prefers not to explain the reasons for his passive
resistance. He defends his position by not resorting to violence or aggression. He takes
his stand, never makes any concessions, and it is obvious that no one can deter him from
his decision. It is this passive resistance and its interpretation that I now want to focus upon.
Passive resistance is disarming because there is no opportunity for cooperation and
reconciliation with the Other. It is far more effective than an active battle because nothing
so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance. If the individual so resisted of a
not inhumane temper, the resisting one perfectly harmless in his passivity; then, in better
moods of the former, he will endeavour charitably to construe to his imagination what
proves possible to be solved by his judgement.12 In this quotation, the narrator frankly
explains his situation with Bartleby, and informs the reader that he tries to reason with
Bartleby for the scrivener is not arrogant in his behaviour. Bartleby’s calm and serene
attitude baffles the narrator because the scrivener neither accepts nor refuses anything.
He does not say “yes” or “no”, yet in some way, he asserts his will, which silences the
possible attempts to come to an agreement. His gentle refusal does not reveal its reasons,
so the narrator is bound by this passivity. The narrator continues to describe the
“wondrous ascendancy”13 of Bartleby over him and says, “had there been the least
uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there
been any thing ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed
him from my premises.”14 If this mysterious man said no, he would be accused of being
irresponsible, careless, and intolerant; but, he manages to survive due to the increasing
suspense that hinders the narrator from providing a rationale for Bartleby’s
nonaggressive yet eccentric behaviour. For Blanchot, “refusal is said to be the first
11.
12.
13.
14.
Herman
Herman
Herman
Herman
Melville, Bartleby, p.17.
degree of passivity,”15 and Bartleby’s refusal is “an abstention which has never had to be
decided upon, which precedes all decisions and which is not so much a denial as, more
than that, an abdication [and] no dialectical intervention can take hold of such
passivity.”16 It can be inferred from these lines that Bartleby’s decision to remain silent
and distant surpasses the narrator’s attempts to bring him back to “normality”.
Bewildered as he is, the narrator tries to deal with this abstention by finding a pretext to
every little incident he undergoes with Bartleby. At the beginning, he assumes that
Bartleby misunderstands him. After several similar incidents, he puts off the problem by
saying that he will deal with it later, when he has time, thereby choosing to run away
from resolving the matter. This relationship is like an experiment for the attorney,
because he is not used to this kind of a relationship. Even so, he tries to compromise with
Bartleby. However, the narrator is doomed to fail because he perceives Bartleby as a
challenge which he has to confront. Even when Bartleby stops copying, the narrator
presumes that the scrivener diligently worked on the documents, and this might have
impaired his eyesight. He wants to legitimize his assumption by demanding the reason
for Bartleby’s decision not to write. Bartleby’s answer, “do you not see the reason for
yourself,”17drags the narrator into a mental agony, and he loses his hopes for
reconciliation with his Other. Until this incident, Bartleby’s writing has justified his
presence on the premises, but this decision transcends any kind of reasoning and
endurance. Everything is obvious for Bartleby, and he expects others to be aware of the
reality. He has a profound reason for his inaction, and his determination causes the
narrator to wonder “what kind of knowledge does this man have that I do not know of?”
Fighting against passive resistance does not work, and this defeat inclines the narrator to
discover his responsibility for Bartleby.
One may ask why the narrator struggles to keep Bartleby around, even when he
quits writing. Can a person be responsible for someone who mentally haunts and even
unmans him? In the case of this story, the narrator tries to bond with Bartleby, and when
his intention falls through, he follows a different method: He chooses to let go off
Bartleby, but the scrivener holds on to him and prefers not to leave him. Because of the
fact that the narrator is robbed of his last excuse and logical thinking, he holds on to the
feeling of responsibility. Blanchot says “my responsibility is anterior to my birth just as
it is exterior to my consent, my liberty. I am born unto the grief of the other, which is
337
338
ESRA ÖZ‹LHAN
the grief of all.”18 In other words, responsibility carries the burden of centuries and of
mankind. This feeling casts pain upon us, strips us from our selfhood and sentences us
to uncompromising solidarity as “the Other does not answer.”19 We depend on each
other by being a burden to one another. For instance, the narrator feels “a fraternal
melancholy! For both [he] and Bartleby were sons of Adam.”20 Like Cain and Abel,
Bartleby and the narrator’s relationship culminates in death when one silently passes
away, and the other is spared but still threatened by death. With the death of the Other,
the one that is left aside does not obtain the knowledge of the disaster, rather he realizes
the inescapable sovereignty of the outside, the exterior. It can be said that he is
responsible for “the death of the Other: a double death, for the Other is death already,
and weighs upon me like an obsession with death.”21 Foreseeing the silent death of
Bartleby, the narrator attempts to protect him from the inevitable so that he can put an
end to his mental suffering and perform his spiritually assigned duty at the same time.
Now that Bartleby, “the forlornest of mankind”22 is in need of some fraternal help, and
the narrator charges himself with a divine mission: to provide a shelter for his lonely
clerk as long as he wants to be around him. Although the narrator seems to have good
intentions towards Bartleby, he is easily affected by his lawyer friends’ remarks about
him, because people who visit the attorney’s office see this strange man doing nothing
but gazing upon a dead wall, gently declining to engage in any kind of business. These
people question the narrator’s purpose in keeping this ghostly figure at the office and
these negative comments cause the attorney to move into another office, leaving
Bartleby behind. Sitting upon the banister in tranquillity, the poor scrivener continues
to occupy the old office, and causes trouble for the new members of the office. The
narrator holds himself responsible for Bartleby, and when he returns to his old premises,
he invites Bartleby to reside in his own house until he decides what to do with his life.
Bartleby declines this proposal by saying “I am not particular”23 and continues his
reveries. Later, the narrator learns that Bartleby is taken to the Tombs – a very symbolic
name for a house of detention – as a vagrant because he prefers not to be responsible
both for himself and the Other. They meet one last time in the Tombs, where Bartleby
dies because of starvation. His last words are “I prefer not to dine to-day, it would
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p.119.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p.19.
disagree with me; I am unused to dinners.”24 The narrator’s divine mission terminates
with the death of the Other.
We have limited access to Bartleby’s story, and we only know what is shared with
us by the narrator. Towards the end of the story, the narrator tells us a rumour that he has
heard after the death of the scrivener. Before being a scrivener, Bartleby worked as a
clerk in the Dead Letters Office. His job was to sort these letters that failed to reach their
addresses and to watch them get burned. It might be possible to infer from this
information that Bartleby was deeply aware of isolation and the dangers of not being able
to send your words across. He saw that we all share in the same kind of grief, but we are
suffering because we cannot always have a chance to convey our thoughts and feelings
as we like. He obtained this knowledge, and did not make an effort to communicate
because, according to Karl Jaspers, “he who has the final answers can no longer speak to
the other, breaking off genuine communication for the sake of what he believes in.”25
With death, Bartleby is freed from the burden of the knowledge of disaster, and brings
about a change in someone else. The narrator is touched by the outside, and obtain the
only truth that matters the most: Knowledge of the Other is disastrous.
In conclusion, it is not wrong to say that just like dead letters, humanity speeds to
death. “Bartleby” is a story about “walls” that both protect and isolate us from the outside.
Walled in by a life that he would prefer not to be a part of, Bartleby, through his passivity,
awakens in the narrator the sense of being a part of this isolated state of humanity.
Therefore, a reading of “Bartleby” based on the aphorisms of Blanchot leads up to the
conclusion that the encounter with the Other leads to an epiphanic effect, which arises
with the feeling of responsibility and the failure of the attempt to rationalize passivity.
REFERENCES
Blanchot, Maurice. The Writing of the Disaster [translated by Ann Smock] (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1995).
Deleuze, G. Essays Critical and Clinical [translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco] (London:
Verso, 1998).
Melville, Herman. Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street, (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation, 2005), p.2,< retrieved from http://courses.washington.edu/art361a/readings/herman_
melville.pdf, on 23th September, 2012.
Sontag, Susan. Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 2002).
25. qtd. in Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 2002), p.13.
339
Speech and Silence within Limits:
Conversation in Henry Jame’s “Brooksmith”
Ömer Çiftçi
‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi
Reciprocity of speech is a central theme in Henry James’s short story “Brooksmith,”
and related to other prominent elements and themes such as dialogue, loss of space,
extinction of voice and speech/silence dichotomy. The fact that dialogue in the story
appears more as a subject than as a form, more talked about than actualized in writing,
makes it the main concern of the narrative, which depends on it whether it is present or
lacking. Obviously the idea of conversation itself is more prominent than any specific
subject of conversation, and it is more valued due to merits like interestingness and
coherence as an element of social life. Reciprocity of speech is essential as a subject to
the continuity of narration; and it is important to the characters in relation to their concern
about securing their habitual states and feeling situated, which becomes the focus of
narration. Its significance is generally apparent in the celebration of its presence and the
lamentation and longing in its absence, and more closely demonstrated in the experiences
of the three main characters. Mr Offord, whose house is the scene of an elite social life,
his butler Brooksmith, and the narrator, who is a close friend of both, are long
accustomed to routine meetings consisting of a select circle. As their positions show,
their lives are adjusted to a distinguished type of social life in a definite place, which
suggests reciprocity’s association with the concepts of centre and limit. These two
elements are represented by the two residents of the house, who hold the community
together by maintaining the atmosphere of conversation. Reading “Brooksmith” with the
help of the two mentioned concepts is useful for seeing their capability of meaning
making by focusing and distinguishing, and also in understanding how they function in
making dialogue a matter of concern and a directive force in the characters’ living. This
essay will try to explain the interrelatedness of the concepts of centre and limit (along
with their connotations like internal/external, speech/silence etc.) with voice,
communication, reciprocity and ability/inability to speak in the mentioned work. It also
aims to suggest that with the extinction of the central figure of social life, there occurs a
dissolution of unity and a loss of coherent conversation. However, it is not simply due to
a lack of centre, but also to the inability of the limit –the peripheral figure– to function
342
ÖMER Ç‹FTÇ‹
without a centre, with no more need to separate the outside from the inside or make a
connection between them. It is this very lack of utility and even of justification of
existence that Brooksmith faces after he loses the world he has been habituated to. In
addition, his search for an atmosphere of reciprocity turns out to be in vain because he
cannot provide himself his former position of a peripheral figure: a position in which he
is silent in the presence of discourse; near and around conversation yet never
participating in it. In the story, Brooksmith’s situation makes it clear that the theme of
reciprocity does not only refer to the coherent dialogue of speakers, but also points to the
mutuality of speech and silence, with an emphasis on their spatial aspect.
The story begins with sentences implying a past sense of unity and a common
attachment to a place among a group of people: “We are scattered now, the friends of the
late Mr Oliver Offord; but whenever we chance to meet I think we are conscious of a
certain esoteric respect for each other. ‘Yes, you too have been in Arcadia,’ we seem not
too grumpily to allow. When I pass the house in Mansfield Street I remember that
Arcadia was there.”1 These sentences obviously associate the sense of community with
a central figure and a definite place. It is understood from the very beginning that what
used to keep the people in the group together and their communication alive were Mr
Offord’s presence in his house. Another emphasized characteristic of Mr Offord’s social
circle is its being composed of frequent visitors, forming a regular community in its time.
This aspect of it, in addition to gathering around a centre in a limited space, reinforces
the idea of a distinguished community apart from the world outside, and a sense of
privacy proper to it. The narrator’s impression of his days there makes it clear that
regularity and particularity are two identifying features of the group of guests: “Any
visitor who came once came again . . . His circle, therefore, was essentially composed of
habitués, who were habitués for each other as well as for him, as those of a happy salon
should be.”2 Almost all the people meeting in Arcadia are acquainted with each other and
share a bordered and maintained atmosphere of communication. As a close-knit group
they expectably have common habits and interests, although not detailed in the narrative.
However, one important quality of their routine meetings is that they are well-known
with the quality of conversation, and lack of boredom. It may even be said that the point
of the meetings is conversation itself. The people’s being habitués implies that this
society represents language in its regular functioning. The importance attached to
1. Henry James, “Brooksmith,” in Milton Crane (ed.), 50 Great Short Stories (Toronto: Bantam Books,
1983), p.43.
2. Henry James, “Brooksmith,” p.44.
SPEECH AND SILENCE WITHIN LIMITS: CONVERSATION IN HENRY JAMES’S “BROOKSMITH”
conversation and its coherency emphasizes the effectiveness of communication among
them. Looking at the social circle of Arcadia from this aspect also seems to suit the
implications of the concept of “community”, as it is put by J. Hillis Miller. According to
Miller,3 “[the] word implies beliefs and assumptions shared, held in common, taken for
granted, by a group”. The description suggests the presence of an agreed and commonly
obeyed code, connecting the ones who know it, like a language. Also attributes like
habitualness, continuance and being “an ordered and prosperous community”4 altogether
point to an ideal state. Although the days of gatherings are over at the time of narration,
the depiction of the circle and its habits, along with the perfect service and arrangement,
gives a sense of permanence. This is evocative of Miller’s description of an ideal
community, the members of which “live together under the aegis of shared beliefs,
institutions, laws, and assumptions” like “monks in a monastery or people living together
in the same rural village or (sometimes) city neighbourhood.”5 Besides shared rules and
continuance, there is another significant element contributing to the idea of a wellfunctioning communicative state. As it is apparent both in Miller’s examples and James’s
narrative, enclosure is another essential part of having a defined area of communication
with an identified group of members in it. Keeping an enclosed place and residing in it
is presented in the story as the first condition of maintaining a social circle; and it is
devotedly done by Mr Offord and Brooksmith. Especially Mr Offord’s residence in
Arcadia is told with an emphasis on his almost constantly being indoors, in a state of
retirement, only enjoying the company of frequenters. According to the narrator:
[He] had recognised . . . that if you wished people to find you at home you must manage not to be
out. He had in short accepted the fact which many dabblers in the social art are slow to learn, that
you must really, as they say, take a line and that the only way to be at home is to stay at home.
Finally his own fireside had become a summary of his habits. Why should he ever have left it?6
Mr Offord’s choice suggests that the way to keep discourse focused and clear is to
procure a fixed centre for its sustenance. The choice also involves a sacrifice, which is
confinement, a limitation of one’s area of reach and communication. It is necessary for
creating a sphere of discourse that functions as desired. Then the model of community
seen in Mr Offord’s house presents the necessities for reciprocity in speech as gathering
3. J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham UP, 2005),
p.86.
5. J. Hillis Miller, Literature as Conduct, p.87.
6. Henry James, “Brooksmith,” pp.44-45.
343
344
ÖMER Ç‹FTÇ‹
around a central figure, having a stable and finite place, and a regular party. However,
the rest of the story draws more particular attention to the elements of centre and limit in
close association with roles pertaining to the realm of dialogue, especially the two that
preserve the meeting circle and represent the two main positions. In addition to the
positional aspect of their roles, Mr Offord and Brooksmith function as centre and limit in
a way that foregrounds speech and silence, the states adopted by the two figures
respectively. Hence it is understood that reciprocity is not only the one between
conversers, but also the one that occurs between speech and silence, the latter providing the
needed space and receptivity to the other. This is where Brooksmith’s role comes into view.
As the narrator reflects upon the order and harmony prevalent in the salon, his
attention is especially drawn to the easiness and perfection in the managing of the guest
group and the air of conversation. His questioning of what “the secret of such
perfection”7 has been leads him to the persuasion that there has been a law functioning
below all the casual activity. The observation of perfection also makes him credit the
authors of it, both the gentleman and the servant of the house, with mastery in a sort of
craft. It is known that Mr Offord is the main figure of dialogue among other participants,
and indispensable for the continuation of it. However, when it comes to perfection or
excellence in performing a task, it is Brooksmith rather than Mr Offord that is talked
about. Brooksmith is not a speaker among the salon crowd, yet the place and the people
occupying it owe their orderly and comfortable state to his service, even to the point of
being regarded by the narrator as the butler’s work of art: “Mr Offord’s drawing-room
was indeed Brooksmith’s garden, his pruned and tended human parterre, and if we all
flourished there and grew well in our places it was largely owing to his supervision.”8
Regardless of his position as a servant and his lack of voice in parties, Brooksmith is a
revered figure whose authority in the salon’s social life is recognised. An important
reason for this is that Brooksmith provides for the group the comfort and easiness that
makes the distinguished atmosphere of conversation possible, special care and
arrangement improving their condition (hence the metaphor of “parterre”). His attention
and almost unnoticeable work among the guests keeps them away from cares about
everyday trivialities or possible inconveniences. Brooksmith’s service therefore opens a
space that is quite convenient for a distinguished social life, disposing of disruptive
factors that can be encountered outside. The comfort provided by this service is described
in some detail:
How was it, for instance, that we never were a crowd, never either too many or too few, always the
right people with the right people . . . always coming and going, never sticking fast nor overstaying [. . .]? How was it that we all sat where we wanted and moved when we wanted and met whom
we wanted and escaped whom we wanted [. . .]? Why were all the sofas so convenient, the accidents so happy, the talkers so ready, the listeners so willing, the subjects presented to you in a rotation as quickly fore-ordained as the courses at dinner? A dearth of topics would have been as
unheard of as a lapse in the service. These speculations couldn’t fail to lead me to the fundamental
truth that Brooksmith had been somehow at the bottom of the mystery. If he had not established the
salon at least he had carried it on. Brooksmith, in short, was the artist! 9
The number of people inside, their encounters, the liveliness and fluency of
conversation are all somehow dependent on Brooksmith’s accurateness. The inside that
is attended by him is protected and hardly subject to difficulty, boredom or
inconvenience but always fluid, interesting, and enjoyed. This quality of the salon is
highly ascribable to particularity and distinction. Choosing the right people (for the place
and each other), the right topics of conversation, the right moment for guests to enter and
leave etc. are all related to the element of space and associated with limitation. Putting
limits in numbers, content, entrance and departure serves the purpose of reciprocity in
speech; and conversation being the point of all the meetings, reciprocal and coherent
dialogue is the purpose of perfectionism indoors. Marking the boundary between the
inside and the outside in this manner emphasizes the concern about perfection of
reciprocity, through protection from the outer, uncontrolled, accidental, ordinary etc.
This way of ensuring order in communication, avoiding the uncontrolled, corresponds
with Maurice Blanchot’s views on the concepts of “everyday” and “everyday speech”.
According to Blanchot, everyday has many negative connotations when order and
regularity are valued. “The everyday is platitude... it escapes every speculative
formulation, perhaps all coherence and all regularity” as well as “all forms or
structures.”10 The everyday is obviously to the detriment of a household like Mr
Offord’s, because it carries all that cannot be limited, defined, or have a specific quality
of interest. It is not only illimitable, but also inseparably associated with ordinariness,
tediousness and banality. On account of all these negative connotations, the everyday
speech is unwanted inside. Then Brooksmith’s attention serves as a protection from the
everyday’s disruptiveness, for the cultivation of an unfailing unity of speech, and acts as
complementary to Mr Offord’s role as a distinguished speaker. The fact that
9. Henry James, “Brooksmith,” pp. 45-46
10. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation [translated by. Susan Hanson] (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2003), p.239.
345
346
ÖMER Ç‹FTÇ‹
Brooksmith’s work is consequentially related to spatial and positional aspect of the
activity of speech more clearly defines his position in it. His service of limitation defines
both his position in the house (as described above) and his distance from speech.
Brooksmith’s lack of voice in the sense of having no active part in dialogue makes him
provide the silence needed for speech to flourish. His silence is a contribution to his
protection of the speech inside, hence a part of his task of limitation. Therefore it can be
suggested that the quality of the dialogue indoors depends as much on distinguished
conversers as on the roles of speech and silence. Moreover it is the role of silence (like
his almost unnoticeable presence) that makes Brooksmith a vital part of the social life of
the house. Having so far emphasized the positional significance of the two opposing
concepts for limitation and order in speech, now the spatial aspect of silence in the story
can be looked into as well.
As it is apparent in the two permanent figures of Arcadia, the conserved
atmosphere of speech is based on the interdependence of voice and silence. In addition
to the fact that the latter opens space to the former, the relation in between is parallel to
those of centre-periphery, or content-container. Hence Brooksmith takes part in the
maintenance of discourse by being in the presence of it, perhaps “around” it yet not
exactly “in” it. His surrounding the speech happens in two levels. Firstly, he surrounds
the place where conversation goes on; he is literally and metaphorically at the threshold
between the life outside and inside. He is the one who faces those coming to the house,
by receiving guests. Standing at this peripheral point situates him between the discourse
inside and the one from the outside. This intermediary position is maintained during
dialogues as well, where Brooksmith “act[s] as [a] moderator” by “avert[ing]
misunderstandings or clear[ing] them up.”11This position suggests that Brooksmith acts
as limit not only in the sense of protection but also that of reception, a faculty he also
maintains during his work in the salon. This is the second way how Brooksmith
surrounds speech. His being around conversation is not simply by being present and
silent where it takes place, but having a keen interest in hearing and getting what is
spoken. This is also a peculiarity of Brooksmith that is marked by the narrator. Reflecting
upon a conversation with Mr Offord, the narrator relates his own opinion of Brooksmith
as follows:
Mr Offord remarked: “What he likes is the talk – mingling in the conversation.” I was conscious
that I had never seen Brooksmith permit himself this freedom, but I guessed in a moment that what
Mr Offord alluded to was a participation more intense than any speech could have represented –
that of being perpetually present on a hundred legitimate pretexts, errands, necessities, and breathing the very atmosphere of criticism, the famous criticism of life. “Quite an education, sir, isn’t it,
sir?” he said to me one day at the foot of the stairs, when he was letting me out; and I have always
remembered the words and the tone as the first sign of the quickening drama of poor Brooksmith’s
fate. It was indeed an education, but to what was this sensitive young man of thirty-five, of the
servile class, being educated?12
Apart from the requirements of his profession, an avid embracement of the role of
silence near speech is explainable with Brooksmith’s keenness on hearing and
comprehending it. Although his presence as a silent figure in the house is needed for
speech to function, taking in and preserving the content of it is apparently not. It seems
to have become one of his ingrained habits in the house. The narrator’s worrying about
his fate signifies that Brooksmith is too habituated to his home, and that he can hardly
hold on to any other way of living or working if one day he has to. His strong adaptation
to the peculiar social life in Mr Offord’s house later turns against him severely, after Mr
Offord is deceased and his company dispersed. Then he no longer can feel himself at
home, being unable to regain his previous position as a servant in a place of cultivated
dialogue. Brooksmith’s peculiar habits gained in Arcadia obviously have made Mr
Offord and the house indispensable to him, as much as he has been to them. The sum of
his habits (his function of limitation) can be viewed as his strong attachment to Mr
Offord. This means he cannot function as the limit without the centre that generates and
focuses conversation, inasmuch as the centre cannot form a unified whole without a limit.
It has been understood so far that reciprocal speech in Arcadia is most basically
dependent on the reciprocity of speech and silence, which is provided by the two men in
the house. However the problem is their particular habituation to each other, to the point
of not being able to communicate properly in any other household. It should not be
expected that Brooksmith’s silence will be fitting to any other master’s or mistress’s
company. This is expressed in an example by the narrator: “His notion of conversation,
for himself, was giving you the convenience of speaking to him; and when he went to
‘see’ Lady Kenyon, for instance, it was to carry her the tribute of his receptive silence.
Where would the speech of his betters have been if proper service had been a
manifestation of sound”13 This is how Brooksmith fulfils his duties in the house, with his
“receptive silence” during conversations, even when he is the addressee. This is the part
he plays in the making of reciprocity. Then his failure in getting in connection with a
347
348
ÖMER Ç‹FTÇ‹
person from out of his social circle may not be regarded simply as a result of his
inadequacy, but as well as others’ inability to fill the silence he provides. Because his
very part in speech is “receptive silence”, the way to outline and make clear the speech
of others, he needs to stick to the part. The clear distinction between the two roles (along
with their connotations relating to space) makes perfection possible in Arcadia. It is this
clear distinction that Brooksmith cannot find in other houses, hence there arises a
vagueness of roles and loss of the reciprocity he has experienced in its perfection. The
degeneracy of clarity and distinction begins with Mr Offord’s illness and his death soon
afterwards. Hence the extinction of voice at the centre leads to the obscuring of the limit.
Neither speech and silence, nor inside and outside can be clearly separated, and this
causes the disruption of Brooksmith’s sense of place and his vanishing as a figure, to the
point of disappearance.
Mr Offord’s illness is the first reminding sign for the habitués of Arcadia that their
community is not going to last forever. It is also the first time in the narrative when Mr
Offord’s central position in the community is acknowledged with some concern. The
narrator’s memory of the first day of his friend’s illness explains his importance for the
unity of the circle:
The first day Mr Offord’s door was closed was ... a dark date in contemporary history. It was raining hard and my umbrella was wet, but Brooksmith took it from me exactly as if this were a preliminary for going upstairs. I observed however that instead of putting it away he held it poised and
trickling over the rug, and then I became aware that he was looking at me with deep, acknowledging eyes – his air of universal responsibility. I immediately understood; there was scarcely need of
the question and the answer that passed between us. When I did understand that the old man had
given up, for the first time ... I exclaimed dolefully: “What a difference it will make – and to how
many people!”
“I shall be one of them, sir!” said Brooksmith; and that was the beginning of the end.14
It is understood from the moment of the narrator’s entrance that guests are not
received in the usual way that day, and there is not going to be any meeting in its usual
sense. It is also notable that this realization occurs to them in their silence. The
impending end of their society by the death of their host is not something commented
upon, except the implied expectation of dispersion. It is known that without the single
person in charge they cannot maintain conversation as before or even manage to keep
gathering. Reciprocity, in its association with perfection, is only possible as long as the
central voice and its limitation are preserved. However, when one of these is lost, the
unity of the conversers and speech is shattered. It is obvious that Mr Offord’s death will
make a great difference to every visitor of Arcadia, yet the change that will happen in
Brooksmith’s life will be radical and different from that of any visitor’s. The difference
is stressed by Brooksmith himself, when talking to the narrator:
“Oh, sir, it’s sad for you, very sad, indeed, and for a great many gentlemen and ladies; that it is,
sir. But for me, sir, it is, if I may say so, still graver even than that: it’s just the loss of something
that was everything. For me, sir,” he went on, with rising tears, “he was just all, if you know what
I mean, sir . . . But you have the pleasures of society, sir . . . That’s not for me, sir, and I have to
keep my associations to myself. Mr Offord was my society, and now I have no more. You go back
to conversation, sir, after all, and I go back to my place[.]”15
The emphasized point of Mr Offord’s being “all” for Brooksmith and his only
society clearly suggests that Brooksmith will not be able to utilize his skills anywhere
else, or even properly communicate with anybody again. It seems with Mr Offord’s
death, he has lost his only connection and place in the world. Having been adapted to the
very particular habits and living provided by his late master, he has become to the point
of only being able to function in his presence and under his roof. When the time of
searching for a new place starts for Brooksmith, his perfect fitting to his ex-household
yet being unable to fit into any other society is even more stressed. It is a point worthy
of notice, for instance, that Brooksmith’s height does not meet the standards of his
profession. Therefore he is “too short for people who [are] very particular,”16 and this is
a handicap in the way of his being acceptable for a new position. Becoming unfavourable
in stature and less noticed is the reverse of Brooksmith’s former state. After having been
regarded as a perfect servant and a revered figure in his former house, now he is
ironically treated with lack of interest. Turning into a vague and unnoticeable figure after
leaving his post echoes the idea of the limit’s disappearance after the extinction of the
centre. Now that Brooksmith lacks both –a centre to surround and a limit to stand at– he
is exposed to what has been kept beyond the limit before, probably everything that “the
everyday” echoes. Even when he later finds short-term jobs at houses, he faces
everything and everyone he finds “too dull for endurance” and “vulgar as well.”17
Therefore he can find nothing to receive; he is out of communication when he does not
have his own space of discourse. It is significant that the communication between the
narrator and Brooksmith also gets poorer after the dispersion, which is basically due to
their loss of their common place. This is related to the lack of what can be called privacy
349
350
ÖMER Ç‹FTÇ‹
after the loss of limit, and it affects their speech in a diminishing way. Therefore, lack of
speech after the disappearance of the limit can be viewed as a shrinking of space, rather
than expansion or infinity of space.
Having begun with Mr Offord’s death as the extinction of the central voice, we
have seen the connection between the lack of centre and the consequent disruption of
limit and unity, which is detrimental to the coherence and reciprocal quality of speech.
The remarkable point, after these have occurred in the story, is that the two remaining
prominent characters, the narrator and Brooksmith do not give in to uncontrolled speech,
which can be regarded as noisy or dull, without a particular character. Once they are out
of the limits of their former common space of conversation, their communication
continues in minimum speech or reciprocal silence. When they are in the presence of
everybody, in the sense of anybody foreign to their shared past, they can hardly speak to
each other. In this way, lack of limit becomes diminishing and eventual lack of space.
This is much more observable in Brooksmith, who, unlike the narrator, lacks any chance
of having company. With illimitable space and speech, he loses more and more space and
privacy, as his state of wandering among an indefinite society drives him to an
increasingly hopeless situation. As for what they cannot communicate to each other, it is
because they have left it in their shared past, which belongs to the days of their private
society and now is incommunicable outside, in the presence of those who have no
appreciation or notion of it. The narrator relates the moments of his leaving a party,
where Brooksmith serves after several places alike, also referring to their remaining
connection:
We were in intellectual sympathy – we felt, as regards each other, a kind of social responsibility. In
short we had been in Arcadia together, and we had both come to this! No wonder we were ashamed
to be confronted. When he helped on my overcoat, as I was going away, we parted, for the first time
since the earliest days in Mansfield Street, in silence. I thought he looked lean and wasted, and I
guessed that his new place was not more ‘human’ than his previous one. There was plenty of beef
and beer, but there was no reciprocity.18
Their sense of responsibility toward each other seems to be based on making an
effort to preserve their previous society in their memories and mutual understanding. The
“intellectual sympathy” can be viewed as the result of this endeavour to keep a society
within society. However they are also aware of their gradual decline and that they are left
placeless, which explains their silence. Despite they are connected in some way, the
narrator cannot do much for Brooksmith but is almost like watching his fall from far
away. The lack of a secluded space for their communication seems to put a distance
between them, in addition to diminishing their field of speech. Then what remains is a
distanced and silent understanding in between, not being able to touch the subject
directly in conversation. This situation is in coincidence with Blanchot’s dealing with the
element of dialogue in its relation to silence in Henry James’s works. The situation is one
in which the characters “communicat[e] actually around the incommunicable, thanks to
the reserve with which they surround it and the air of understanding that allows them to
speak of it without speaking of it.”19 Like their past days, the narrator cannot speak of
Brooksmith’s decline, which is apparent in his even more shrunken figure. His unhealthy
appearance is a result of his being deprived of society among vast and undistinguished
social circles. Later, during his days of seclusion near his mother and aunt, the image of
shrinking and vagueness of appearance is more observable when he is visited by the
narrator: “He was vague himself, and evidently weak, and much embarrassed, and not an
allusion was made between us to Mansfield Street. The vision of the salon of which he
had been an ornament hovered before me, however, by contrast, sufficiently.”20 Their
last meeting echoes Mr Offord’s last meeting in his bedroom upstairs, described as “a
sadly shrunken little salon” that he “held for then minutes.”21 Now Brooksmith appears,
with great contrast, in a small room after his life in a mansion. His image also adds to his
disfigurement that has happened so far, “[sitting] with a blanket over his legs at a clean
little window.”22 The last meeting marked with the diminishing of figure and space does
not allow the two men any privacy again, where “poor Brooksmith seem[s] encompassed
with vague, prying, beery females.”23 Although there is no sentence the narrator quotes
from Brooksmith, their mutual concern for privacy is expressed in a sentence that is
attributed to Brooksmith’s last silent look: “When I bade him farewell he looked at me a
moment with eyes that said everything: ‘How can I talk about those exquisite years in
this place, before these people, with the old women poking their heads in?”24 This scene
is the last depiction of the loss of space that happens gradually and splits the bond
between the two men, until the narrator is one day told the news that Brooksmith “[has]
19. Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come [translated by Charlotte Mandell] (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003).
351
352
ÖMER Ç‹FTÇ‹
disappeared” 25 after a short period of waiting on tables at dinner parties. The fact that
Brooksmith has left no trace behind completes the idea of him as a diminishing body,
losing size after his deprivation of conversation, which “[has] become a necessity of [his]
nature.”26 His not giving in to any other living than his previous one ends up with his
bodily disappearance after speechlessness, leaving only his “dim ghost”27 in the memory
of the narrator.
The theme of reciprocity in “Brooksmith” appears in several ways that are
connected through the concepts of centre, limit and regularity. These concepts lead up to
the forming of a whole that can function in order, having its own rules working inside it,
which is seen in the story as a model of community. The positions maintained in this
unity –mainly centre and limit in their association with speech and silence– are essential
to the functioning of a whole body of speech, as well as to its distinction from the outside,
which lacks its particular arrangement of conversation, that is, speech in its reciprocal
activity. Although the model of community implies perfection in its management of
social life and through the habituation of its members, its wholeness depends on the
existence of the basic roles that must be preserved in a permanent place. The main figure
of speech and that of silence also occupy positional roles of centre and limit(ation),
thereby focusing meaning around a centre in a limited space, and thus provide wholeness
of content. While this limitedness and clarity make the vital point of reciprocity, with the
extinction of the central voice there occurs a dispersion of other elements. This,
particularly leading to a vagueness and lack of utility in the peripheral figure, brings up
the question of limit and of what follows in its absence. With the disruption of the
coexistent positions of centre and limit there follows the failing of distinction between
inside and outside spaces, which results in unlimited content, hence the loss of
controllable speech. This causes the remaining characters’ (the narrator and Brooksmith)
inability to communicate, for the lack of a private space as they used to enjoy. What has
been shared between the old members of the community become unspeakable once they
are out of its limits. Especially the inability to speak and gradual loss of space
experienced by Brooksmith suggests that unlimited space and society diminish the space
of communication, to the point of silence and disappearance, instead of enhancing it.
Therefore a reading of the story based on the mentioned concepts leads up to the
conclusion that reciprocity in speech is dependent on the existence of distinct roles within
limits, and that ambiguity or subversion of positions leads to a loss of communication
rather than enrichment of it.
REFERENCES
Blanchot, Maurice. The Book to Come [translated by Charlotte Mandell] (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2003)
Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation [translated by Susan Hanson] (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2003).
James, Henry. “Brooksmith” in Milton Crane (ed.) 50 Great Short Stories (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1983)
Miller, J. Hillis. Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2005).
353
The Stoic Mothers, Violence and
Human Condition in Union Street
Bircan Ça¤lar
‹stanbul Gedik Üniversitesi
Pat Barker with her first novel, Union Street, provides a realistic social panorama
of her time and offers a significant vantage point to class and gender issues by focusing
on overall characteristics of working class environment with the emphasis on women in
such an environment. She draws attention to the problems that exist in working class
houses and sees corruption and violence as outcomes of economic inequalities. In
women’s case this situation is doubled as they both have to carry the role of the woman
as a housewife and as a worker. “Among the working class family there has always been
a tight-knit institution, a place where the gender roles have their fixed place, but in the
post-war period when women started to work, the role of the woman as housewife
seemed to exist alongside her role as a worker. Yet still the socially expected gender
performances were to be fulfilled at home.”1
In Union Street, Barker presents a picture of working class women, whose lives are
hardened with procreation, child care, violence at home and sexual abuse. She gives
voices to silenced women neglected during economic upheaval. Their suffocating
situation is projected through the consciousness of seven different women, [who are]
“trapped in a relentless cycle of poverty, casual underage sex, backstreet abortions,
abusive relationships, and early signs of illness.”2 Union Street can be read from and
within realist and feminist perspectives. “To Barker, gender is a cultural construct, and
she defines class through sexual difference, identifying working-class women as the
working class within the working class.”3
The aim of this paper is to analyze first, women (by focusing especially on
mothers) in Union Street from a socialist feminist point of view; second, indicate that the
1. Aytül Özüm, The Representation of Working Class and Masculinity and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning (Ankara: Hacettepe University Press, 1995), retrieved from: HTTP: <
http://warlight.tripod.com/AYTUL.html> on 13th May, 2012.
2. John Brannigan, The Small World of Kelly Brown: Home and Dereliction in Union Street in Critical
Perspectives on Pat Barker (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), p.8.
3. Sharon Carson, ‘‘Pat Barker,’’ in George Stade, Carol Howard (eds.), British Writers: Supplement IV
(New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan Press, 1997), p.75.
356
B‹RCAN ÇA⁄LAR
on-going violence in Union Street is an outcome of economic depression; and, lastly,
draw attention to how Barker avoids simple solutions such as blaming the oppressor (man)
by showing that rudeness and negligence of the men of Union Street are also determined
by socio-economic factors. Socio-economic factors constitute the core of the novel as
people’s manners are shaped according to their social standing. “The hopelessness, the
frustration and the irresponsibility which became apparent after the second world war,
affected the way [Working class people] lived and the relationships they built.”4
Pat Barker gives the reader insights about the conditions of working-class people
by particularly shedding light on the stories of seven different women and showing that
how they share a common consciousness. All the women living in Union Street suffer
from common problems and their life intersect in Union Street. They have similar pasts,
presents and will probably have similar futures as a result of their social standing. Almost
all of them suffer from violence, procreation, sexual abuse and have become, in part,
inured to violence and abuses. They are wearied by economic conditions, these
conditions affect the overall course of their lifestyle and as readers, we, witness that lives
are getting even worse than worse under those difficult conditions. Pat Barker especially
draws attention to working class women whose role in the development of economy as a
bread-winner is neglected. She provides a different vantage point to the gender roles by
depicting the men as idle creatures (on the surface) wearied by vain attempts to find a
job, while depicting women as wage-earners:
What is really striking is the fact that, although more women went out to work during and after the
Second World War, this did not bring about a change in working class values which has always
been represented as much closer to masculinity and brought to mind the position of man as wage
earner or bread-winner, earning a living to feed his family or contribute to the salary of his parents.5
With the first story, which is titled as “Kelly Brown,” Barker shows that she
displays a different working-class atmosphere from the ones depicted in George
Orwell’s, Hoggard’s or Raymond Williams’ works. “Barker reorients [their] contexts, in
her construction of the experiences and identities of working-class women, against an
emergent condition of postindustrial economic blight.”6 Contrary to earlier depictions of
and Sunday Morning.
and Sunday Morning.
6. John Brannigan, The Small World of Kelly Brown: home and dereliction in Union Street, in Critical
Perspectives on Pat Barker, p.6.
THE STOIC MOTHERS, VIOLENCE AND HUMAN CONDITION IN UNION STREET
cozy, domestic and familial working class environment, we, as readers are subjected to
suffocating, frustrated and corrupted relationships. Brown family is the first example of
the families depicted in Union Street, Mrs. Brown, Kelly’s mother, sinks into her own
miserable life, neglects her children, she never controls what they are doing, where they
are going or what time they are coming home. In most cases she is outside of home
herself. In general motherhood is seen as the happiest stage that a woman can reach in
her lifetime but it becomes a burdensome, exhausting experience for the woman in Union
Street, so Mrs. Brown doesn’t show any affection to her children and her relationship
with her daughters does not carry any respect or attentiveness. That’s why Kelly lacks an
attentive mother figure as well as a father figure that she can lean on and this indifference
leads her to search for anything that she can fill the void in her life. For that reason
she wanders in the streets alone as her house is not the source of safety and comfort.
Her efforts to fill the void take a tragic turn when she is raped by “The Man”. Instead
of staying away from a stranger, Kelly does not care talking with “The Man” or walk
with him. Not having a father model to lean on or proper relationships with people
around her, she needs a kind of attachment. After the rape, Kelly neither cries nor
escapes from “The Man. “He [The Man] looked at her so intently. Other people-her
mother, Linda, The teachers at school-merely glanced at her and then with indifference
or haste, passed on.”7
Kelly’s stoic calmness after the rape shocks the reader. Her mother is always out
either for working or passing time with somebody else. In such an environment Kelly
feels alone and she has an urge to attach herself to her rapist as she has no one else. Rape
is a traumatic experience especially for such a young girl but she shows stoic reactions
to the even the most tragic event which is rape. Instead of screaming, yelling crying or
trying to escape; she takes situation calmly. This stoic calmness is also the result of the
shock that rape creates in her, but stoicism comes from her being alone indeed. As
readers, we might blame her mother like her neighbors do. If Mrs. Brown had really
cared for her children this incident couldn’t have happened but Barker by revealing few
moments of Mrs. Brown and giving the reader insights about her inner life, has
accomplished to establish a kind of empathy for the situation of Mrs. Brown. After the
rape three weeks have passed and Kelly finally can’t help and bursts out. Although Mrs.
Brown is unable to show any affection to her daughter or doesn’t know what to do, she
still cares for her little child, but life has been so hard on her and her children that they
7. Pat Barker, Union Street (London: Virago, 1982), p.15.
357
358
B‹RCAN ÇA⁄LAR
don’t know how to react or how to show affection to each other. Via Barker’s narration
we, as readers, witness the consciousness of Mrs. Brown:
The sight of her daughter’s misery would bring her own gushing to the surface again, it had taken
most of the night for her get it under control… she heard herself start to whimper. The whimpering
frightened her; it sounded so lost, so out of control, so unlike her normal self. For she thought of
herself as a hard, though, realistic woman, able to cope with most things. She had to be bringing up
two children on her own.8
Although Mrs. Brown’s behavior seems immoral in terms of letting her children
alone at home or hangs out with men outside, her situation is desperate indeed. She is left
alone with two children and she needs to use every opportunity to supply basic needs
both for herself and for her children.
Mrs. Brown sees Arthur or any subsequent male as a kind of roborant medicine on
the path of this miserable life. She doesn’t have a strong male model to submit to. She is
alone in raising two children. She needs a man to be a family, and to take care of children.
Maybe in each man that she is together with, she searches for the pieces of a happy merry
family. Underneath of her stoic indifferent appearance, she carries concerns, dreams and
wishes that any other women would carry. That is why she is devastated by the departure
of Arthur and cries. Kelly, when she sees her mother crying, feels disturbed as it is not
something that she is used to. What she is used to is, her mother’s endurance, and seeing
her in such a devastated situation makes her uncomfortable. Kelly herself has become
stoic after the rape that’s why she can’t stand seeing her mother’s weakness. “She felt no
sympathy: She felt, rather, distaste for this woman whose hard exterior had cracked to
reveal an inner corruption.”9
Women of Union Street share the present and the future. Each story in Union Street
shares the similar characteristics with each other. “The characters are really versions of
one character’s progress through life. Barker indicates this in the recurrent scenes in
which characters see their younger or older selves reflected in the other characters.”10
When Joanne Wilson sees Lisa Goddard, who is the mother of two children and the one
in her belly, she imagines her own future and she knows that her future will probably be
no different from Lisa Goddard’s. Already stuck between bakery and home Joanna
Wilson’s life has become mechanical. Conditions have made her expect least from life.
8. Pat Barker, Union Street, p.34.
10. John Brannigan, The Small World of Kelly Brown, p.10.
She marries a man without knowing and without questioning whether she really likes him
or not. She submits to what she has. Kelly’s situation is similar. She doesn’t have great
expectations. She doesn’t even know how to envy others as lives of the wealthy families
are too far for her to imagine. “She might have pitied or despised the girl who lived in
this room, but she would not have known how to envy her.”11 Under such circumstances,
Kelly has developed a kind of defense mechanism and she is proud of herself after
realizing that she can manage alone. Like her mother, she probably won’t show any
affection to her own children or she won’t have any loving tender family life as this is
what she is used to. She can manage alone. She’ll try to manage alone in the future so
the present situation of women in Union Street will show itself in the future of their own
daughters like a vicious but unified circle.
Weariness of people is skillfully reflected via short and abrupt sentences or
sometimes one-word-expressions throughout the novel. This style creates a
straightforward effect on the reader in terms of understanding the situation and sensing
the atmosphere directly. This style shows itself especially when characters think about
their pasts or upcoming futures or when there is a kind of traumatic impact. Lisa Goddard
thinks about her future. “There’d be a house. Somewhere. Housework and eventually, a
baby. Well, that was what she wanted. Wasn’t it?” 12 Although this is not what Lisa
actually wanted, she has no better choice. Joanne Wilson will probably have a similar
future like Lisa Goddard.
Economic and social distresses create violence in the lives of Union Street people.
They are wearied by harsh conditions and this situation creates violence which shows
itself in different circumstances. Lisa Goddard is another stoic woman figure. Although
she has a husband, she manages everything alone. Having two children and the one on
its way, she moves like as if “tiredness and desperation were written all over her face.”13
Lisa although loves her children, hits them hard. “She hit him again and again, stinging
hard slaps, her face distorted by hatred as she looked at him.” 14 This situation may create
bitterness in the reader but the narrator focuses on Lisa’s consciousness, revealing that
Lisa would have been a loving, tender mother if she hadn’t carried the burden of life on
her shoulders. “God forgive me, she thought. She held him close and rocked him. It
wasn’t that she didn’t love him. It was only that she got so desperate. She loved him all
11.
12.
13.
14.
Pat Barker, Union Street, p.52.
359
360
B‹RCAN ÇA⁄LAR
right: this rocking gave her as much peace as it gave him.”15 She questions her own bad
temper towards her own children: “Why am I so bad-tempered with them? It isn’t their
fault.”16 With Lisa’s questioning, the reader is encouraged to question the bad temper of
women throughout the novel. Instead of looking at superficial reasons, the reader may
start to understand how these miserable conditions make people both stoic and bad
tempered. They need to relax and get rid of their rage that life created on them, so they
divert this rage against their own children. Lisa’s husband’s (Brian) condition is no
different. Lisa gets so desperate that she can’t control her temper and hits her children.
Her husband is the same. He beats Lisa hardly as if he doesn’t have any other choice. “He
had to silence her somehow. So he stood up and hit her, not very hard, on the side of the
head. But the blow liberated something in him, an enormous anger that had been chained
up waiting for this moment. He hit her again. And again. It was easier now. She was
driven back against the wall.”17 Lisa’s response to her husband is significant. She just
looks at him and says: “Would you pass me the flannel please?”18 Miserable conditions
of people have created a kind of stoic endurance, they get used to it gradually. This
desperate situation is fully described with short and abrupt words by the narrator. “There
were morning silences. The evening drinking. Rows. Occasionally, violence. Nothing
else.”19 Life has become stagnant for the people of Union Street. The women of Union
Street have nothing to do but submit to their husbands. This submission is not a kind of
oppression, but a kind of bond between people who have similar miserable situations.
Barker, by way of Lisa’s thoughts, leads the reader to see how males are crushed
by life circumstances as well. “Life had no vertical acceleration for working class
families. Hence, social stratification was quite fixed for the working class man. Life was
slow moving and based on physical pleasures like drinking, eating, sex.” 20 Brian, after
seeking for a job for a long time, has already given up and Lisa knows it and understands
him. She knows that he is like a child underneath of his violent behavior. “She, [Lisa]
was sorry for him. She felt how like a child he had become. Underneath the drinking and
blustering and violence he was like this all the time.”21 The reader not only witnesses
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
Aytül Özüm, The Representation of Working Class and Masculinity and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning.
how women of Union Street have become stoic under the abusive attitudes of social
relations, their husbands or mothers, but also, recognizes that men of Union Street are
also trapped by poverty and crushed under the burden of responsibilities that they cannot
meet. Therefore, the story of Union Street is not just a story of oppressed women but a
story of oppressed people.
The characters who apply violence against each other release their suppressed rage
in moments of sudden bursts of anger and find relief in violence. Their sudden rage is the
result of heavy burden that life puts on their shoulders. They oppress it continuously but
not always. Iris King, who is very cautious about her reputation in Union Street, is happy
to be known as the mother of whole street. When it comes to her own daughter, in order
to prevent any harm to her decency, she beats up her young, wounded and pregnant
daughter. Iris’s concern for decency and her obsession with cleanness come from
growing up in even a worse street than Union Street which is called Wharfe Street. In
Wharfe Street murder, rape, suicide is part of a normal life. Iris was beaten up badly by
her father in her young age. So, Iris’s picture of “good life” rests in escaping from
Wharfe Street as soon as possible. She finds the salvation in marriage. Getting married
seems to be the only way for her to get rid of Wharfe Street: “When she came back [from
her Auntie] she got on with Ted, and married him. ‘Course she had to, but by that time
she’d’ve married anybody, just to get out.”22
Barker’s characters might be examined through their background. Their
psychological background is constructed by their traumatic experiences, therefore; their
abusive attitudes need to be related to those of their earlier or present experiences. Iris’s
childhood experiences lead her to detest sexual intercourse and associate it with dirt and
violence as she was beaten up by her father after menstruation. Iris’s preoccupation with
cleanness and stability in the household stems from her concerns about possibility of
going back to Wharfe Street (to her traumatic experiences) one day. Iris strived hard to
create a life different from Wharfe Street so she becomes obsessed with decency and
reputation but her memories follow her all the time. She does everything that she can do
not to return there again, so her inner fears come to surface when she hears about her
sixteen –year old daughter’s pregnancy. She sees it as a barrier in front of her reputation
that she has been striving hard to keep for years. Although she draws a portrayal of ideal
mother, she becomes cold-hearted, when her reputation is threatened. Just after she learns
about pregnancy she beats her daughter up badly. “Iris’s fist came up and hit the girl on
361
362
B‹RCAN ÇA⁄LAR
the mouth. It was such a relief that she did it again… Iris was dragging Brenda around
the ward by her hair. The girl was white lipped and moaning with fear. She had both
hands pressed together over the wound in her belly.”23 Like the other violence scenes,
burst of anger brings the subsequent violent attitudes with it. It is like a moment of anger
bringing all the oppressed excessive distress to the surface and characters find the relief
through hitting again and again.
Iris’s concern about her social situation is not the only reason behind her violent
attitude. Her protective feeling towards her daughter is another reason. She wants her
children to have a better life than she has had and Brenda’s pregnancy threatens these
hopes for a better life. She thinks that it is more difficult for women to walk out of the
door not only because of the circumstances in which they are born but also because of
poor economic conditions that they have. They are more vulnerable to harsh conditions
or abusive attitudes of their husbands and it is more difficult to give up and walk out of
the door if you have a child. That’s why she says “five minute pleasure and a lifetime of
misery.”24
Iris becomes cruel to her daughter and she wittily persuades her to illegal abortion
in their conversation. She leaves no other option but this dangerous abortion and already
wounded, young, five-months pregnant Brenda risks her life. The fact that abortion takes
place in Wharfe Street is ironic as Iris always tries to get rid of the memories of Wharfe
Street. She doesn’t want to remember anything or see anybody related to her life in there.
Though Iris’s motherhood is described in negative terms, Barker invites the reader to
question the ambivalence of this love-hatred relationship between mothers and
daughters. Women of Union Street were daughters before who were abused, were
exposed to violence and who have to cope with the burden of poverty on their own. Life
has forced them to make difficult, painful choices and they, gradually, have started to
take life with a kind of stoic coldness, however; the reader is invited to see they actually
carry fragile, caring sentiments to their daughters: “Brenda might die. Iris wanted to run
back, to stop it happening: the child would grow up as thousands before it had done. But
she didn’t. Instead she went on clinging to the spikes, pulling on them as if she was in
pain.”25
The reader is exposed to the dualistic nature of the motherhood in Union Street .On
the one hand we have Iris King who wraps the still living baby of her daughter in a
newspaper without hesitation; but on the other hand, there is a suffering Iris trembling
with remorse. The family life of Union Street people and their social behaviors are
shaped according to their financial needs: That’s why it is wrong to judge mothers or
teenage girls of Union Street according to traditional sets of values such as “ideal
mother” or “decent young girl”. Life is not is not easy neither for Brenda nor for Iris.
Although Iris buries newborn fetus immediately without hesitation, the image of her own
flesh never leaves her. “Iris held on to her [Brenda’s] hand. It is funny –yesterday I could
have killed her. Now if I could bear the pain for her I would.”26 She feels the pain of her
daughter and her own murder but she has to take it with stoic endurance in order to keep
up with the conditions she has.
As readers, we witness that although capitalist system leaves most of the men
unemployed and miserable, the pressure on women is doubled. They need to cope with
several things at the same time. Barker in Union Street gives voices to silenced, ignored
and abused women by not distinguishing them from others but drawing attention to their
hardships and she shows that they are the important part of a whole. Union Street, despite
taking place in a limited area, symbolizes the problems of masses. Low economic status
brings violence and corruption and this corruption determines the life of future
generations. Barker’s feminist point of view is political and she aims to reveal injustices
of gender and imbalances of power. Her realistic depictions and details of miserable life
meet the criteria of social realism and socialist feminism. Women are trapped in the web
of violence, procreation, motherhood, violence, poverty but they share similar problems
and construct a kind of common consciousness so, they make the name of the book even
more meaningful.
Barker’s feminist ideology goes hand in hand with her social realism. Her Socialist
Feminism is “characterized by her refusal to one-sided ascriptions of blame or easy
fictional solutions.”27 Male characters are also trapped like female characters in life
cycle. Her women are the victims of social corruption and exposed to violence but Barker
shows that they are not the only victims. Barker tries to construct a kind of empathy for
male victims as well. She reveals that nobody is isolated. Union Street is the story of
invisible unions transferred through generations. The characters that live in Union Street
are bound to each other with invisible links. Everything occurs in a cause and effect
27. C.E. Sarah Ross, ‘‘Regeneration Redemption, Resurrection: Pat Barker and the Problem of the Evil,’’
in James Acheson and Sarah C.E. Ross, (ed.), The Contemporary British Novel (Edinburg: Edinburg
University Press 2005), p.132.
363
364
B‹RCAN ÇA⁄LAR
relationship so; this book is not just about the life of working class women but about how
human condition is shaped under specific circumstances. Although Barker takes side with
the women, she also leads us to question the main causes of oppression. She puts the
blame on economic conditions and corrupted system that leaves people in desperation.
REFERENCES
Barker, Pat. Union Street (London: Virago, 1982).
Brannigan, John. The Small World of Kelly Brown: Home and Dereliction in Union Street in Critical
Perspectives on Pat Barker (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005).
Carson, Sharon. ‘‘Pat Barker,’’ in George Stade and Carol Howard (eds.), British Writers: Supplement IV
(New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan Press, 1997).
Özüm, Aytül. The Representation of Working Class and Masculinity and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night
and Sunday Morning (Ankara: Hacettepe University Press, 1995), retrieved from: HTTP: <
http://warlight.tripod.com/AYTUL.html> on 13th May, 2012.
Ross, C.E Sarah. ‘‘Regeneration Redemption, Resurrection: Pat Barker and the Problem of the Evil,’’ in
James Acheson and Sarah C.E Ross (ed.), The Contemporary British Novel (Edinburg: Edinburg
University Press, 2005).
A Chronotopic Analysis: Bakhtinian Review of
Women in Love by D. H. Lawrance
Mete Çal
Hakkari Üniversitesi
In this paper the aim is to interpret the Bakhtinian elements in terms of chronotopes
and analyze Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence. Bakhtin in his work Dialogic Imagination
opens a new path for analyzing the texts through which the comprehension of analysis is
extended. He introduces the term “chronotope” that can enable the reader to understand
a text, an event, a character or a philosophy. He has given no specific explanation to
the term; rather it is left blank for the reader. However, he names the theory as follows:
“We will give the name chronotope to intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial
relationships that are artistically expressed.”1
In a general sense chronotopes describe the discoveries about the relationship of
actions and characters to time and space. It is a way to comprehend the ways in which
the relation of people may be understood. Thus it is needed to examine the literary works
in detail that are concrete. These concrete details are the chronotopes as Bakhtin calls.
Therefore, for him, novel becomes a rich place where the richest chronotopes can be
expressed in order to analyze the characters’ inner world and nature of events. He defines it as: “The chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied.
It can be said without qualification that to them belongs the meaning that shapes narrative.”2
It can be said that here Bakhtin highlights the importance of the wholeness of time
and space. For him time and space constitutes a whole and they cannot be separated. The
reason is that people can find a variety of senses belonging to time and space. Therefore
chronotopes reveals the meaning of the works of literatures.
Thus the chronotope, functioning as the primary means for materializing time and space, emerges
as a center for concretizing representation, as a force giving body to entire novel. All the novel’s
abstract elements- philosophical and social generations, ideas, analyses, of cause and effect- gravitate
toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art
to do its work.3
1. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p.85.
2. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p.250.
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 9/2 (November 2012), pp.365–372.
366
METE ÇAL
Chronotopes erase the abstract shadow from the text and reveal the real representation. Text does not hang in the air; namely it becomes concrete. Therefore reader can
visualize “chronotopes as an optic” through which he can get into the depths of the text.4
In literature it is possible to find many chronotopes. It offers us profound image of people,
events, history and public. In this context Bakhtin sees novel as a means to understand
the time and space relationship.
In his theory, Bakhtin deals with the subject under there main title; the Greek
romance, the adventure novel of everyday life, and the ancient biography. He finds that
these novels lack historical change or biographical existence. However he claims that
change is primary for the modern realistic novel. For him the ancient literature does not
succeed in creating a living forms and unities that could be sufficient for individual’s
private life. They are mechanic and static. On the other hand Bakhtin urges that the chronotopes should not be stable, rather they should be energetic in order to sustain the unity in
time and space:
The most abstract of all chronotopes is also the most static. In such a chronotope the world and the
individual are finished items, absolutely immobile. In it there is no potential for evolution, for
growth, for change. As a result of the action described in the novel, nothing in its world is destroyed,
remade, changed or created anew. What we get is mere affirmation of the identity between what had
been the beginning and what is at the end.5
He is totally against the mechanic and unmoving relationship among individual,
time and space. The reason is that chronotope loses its analytic mission. He adds that
“space becomes meaningful as time becomes endowed with the power to bring change.”6
Readers find many references to this Bakhtinian idea which is the static and immobile
life of the individuals in Women in Love. Gudrun and Gerald are the most static and
closed ones. Throughout the novel reader is unable to see the slightest change in these
two. Gerald has a mechanic and traditional mind and he is close to question the social
and traditional ideas and values. He takes them for granted and never asks a question. It
can be said that it is the result of his surrounding, his being the head of coal miners and
the closed brain he has. Therefore he has a predetermined life standards and rules. On the
other hand Birkin is open to new ideas, discussions and questions which make his life
energetic and mobile.
A CHRONOTOPIC ANALYSIS: BAKHTINIAN REVIEW OF
WOMEN IN LOVE BY D.H. LAWRENCE
‘Standard—no. I hate standards. But they’re necessary for the common ruck. Anybody who is anything can just be himself and do as he likes.’ ‘But what do you mean by being himself?’ said Gerald. ‘Is that an aphorism or a cliché?’ ‘I mean just doing what you want to do. I think it was perfect good form in Laura to bolt from Lupton to the church door. It was almost a masterpiece in good form. It’s the hardest thing in the world to act spontaneously on one’s impulses—and it’s the
only really gentlemanly thing to do—provided you’re fit to do it.’7
It can be said accordingly to the quotation Gerald accepts the ideas within standards.
Therefore he is bound to live a limited life drawn by boundaries. However Birkin has no
standards, rather he hates them and he lives freely in his lively sphere. Gerald thinks that
it is very difficult to do what one wants to do. Therefore he represses his desires and
wishes, he exerts himself in life in order to behave according to some determined standards
thus he is far away from the real joy of life in which one can freely expresses his identity.
Bakhtin also urges the necessity to surprise in one’s life in order that one’s life
will be away from the immobility. This enables one creativity and productivity in his
life span. This can ensure the character to be open one, not closed off. The individual
achieves changes and surprises in his life and thus saves his life from being a mechanical
one. In this sense Birkin would like to discover new things so that life will be a discovery
for him. In addition it is worth mentioning Bakhtin’s definition of “collective time.”8
His understanding of collective time can be interpreted as that the collective time is
suffocating the individual freedom. The reason is that time is collectively passing for
the individuals.
What then, are the distinctive features of this form of time? This time is collective, that is, it is
differentiated and measured only by the events of collective life; everything that exists in this time
exists solely for the collective. The progression of events in an individual life has not been isolated
(the interior time of an individual life does not yet exist, the individuum lives completely on the
surface, within a collective whole.) both labor and the consuming of things are collective.9
It can be said that the lives of Ursula, for the time being, and Gerald, almost always
is within the collective time. Gerald’s position in life forces him to be the participant of
collectiveness, of which the life standards are predetermined. He is the typical example of
capitalist man whose only concern is to work and satisfy animalistic desires. Such collective
behavior irritates Birkin in that he thinks that it reduces individuality and freedom and
that it turns man into a machine that at the last is bound to be broken: “I think they
7. David Herbert Lawrence, Women in Love (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1996), p.33.
8. Paul Smethurst, The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction
(Amsterdam: Atlanra-Rodopi, 2000), p.67.
367
368
METE ÇAL
always do. But I should like them to like the purely individual thing in themselves, which
makes them act in singleness. And they only like to do the collective thing.”10
If a person is able to create his personal time besides the collective time, passing of
time may not create a problem for him. The reason is that he lives the joy of each period
as it is required. Thus he will not feel that his life slips from his hands and he does not
feel the finalization effect. In order to achieve this Bakhtin says that it is required to include
individuality to one’s life: “Insofar as individuality is not isolated, such things as old age,
decay and death can be nothing more than aspects subordinated to growth and increase,
the necessary ingredients of generative growth.”11
Throughout the novel it is observed that the importance of individuality is expressed.
The reason may be that with World Wars and industrialism man has been tried to be melted
in the same pot. They would like create masses rather than individuals in order to create
their so-called harmony. Different voices and colors irritated them so they left no space
for the individuality. Thus it can be said that they were all against “Carnivalism.”12 Since
Bakhtin himself suffered much the lack of multiplicity and Carnivalism in the society he
puts forward the idea that everybody has the right to express his own individual ideas. In
this sense Women in Love has many scenes where author lets his characters speak freely.
In this way the novel does not become an omniscient one and readers are not directed by
single point of view. The free expressions of ideas of the characters represent the need to
have individuality, at the same time free discussion within the society. It is not desirable
to accept the things as they are but it is desirable to question the things and than decide.
Rather dictating one idea the author sets his characters free in order to sing their individual
song. In this point Bakhtin asserts that:
In the struggle against conventions, against the inadequacy of all available life-slots to fit an
authentic human being, these masks take on an extraordinary significance. They grant the right not
to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize the life; the right to parody others while
talking; the right to not be taken literally ; not “ to be oneself”; the right to live a life in the
chronotope of the entr’acte, the chronotope of theatrical space, the right to act life as comedy and
to treat others as actor, the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost
cultic) rage- and the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and
prurient little secrets.13
10. David Herbert Lawrence, Women in Love, p.33.
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1984).
Besides this it is possible to see the characters questioning the given standards and
rules of the society. Birkin does not want to live in his public square as he cannot bear the
people who are unable to grasp the inner meaning of the life. For example he is against the
conventional way of understanding love concept. He does not want the given standards
in a love relationship. As he wants to live a spontaneous life he would like to digest love
step by step. He never cares for the surface meaning of love rather he searches for something
deeper and mysterious which will drag him into the depths of this secret world. The
desire to find new emotions and feelings and the hatred to live a mechanic life take him
to the boundaries of such world. And of course the door of this secret world is only open
to the ones who can find the right key. According to him this key is the having the spiritual
sight into the one you feel yourself attached. He is looking for something eternal and long
lasting, and it is this thing which maintains his existence. If the thing you love is mortal
then your love is bound to end. This is one way of looking the concept of love, namely
monologic; however with monologism it is impossible to maintain the relationship. It is
asserted by Plato that rather than appearance one should gaze into the depths of things’
nature in order that he can reach the “deep knowledge” and love.14 Such people accomplish
to reach the true knowledge. This brings spirituality which enables man the state of
immortality. As Birkin hates the “idea of finalization”15 he follows this idea: “What I
want is a strange conjunction with you—’ he said quietly; ‘not meeting and mingling—
you are quite right—but an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings—as the stars
balance each other.”16
In order to attain this knowledge it can be said that individual knowledge should be
acquired. When you establish your own set of ideas and digest them you are ready to enter
the world as Birkin mentions. Therefore as it is mentioned before one should differentiate
the collective and the personal time. As one is melted in the collective time, he will lose
his identity and ceases to exist. He should construct his own individuality and he should
let others construct theirs. Therefore a person should be open to different voices in the
society, as it is in the carnival.
when the time of personal, everyday family occasions had already been individualized and separated
out from the time of collective historical life of the social whole, at a time when there emerged one
scale for measuring the events of a personal life and another for measuring the events of the history.17
14.
15.
16.
17.
Plato, The Republic, [translated by Desmond Lee] (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), p.518.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p.76.
David Herbert Lawrence, Women in Love, p.157.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p.208.
369
370
METE ÇAL
The strong stress upon individualism urges the necessity to create single identities
within plurality. The problem of measurement in the society can only be solved through
this fact. If one degrades the things into some rules, it means that he is not dialogic and he
views the life from one old window of which curtains are dark and invisible to the realities.
In this sense Gudrun is unable to grasp the necessary existence of separate identities,
thinking that her own criterion is the absolute judgment mechanism.
They are really unknown to us, they are the unknown forces. It is impudence to look
at them as if they were the same as human beings. They are of another world. How stupid
anthropomorphism is! Gudrun is really impudent, insolent, making herself the measures
of everything, making everything come down to human standards.18
Gudrun cannot establish her identity, that’s why she has difficulty in taking part in the
society, so she scorns the people and measures them according to her own fixed standards.
However, it can be said that the people whom she scorns are the ones who reveal her
inadequacy in understanding humanity. In this sense the common people serves as fools
and clowns in Bakhtinian concept. Actually there is a paradoxical situation at this point.
It is known that Gudrun seems to be clown within the society. She wears colorful and
ornamented cloths as if she tries to show off. Here she is the clown in the real sense; the
people are also the clowns in Bakhtinian sense. They are like Shakespearian fools who
reveal the true nature of the people. Bakhtin asserts that: “The rogue, the clown, and the
fool create around themselves their own special little world, their own chronotope…
Their very appearance, everything they do and say cannot be understood in a direct and
unmediated way but must be grasped metaphorically.”19
Gudrun cannot feel the rhythm of nature in her heart and she alienates herself from
the rest of the society as she thinks that they are lower than her. She is unable to embrace
all the people despite the differences. In this sense reader comes across with Bakhtinian
idea of “provincial novel.”20 In provincial novel, he asserts that, with the celebration of
nature the everyday life becomes important because it has the traces of folkloric images.
The society turns in to carnival rather than turning into desolated unloving organisms.
Therefore it is desirable to found an idyllic life with full of peace and joy.
It can be said that Bakhtinian description of idyll and provincial novel complies with
our novel though we cannot certainly talk about a hero in our novel. In the following
quotation Bakhtin urges that:
in the provincial novel one occasionally finds a hero who has set off for the city and either perishes
there or returns, like a prodigal son, to the bosom of his family. In novels of Rousseauan type, the
major protagonists are the author’s contemporaries, people who already succeeded in isolating individual life-sequences, people with an interior perspective. They heal themselves through contact
with nature and the life of simple people, learning from them the wisdom to deal with life and that;
or they go outside the boundaries of culture altogether, in an attempt to utterly immerse themselves
in the wholeness of the primitive collective.21
In the aforementioned paragraph, many implications in the novel can be founded.
First of all, it is Gudrun who turns to her home town and perishes there since she cannot
establish the harmony with the nature around herself. As it is expressed she desolates herself
from the wholeness of the society by not celebrating the other simple people. Secondly
it is Birkin who can establish an isolated individual life style with the bosom of nature by
celebrating the existence of different colors and voices in the society. As he is irritated
by the negative effects of the time he finds peace in primitivism rather than modernism.
The wholeness of the primitive and collective desire shows itself when Birkin swims
naked. He wants to throw off the unnecessary masks and rags in order to have a pure and
primitive living.
Yet he wanted something. He was happy in the wet hillside that was overgrown and obscure with
bushes and flowers. He wanted to touch them all, to saturate himself with the touch of them all. He
took off his clothes, and sat down naked among the primroses, moving his feet softly among the
primroses, his legs, his knees, his arms right up to the arm-pits, lying down and letting them touch
his belly, his breasts. It was such a fine, cool, subtle touch all over him, he seemed to saturate himself
with their contact.22
To summarize, D.H. Lawrence’s novel Women in Love coincides much with
Bakhtinian chronotopes. It can be said that both Lawrence and Bakhtin tries to open a
new path for the readers in order to extend their scope of understanding in terms of life
and its components. That’s why the individual free expression, the completeness of the
primitivism, the exclusion of the surface meaning, the dialogic discovery of the self are
emphasized in both works.
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
371
372
METE ÇAL
Plato, The Republic, 2nd edition [translated by Desmond Lee] (New York: Penguin Books, 1987).
Lawrence, D.H.. Women in Love (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1996).
Smethurst, Paul. The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction (Amsterdam: Atlanra, Rodopi, 2000).
Who Ignores Women: Not Only Man
Yeflim Mersin
Hakkari Üniversitesi
Throughout the history, as it can be clearly understood from the word his-story,1
women cannot have their own identity or social roles; rather they are forced to take on a
lot of gender roles imposed upon them by the patriarchy and carry them as their identity.
They have had two labels: either “angel in the house” or “mad women in nowhere”.
Unfortunately, they cannot put a stop to this situation since they are not able to found a
real, powerful sisterhood which would provide them with the world where they can
realize their own selves. On the contrary, they make them fall into a bottomless hole as
Charlotte Brontë does in her novel Jane Eyre by leading her character Jane ignore Bertha,
“the mad creature in the attic” and call her “it,” meaning that she has lost all her
humanity in the eyes of others who transformed her into mad, alienated and lonely
“other”. The aim of this essay is to analyze how a woman’s existence is ignored while
making another praised by comparing and contrasting Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea
through the Feminist Approach, showing how this movement lacks the necessary support
by women themselves.
Today and in previous centuries men have had the control of everyday life and
women have searched the way of expressing their womanly needs and emotions in
manly world. That is to say women’s gender issue is the product of patriarchal ideologies
which give priority to the masculine over feminine in almost all societies. The war of
power between man and woman gender have been one of the most important issue of
literature:
This supposedly marginal curiosity called the “woman problem” had become one of the most earthshaking debates in the Western world, fully explosive an issue as the class or national conflicts of
the day. Here, after all, was the world’s largest oppressed “minority” threatening mutiny: something
no man could ignore. And none did... The “woman problem” was argued about, shouted about,
raved about, agonized about, endlessly, endlessly. By the final decades of the century, it permeated
everything.2
1. The word “history” refers to suppression of men by including the meaning “his-story”. Men realize
history so women are “passive figures” of that manly-made history.
2. M. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), p.21.
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 9/2 (November 2012), pp.373–378.
374
YEfi‹M MERS‹N
“Being woman” or “femininity” could be counted as equal term with an object
which can be exploited or suppressed. Namely, women are very suitable tools used by
men in every field they wanted “power.”3 It can be easily inferred from this quotation
that women are victims of the owner of the power. In other words, men victimize women
just for the sake of their individual needs and wishes. It can be likened to the master and
slave relationship: “they have called you slave, you unhappy slave. Masters, they have
exercised their right as master.”4
Women, like working class of the societies, are seen as ‘things which can be used in
production process. In other words, women can be counted as a kind of means of production.
They are exploited in the house just like workers in the factories. Men get the control of
women, namely means of productions. They have to give birth, look after them, cook,
work, in order to earn their life.
Virginia Woolf is another writer who expresses the situation of women clearly,
explicitly and vividly as being a woman who lives all of these pains deeply and fights to
find anantidote for the poison of men killing their soul day by day. Woolf explains this
hard situation as:
Women have to sell their labour power, even their bodies just for the sakes of survive. Due to this
dependence of women to men, they all have been used a test-board throughout the history. Manly
power have satisfied their disgusting desire on women and used them as looking glass: Women have
served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting
the figure of man at twice its natural size.5
Woolf reflects clearly in the quotation above that women had no function except
being servants of man and simple mirrors which appeal men’s egos by showing them
bigger than they are. The only solution she offers is to write on their experiences without
stopping and finding a space special to them. She states that: “In the first place, to have
a room of her own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the question,
unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to the beginning of the
nineteenth century.”6
As Virginia Woolf emphasizes, women has only one solution to gain their individuality
and autonomy: writing but it is not easy as so. In her essay Professions for Women, Virginia
Woolf states that she had to kill “the Angel in the House” in order to write her novels and
critical works:
3.
4.
5.
6.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977), p.142.
M. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p.237.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), p.41.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p.59.
WHO IGNORES WOMEN: NOT ONLY MAN
Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing.
For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind
of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex.
And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly
by women. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer. 7
Woman who has two choices of life style one of which is to be an angel in her house,
which sometimes brings serenity but never happiness and the other choice is being an outcast
following her ambitions, which brings loneliness but happiness and real serenity in the soul
at the end after breasting a lot of hassles. Feminist writers try to reflect these difficulties they
live in the male-dominated society in which they are scorned and seen as inferior by men.
Women find a solution for this problem with their own power: writing.
Charlotte Brontë is one of the most important writers who find solution for feminine
problems in writing. She has enough courage to write her works by her own name which
is very difficult for women in her time. Her characters are like herself who are able stand
on their own foot, express their feelings and ideas, and brave enough to fight against the
inequality of life conditions in the male dominated world. Her novel Jane Eyre is one of the
most striking novels of Victorian period in that as Richard Chase states “Well, obviously
Jane Eyre is a feminist tract, an argument for the social betterment of governess and equal
rights for women.”8 In the novel the character Jane is an extraordinary one with her
refusal to accept the forms, customs, traditions and the standards of the Victorian society
and her anger resulting from repressed femininity and sexuality for her period. Her rejection
against male dominance starts actively when her wicked cousin John Reed who is the
symbol of tyranny and oppressive patriarchal system throws her the book she is reading.
At this point Jane revolts against him and her voyage of self-determinism and autonomy
against patriarchy starts.
My world had for some years been in Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems: now
I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations
and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse to seek real knowledge
of life amidst its peril.9
Jane is not content with what life provides her. She is a free-spirited curious young
woman who determines her own fate and knows the world is not limited by her perception
7. Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1942), p.52.
8. M. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, p.338.
9. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (New York: Penguin, 1966), p.86.
375
376
YEfi‹M MERS‹N
or experience. She looks for more than what the life conditions offer to her. She becomes
a teacher and goes to a place called Thornfield where she stresses her freedom and individuality. The master of Thornfield is called Rocherster and is a product of patriarchal
society. Although Jane feels some romantic feelings for him, she never allows him
to command her by saying: “I don’t think, sir, you have right to command me, merely
because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your
claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”10
Jane is an individual and wants Rochester to recognize it. She sets her own rules
and refuses to obey a man’s rules since he is a male. She wants to see that they live under
equal conditions and most importantly wants him to understand that they are equal. She
goes on correcting his patriarchal view that women should be angels:
I laughed at him a she said this. “I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I
will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me—for you
will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.11
As it is understood from the quotation above, Jane never accepts being an innocent
angel-like figure who sacrifices herself to the gender roles given her like a burden by the
society. She wants him to accept her for what she is, not for an idealized woman. She is
Jane Eyre no more or less than she is. Through the end of the novel the reader sees that
Rochester starts to accept the powerful existence of Jane which she reflects by saying that
“Reader I married him.”12 This sentence shows that she has the power of choosing her
husband and it is up to her to marry him or not to marry him.
Rochester lives such a situation before with another woman indeed. This woman’s
real name is Antoinette Mason who is a Creole though Rochester gives her different names
like Bertha. Jane sees this woman and describes her as:
In the deep shade, at the farther end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was,
whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it grovelled, seemingly on all fours; it
snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing and a quantity
of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face.13
In the novel the character Bertha is described as a beast-like creature that has lost
her intelligence and lives in the attic on her own under poor conditions. Bertha is lost in
10.
11.
12.
13.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, p.135.
WHO IGNORES WOMEN: NOT ONLY MAN
her loneliness because of merciless people who made her other since she is a Creole and
a woman. Jane calls her “it” which means that she is not given even a human identity.
She is wild and strange, opposite of Jane. While Jane achieves sanity, Bertha fails but the
reason of this situation is never questioned in the novel by the heroine Jane, which causes
the reader to question her ideas, ideals and sincerity. The readers wondering the quest of
Bertha find the answer in another novel called Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys. In the
novel the reader comes across a Creole girl who is torn from the people and nature they
loved because of her marriage to a man from the materialistic world of England and how
she is lost in this illusionary world.
Antoinette is a primitive girl who is very near to her soul and body and understands
the meaning and the mystery of life. Suddenly a man enters her life and wants to marry
her. From his cynical looks she understands his real nature and rejects marrying this white
man: “You don’t wish to marry me?’ ‘No.’ She spoke in a very low voice. ‘But why?’
‘I’m afraid of what may happen.’ ‘But don’t you remember last night I told you that when
you are my wife there would not be any more reason to be afraid?”14
Antoinette is a transparent character so she represents what she thinks or feels as
they are without hiding them with masks or lies; thus, she believes this man and accepts
marrying him without knowing that her sentences are writing her bad fate. Her husband
never becomes happy in Coulibri, loves those places or Antoinette. He marries her for
her money and after getting her whole money his hatred for her gets bigger and bigger
since he knows that this “odd creature” understands his real evil nature and his vain
world. He can never solve the mystery of that place and this girl since he looks at them
with his materialistic eyes not with his soul and spirit.
The man’s mind is preoccupied with only money but this Creole girl does not give
importance to it, but she deals with humanly feelings. The only thing she needs is love of
this man so he always feels inferior to her. After a while she starts to reflect his inferiority
through her smiles and words. She understands that he is not true either to himself not to
Antoinette. She feels as if she is caged and although the cage is her husband, she does
not have any other solution accept the cage. The dialogue between her and her husband
shows how helpless she is:
“You are always calling on God,” she said. “Do you believe in God?”
“Of course, of course I believe in the power and wisdom of my creator.”
She raised her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth turned down in a questioning mocking way.
... “And you,” I said. “Do you believe in God?”
14. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p.66.
377
378
YEfi‹M MERS‹N
“It doesn’t matter,” she answered calmly, “what I believe or you believe, because we can do nothing
about it, we are like these.” She flicked a dead moth off the table.’”15
As a result of his growing hatred for Antoinette, he wants her to be totally helpless,
and to do this he takes her to his illusionary and material world and leaves her alone among
the walls of a cold house. He even takes her hatred for him by never seeing her which is
another resource for her connecting her to the life. Her only way of communication, nature
is taken by her and this causes her to cut her ties from life.
To conclude, Antoinette is called “mad” or she gets really mad since she is far
away from the tricks of the “higher, superior white people”, true to herself, knows her
body and soul and connect them and lives her real primitive character in the arms of nature
and reflect all her wishes like sexuality, hatred, love, etc. without a curtain, which causes
her to be criticized, judged by the society especially by woman and this situation of her
is ignored even by the perfect character Jane who knows how to play the game according
to its rules.
REFERENCES
Brontë, Charlottë. Jane Eyre (New York: Penguin, 1966).
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Penguin, 1977).
Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth, Penguin, (2001).
Woolf, Virginia. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942).
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Classics, 2000).
15. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, pp.76-77.
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR / NEW BOOKS
OCAK-HAZ‹RAN 2012 ARASI TÜRK‹YE’DE YAYINLANAN YEN‹ K‹TAPLARDAN SEÇMELER
G‹LBERT ACHCAR, Barbarl›klar Çat›flmas› [çeviren Atefl Uslu] (‹stanbul: ‹thaki Yay›nlar›, 2012), 200 ss.
ISBN 978-605-375-170-0
Gilbert Achcar kitab›nda 11 Eylül 2001 sald›r›lar›n› ele al›yor. Kendi ifadesiyle: ikiz terörizmlerin
ölümcül serisini anlat›yor. 11 Eylül 2001 sald›r›lar›n› genellikle yap›ld›¤› üzere iyilerin ve kötülerin saflar›n›n net bir biçimde tan›mland›¤› lanetli bir senaryo olarak de¤il ama sald›r›lar›n ard›ndan yaflanan Afganistan ve Irak iflgallerinin yaratt›¤› trajedileri ve bu tradejilerin mutlak nedeni tek ve benzersiz bir fenomen
olarak da ele alm›yor. Aksine, yazar okurlar›n› 20. Yüzy›l boyunca Ortado¤u’da ve tüm dünyada uygulanan Amerikan politikalar›n›n kaç›n›lmaz sonucu, nihai meyvesi ve doruk noktas› olarak bu fenomeni do¤ru bir biçimde anlamaya ve tan›mlamaya ça¤›r›yor. Arap Uyan›fl›n›n tüm ‹slam co¤rafyas›n› sard›¤› ve kanl› çat›flmalara sürükledi¤i günümüzde 11 Eylül 2001 sald›r›lar› ve Ortado¤u üzerine bir kez daha düflünmek için iyi bir f›rsat sunuyor.
BARIfi ADIBELL‹, Arap Bahar› ve Suriye Emperyalizmin Oyununda ‹kinci Perde (‹stanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat
Yay›nc›l›k, 2012), 320 ss. ISBN 978-975-255-349-1
AB’nin lokomotifi durumunda olan Fransa ve ‹ngiltere için Suriye, tarihi emperyal hedeftir. Esad
rejiminin ortadan kalkmas› durumunda Fransa yeniden bu topraklarda varolmay› hedeflemekte ve 1940’l›
y›llar›n bafl›nda terk etmek zorunda oldu¤u projelerini yeniden bafllatmay› hedeflemektedir. Zira ezeli düflman› durumunda olan ‹ngiltere, Irak’›n iflgalinde ABD ile beraber hareket etmesi nedeniyle Fransa’dan bir
ad›m öndedir. Türkiye, sahnelenen büyük oyunun son perdesi olan Arap Bahan bölümünde meydana gelen geliflmelerin ortas›nda kalm›flt›r. fiuras› bir gerçektir ki, Esad rejiminin ortadan kalkmas› sonras›nda Suriye’ye muhalifler istikrar getiremeyecektir. Çünkü demografik yap› dikkate al›nd›¤›nda istikrar ortam›
sa¤layacak kadar güçlü bir muhalif yoktur. Dolay›s› ile bu flu anlama gelmektedir. Suriye’de her grubun
kendisine göre bir hedefi vard›r ve bu hedefler Suriye’ye istikrar getirmekten çok uzakt›r. ‹stikrars›z bir
Suriye de bu co¤rafyada en fazla Türkiye’ye zarar getirecektir.
EMEL AKAL, Milli Mücadelenin Bafllang›c›nda Mustafa Kemal, ‹ttihat Terakki ve Bolflevizm (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 439 ss. ISBN 978-975-050-992-6
Emel Akal, Milli Mücadele’nin sevk ve idaresini gerçeklefltiren kadrolar› ele ald›¤› bu araflt›rmas›nda, sürecin büyük ölçüde ‹ttihatç›lar›n örgütlenmesine dayand›¤›n› ortaya koyuyor. Bu örgütlenmenin de
büyük ölçüde ‹ttihatç›lar›n ‘komitac›’ tecrübesinden yararlanarak, yukar›dan afla¤›ya gerçeklefltirildi¤ini
gösteriyor. Kitab›n temel konusu, bu örgütlenmelerin üstünde, hatta d›fl›nda bir siyasi aktör olan Mustafa
Kemal, nas›l ve hangi koflullarda bu mücadelenin liderli¤ine yükseldi? Akal, Mustafa Kemal’in ‹ttihatç›
güç odaklar›yla mücadele içinde liderli¤ini kurma sürecini ayr›nt›l› biçimde ele al›yor. Bolflevizmle flört,
kitab›n bir baflka a¤›rl›k merkezi. Milli Mücadele yönetiminin ve ‹ttihatç›lar›n Bolflevik harekete duyduklar› sempatinin kâh pragmatik kâh ideolojik boyutlar›n› görüyoruz. Dönemin Anadolu’sundaki ‹slami renge boyanm›fl Bolflevik propagandas›, bu olgunun ilginç bir cephesidir. Milli Mücadele’nin/Kurtulufl Savafl›’n›n önderlik yap›s› ve politik sosyolojisi üzerine titiz ve iddial› bir inceleme.
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 9/2 (Kas›m 2012), ss.379–418
380
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
TUBA AKEKMEÇ‹ ve MUAZZEZ PERVAN, Dersimlilerden Mektuplar, 1941-1953. (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf› Yurt
Yay›nlar›, 2012), 392 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-277-4
Bizler garp muhacirlerinden ve memnu m›nt›ka halk›ndan›z. Bakanlar Kurulunun karar›yla memleketimiz olan Danzik buca¤›na ba¤l› Aflkirik köyüne gitmeyerek Pülümür ilçesine geldik. Çoluk çocu¤umuzla sokak ortas›nda aç ve susuz periflan bir halde beklemekteyiz. Yiyecek zahiremiz ve oturacak yerimiz yoktur. Tohumluk bu¤day, yiyecek, öküz, tohum gibi g›dalar›m›z›n temini ile kasabaya ba¤l› köylerden birinde yerlefltirilmemiz için müsaade ve delaletlerinizi arz ve istida eyleriz. 2 Eylül 1947 Pülümür’de Aflkirik köyü halk›ndan Mahmut o¤lu Paflu Toprak. Aflkirik köyü halk›ndan Hüseyin o¤lu Ali
Cuflku.
MEHMET AKINCI, Türk Muhafazakârl›¤›: Çok Partili Siyasal Hayattan 12 Eylül’e (‹stanbul: Ötüken Neflriyat,
2012), 383 ss. ISBN 978-975-437-874-0
Muhafazakârl›k kavram› ile ilgili çal›flmalar kavram›n tan›mlama güçlü¤ünden bahsederler. Konu
Türk muhafazakârl›¤› oldu¤unda tan›mlama çabas› oldukça güçleflir. Sa¤ kanat partilerin ço¤u bu s›fat›
aç›k ya da üstük olarak kabul ederler ve benimserler. Fakat benimsedikleri s›fat›n ne anlama geldi¤i aç›k
de¤ildir. ‹slamc›l›ktan ya da milliyetçilikten ba¤›ms›z bir Türk muhafazakârl›¤›ndan bahsedilebilir mi?
Bahsedebiliyorsak muhafazakârl›¤›, Türk sa¤›n›n di¤er ak›mlar›ndan ay›ran özellikleri nelerdir? Di¤er taraftan Türk muhafazakârl›¤›n›n bat›l› örnekleriyle ayr›lan ya da ortak yönleri mevcut mudur? Siyaset, fikirden ba¤›ms›z düflünülemez. Bu nedenle Türk muhafazakârl›¤›n› anlamak için soraca¤›m›z sorular›n cevab›n› siyasette de¤il fikirde aramal›y›z. Elinizdeki kitap çok partili siyasal hayattan 12 Eylül darbesine
uzanan dönemde eser vermifl alt› düflünürün (Peyami Safa, Mümtaz Turhan, Osman Turan, Ali Fuat Baflgil, ‹smail Hakk› Baltac›o¤lu, Erol Güngör) eserlerinden hareketle Türk muhafazakârl›¤›n› tan›mlamay›
hedefliyor; Türk muhafazakârl›¤›n›n zihnî koordinatlar› üzerinden bir fikir haritas›n› ç›karmay› deniyor.
GÖKSUN AKYÜREK, Bilgiyi Yeniden ‹nfla Etmek Tanzimat Döneminde Mimarl›k, Bilgi ve ‹ktidar (‹stanbul:
Tarih Vakf› Yurt Yay›nlar›, 2012), 248 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-272-9
Son y›llarda, geleneksel tarih yaz›m› anlat›lar›ndan farkl›laflan çal›flmalar ile Tanzimat dönemi bir
anlamda yeniden ele al›n›yor. Bu yeni çal›flmalar›n ortak yönünün dönemi Do¤u - Bat› ikilemine dayal› bilgi rejimlerinin d›fl›na ç›karak okumak oldu¤u ileri sürülebilir. Göksun Akyürek de elinizdeki çal›flmas›nda, mimarl›k tarihi anlat›lar›nda bir tür karanl›k ça¤ olarak görüldü¤ünü ileri sürdü¤ü bu dönemi,
do¤ru bilginin kurulufluna iliflkin bir süreç olarak ele al›yor. Akyürek, bir yandan öznesi ço¤unlukla merkezi yönetim olan bu dönemin mimari pratiklerini incelerken, di¤er yandan bu mimari pratiklere paralel olarak gelifltirilen söylemsel deneyimi aktar›yor. Böylece bilginin ve onu iflleyen zihniyetin de¤iflimi
de baz› ilginç mimari durumlar eflli¤inde gözler önüne seriliyor. Akyürek, ilk Osmanl› üniversitesi oldu¤u iddia edilen Darülfünunun inflaat sürecini, 1863 y›l›nda ‹stanbul’da h›zla infla edilerek aç›l›fl› yap›lan Sergi-i Umûmî-i Osmâni binalar›n› ve kentin yeniden infla sürecinin bir parças› olarak bu eflikte keflfedilen ‹stanbul’un Bizans miras›na yönelik s›n›rl› restorasyon çal›flmalar›n› incelerken, yeni bir bilgi
alan›n›n kuruluflunu özneler, söylem ve mimari pratikler ba¤lam›nda de¤erlendiriyor. Kitaba yazd›¤›
Önsözde U¤ur Tanyeli’nin de belirtti¤i gibi Akyürek’in kitab› vaatleri de olan bir metin. Tüm iyi metinler gibi, kapsad›klar› kadar, dolay›mla akla getirdikleriyle ve harekete geçirdi¤i düflünme imkânlar›yla
da önemli.
NEW BOOKS
ROBERT J. ALLISON, Amerikan Devrimi K›sa Bir Tarihçe [çeviren Uygur Kocabaflo¤lu] (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim
Yay›nlar›, 2012), 168 ss. ISBN 978-975-050-997-1
Amerikan Devrimi, ‹ngiliz ‹mparatorlu¤una karfl› vatandafll›k haklar› temelinde bir isyanla bafllad›. Devrimin getirdi¤i tart›flmalar, insan haklar› konusunda Frans›z Devrimini önceleyen güçlü bir etkiye sahipti. Robert J. Allison bu kitab›nda bir toplumun özgürlük mücadelesini, devrime yön veren fikirler etraf›nda inceliyor. ‹syan, silahl› mücadele, savafllar ve anlaflmalar›n ayr›nt›l› sunumunun yan› s›ra Amerikan Devrimi s›ras›nda yaflanan insan haklar›, anayasa, özgürlük, eflitlik, temsiliyet, seçim ve siyasal sistem tart›flmalar›n› da canl› bir biçimde aktar›yor. Amerikal›lar niçin isyan ettiler? Savafl nas›l
bafllad›? Frans›zlar Amerika’y› niçin ve nas›l destekledi? Amerikan Anayasas›n› biçimlendiren fikirler
ve tart›flmalar nelerdi? Eyaletler bu tart›flmalar s›ras›nda hangi tutumlar› ald›lar? Amerikan Anayasas›
nas›l haz›rland›? Bir toplumun ortak iradesi nas›l flekillendi? Amerikan Devrimi: K›sa Bir Tarihçe, dünyay› etkileyen ilk devrimi ve Amerika Birleflik Devletlerinin kurulufl hikâyesini bu sorular etraf›nda ele
al›yor.
LOUIS ALTHUSSER, Felsefi ve Siyasi Yaz›lar [çeviren Ya¤mur Ceylan Uslu] (‹stanbul: ‹thaki Yay›nlar›, 2012),
288 ss. ISBN 978-605-375-188-5
Yaz›lar›n bu alt›nc› ve son cildi, Althusser düflüncesinin klasik temalar›ndan oluflan metinleri bir
araya getiriyor. Felsefe, bilim, din ve ideoloji nas›l tan›mlanmal›d›r ve aralar›ndaki iliflkilerin do¤as› nedir? Tarih nedir? Öznesiz bir süreç olarak tarih nedir? Marx›n gençlik yap›tlar›yla Kapital aras›nda gerçeklefltirdi¤i epistemolojik kopufl ne anlama gelir? Ve felsefe nedir? Söz bir kez daha Althusser’in: Marksizmi emek felsefesi olarak gören bütün idealist yorumlar, bütün emek ideolojileri incelendi¤inde, bunlar›n
1844 Elyazmalar›n›n konular›n› yineledi¤i ya da bir praksis Fenomenolojisi kurmaya çal›flt›klar› a posteriori olarak kolayca fark edilir. Ama burada söz konusu olan›n, baflka bir alana, bilimin alan›na yerleflmifl
tarihsel materyalizm de¤il, felsefi ideoloji oldu¤u söylenerek itiraz edilecektir. Emek kavram›, flu kavramlarda parçalan›r: emek süreci, emek sürecinin toplumsal koflullar›n›n yap›s›, (emek de¤il) emek gücü,
(eme¤in de¤il) emek gücünün de¤eri, somut emek, soyut emek, emek gücünün uygulamaya koyulmas›,
emek miktar›, vb. Tüm bu parçalanmalar yaln›zca basit, kökensel emek mefhumunun tarihsel materyalizm
için teflkil etti¤i büyük epistemolojik engelin, tarih biliminin önünden kald›r›ld›¤› belirli biçimlerdir. Marx
Kapitalde, eme¤in toplumsal niteli¤inden, gitgide daha çok toplumsallaflan emekten bahsetti¤inde, bu ifadelerdeki, emek kelimesi, teorik olarak ilksel ve dolay›s›yla kendili¤inden bilimsel olan bir ana kavrama
yani Emek kavram›na göndermez.
KEMAL ARI, Büyük Mübadele (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf› Yurt Yay›nlar›, 2012), 208 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-029-9
Y›l 1923, Lozan Antlaflmas›’n›n ard›ndan Türkiye’de ve Yunanistan’da do¤up büyümüfl milyonlarca insan, hükümetler aras› antlaflmalar mucibince zorunlu göçe tabi tutularak yurt bildikleri topraklara veda ediyorlar. Drama, Kavala, Girit, Selanik’te do¤mufl befl yüz bin müslüman, Kayseri, ‹zmir, Manisa,
Samsun’da do¤mufl yüz binlerce ortodoksun boflaltt›¤› topraklara yerlefltiriliyor. Dr. Kemal Ar›, Kurtulufl
Savafl› sonras›ndaki Türk-Yunan nüfus mübadelesinde Yunanistan’dan Türkiye’ye gelenleri ele al›yor;
da¤lar›, denizleri afl›p gelen mübadillerin yeni topraklar›na nas›l yerlefltiklerini ve yeni ülkeye nas›l uyum
sa¤lad›klar›n› araflt›r›yor. Genç Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin bu ola¤anüstü zor iflin alt›nda kalk›p kalkamad›¤›n› sorufltururken bir insanl›k dram›n› belgelerle yans›t›yor.
381
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
ONUR ENDER ASLAN, Devlet Bürokrasi ve Kamu Personel Rejimi (Ankara: ‹mge Kitabevi Yay›nlar›,
2012), 657 ss. ISBN 978-975-533-703-6
Çal›flma, tarihsel süreç içerisinde, bütüncül bir bak›fl aç›s›yla 19. yüzy›ldan 21. yüzy›la kadar kamu
personel rejiminin Bat› ve Türkiye’deki de¤iflimini “neden” ve “nas›l” sorular› eflli¤inde keflfetmektedir.
Bu keflif, betimlemeyi ve çözümlemeyi aflmakta, Kamu personel rejimi kuram›na ulaflmaktad›r. Kitapta,
kamu personel rejimi aç›klama gücüne ulaflmak için, kapitalizm, devlet ve bürokrasi birer u¤rak olarak çözümlenmifl, ayn› zamanda Düzenleme Okulu’nun Fordizm ve Post-Fordizm kavramlar› kullan›lm›flt›r.
ˆ
382
PAUL–LAURENT ASSOUN, Frankfurt Okulu (‹stanbul: Dost Kitabevi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 145 ss. ISBN 978975-298-462-2
Felsefe ve sosyolojinin kesiflim noktas›nda yirminci yüzy›l›n baflat düflünce geleneklerinden birini temsil eden Frankfurt Okulu, Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin ve Habermas gibi kifliliklerin boy gösterdi¤i bir düflün hareketi. Kültür ve estetik teorisinden tarih felsefesine dek uzanan ilgi alanlar›n›n çeflitlili¤i onu yirminci yüzy›l felsefesi için bir kerteriz noktas› haline getiriyor. Alman idealizminden beslenmifl, Marx ve Freud’u elefltirel teorinin temel u¤raklar› saym›fl Frankfurt Okulu’nu ele alan bu kaynak çal›flma, yeni bir yüzy›l›n flafa¤›nda öznenin durumu ve varl›k koflullar›yla ilgili kapsay›c› bir tart›flma sunuyor.
TOURAJ ATABAK‹ ve ERIK JAN ZÜRCHER, Türkiye ve ‹ran’da Otoriter Modernleflme Atatürk ve R›za fiah
Dönemleri [çeviren Özgür Bircan] (‹stanbul: ‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 274 ss.
ISBN 978-605-399-184-7
Uluslararas› Sosyal Tarih Enstitüsünün (USTE) düzenlemifl oldu¤u Türkiye ve ‹ran da Otoriter
Modernizasyon konulu bir atölye çal›flmas›n›n ürünü olan ve Touraj Atabaki ile Erik Jan Zürcherin derledi¤i bu kitapta yazarlar, söz konusu sürecin ve modernite konusunda benimsenen ortak düflüncenin
özellikle Atatürk ve R›za fiah dönemindeki uygulamalar›n›, bunlar›n benzerlik tafl›yan ve farkl›l›k gösteren yanlar›n› ele al›rken, her iki ülkede günümüzde de yaflanmaya devam eden modernleflme sorunlar›na
›fl›k tutuyor.
GÜNGÖR AYDIN, Vali - Düflündüklerim ve Yaflad›klar›m (Ankara: ‹mge Kitapevi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 270 ss.
ISBN 978-975-533-711-1
Onu ilk kez 1978 y›l›nda Elaz›¤ valili¤i s›ras›nda, Alevileri katletmeye haz›rlanan gerici güruha karfl›, yasalardan ald›¤› yetkileri zorlayarak, planlanan katliam› önlemesiyle tan›d›k. Fakat öncesi de vard›
Güngör Ayd›n, genç bir kaymakam olarak görev yapt›¤› her yerde halk›n sevgisini ve sayg›s›n› kazanm›fl,
Vali olmas›ndan çok önce halk›n gönlünde efsaneleflmiflti. ‹lerici, demokratik yönetim anlay›fl›n›, görev
yapt›¤› her yerde bilinçli ve kararl› bir tutumla, çok sevdi¤i halk›yla bütünleflerek, siyasal iktidarlar›n engelleme çabalar›na ra¤men uygulamaktan çekinmedi. Efsane Vali resen emekli edildikten sonra da bofl
durmad›. 12 Eylül rejimine karfl› Ayd›nlar Dilekçesinde, ‹nsan Haklar› Derne¤inin kuruluflunda, demokrasi için verilen bütün mücadelelerde onun eme¤i, bilgisi ve deneyimi vard›. 12 Eylül askeri diktatörlük döneminde baflkanl›¤›n› yapt›¤› Mülkiyeliler Birli¤i, bütün demokratlar›n, ilericilerin ve sosyalistlerin s›¤›na¤› oldu. Bu kitapta, Güngör Ayd›n›n mücadeleyle süren yaflam öyküsünü; kamu yönetimine, Kürt sorunu-
NEW BOOKS
na ve Anayasa yap›m›na iliflkin kuramsal görüfllerini bulacaks›n›z. Güngör Ayd›n, Bütün bunlar› yazmak
zorundayd›m, demokrasiyi savunmak ve yerlefltirmek için sürekli savafl›m vermifl bir insan olarak, bunu
yapmak zorundayd›m, diyor.
KEMAL AYTAÇ, Avrupa E¤itim Tarihi (Ankara: Phoenix Yay›nevi, 2012), 336 ss. ISBN 978-605-573-899-0
Avrupa E¤itim Tarihi bafll›¤›n› tafl›yan bu eser, Avrupa da Antik Ça¤dan 19. yüzy›l›n sonlar›na kadarki sürede yer alan önemli e¤itim düflünürlerinin görüfllerini konu edinmektedir. Düflünürlerin e¤itim görüflleri, onlar›n ait olduklar› felsefi sistemlerle ba¤lant›lar› içerisinde aç›klanm›flt›r. Eserin bir di¤er önemli özelli¤i ise, didaktik ve estetik ilkeler gözetilerek kaleme al›nm›fl olmas›d›r. Bu da onun, a¤layan de¤il,
gülen bir kitap olmas›n› sa¤lam›flt›r.
AYDIN BABUNA, Bir Ulusun Do¤uflu: Geçmiflten Günümüze Boflnaklar (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf› Yurt Yay›nlar›, 2012), 256 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-122-7
Saraybosna’da, 1993 y›l›n›n eylül ay›nda, kanl› çat›flmalar›n ortas›nda Tüm Boflnaklar Halk Meclisi toplant›ya ça¤r›ld›. Bu toplant›da temsilciler, Bosna halk›n›n ulusal ad›n› Boflnak ya da Bosnal› olarak
kabul ettiler. Bu karar, bir yandan eski bir gelene¤e geri dönüfle iflaret ederken, bir yandan da Bosnal› Müslümanlar›n ulusal hareketinin laikleflmesi yolunda at›lan önemli bir ad›m› ifade ediyordu. Bosna tarihine
yönelik birçok araflt›rmada bir kurgu-ulus olarak gösterilmek istenen Boflnaklar, asl›nda çok daha önce,
Avusturya-Macaristan egemenli¤i döneminde modern anlamda siyasi taleplerle ortaya ç›km›fllard›. Ayd›n
Babuna’n›n, Bosna-Hersekli Müslümanlar›n tarihine yönelik oryantalist bak›fl aç›lar›na bir elefltiri niteli¤ini de tafl›yan bu çal›flmas›, Osmanl› Bosnas›’n› inceledikten sonra Avusturya-Macaristan egemenli¤i dönemini eksen al›yor ve günümüzdeki geliflmelere de ›fl›k tutuyor.
MUSTAFA H‹LM‹ BAfi, Kadim ‹nsan›n ‹zinde: Mircea Eliade Düflüncesine Girifl (‹stanbul: Kaknüs Yay›nlar›, 2012), 128 ss. ISBN 978-975-256-356-8
Eliade’nin düflüncesinin ana temalar›ndan birisi arkaik ontoloji olarak isimlendirdi¤i, modernlik öncesi kadim dünyan›n dinî düflünceleri ve buna ba¤l› olarak gelifltirdikleri kozmolojileridir. Ona göre kutsal
varolufl tarz› ile dind›fl› varolufl tarz›, birbirine bütünüyle z›t iki varoluflsal tav›rd›r. Eliade eserlerinde, bu iki
varolufl tarz›n›n tezahürlerini genifl bir flekilde incelemektedir. Eliade’ye göre arkaik dünyada dinî bir süreklilik mevcuttur. Dinin ve kutsal›n bu süreklili¤i, modern zamanlara kadar hayatiyetini devam ettirebilmifltir.
Bu süreklilik, modern insan›n bilinçalt›nda da devam etmektedir. Ancak modern insan, kendisini
geçmiflten tümüyle ve bilinçli bir biçimde kopard›¤› için, kendi bilinçalt›nda süren bu dinî yap›lar›n fark›nda de¤ildir.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD, Karnaval ve Yamyam [çeviren O¤uz Adan›r] (‹stanbul: Bo¤aziçi Üniversitesi Yay›nevi, 2012), 64 ss. ISBN 978-605-423-879-8
Hiçlikle birlikte yaflamay› ö¤renmek gerekmektedir. Sahip oldu¤u insan› her fleye karfl› duyars›z k›lma gücü sayesinde nihilist olan bir fley varsa o da sistemdir. Baudrillard’›n deyimiyle sistem “hakikaten
383
384
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
inkârc›d›r”, çünkü kendisi hiçli¤in, her türlü yan›lsaman›n inkâr edilmifl biçimidir. Meydan okuyan, dünyan›n bir yan›lsamaya benzedi¤ini iddia edip, bir fleyler olmas› gerekirken neden hiçbir fley olmad›¤›n› soran ve ‘hiç bitip tükenmeyecek bir anlam görünümüne sahip hiçli¤in peflini b›rakmayan’ radikal düflünceden baflka geriye bir fley kalmam›flt›r. Bu bir karfl› metafizik düflünce de¤il, tamam›yla metafizik düflünce
karfl›t› olarak nitelendirilebilecek bir düflüncedir.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD, Neden Her fiey Hala Yok Olup Gitmedi? [çeviren O¤uz Adan›r] (‹stanbul: Bo¤aziçi
Üniversitesi Yay›nevi, 2012), 40 ss. ISBN 978-605-423-878-1
E¤er do¤al dünya bize ba¤›fllanm›fl olan bir fleyse, bu durumda ona bir karfl›l›k verilmesi gerekmektedir. Karfl›l›k verilemiyorsa bu durumda do¤al dünyan›n yok edilmesi gerekir. ‹nsanl›k da do¤al dünyaya
karfl› bu flekilde davranmakta ve modernleflmenin bafllang›c›ndan bu yana onu garip bir flekilde yok etmeye, soyut bir varl›¤a dönüfltürmeye ve kendisinden tamam›yla kurtulmam›z› sa¤layacak egemen bir yap›
oluflturmaya çal›flmaktad›r. San›r›m do¤al dünyan›n yerine kendi ellerimizle oluflturdu¤umuz dünya boyutlar›na oluflan bir güç koyarak, ayn› boyutlara ulaflan teknolojik bir dolap çevirerek, yani denetim alt›na al›nabilen bir evren oluflturarak bafllang›çtan bu yana bize bir karfl›l›k beklenmeden verilen ve k›ymetini bilmeyerek yitirdi¤imiz her fleyin zihnimizde yol açt›¤› kayg›dan kurtulmaya çal›fl›yoruz.
ZYGMUNT BAUMAN, Yaflam Sanat› [çeviren Ak›n Sar›] (‹stanbul: Versus Yay›nlar›, 2012) 200ss. ISBN
978-605-569-149-3
Dünya üzerindeki milyarlarca insan›n farkl› beklentileri ve amaçlar› olsa da tek bir ortak hayali var:
Mutlu olmak. Hepimiz mutlu olmak için çabal›yor, bunun için yaflamlar›m›zda baz› seçimler yap›yor, baz› fleylerden vazgeçiyor, k›sacas› yaflamlar›m›za yön vermeye çal›fl›yoruz. Peki nedir bu mutluluk denen
muamma? Gerçekten aran›p bulunabilecek bir fley mi, yoksa beyhude yere peflinden koflulan, asl›nda tamamen rastlant›lara ba¤l› olan bir fley midir? Mutlulu¤u ararken, kader dedi¤imiz fleyin a¤lar›nda debelenen bir piyondan m› ibaretiz, yoksa seçimlerimiz sayesinde kendi yaflamlar›m›z› “yaratan” sanatç›lar m›y›z? Zygmunt Bauman, mutlulu¤u haz›r reçetelerle ulafl›labilecek bir fleye, yaflam› da adeta metaya indirgeyen yaflad›¤›m›z ak›flkan modern ça¤›n açmazlar›n› ve ikilemlerini bir bir önümüze seriyor ve yaflamlar›m›za vurulan prangalar›n, dayat›lan yaflam tasar›lar›n›n, sözde bizim ad›m›za yap›lan seçimlerin iç yüzünü ortaya koyuyor.
TOMMASO BERTELÊ, Venedik ve Kostantiniye: Tarihte Osmanl›-Venedik ‹liflkileri [çeviren Mahmut H.
fiakiro¤lu] (‹stanbul: Kitap Yay›nevi, Baflvuru Kitapl›¤› Dizisi, 2012), 520 ss. ISBN 978-605105-089-8
Bertelé ‹stanbul’da bulundu¤u s›rada Venedik Saray›’n›n ihtiflam› karfl›s›nda büyülendi ve binan›n
tarihinden hareketle bafllad›¤› araflt›rmalar Osmanl›-Venedik iliflkilerini ele alan bu eserin ortaya ç›kmas›na neden oldu. Bertelé Venedik temsilcilerinin faaliyetlerini incelerken, Osmanl› devlet erkân›yla iliflkilere, tantanal› ve itibarl› günler kadar, ›st›rap dolu günlere de yer verir. Bu iliflkiler aras›nda tarihte büyük bir
iz b›rakmam›fl kifliler yani Galata yöneticileri, kad›lar ve hatta yeniçeriler de kendilerine yer bulur. Venedik Saray›’nda elbette diplomasi, siyaset ve dinsel e¤ilimler baflroldedir ve balyoslarla di¤er temsilcilerin
tutumlar› bunlara göre ifllenir. Bu arada, binada muhtelif zamanlarda kültür adamlar› da kal›r ve eserler ya-
NEW BOOKS
rat›rlar: ilk edebiyat tarihi araflt›rmac›lar›ndan G.B. Donadu, G. Battista Toderini; teflkilat üzerine bir eser
yazan P. Busenello; ‹stanbul’u ve Osmanl› askeri teflkilat›n› inceleyen Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli; Kuzey
Afrika’ya yapt›¤› seyahat izlenimlerini ve II. Osman’›n katli s›ras›ndaki buhranl› günleri kaleme alan dra¤man G.B. Salvago da bunlar aras›ndad›r. Elimizdeki kitap, Venedik balyoslar›n›n yabanc› elçilerle iliflkilerine dair bilgiler de içerir ve komflu elçilik binalar›n›n yap›m›, geliflmesi, konuk kiflilerin özellikleri belirtilir. Venedik balyoslar›n›n Bo¤aziçi taraflar›nda yazl›k mekânlar edinme veya baflta veba olmak üzere
hastal›klardan kaçma giriflimleri s›ras›nda be¤endikleri yerlerden bahsederken de Bo¤aziçi’nin Avrupa yakas›n›n geliflmesine ve salg›n hastal›klara dair önemli ayr›nt›lar aktar›r. Kitab›n zengin görsel malzemeleri araflt›rmac›lar ve tarih merakl›lar› için ayr› bir kazanç oluflturmaktad›r.
NANCY BISAHA, Do¤u ile Bat›’n›n Yarat›l›fl› (‹stanbul: Dost Kitabevi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 330 ss. ISBN 978975-298-458-5
Eski Yunan ve Latin kaynaklar›ndan beslenen ‹talyan hümanistleri XIV. yüzy›lda Türklerin Bat›’ya
do¤ru ilerleyiflleri, özellikle de ‹stanbul’un fethedilifli karfl›s›nda Haçl› seferleri konusunda kendilerinden
önceki yazarlar›n düflüncelerini ele al›rlar. Ancak Haçl› düflüncesine iliflkin yarg›lar› art›k daha seküler ve
ideolojilerden ar›nm›fl olarak çözümlemeye bafllarlar. ‹talya’daki hümanistler H›ristiyan düflüncesinin oluflturdu¤u Türk tehdidi alg›s›n› benimsemekle birlikte, ‹slam karfl›t› baz› konular› da yeni bak›fl aç›lar›yla ifllerler. Çok kapsaml› bir kaynakçaya dayanan bu kitapta, aralar›nda Leonardo Bruni, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco Petrarca gibi iyi bilinen hümanistlerin de bulundu¤u çok say›da yazar ve düflünürün Bat›’daki Türk
ilerlemesi karfl›s›nda Haçl› fikrini ele al›fl biçimi inceleniyor.
J. M. BLAUT, Sömürgecili¤in Dünya Modeli: Co¤rafi Yay›lmac›l›k ve Avrupa-Merkezci Tarih [çeviren Serbun Behçet] (‹stanbul: Dergâh Yay›nlar›, 2012), 351 ss. ISBN 978-975-995-303-4
1492’de Amerika k›tas›n›n keflfiyle bir Avrupa-merkezci bak›fl aç›s›n›n temelleri de at›lmaya baflland› denilebilir. Yeni bir ekonomik iliflkiler a¤› ve yeni karfl›lafl›lan toplumlar karfl›s›nda “Avrupa” merkezli bir dünyay› anlamland›rma çabas› h›z kazand›. ‹flleyen sürecin “egemen”i sürecin nas›l iflledi¤i ve nas›l iflleyece¤i hakk›nda da bir söz söyleyecekti elbette. Bu kitapta yazar bütün bu süreci yöneten dili ve bak›fl aç›s›n› masaya yat›r›p elefltirel bir okumaya tabi tutmaktad›r.
MARTIN VAN BRUINESSEN, Kürdoloji’nin Bahçesinde: Kürdologlar ve Kürdoloji Üzerine Söylefli ve Makaleler [çeviren Mustafa Topal] (‹stanbul :‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 168 ss. ISBN 978-975-051-058-8
Özellikle Kürtlerin tarihi, siyasi ve toplumsal yap›s› ile ilgili yapt›¤› araflt›rmalarla dünya çap›nda
tan›nan bir bilim insan› olan Martin Van Bruinessen, Kürdoloji’nin Bahçesinde de yine zengin gözlem ve
analizler ortaya koyuyor. Kitaptaki yaz› ve söyleflilerde, 1970li y›llardan itibaren Kürtlerle ilgilenmeye
bafllamas›n›n arkas›nda yatan nedenleri anlatan, Kürtlerle ilgili araflt›rmalar›n›n geliflimi konusunda Evliya
Çelebiden ‹smail Beflikçi’ye ve Wadie Jwaideh’e uzanan yelpazeyi sunan Van Bruinessen, Kürt varl›¤›n›
inkâr edenlerin argümanlar›n›n zay›fl›¤›n› da gözler önüne seriyor. Ancak bunu yaparken, Kürt milliyetçi
tarih yaz›c›l›¤›n› da elefltirmeyi ihmal etmiyor. Sürgün dolay›s›yla Avrupaya yerleflen ya da daha sonra orada yetiflen kuflaklar›n Kürt ulusal bilincinin yerleflmesine yapt›¤› katk›lar› da de¤erlendiren Van Bruinessen, ele ald›¤› konulara yaklafl›m›nda sergiledi¤i gerçek biliminsan› so¤ukkanl›l›¤›yla, herhangi bir taraf-
385
386
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
tan olma kayg›s› gütmeden tarihsel ve sosyolojik olgular› net bir flekilde gösteriyor. Kürdoloji’nin Bahçesinde sadece Kürt toplumunu anlamak için de¤il, Türkiye toplumunun açmazlar›n› kavramak için de çok
iyi bir f›rsat. Türkoloji varsa Kürdoloji de vard›r. Ama Kürdoloji derken iki de¤iflik fley ifade ederiz. Birincisi, bir bilim dal› olarak Kürdoloji: Kürtlerle ilgili bütün bilimler; tarih, edebiyat, dil bilgisi, Kürdistan
toplum yap›s› ile ilgili sosyolojik ve antropolojik incelemelerin hepsi Kürdolojiye girer. Bunun yan› s›ra
ayn› zamanda Kürdoloji bilimsel kurumlar demektir; bilim akademileri, e¤itim enstitüleri vb. Bu anlamda
Kürdoloji hemen hemen yok, yani çok zay›f. Kurumlar çok az.
PETER BURKE, Tarih ve Toplumsal Kuram [çeviren Mete Tuncay] (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf› Yurt Yay›nlar›,
2012), 240 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-280-4
Tarih ve Toplumsal Kuram, tarih metodolojisinin kilit metinlerinden biri. Kilit, kitab›n aç›l›fl cümlesindeki soruda gizli: Toplumsal kuram›n tarihçilere faydas› nedir ve tarihin toplumsal kuramc›lara faydas› nedir? Peter Burke’nin bu çal›flmas›, tarih disiplinini açmaya bir ça¤r›. Tarih ile sosyal bilimlerin di¤er alanlar› aras›ndaki s›n›rlar› sorgulayan; tarihi daha fazla sosyal bilimsel, sosyal bilimleri de daha fazla
tarihsel olmaya davet eden bir ça¤r›. Tarih ve Toplumsal Kuram, her türlü teoriden, model kurma çabas›ndan, kavramsal analizden, karfl›laflt›rmal› tarihsel çal›flmalardan kaçma e¤iliminin maalesef hâlâ hüküm
sürdü¤ü Türkiye’de gerek profesyonel tarihçiler gerekse de tarih ö¤rencileri için temel bir baflvuru kayna¤›. Bir yandan mesle¤in evrensel ölçütlerini merkeze alan, di¤er yandan da disiplinler aras› bir tarih yaz›m›n›n imkânlar›n› ve zenginliklerini gösteren bu kitapta okur; toplumsal cinsiyetten s›n›fa, iktidardan hegemonya ve direnifle, zihniyetten sözlü tarihe kadar bir dizi kilit kavram›n önemli bir tarihçinin perspektifinden aç›mlanmas›n› da izleyebilecek.
HAM‹T BOZARSLAN, Arap ‹syanlar›ndan Önce ve Sonra Ortado¤u’nun Siyasal Sosyolojisi [çeviren Melike
Ifl›k Durmaz] (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 184 ss. ISBN 978-975-051-045-8
Arap isyanlar›n›n öncesine ve sonras›na dair hem temel bir bilgi hem de yetkin bir yorum sunan Ortado¤u’nun Siyasal Sosyolojisi, Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’nun s›n›rlar› içindeki Arap bölgelerinin Birinci
Dünya Savafl› ertesinde bölünmesi, 1948’de ‹srail devletinin kurulmas›, 1979’da SSCB’nin Afganistan’›
iflgali ve ‹ran Devrimi, 1980-1990 aras›nda ç›kan bölgesel savafllar ve son olarak 11 Eylül 2001 sald›r›s›ndan sonra bafllayan teröre karfl› savafl gibi olgular›n, meydana geldikleri yerlerden çok uzaklarda bile siyasal dinamikler yaratabilece¤ini ortaya koyuyor. Hegemonya ve siyasal mühendislik kavramlar›ndan yola
ç›karak Ortado¤u’da otoritarizm olgusunu inceleyen, devletlerin çeflitli zor kullanma biçimleriyle ayakta
tutuldu¤unu gösteren çal›flma, geçmifle dayanan siyasal muhalefet biçimlerini ve az›nl›klarla ilgili tarihsel
olgular› ele al›rken, yeni direnifl biçimleriyle paralel giden genel bir toplumsal y›lg›nl›¤a da dikkat çekiyor.
CAH‹T CAN, Türk Hukukunun Kökenleri ve Türk Hukuk Devrimi (‹stanbul: Kaynak Yay›nlar›, 2012), 216 ss.
ISBN 978-975-343-635-9
Prof. Dr. Cahit Can’›n Türk Hukukunun Kökenleri ve Türk Hukuk Devrimi kitab›, Cumhuriyet
Devrimi’nin karakterini, onun yaratt›¤› hukukun beslenme kaynaklar›ndan biri olan “resepsiyon” (d›fltan
alma) üzerinden incelemektedir. Kitap bu bak›mdan, türünün en kapsaml›, en özgün ve en baflar›l› örne¤i
olarak, hem Türk hukuk tarihi çal›flmalar› içinde çok önemli bir yere sahiptir hem de Cumhuriyet Devri-
NEW BOOKS
mi’nin siyasi ve toplumsal karakterini, beslendi¤i ve kendi toplumsal koflullar› ile birlefltirerek içsellefltirdi¤i hukuk üzerinden inceleyen yönüyle, siyasi ve toplumsal devrim tarihçili¤imiz alan›nda özgün ve
önemli bir yere sahiptir. Türk Hukukunun Kökenleri ve Türk Hukuk Devrimi kitab› ayn› zamanda bir karfl›devrim tarihi. Bir yandan da, birinci kitapta oldu¤u gibi, yine, “Cumhuriyet devriminin öngörülmeyen
bugünü” ne gelifli irdeliyor ama hemen hemen hiç kimsenin yapmad›¤› bir yönüyle: Neden öngörülemedi¤inin nedenlerini irdeliyor.
DIPESH CHAKRABARTY, Avrupa’y› Taflralaflt›rmak: Postkolonyal Düflünce ve Tarihsel Farkl›l›k [çeviren ‹lker Cörüt] (‹stanbul: Bo¤aziçi Üniversitesi Yay›nevi, 2012), 356 ss. ISBN 978-605-423-876-7
Dipesh Chakrabarty, siyasal modernlik, yani yönetim, bürokrasi ve kapitalist giriflim olgusu hakk›nda düflünmenin, dünyan›n hiçbir yerinde, Avrupa kökenli kategorilere ve kavramlara baflvurmadan mümkün olamad›¤›na dikkat çekmektedir. Chakrabarty, vatandafll›k, devlet, sivil toplum, kamusal alan, insan
haklar›, kanun önünde eflitlik, birey, kamusal ve özel ayr›m›, özne fikri, demokrasi, halk egemenli¤i, sosyal adalet, bilimsel rasyonalite gibi kavramlar›n Avrupa tarihinin ve düflüncesinin yükünü tafl›d›¤›n› vurgulamaktad›r. Ona göre, sosyal bilimlerin yap›s›n› flekillendiren Bat›l› filozof ve düflünürlerin kuflaklar boyunca ürettikleri bütün insanl›¤› kapsayan teorileri, insanl›¤›n önemli bir bölümünü yani Bat›-d›fl› kültürlerde yaflayanlar› k›smen ve hatta bazen tamam›yla dikkate almam›flt›r. Bu durumun fark›nda olan Avrupal› filozoflar her zaman bu tavr› teorik olarak meflrulaflt›rman›n yollar›n› aram›flt›r. Üçüncü Dünya sosyal
biliminin gündelik paradoksu, bünyevi olarak bizden habersiz bu teorileri kendi toplumlar›n› anlamak için
çok kullan›fll› bulmas›d›r. Chakrabarty, Modern Avrupal› âlimlerin deneysel olarak cahili olduklar› bu toplumlar hakk›nda kehaneti and›r›r öngörülerde bulunma hakk›n› nereden ald›¤›n› sorgulamakta, Avrupa
merkezli bak›fl› iade etmek üzere Avrupa’y› taflralaflt›rmaya ve ya merkezsizlefltirmeye çal›flmaktad›r.
STEPHEN CHAMBERS, Ar›burnu Ç›karma [çeviren ‹smail Hakk› Y›lmaz] (‹stanbul: Türkiye ‹fl Bankas› Kültür Yay›nlar›, 2012), 304 ss. ISBN 978-605-360-335-125
Nisan 1915 sabah› Avustralya ve Yeni Zelanda birliklerinden oluflan Anzak Kolordusu, Gelibolu Yar›madas›’ndaki Ar›burnu bölgesinin engebeli, sarp arazisindeki küçük bir koya ç›karma yaparak komutanlar›n›n hedef gösterdi¤i tepeleri ele geçirmek için var güçleriyle savaflm›flt›r. Ancak Anzaklar, karfl›lar›nda
yurdunu istilaya gelen düflman› püskürtmeye kararl› Türk askerini bulmufltur. Özellikle ç›karman›n yap›ld›¤› ilk iki gün, her iki taraf›n da modern savafl›n gereklilikleri yan›nda kiflisel kahramanl›k örneklerini bolca
sergiledi¤i kanl› çarp›flmalar yaflanm›flt›r. Anzaklar, fedakâr mücadeleleriyle, baflta kendilerini karfl›layan
komutanlardan Mustafa Kemal olmak üzere Türklerin sayg›s›n› kazanm›fl ve bu sayg›ya hürmeten ç›karma
yapt›klar› koya, sonradan Anzak Koyu ismi verilmifltir. Elinizdeki kitap, Anzaklar›n Ar›burnu’ndaki cehennem gibi ilk iki gününün hikâyesini, onlar›n gözünden anlatmaktad›r. Ayn› zamanda bir rehber olarak düzenlenmifl kitapta, Ar›burnu bölgesinde görülmesi gereken yerlere iliflkin ayr›nt›l› bilgi de verilmektedir.
PAUL CONNERTON, Modernite Nas›l Unutturur [çeviren Kübra Kelebeko¤lu] (‹stanbul: Sel Yay›nc›l›k, 2012),
160 ss. ISBN 978-975-570-560-6
Olaylar›, yerleri ve fleyleri neden unuturuz? Modernite hat›rlama yetimizi nas›l etkiler? Connerton
modern toplumun belle¤imizi nas›l afl›nd›rd›¤›n› ele al›yor: ‹nsanüstü h›z, ö¤renilemeyecek denli büyük
387
388
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
mega kentler, emek süreciyle ba¤› kopmufl tüketicilik, nas›l ve kimin üretti¤ini bilmedi¤imiz nesneler, kent
mimarisinin k›sa ömrü, geçici ifller, sürekli maruz kal›nan görüntü bombard›man›, toplumsal iliflkilerin bulan›klaflmas›. Söz konusu olan bellek yitimi de¤il kiflisel an› ve al›flkanl›k bile edinememek. Sherlock Holmes’un Watson’a sürekli olarak dedi¤i gibi: “Görüyorsun ama gözlemlemiyorsun.”Aflina oldu¤umuz toplumsal iliflkilerle örülmüfl bir yaflam ve çal›flma deneyiminin mümkün olmad›¤› modern dünyada hayat›n
ölçüsü insan de¤ildir. Bu bellek yitiminin yol açt›¤› tedirginli¤e, geçmifl zaman modalar›na ya da an›tlara
duyulan tuhaf bir ilgi efllik ediyor ve bu ilgi nostalji tacirleri taraf›ndan sömürülüyor. Belle¤imizi, ça¤›m›z› kuflatan kolektif amneziden kurtarman›n yolu ise nostalji aflk› ya da an› yaflama sarhofllu¤undan de¤il
modern kapitalizmin unutturdu¤unu hat›rlamaktan geçiyor.
ANDRE COMTE-SPONVILLE, Kapitalizm Ahlaki midir? Zaman›m›z›n Kimi Gülünçlükleri ve Zorbal›klar› Üzerine [çeviren Derya Yankaya] (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 253 ss. ISBN 978-975-050-996-4
Kapitalizm ahlaki midir? Kapitalizmin insan›n insana yapabilecekleri konusunda özgürlefltirici bir
taraf› oldu¤u düflünülürse, bu potansiyeli k›s›tlay›c› bir ifllevi olan ahlakla çeliflti¤i varsay›l›r. Öyle midir
hakikaten? Marksist bir geçmifli olan Frans›z filozof André Comte-Sponville, üniversitelerde düzenlenen
konferanslarda yapt›¤› konuflmalar› toplad›¤› bu kitapta, biraz da k›flk›rt›c› bir üslupla, kapitalizmin ahlakl› bir ekonomik sistem olup olmad›¤›n› tart›fl›yor. Bunu yaparken, amac›n› da bireyin görüflünü netlefltirmesi, kararlar›n› vermesi, k›sacas› bugünün dünyas›n›n dayatt›¤› çeflitli güçlüklere karfl› profesyonel, ahlaki ve siyasi sorumluluklar›n› üstlenmesi gibi konularda yard›m etmek, diye ortaya koyuyor. Tart›flma esas›na göre, Comte-Sponville derdini anlatt›ktan sonra, ikinci bölümde sorular› al›yor ve bunlar› tek tek cevapl›yor.
fiER‹FE ÇA⁄IN, Bir fiiir Elefltirmeni Olarak Nurullah Ataç (‹stanbul: Dergâh Yay›nlar›, 2012), 295 ss. ISBN
978-975-995-259-4
Nurullah Ataç, Cumhuriyet döneminde ikilemleri, çeliflkileri, kalem kavgalar›yla haf›zalarda yer etmifl; kimi zaman övülüp samimi bulunmufl, bazen de nesnellikten uzak olmakla suçlanm›fl, buna karfl›l›k
daima ses getirmifl bir elefltirmendir. Her söyledi¤i do¤ru oldu¤u için de¤il, fakat elefltiriye ve fliir teorisine ait görüflleri, kavramlar› iyi ifade edebildi¤i, aç›k seçik ortaya koyabildi¤i için Ataç’›n, elefltiri ve fliirin
ne oldu¤unun ve ne olmad›¤›n› anlama konusunda baflvurabilecek en iyi kaynaklardan biri oldu¤unu söyleyebiliriz.
RÜfiTÜ ÇEL‹K, Kandiye Olaylar›: Girit’in Osmanl› Devletinden Kopuflu [çeviren Bülend Tuna] (‹stanbul:
Kitap Yay›nevi, Akademik Dünya Dizisi, 2012), 93 ss. ISBN 978-605-105-083-6
Bu kitapta, Do¤u Akdeniz’in ikinci en büyük adas› olan Girit’te, 6-7 Eylül 1898’de Kandiye’de ortaya ç›kan olaylar ele al›n›yor. 1897’deki muhtariyet ilan›ndan bir y›l sonra, Müslüman ahalinin tepkisi sonucu ortaya ç›kan 1898 Kandiye olaylar› Girit’in Osmanl› hâkimiyetinden kopmas› sürecinde bir menzil
tafl› oldu. Büyük devletlerin bu olaylar nedeniyle Osmanl› devletine uygulad›klar› bask› artt›, Osmanl› asker ve memurlar› Girit’ten ç›kart›lm›fl ve 1899’da Yunan kral›n›n o¤lu Prens Georgios vali olarak atand›.
1908’de Girit Meclisinin Yunanistan’a ilhak karar›n› ilan etmesini izleyen geliflmelerden sonra, 1913 y›l›nda imzalanan Londra Antlaflmas› ile Osmanl› devleti Girit üzerindeki haklar›ndan vazgeçti¤ini bildirdi.
NEW BOOKS
Yunan kral› ayn› y›l Girit’in Yunanistan’a ba¤land›¤›n› dünyaya ilan etti. Kitab›n ilk bölümünde Kandiye
olaylar› öncesi adadaki durum de¤erlendiriliyor. ‹kinci Bölümde ise adan›n Osmanl› devletinden fiilen
kopmas›na ve göçlerin h›zlanmas›na neden olan Kandiye olaylar›, bast›rmak için al›nan önlemler ve Avrupa devletlerinin tutumu ele al›n›yor. Son bölümde ise adadan Osmanl› askerlerinin çekilmesiyle birlikte
güvenlikleri tehlikeye düflen Müslüman ahalinin adadan kitlesel olarak göçmeleri ve bu göçler karfl›s›nda
özellikle Osmanl› devletinin tak›nd›¤› tutumla, göçmenlerin sevk ve iskânlar› için yapt›¤› düzenlemelere
de¤iniliyor. Girit’ten göçler denilince hem gündelik yaflamda, hem de akademik alanda akla mübadele geliyor. Oysa mübadele öncesinde, 1898 y›l›nda gerçekleflmifl ve yaklafl›k 40.000 kiflilik bir göçmen kitlesinin kat›ld›¤› büyük bir göç hareketi de yafland›. Üstelik kendilerine “Eski Giritli” diyen bu göçmenlerin say›s› mübadele ile Türkiye’ye gelen ve kendilerine “Yeni Giritli” denilen gruptan fazlad›r
HAL‹S ÇET‹N, Korku Siyaseti ve Siyaset Korkusu (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 400 ss. ISBN 978-975051-003-8
Korku mu siyaseti yaratm›flt›r yoksa siyaset mi korkuyu yaratm›flt›r? Korkutan, korku ve korkan
aras›ndaki iliflki mi siyasettir yoksa iktidar, meflruiyet ve itaat aras›ndaki iliflki mi korkudur? Tanr› m› korkuyu yaratm›flt›r yoksa korku mu Tanr›y› yaratm›flt›r? ‹nsan korkuya boyun e¤mek için mi yarat›lm›flt›r
yoksa korkuyu yok etmek için mi vard›r? ‹nsan insandan korunmak için mi korkuyu yaratm›flt›r yoksa insan insan›n korkusu olsun diye mi yarat›lm›flt›r korku? ‹nsan korkular›n›n m› ürünüdür yoksa korkular insanlar›n m›? ‹nsan korkudan korunmak için mi iktidar üretir yoksa iktidarlar insandan korunmak için mi
korku üretir? Neden ve Niçin korktu¤umuz mudur siyaset yoksa Neden ve Niçin sorular›ndan korkutuldu¤umuz mudur siyaset? Korku siyasetinin ve siyaset korkusunun izini sürüyor bu kitap. Modern-klasik siyaset teorilerinde ve Türk-‹slam devlet gelene¤i denen siyaset kültüründe korku-iktidar iliflkisinin nas›l kuruldu¤una bak›yor. Mercek tutulan as›l nokta: Türkiye’nin resmî ideolojisine damgas›n› vuran otoriter devlet ülküsü Halis Çetin, Türkiye’nin yerleflik siyasal kültürünün muhalefet korkusuyla, özgürlük korkusuyla, kaos korkusuyla flekillendi¤ini gösteriyor.
TÜLÜN DE⁄‹RMENC‹, II. Osman Devrinde De¤iflen Güç Sembolleri (‹stanbul: Kitap Yay›nevi, 2012), 362
ss. ISBN 978-605-105-055-3
23 fiubat 1618’deki cülusunun hemen ard›ndan, Sultan II. Osman bir kitap yazd›rmak üzere Meddah Medhî’yi huzuruna kabul eder. Darüssaade A¤as› el-Hac Mustafa A¤a’n›n tavsiyesiyle bu göreve
nail olan ve sarayda uzun zamand›r meddahl›k ve tarih okuyuculu¤u yapan Medhî, buluflma esnas›nda
sultana ne tür bir kitap emretti¤ini sorar ve yazmak üzere üç farkl› eser önerir: Dâsitân-› Hamza, Süleymânnâme-i Kebîr ve fiehnâme-i Firdevsî. Medhî’ye göre, sultan›n yapaca¤› seçim onun gelecekte nas›l
bir yönetici olaca¤›n›n da göstergesi olacakt›r; sultan e¤er fiehnâme-i Firdevsî’yi seçerse, bu onun âlemi bilmeye karfl› merak› ve adaletli olmaya da niyeti oldu¤unun iflaretidir. II. Osman ve Mustafa A¤a
için Meddah Medhî taraf›ndan tercüme edilen ve sarayda resimlenen fiehnâme-i Türkî nüshalar›n›n giriflinde nakledilen bu olay, Osmanl› saray›nda haz›rlanan resimli kitaplar›n sadece edebi bir zevkin ya
da tek bafl›na kitap merak›n›n neticesinde üretilmediklerini, içinde yarat›ld›klar› tarihsel ba¤lam›n siyasi ve kültürel dinamikleri ile flekillenen pek çok farkl› roller üstlendiklerini düflündürür. Bu kitap genç
bir sultan› ölüme götüren, veraset tart›flmalar›, siyasi mücadele ve çekiflmelerle geçen çalkant›l› bir dört
y›l›n sonunda, II. Osman’›n saray›nda üretilen resimli kitaplar›, tüm bu yaflananlar›n zaviyesinden bakarak okuma ve anlamland›rma denemesidir. Bir yandan da tüm karmaflalar›n içinde genç bir Osmanl› sul-
389
390
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
tan›n›n kiflisel zevk ve meraklar›n› okudu¤u/dinledi¤i ve seyretti¤i kitaplardan yola ç›karak anlama çabas›d›r.
AHMET DEM‹REL, Tek Partinin Yükselifli (‹stanbul : ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 372 ss. ISBN 978-975-051-027-4
Ahmet Demirel’in makalelerini bir araya getiren Tek Partinin Yükselifli, Milli Mücadele dönemi ve
Cumhuriyetin kurulufl y›llar›ndaki seçimlere ve bu seçimler sonucu oluflan Meclisin yap›s›na odaklan›yor.
Demirel, tek parti rejiminin yavafl yavafl kuruldu¤u bu süreçte, milletvekili adaylar›n›n belirlenmesinden,
Meclisin oluflmas›na kadar geçen zaman içerisinde neler yafland›¤›n› çarp›c› ayr›nt›larla okuyucuya sunuyor. Fikrî ve ideolojik tart›flmalar kadar milletin vekillerinin seçilmesine ve Meclisin oluflmas›na yön veren pratiklere de dikkat çekiyor. Milletvekili profillerinden, muhalefetin taleplerine, Do¤u ve Güneydo¤u
bölgelerinin Meclisteki temsilinden Atatürk dönemindeki Kemalizm anlay›fl›na kadar kapsaml› bir kurulufl
dönemi tahlili yap›yor. Tek Partinin Yükselifli, Milli Mücadeleden çok partili siyasi hayata uzanan süreçte
yaflananlar›, Meclis ve vekillere odaklanan kapsaml› bir araflt›rma, ayr›nt›l› istatistikler ve yetkin bir de¤erlendirmeyle inceliyor.
FATMAGÜL DEM‹REL, Osmanl›’dan Cumhuriyet’e Esnaf ve Ticaret (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf› Yurt Yay›nlar›,
2012), 240 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-275-0
Ülkemizde her y›l yap›lan Ahilik Haftas› kutlamalar›nda de¤iflik etkinliklerle ahilik gelene¤i yaflat›lmaya ve bu gelenek topluma hat›rlat›lmaya çal›fl›lmaktad›r. Bu etkinlikler kapsam›nda, 2010 y›l›nda Y›ld›z Teknik Üniversitesi’nde “Osmanl›’dan Cumhuriyet’e Esnaf ve Ticaret” konulu bir sempozyum düzenlendi. Sempozyumda sunulan tebli¤lerin bir araya getirilmesiyle oluflan bu kitap, Osmanl›’daki ve Cumhuriyet’in ilk y›llar›ndaki esnaf ve ticaretin farkl› kesitlerini ortaya koymaktad›r. Makaleleri Fatmagül Demirel derledi ve sunufl yaz›s›yla de¤erlendirmelerde bulundu. Yavuz Cezar, “Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’nda Ticaretin Maddi Unsurlar› Üzerine”; Cengiz K›rl› ve Betül Baflaran, “18. Yüzy›l Sonlar›nda Osmanl› Esnaf›”; Nalan Turna, “Yeniçeri-Esnaf ‹liflkisi: Bir Analiz”; Aziz Tekdemir, “Ticaret Nezareti’nin Kuruluflu ve
‹dari Birimleri”; Alp Yücel Kaya, “19. Yüzy›l ‹zmir’inde Tüccarlar ve Esnaflar” veya “Hac›a¤alar, Beyler
ve Frenkler”; Cihan Osmana¤ao¤lu Karahasano¤lu, “Zimmi Esnaf ve Tacirlerin Yabanc› Devlet Vatandafll›¤› ‹ddialar›n›n Osmanl› Hukukuna Etkisi”; Fehmi Y›lmaz, “‹stanbul’da Tütüncü Esnaf›”; Sacit Kutlu, “‹ttihat ve Terakki Cemiyeti ve Esnaf Örgütleri”; Arzu Terzi, “Osmanl› Devleti’nin Mütareke Dönemi Fiyat
Politikalar›” ve Nevin Coflar, “Osmanl›’dan Cumhuriyet’e Tüketim Al›flkanl›klar›” bafll›kl› makaleleri ile
bu çal›flmaya destek verdiler.
D‹LfiA DEN‹Z, Yol/Re: Dersim ‹nanç Sembolizmi (‹stanbul : ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 384 ss. ISBN 978975-051-019-2
Dersim, kendine mahsus bir dünya. Üst bafll›klardan taflan, Kürtlerle, Zazalarla, Alevilikle ilgili etno-dinsel ve kültürel tasniflere s›¤mayan bir yan› var. Dilfla Deniz, Dersime e¤ilen ilk antropolojik çal›flmaya dayanan kitab›nda, okuru bu kendine mahsus dünyaya davet ediyor. Dersimle ilgili yüceltici ve karalay›c› efsanelerin perdesini kald›r›p, ola¤anüstü incelikli bir bak›flla, gerçek inanç dünyas›na ve gerçek
efsanelere e¤iliyor.
NEW BOOKS
NAH‹T DURU, Aray›fl (Ankara: ‹mge Kitapevi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 280 ss. ISBN 978-975-533-707-4
Seni bir kez daha uyar›yorum, dergiyi bir an önce kapat Yar›n olacaklardan ben de¤il, sen sorumlu
olacaks›n Dikkatli ol! Mert ve cesur bir çocu¤a benziyorsun. Bu sözler, S›k›yönetim Komutan› Korgeneral Recep Ergun’a ait. Karfl›s›nda oturan kifli, gazeteci-yazar Nahit Duru. 12 Eylül dönemi Ülkenin her yerinde s›k›yönetim ve soka¤a ç›kma yasa¤› var. Bülent Ecevit, darbenin karanl›¤›na bir mum ›fl›¤› yakmak
için bir avuç yürekli, özverili ayd›nla birlikte Aray›fl dergisini ç›kar›yor. Nahit Duru da o derginin Yaz› ‹flleri Müdürü. Nahit Duru bu kitab›nda, 12 Eylül darbesinin henüz birinci y›l›nda, çok zor koflullar alt›nda
verilen bir demokrasi ve bas›n özgürlü¤ü mücadelesini anlat›yor ve yak›n tarihin pek bilinmeyen bir yönünü, Ecevit’in özel notlar›yla, Ertu¤rul Özkök’ten Ayd›n Do¤ana, Murat Yetkinden Oruç Aruobay’a kadar,
bugünden bak›ld›¤›nda okura çok flafl›rt›c› gelecek isimlerin çabalar›na da yer vererek ayd›nlat›yor
MAHF‹ E⁄‹LMEZ, Kolay Ekonomi (‹stanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2012), 216 ss. ISBN 978-975-141-498-4
‹çinden ç›k›lmaz ekonomik sorunlar› anlamak için kolay okunan bir elkitab›! Bu kitap, ekonomi
e¤itimi almam›fl ya da bir dönem alsa da konunun özüne vâk›f olamam›fllar›n, iflin özünü kavramas›na yard›mc› olmak amac›yla haz›rland›. Bunun yan› s›ra ekonomi ö¤renimi gördü¤ü halde baflka konularda çal›flt›¤› için ekonomiden uzak kalm›fl olanlar›n bilgilerini tazelemeleri için de haz›rland›. Bu kitab›n baflkaca hiçbir amac› yoktur. Mahfi E¤ilmez’in bu kitab›yla herkes her gün gazetelerin ekonomi sayfalar›nda
gördü¤ünüz rakamlar›, istatistikleri kolayca yorumlayabilecektir.
AYTEK‹N ERSAL, Türkiye’de Ulus Devlet ve Ziya Gökalp, Mümtaz Turhan, Erol Güngör (‹stanbul: Ötüken
Neflriyat, 2012), 541 ss. ISBN 978-975-437-894-8
Devrimsiz, reformsuz, ihtilalsiz bir modernleflme aray›fl›, milli kültürü gelifltirecek bir sosyal bilim
yaklafl›m›, dinin ulus kimli¤inin billurlaflmas›nda inkâr edilemez ehemmiyetini kavray›fl, tüm bunlar›n ifade vas›talar› olan dil, tarih ve kültür yaklafl›mlar›n›n k›vam›na kavufltu¤u dönemi II. Meflrutiyette bulma
çabas› Ziya Gökalp’i kaç›n›lmaz olarak gelene¤in kuruculu¤una götürmektedir. Zira dönemin Gökalp’i
milliyetçi muhafazakâr modernleflme aray›fllar›na kuruculuk verecek zenginli¤e fazlas›yla sahiptir. Mütareke sonras› düflüncelerinde görülen k›r›lmalar onu ink›lâpç› münevver kal›b›na sokmaya yetmemifltir. Arkas›ndan gelenlerin tashihleriyle Ziya Gökalp, Mümtaz Turhan, Erol Güngör hatt› teflekkül etmifltir. Bu gelenek, ulus devlet ba¤lam›nda karfl›lafl›lan problemleri çözmek için hasbi tefekküre muhtaç olanlar› kendisine ça¤›rmaya devam eden mümbit bir ak›fla sahip görünmektedir
ADEM ESEN, Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi’nin ‹ktisat Anlay›fl› (‹stanbul: Ötüken Neflriyat, 2012), 194 ss.
ISBN 978-975-437-873-3
Doç. Dr. Adem Esen, Mevlana topra¤›nda Konyal›n›n dertlerine çözümler ararken bir yol bulup da
yüce Mevlana’n›n eserlerini tetkikle ciddi ve bu güne de¤in araflt›r›lmam›fl bir konu omuzlamas›yla bu büyük hamuflun ikram›n› bizlere bu eserle sunmufl bulunuyor. Dr. Esen bu çal›flmas›yla, araflt›rmac›lara bu
madenin varl›¤›na dair izleri göstermektedir. Art›k Hz. Mevlana’n›n evrat ve erkân içinde bir madde anlay›fl›na sahip oldu¤u bu eser ile gözler önüne serilmifltir. Hz. Mevlana’n›n maddi bir mecburiyeti nas›l aflt›¤›n› bilmek tasavvufla iktisat aras›nda kurulmas› gereken sa¤lam köprülerden birisidir.
391
392
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
JEREMY GILBERT, Antikapitalizm ve Kültür: Radikal Teori ve Popüler Politika [çeviren Tu¤ba Sa¤lam] (‹stanbul: Ayr›nt› Yay›nlar›, 2012), 352 ss. ISBN 978-975-539-644-6
Yirmi birinci yüzy›l politikas› ve kültürü aç›s›ndan antikapitalizm gerçekten ne anlama geliyor? Antikapitalizm, küresel geçerlili¤i olsa da, yerele kök salm›fl, taban hareketleri ve eylemlerinin gevflek birli¤i olarak varl›¤›n› ve etkisini sürdürmekle birlikte, tutarl› ve bütünlüklü bir felsefe gelifltirmekte yetersiz
kal›yor. Bu eksikli¤i, Ernesto Laclau, Stuart Hall, Antonio Negri, Gilles Deleuze ve Judith Butler gibi önde gelen radikal düflünürlerin eserlerini temel alan kültürel teori ile Yeni Solun entelektüel miras› birlikte
giderebilir. Antikapitalizm ve Kültür, iflte bu bofllu¤u doldurmay› amaçl›yor ve kültürel çal›flmalar›n radikal gelene¤i ile sermayenin küreselleflmesine direnmeye çal›flan radikal hareketler aras›nda güçlü ba¤lar›n
oldu¤unu savunuyor. Asl›nda, bu ikilinin birbirine ihtiyac› var; bir yanda teori muazzam bir çeflitlilik sergileyen antikapitalist eylemler a¤›n› biçimlendirip yönlendirirken, antikapitalist hareketin büyük enerjisi
ve politik inanc› kültürel çal›flmalara yeni bir soluk kazand›rabilir. Kitap, Deleuze ve Guattari, Laclau ve
Mouffe, Negri ve Hardt olmak üzere üç ikilinin fikirleri ekseninde, ça¤dafl ve radikal demokratik bir Marksist aç›l›m›n küresel mücadeleler aç›s›ndan önemini ortaya koyarak, günümüzün en can al›c› tart›flmalar›na katk›da bulunuyor.
CORRY GUTTSTADT, Türkiye, Yahudiler ve Holokost [çeviren Atilla Dirim] (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›,
2012), 614 ss. ISBN 978-975-051-020-5
Türkiye, ‹kinci Dünya Savafl› s›ras›nda gerçekleflen Yahudi soyk›r›m›yla ilgili nas›l bir politika izledi? Bu konudaki yayg›n ve popüler anlat›ya göre, Avrupa’daki baz› Türk diplomatlar›n›n giriflimleri, binlerce Yahudi’nin soyk›r›mdan kurtulmas›n› sa¤lam›flt›. Elinizdeki kitap, bu korumac›-kurtarmac› tutumun
istisnai, münferit oldu¤unu ortaya koyuyor. Corry Guttstadt, ola¤anüstü ayr›nt›l› incelemesinde, ‹kinci
Dünya Savafl› döneminde Türkiye’nin izledi¤i resmî politikan›n Yahudileri vatandafll›ktan ç›kartarak kaderlerine terk etmek oldu¤unu gösteriyor bize. Birçok Avrupa ülkesinde yaflayan binlerce Yahudi, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti vatandafll›¤›n› kaybetmeleriyle beraber, kaderlerine yani Nazilerin soyk›r›m ayg›t›n›n eline terk edilmifl. Hem Türkiye devletinin ve resmî/milliyetçi ideolojinin az›nl›klar›na bak›fl›na dair, hem de
Türkiye ile Nazi Almanyas› aras›ndaki iliflkilere dair bilgilerimizi derinlefltiren bir çal›flma. Ayr›ca, Nazilerin soyk›r›m› örgütlemekteki dehflet verici titizlik ve kararl›l›klar›n› da gösteriyor.
SERP‹L ÇELENK GÜVENÇ, Dara¤ac›na Mektuplar - Deniz / Yusuf / Hüseyin (Ankara: ‹mge Kitapevi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 406 ss. ISBN 978-975-533-708-1
Kim, tek cana k›ymam›fl devrimciler için ip talep etmiflti? Hangi milletvekili, sat›r aras›nda Bizden
3 kifli yand›, onlardan da yans›n bedduas› okunan dilekçelerle ‹nfazlar durdurulmas›n kampanyas› açm›fl,
faflizme alk›fl tutmufltu? Hangi yazar, Denizler için parka giyen, gözü dönmüfl psikopatlar, efsane k›l›¤›ndaki haydutlar, eli, gözü kanl› mahlûklar, vatan› satan iç düflmanlar diye yazm›fl, darbeci komutanlara övgüler düzmüfltü? Bunlar gerçek yüzleriyle birer birer tarih huzuruna ça¤r›l›yor kitapta... Can Dündar Dara¤ac›na Mektuplar, Deniz Gezmifl ve arkadafllar› hakk›nda bugüne kadar yaz›lan bütün kitaplardan farkl›. Asl›nda bu kitap tarihe kalacak bir ibret belgesidir. Sosyalistlerin ve ayd›nlar›n her türlü yönteme baflvurarak, avukatlar›n bütün yasal imkânlar› kullanarak, baz› milletvekili ve senatörlerin Mecliste mücadele
ederek üç devrimci genci ipten kurtarmak için nas›l ç›rp›nd›klar›n› okuyacaks›n›z. Bu arada Türkiye’deki
sa¤c› bas›n›n intikam ç›¤l›klar›na, ac›mas›zl›klar›na ve kay›ts›zl›klar›na tan›k olacaks›n›z. Ayr›ca d›fl bas›-
NEW BOOKS
n›n K›z›ldere katliam› ile infazlar›n öncesinde ve sonras›nda yaflanan olaylar› nas›l yorumlad›¤›n› da k›rk
y›l gecikmeyle ö¤reneceksiniz. Serpil Çelenk Güvenç, bu kitab› Halit Çelenk’in b›rakt›¤› belgeler üzerine
çal›flarak yazd›. Böylece babas›n›n vasiyetini de yerine getirmifl oldu.
MAHMUT GOLO⁄LU, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Tarihi 1939–1945, 3: Milli fief Dönemi (‹stanbul: Türkiye ‹fl
Bankas› Kültür Yay›nlar›, 2012), 488 ss. ISBN 978-605-360-580-5
Mahmut Golo¤lu’nun Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Tarihi dizisinin üçüncü kitab› Milli fief Dönemi, tek partili dönemin 1939-1945 y›llar›n› kaps›yor. Atatürk’ün vefat›n›n ard›ndan ‹smet ‹nönü’nün cumhurbaflkanl›¤›na seçilmesiyle bafllayan Milli fief Dönemi o y›llar›, dünyay› alt üst eden ‹kinci Dünya Savafl›’n›n hem ülke içindeki hem de Türkiye’nin uluslararas› siyasetindeki yans›malar›yla birlikte ele al›yor. Ülkede yaflanan
ekonomik ve toplumsal s›k›nt›lar›n yan› s›ra, ülkeyi savafltan uzak tutmaya çal›flan ‹nönü’nün uluslararas›
iliflkilerini kolay anlafl›l›r anlat›m›yla mercek alt›na al›yor: ‹nönü’nün kat›ld›¤› Kahire ve Adana Buluflmalar›, Türkiye’nin ‹kinci Dünya Savafl› süresince sürdürdü¤ü uluslararas› denge siyaseti, Varl›k Vergisi baflta olmak üzere ç›kar›lan vergilerin toplumsal yaflam›n dengesini de¤ifltirifli, Hasan Âli Yücel’in öncülü¤ünde kurulan Köy Enstitüleri. ‹kinci Dünya Savafl›’n›n sona erifli ve Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin çok partili döneme geçmesiyle kapanan Milli fief Dönemi’ni bu dizinin son kitab› olan Demokrasiye Geçifl izleyecektir.
FAZIL GÖKÇEK, Küllerinden Do¤an Anka: Ahmet Mithat Efendi Üzerine Yaz›lar (‹stanbul: Dergâh Yay›nlar›,
2012), 247 ss. ISBN 978-975-995-298-3
Edebiyattan müzi¤e, co¤rafyadan dinler tarihine birçok alanda ciltler dolusu eser yazm›fl olan Ahmet Mithat Efendi, ölümünden sonra pek hat›rlanmam›flt›r. Edebiyat tarihlerinde ço¤unlukla ‘önemini yitirmifl bir yazar’ olarak bahsedilmifltir, fakat son y›llarda artan ilgi, onun, ‘küllerinden do¤du¤unun’ bir iflaretidir. Birçok alanda eser vermifl olan Ahmet Mithat Efendi, vefat›n›n 100. y›l›nda Türk edebiyat› ve düflünce tarihi aç›s›ndan k›ymetini korumaktad›r. Faz›l Gökçek’in muhtelif yaz›lar›n›n bir araya getirilmesinden oluflan bu kitab›n Ahmet Mithat Efendi hakk›nda yap›lm›fl araflt›rmalara bir katk› olaca¤›n› düflünüyoruz.
R. IfiIK GÜNGÖR, Görünmez Komite: Yaklaflan ‹syan (‹stanbul: Sel Yay›nc›l›k, 2012), 120 ss. ISBN 978975-570-555-2
“Son otuz y›l›n ‘kriz’lerle geçmesine, iflsiz kitlelere ve iyiden iyiye yavafllayan büyümeye ra¤men
hâlâ ekonomiye inanmam›z› bekliyorlar. Ekonominin krizde olmad›¤›n›, ekonominin kendisinin bir kriz
oldu¤unu art›k görmemiz gerek.” Dünyan›n üzerinde bir hayalet dolafl›yor: Paris ve Londra banliyöleri,
Atina sokaklar›, Puerta del Sol ve Tahrir meydanlar›, “ekonominin kalbi” Wall Street. Yaklaflan ‹syan, hepsini birlefltiren ruhun bir manifestosu olarak görülebilir. “Demokratik” Fransa’da bir terör davas›n›n “kan›t›” olarak sunulan bu kitap, çürüyen “medeniyetimizi”, yaflad›¤›m›z yabanc›laflmay› ve devrim ihtiyac›n› yedi halkada ele al›yor: Benlik, sosyal iliflkiler, ifl ve çal›flma, ekonomi, kent, çevre ve medeniyet. Yaklaflan ‹syan, ekonomistlerin, politikac›lar›n, sosyologlar›n, psikologlar›n, ‘önderlerin’, ‘akil adamlar›n’,
‘kamuoyunun’ ve hatta alternatif olma iddias›ndaki ‘sol geleneklerin’ ne olup bitti¤ine dair geveleyip durduklar› ezberleri bozarken, hepsinden daha parlak tespitleriyle ça¤›m›z›n hakiki bir resmini sunuyor. Bilindik fleyleri duymaktan s›k›lanlar Görünmez Komite’ye kulak vermelidir.
393
394
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
DAVID HARVEY, Sermaye Muammas›: Kapitalizmin Krizleri [çeviren Sungur Savran] (‹stanbul: Sel Yay›nc›l›k, 2012), 312 ss. ISBN 978-975-570-567-5
Beden için kan dolafl›m› neyse, günümüz toplumunun “politik bedeni” için sermaye ak›fl› da odur.
Bu ak›fl yavafllad›¤›nda, kesintiye u¤rad›¤›nda ya da durdu¤unda gündelik hayat da duruyor. Ancak kapitalizmde krizler yaln›zca kaç›n›lmaz de¤il, ayn› zamanda gereklidir. Dolay›s›yla her an patlak vermeye haz›r olsalar da, ekonomi politikalar›na yön verenler taraf›ndan nedense asla öngörülemiyorlar. Sermaye ak›fl›n›n nas›l sürdü¤ü ve neden kesintiye u¤rad›¤› ise kavray›fl yoksunu burjuva iktisatç›lar›n makaleleri, raporlar›, öngörüleri, analizleri ve ekonomi haberleri aras›nda kaybolup gidiyor. Teflhis yok, tedavi de. Bu
esnada kapitalizm toplumlar›n ve bireylerin yaflam›nda y›k›mlar yaratarak dünyaya egemen olmaya devam
ediyor. Peki, anti-kapitalist hareketimizi nereden bafllatmal›y›z? Zihinsel kavray›fllardan m›? Do¤a ile iliflkilerden mi? Toplumsal iliflkilerden mi? Teknolojiler ve organizasyonel biçimlerden mi? Emek süreçlerinden mi? Kurumlar›n ele geçirilmesi ve devrimci biçimde dönüfltürülmesinden mi? David Harvey, krizlere
ra¤men sermayenin hâkimiyetini nas›l sürdürdü¤ünü sorgularken “ne yapmal›?” ve “kim yapacak?” sorular›na da cevap ar›yor. Hem sermayenin egemenlik kurdu¤u hem de kapitalizme karfl› mücadelenin geliflece¤i ‘faaliyet alanlar›’n›n haritas›n› ç›kar›yor.
DAVID HARVEY, Sermayenin Mekânlar›: Elefltirel Bir Co¤rafyaya Do¤ru [çeviren Seda Yüksel, Deniz Koç,
K›vanç Tanr›yar ve Baflak K›c›r] (‹stanbul: Sel Yay›nc›l›k, 2012), 488 ss. ISBN 978-975-570-574-3
David Harvey, son dönemin en çok referans verilen, en etkileyici sosyal kuramc›lar›ndan birisidir.
Aktivist kimli¤i ve antikapitalist hareketler üzerine yazd›klar›yla da bilinen Harvey’in ünü ve etkisi bak›fl
aç›s›n› de¤ifltirdi¤i co¤rafya biliminin yan› s›ra sosyoloji, politik ekonomi, mimari, iktisat, edebiyat incelemeleri ve kent çal›flmalar›na kadar uzan›yor. Bu kitap, 30 y›l› aflk›n bir süre zarf›nda yazd›¤› makaleleri
ilk kez bir araya getirerek Harvey’in elefltirel co¤rafya kuram›n›n geliflimine ve düflüncesinin yap›tafllar›na ayna tutuyor. Co¤rafi araflt›rmalar›n sonucu elde edilen, bilginin sistematik bir biçimde ele al›namayaca¤›, co¤rafyan›n yaln›zca veri sundu¤u yönündeki doktrine karfl› ç›kt›¤› gibi Marksizm ve sosyal teoriye
co¤rafya ve mekân boyutunun kazand›r›lmas›nda da önemli bir yeri olan Harvey, “Co¤rafya Bilgisi/Politik ‹ktidar” ve “Mekân›n Kapitalist Üretimi” isimli bölümlerle iktidar, politik ekonomik yap›, bilgi, sosyal
bilimler ve co¤rafya aras›ndaki iliflkiyi yeniden kurarken; sermaye birikiminin, mekân›n kapitalist üretiminin ve eflitsiz geliflimin co¤rafyas›n› Marksist bak›fl aç›s›yla ele al›yor. Kapitalizmin jeopoliti¤ini sergilerken Kant, Marx, Hegel, Foucault, Von Thünen ve Heidegger gibi düflünürlerin kuramlar›nda co¤rafi düflüncenin izlerini gösteriyor.
PETER HEATHER, Gotlar [çeviren Erkan Avc›] (Ankara: Phoenix Yay›nevi, 2012), 488 ss. ISBN 978-605573-897-6
Got halklar› MS 1. ve 7. yüzy›llar aras›nda Avrupa boyunca Balt›k Denizinden Atlantik k›y›lar›na
kadar uzanan co¤rafyada binlerce kilometre yol kat ederler. ‹lk bafllarda kimsenin fark›na varmad›¤› önemsiz halk topluluklar›d›r. Zaman geçtikçe Roma ‹mparatorlu¤unun önemli bir silahl› gücü haline gelip kendi devletlerini bile kurarlar. Bu kitab›n amac›, daha önce hiç ele al›nmam›fl yaz›l› ve arkeolojik bulgulardan yola ç›karak Gotlar›n dramatik tarihlerini yeniden ele almak ve Got kimli¤inin de¤iflik zaman ve kullan›m alanlar›nda ne anlama geldi¤ini araflt›rmakt›r. Kitap üç bölümden olufluyor. Her bölüm Got tarihindeki ana evrelerden bahsetmektedir: ‹lk bölüm 1. yüzy›ldan 4. yüzy›la kadar olan dönemdeki Got tarihini,
NEW BOOKS
ikinci bölüm Hunlar›n gelifliyle Got halk›n›n yaflad›¤› hareketlenmeyi, son bölüm de Gotlar›n kurduklar›
ve Bat› Roma ‹mparatorlu¤unun devam› olan devletlerin tarihini ele al›yor.
EKREM IfiIN, Düflünen Tohum Konuflan Toprak: Cumhuriyet’in Köy Enstitüleri, 1940-1954, 2 Cilt (‹stanbul: Suna ve ‹nan K›raç Vakf› Yay›nlar›, 2012), 641 ss. ISBN 978-975-912-399-4
Cumhuriyet tarihinin en dramatik de¤iflim süreçlerinden biri olan Köy Enstitülerine odaklanan, ‹stanbul Araflt›rmalar› Enstitüsü’nün ‹smail Hakk› Tonguç Belgeli¤i Vakf› iflbirli¤iyle haz›rlad›¤› “Düflünen
Tohum, Konuflan Toprak: Cumhuriyet’in Köy Enstitüleri 1940-1954” sergisi, arfliv belgeleri, foto¤raflar,
kiflisel eflyalar ve tan›kl›klarla önemli bir döneme ›fl›k tutuyor. Yüzde doksana yak›n› okuma yazma bilmeyen bir ülkede Cumhuriyet’i yaflatma ve bu topraklarda yeni bir insan tipi yetifltirme amac›yla, dönemin ‹lkö¤retim Genel Müdürü ‹smail Hakk› Tonguç önderli¤inde 17 Nisan 1940’ta kurulan Enstitüler, köyden
ald›klar› çocuklar› e¤itip tekrar köye yollayarak halk›n bu genifl kesiminin ayd›nlanmas›n› hedeflemifllerdi. 1946’da d›fl ve iç bask›larla yavafllayan süreç sonunda, 1954’te Enstitüler kapat›ld›.
VARTAN ‹HMALYAN, Bir Yaflam Öyküsü (‹stanbul: Cem Yay›nevi, 2012), 340 ss. ISBN 978-975-406-807-5
Vartan ‹hmalyan 1913’de Konya’da do¤du. 1944’de Robert Kolej’in mühendislik bölümünü bitirdi. 1948’de Fransa’ya gitti. Daha sonra da Macaristan, Polonya ve Çin’e gitti. 1961’de Moskova’ya gelen
‹hmalyan, 1987’de ölümüne kadar orada yaflad›. “Benim iki anadilimden ilki Türkçedir.” diyen ‹hmalyan’›n an›lar›n› aktaran bu eseri, Vedat Türkali ve Mete Tuncay’›n yap›t üzerine düflüncelerini yans›tan yaz›lar›yla birlikte; Türk okuruna sunarken, ayn› zamanda onun, kitab›n›n Türkiye’de yay›nlanma dile¤ini de
yerine getirmifl oluyoruz.
MANFRED JAHN, Anlat›bilim [çeviren Bahar Derviflcemalo¤lu] (‹stanbul: Dergâh Yay›nlar›, 2012), 174 ss.
ISBN 978-975-995-275-4
Manfred Jahn’›n anlat› teorisiyle ilgili karmafl›k konular› bile son derece aç›k bir dille izah etti¤i bu
çal›flma, anlat›bilime ve anlat› teorisine ilgi duyan bütün ö¤renciler ve araflt›rmac›lar için faydal› bir girifl
kitab› niteli¤i tafl›maktad›r. Bugün dünyadaki birçok üniversitenin muhtelif bölümlerine “anlat›bilim” dersleri konmaya bafllam›flt›r. Elinizdeki eserin, ülkemizde henüz gereken önemin verilmedi¤i bu alanda büyük bir ihtiyac› karfl›layaca¤›na inan›yoruz
PHILIP S. JOWETT, Balkan Harpleri’nde Ordular, 1912-13 [çeviren Emir Yener] (‹stanbul:Türkiye ‹fl Bankas› Kültür Yay›nlar›, 2012), 64 ss. ISBN 978-605-360-592-8
Birinci Dünya Savafl›’n›n muazzam bo¤azlaflmas› taraf›ndan gölgede b›rak›lm›fl olsalar da, 1912-13
tarihli iki Balkan Harbi, dünyay› de¤ifltirecek Harb-i Umumi’yi ateflleyen esas k›v›lc›m› çakm›flt›. Bu eserde ard arda gerçekleflen Balkan Harpleri’nin sebepleri, seyirleri ve neticeleri özetleniyor ve muharip ordular -1912’de Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u ile hasm› Balkan ‹ttifak› (Bulgaristan, Yunanistan, S›rbistan ve Karada¤); 1913’te ise Bulgaristan karfl›s›nda eski müttefikleri, Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u ve harbe yeni dahil olan
Romanya - tasvir ediliyor. Çok çeflitli üniformalar ile ilginç yerel k›yafetleri resmeden renkli levhalar ve
az bulunur foto¤raflar, 19. yüzy›ldan 20. yüzy›la geçifl niteli¤ini tafl›yan bu çarp›c› tarihsel döneme askerî
k›yafet ve teçhizat aç›s›ndan ›fl›k tutuyor.
395
396
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
HAKAN T. KARATEKE, Padiflah›m Çok Yafla! Osmanl› Devletinin Son Yüz Y›l›nda Merasimler (‹stanbul:
Kitap Yay›nevi, 2012), 322 ss. ISBN 978-975-587-046-1
Abdülhamid’in k›l›ç alay› Osmanl› devletinin son yüzy›l›ndaki en ihtiflaml› merasimlerden biriydi.
Yeni padiflah›n Dolmabahçe Saray›ndan yola ç›kt›¤› yedi pare top at›fl›yla bildirildi. Eyüpe deniz yoluyla
gidilecekti. Yaverlerin ve saray erkân›n›n yer ald›¤› üç kay›¤›n arkas›nda bembeyaz k›yafetli Arnavut kürekçilerin çekti¤i on dört çifte saltanat kay›¤›nda Abdülhamid, seryaveri, mabeyn baflrefiki ve Damad
Mahmud Pafla vard›. Hanedan mensuplar›n›n ve saray erkân›n›n kay›klar› arkadan geliyordu. Eyüp Çömlekçilerde karfl›lanan Abdülhamid, tak›mlar› som alt›ndan beyaz bir Arap at›yla k›l›ç kuflanmaya giderken
önünde k›rm›z› elbiseli kavaslar, gümüfl buhurdan tutan hazine hademeleri yürüyordu. Hal› döfleli yolun
iki taraf›na teberleri ve sorguçlu serpufllar›yla peyk ve solaklar dizilmiflti. Sultan töreni izleyenlere göre ecdad›n›n usulünü ihya buyurmufltu. Amaç da bunu dedirtmekti zaten.
MURAT KAYMAZ, Bal Kafl›¤›m (‹stanbul: Ötüken Neflriyat, 2012), 231 ss. ISBN 978-975-437-891-7
Kâh bunal›ml› zamanlar›nda kâh pür nefle anlar›nda ilham perilerinin zaman zaman müellifin kalemine konmalar›yla ortaya ç›kt› bu eser. Do¤rusunu söylemek gerekirse dili kesik kalemimizin misafirleri
pek havai idiler. Gün oldu nefleli ezgilerle raks ettirdiler çeke çeke, an oldu tamtam sesleriyle savafl danslar› yapt›rd›lar; dili mahkûm müellife. Periler kimi vakit sahib-i kalemin hayat›na bir çentik att›lar, kimi de
kader kisvesiyle baz› kitaplar›n, olaylar›n aras›na kar›fl›p muhtelif yaz›lara vesile oldular. Böylelikle ortaya ç›kan yaz›lar ancak kâ¤›t, kalem ve yazar›n esrarl› birlikteliklerinde ona ait olup, ba¤lant› kopar kopmaz, içinden pay›n› almaya talip okurun mal›na dönüflüverdi. Ne flu burgac›n ne beriki büklümün merkez
olamad›¤› bir duman bulutundaki gibi elinizdeki kitab›n da bir merkezi yahut bir ak›fl yönü yoktur. Ancak
kitab›n bütününe hâkim bir fikri taban oldu¤u da inkâr edilemez. Bu taban›n tafllar› bizzat “Bal kafl›¤›m”
taraf›ndan döflenmifltir. Aya¤›m›za tak›ls›n diye de¤il yere sa¤lam basal›m diye. “A¤layan bafllar öne e¤ilir ve büyük gözyafl› fliflesine saklar azab›n›. Dünyan›n içine. Gelin görün ki mutlunun müsrif g›rtla¤› havaya savurur, yele kapt›r›r bol keseden kahkahalar›n›. Dünyan›n d›fl›na. H›zla maddeleflirken hüzün, gene
h›zla süblimleflir tebessüm.”
GÜLTEN KAZGAN, Türkiye Ekonomisinde Krizler, 1929-2009 (‹stanbul: ‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 352 ss. ISBN 978-605-399-233-2
Türkiye ekonomisinde krizler, cumhuriyetin kuruldu¤u y›llardan bafllayarak, günümüze kadar uzanan; ekonomide derin izler yaratan, kimi k›sa sürede atlat›lan kimi ise yap›sal de¤iflimlerle birlikte geride
de¤iflik ekonomik miraslar b›rakan bir sarmal fleklinde ilerler. Prof. Dr. Gülten Kazgan bu de¤erli çal›flmas›nda cumhuriyet döneminin tüm krizlerini incelerken, özellikle yaflanan befl büyük krizi (1929, 1958,
1978, 1998, 2008) ele alarak, krizleri tetikleyen küresel ve yerel olaylar›n yaratt›¤› ortam› tüm boyutlar›yla ortaya koyup, do¤ru sonuçlara ulaflmaktad›r. Bunu yaparken modellefltirme kayg›s› gütmeyen Kazgan,
bafllang›çta köy-tar›m a¤›rl›kl› yap›dan kent-sanayi ve hizmet a¤›rl›kl› yap›ya geçen Türkiye ekonomisinde krizlerin seyrini, siyasal iktidarlar›n izledi¤i sosyoekonomik politikalar ve bunlar›n yaratt›¤› sonuçlar
çerçevesinde incelerken, aralar›ndaki farkl›l›klara da de¤inmektedir. Kazgan bu yap›t›nda özellikle d›flar›dan Türkiye ekonomisine yans›yan olumsuz etkilerin artt›¤›na dikkat çekerek, bu konuda kamu politikalar›nda gözlenen s›n›rlamalar›n büyüme üzerindeki olumsuz etkilerine de¤inirken, ülkemizde yaflanan son
dönem krizlerin bize yans›ma biçiminin bir tür domino kuram› biçiminde flekillendi¤ini vurgulamaktad›r.
NEW BOOKS
Daha evvel Türkiye Ekonomisinde Krizler (1929-2001) ad› alt›nda yay›nevimiz taraf›ndan yay›nlanan ve
1929, 1958, 1978, 1998 krizlerini ayr›nt›lar›yla ele alan bu kitap, yazar taraf›ndan geniflletilmifl, 2008 küresel krizinin kapsaml› yeni bir de¤erlendirmesi de kitaba dahil edilmifltir. 2008 krizinin bu ayr›nt›l› incelemesinin eklenmesiyle, Türkiye ekonomisinin bugüne kadar yaflad›¤› belli bafll› befl büyük kriz toplu halde gözler önüne serilmifltir.
RÜYA KILIÇ, Osmanl›da Seyyidler ve fierifler (‹stanbul: Kitap Yay›nevi, 2012), 188 ss. ISBN 978-975-870493-4
‹slam toplumu, 7. yüzy›l›n son çeyre¤inde geri dönülmeyecek bir de¤iflimin içine girdi. Kureyfl afliret federasyonunun üyesi Ümeyye O¤ullar›, ayn› federasyonun di¤er üyesi Hâflim O¤ullar›yla ‹slamdan
çok önce aralar›nda zuhur eden iktidar kavgas›na, 661 y›l›nda son noktay› koydular ve siyasal otoriteyi tekrar ele geçirdiler. Muaviye b. Ebî Süfyan›n politik entrikalar›yla bafl edemeyen dördüncü Râflid halife Hz.
Ali, Hakem olay› ile, siyasal bir hata iflleyerek yetkisini tart›fl›l›r hale getirdi ve sonuçta devretmek zorunda kald›. Bu son nokta, ‹slam toplumunun inanç yap›s›n› da derinden etkileyerek onu üçe böldü: Haricîler,
fiîîler ve Sünnîler Ümeyye O¤ullar›n›n ilk saltanat y›llar›, yine entrikalar ve kanl› olaylarla geçti. Hz. Alinin büyük o¤lu Hasan, hilafet hakk›ndan vazgeçti¤ini resmen ilan etmesine ra¤men zehirlenerek öldürüldü. Muaviyenin o¤lu Yezid ise, babas›n›n elinden entrikayla al›nan hilafet hakk›n›n kendisine ait oldu¤unu söyleyerek ortaya ç›kan küçük o¤ul Hüseyini ve ailesinden ço¤unu Kerbelâ’da trajik bir flekilde katlettirdi. ‹slam toplumu, Hz. Alinin ‹slam içindeki yerine bak›fl itibariyle iki ana kesime bölündü. Bu kesimlerden genel olarak fiîîlik (fiîa) diye bilinen birincisi, onu inançlar›n›n merkezine oturttu. Di¤eri ise, ona
Peygamberin en yak›n akrabas› ve ilk ‹slam büyüklerinin en önde gelenlerinden biri ve Râflid Halifelerin
dördüncüsü olarak bak›yordu. Bununla beraber, her iki çevrede de Hz. Alinin iki o¤lunun, daha genel bir
ifadeyle Peygamberin soyundan gelenlerin, zamanla Araplar›n eski soy asaletine verdikleri özel önemin bir
anlamda yeniden dirilifli idi. Böylece Peygamberin geleneksel Arap telakkisinin aksine kad›n üzerinden devam eden soyunun, ‹slam toplumlar› içinde ayr›cal›kl› bir konum kazand›¤› görüldü. Bu belki, Peygamber
soyunun u¤rat›ld›¤› haks›zl›klar›n ve yaflad›¤› trajedinin karfl›l›¤› olarak Müslümanlar›n onlara ödedi¤i bir
çeflit kefaretti. Her hâlükârda, istisnas›z bütün ‹slam devletleri Seyyid ve fierif denilen bu soyu hem siyaseten, hem dinen her zaman sayg›n tutmaya olabildi¤i ölçüde riayet ettiler. Onlar›n iflleriyle ilgilenecek
özel kurumlar (Nakîbül-Eflrâfl›k) ise daha Abbasîler zaman›nda oluflmaya bafllam›flt›.
EROL KILINÇ, Damla Damla Yaflad›klar›m (‹stanbul: Ötüken Neflriyat, 2012), 314 ss. ISBN 978-975-437899-3
Yaflad›klar›mdan bölük pörçük aktard›¤›m fleyler, bu kitapta topland›. Bunlar›, isteyen bir gençlik
maceras›, isteyen ibretlik ifller ve yaflanm›fll›klar, isteyen s›radan bir ülkücünün ilk gençli¤inden kocam›fll›¤›na kadar hayat›n›n flahsî veya davas› bak›m›ndan kendisince sivri yanlar› ile sosyal araflt›rmalar için
malzeme olabilecek yönlerinin kaydedildi¤i bir hat›ra defteri telakki ederek okusun. Bilinsin ki, küçük fleyler de olsa, tarihe do¤ru notlar b›rakmak arzusu, bunlar› kaleme al›rken en baflta gelen duygumuzdu. ‹nan›yorum ki, bizim kufla¤›n hayat serüvenleri afla¤› yukar› böyleydi; onun için zannederim ki, Damla Damla Yaflad›klar›m’da okuyucu, kendi vicdan› ile yüzleflecek, hayat›n›n muhtelif veçhelerinin yans›lar›n› bulacakt›r.
397
398
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
SADIK KIRBAfi, Siyasetin Finansman› (Ankara: Phoenix Yay›nevi, 2012), 231 ss. ISBN 978-605-573-894-5
Siyasetin finansman› ça¤dafl demokrasinin temel özellikleri olan saydaml›k, kat›l›mc›l›k ve hesap
verebilirlik ilkeleri aç›s›ndan çok önemlidir. Burada sorunlar varsa siyasete ve siyasetçiye güven azalmakta ve demokrasinin iflleyiflinde sorunlar oluflmaktad›r. Siyasetin finansman›n› en olumsuz etkileyen nedenlerin bafl›nda kay›t d›fl› ekonomi ve yolsuzluk gelmektedir. Kay›t d›fl› ekonomi, yolsuzluk ve siyasetin finansman› üçgeni birbirini etkileyen, çok boyutlu, çözümü zor sorunlar yuma¤›d›r. Bu sorunlar›n çözümü
için bu üçgenin bir bütün halinde ele al›nmas› ve çözümler üretilmesi gerekmektedir. Bu çal›flmada böyle
bir yaklafl›m izlenmeye çal›fl›lm›flt›r. Yabanc› literatür a¤›rl›kl› ve akademik yo¤unluklu bir çal›flma yerine
Türkiye uygulamas› ele al›nm›fl, zaman zaman Dünyada Türkiye’nin yerine de¤inilmifl, uygulamadan olabildi¤ince bol örnek verilerek genifl kitlelerin daha rahat izleyebilece¤i bir yaklafl›m hedeflenmifltir.
CEM‹L KOÇAK, 2: ‹ktidar ve Demokratlar: Türkiye’de ‹ki Partili Siyasi Sistemin Kurulufl Y›llar›, 19451950 (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 552 ss. ISBN 978-975-050-990-2
Türkiye’de tek-parti rejiminin sona ermesi, genellikle demokrasiye ya da çok-partili hayata geçifl dönemi olarak adland›r›l›r. Cemil Koçak, Türkiye’de ‹ki Partili Siyasî Sistemin Kurulufl Y›llar›, 1945-1950 adl› kitap dizisinde, yerleflik say›lan tarihsel kabulleri tart›flmaya aç›yor ve bu adland›rmay› sorguluyor. Rejimin
de¤iflmesi, fakat dönüflememesi, bu sürecin temel özelli¤idir. ‹çinde yaflad›¤›m›z siyasî sistem ve bu sistemin
kurulufl sürecinin yol açt›¤› sorunlar, bu dönemin de ürünüdür. Bu kapsaml› araflt›rma, üzerinde hayli tart›fl›lan dönemi, bütün boyutlar›yla ve derinlemesine yeniden ele almay› öneriyor. Bunu önerirken yaln›zca d›fl
politika geliflmelerini ya da iç siyasî tart›flmalar› de¤il, bunlar›n ayn› anda iflledi¤i dinamik bir analizi hesaba
kat›yor. Belgeler, an›lar, dergiler, gazeteler, diplomatik raporlar ile araflt›rmalar temelindeki tart›flmalarla analiz çerçevesini genifl bir ufka yerlefltiriyor. Cemil Koçak, Türkiye’de Millî fief Dönemi, 1938-1945 adl› araflt›rmas›n›n devam› niteli¤indeki bu kitap dizisiyle, Türkiye siyasî tarihinin tart›flmal› dönemlerinden birinin en
ayr›nt›l› ve en kapsaml› panoramas›n› gözler önüne seriyor. ‹ktidar ve Demokratlar, Demokrat Partinin kuruluflunun ard›ndan iktidar ve muhalefet iliflkilerini ele al›yor. Serbest Cumhuriyet F›rkas› deneyimi karfl›laflt›rmas›, DP üyelerinin muhalif geçmiflleri, tek-parti iktidar›n›n muhalifler üzerindeki denetim çabalar› ve muhalefete siyasi alanda iktidar›n biçti¤i rol bu ciltte tüm ayr›nt›lar›yla gözler önüne seriliyor.
EMRE KONGAR, ABD’nin Siyasal ‹slam’la Dans› (‹stanbul: Remzi Kitabevi, 2012), 224 ss. ISBN 978-975141-501-1
Günümüzün en yak›c› sorunlar›na bilimsel bir bak›fl. Emre Kongar yeni kitab›, ABD’nin Siyasal ‹slam’la Dans›’nda, Ortado¤u ve Kuzey Afrika’daki oluflumlar›, ‹slam alemi ile Amerika’n›n iliflkileri aç›s›ndan irdeliyor. Türkiye’nin önündeki “model olma” seçene¤ini de¤erlendiriyor. Kongar, yaln›zca sorun
belirleyen de¤il, ‹slam alemi, ABD ve Türkiye aç›s›ndan çözümler öneren bir yaklafl›m sunuyor.
NEVZAT KÖSEO⁄LU, Türk Dünyas› Tarihi ve Türk Medeniyeti Üzerine Düflünceler, 4 Cilt (‹stanbul: Ötüken
Neflriyat, 2012), 1304 ss. ISBN 978-975-437-878-8
Bu kitap, Osmanl› merkez olmak üzere Türk tarihinin destans› bir hikâyesidir. Üslup olarak geleneksel tarihlerimizi hat›rlatabilir; içerik olarak da bilinen muteber kaynaklar›m›z kullan›lm›flt›r. Kitaptaki
NEW BOOKS
de¤erlendirme makalelerinde bütünlü¤ü olan bir tarih ve kültür anlay›fl› parça parça ifllenmifltir. Bu yap›l›rken, temel kavramlar vurgulanm›fl, Osmanl›’ya uygulan›rken hükümlerin yüzde yüz tarihi gerçekli¤i
ikinci plânda tutulmufltur. Yani de¤erlendirmelerde daima model önde tutulmufltur. Ortaya konulan esaslar›n tarihi olufllarla mutabakat› çok daha genifl ve dikkatli çal›flmalar›n konusu olmal›d›r. Zevkle okunaca¤› ve üzerinde düflünülece¤i kanaati ile sunuyoruz.
AHMET BEDEV‹ KURAN, Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤unda ‹nk›lap Hareketleri ve Milli Mücadele (‹stanbul: Türkiye ‹fl Bankas› Kültür Yay›nlar›, 2012), 927 ss. ISBN 978-605-360-450-1
Bedevî Kuran’›n Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’nda ‹nk›lâp Hareketleri ve Millî Mücadele adl› eserini yay›ml›yor. Çeltüt Matbaas›nda yap›lan 1959 bask›s›n›n t›pk›bas›m› olan ve Tanzimat’a haz›rl›ktan Meflrutiyete, Hürriyetin ‹lan›ndan Mütarekeve Milli Mücadeleye uzanan can al›c› dönemi genifl bir belge külliyat›na ve tan›kl›klara dayanarak ele alan bu kitap, konusunda yap›lan araflt›rmalarda vazgeçilmez bir kaynak
olmay› sürdürüyor. Yazar›n, Demokratik temayüllerin yaln›z Cumhuriyet rejimine münhas›r olmad›¤› ve
daha önceleri Garb kültürünü memlekete sokmak ve saltanat istibdad›n› y›kmak gayesiyle pek önemli gayretler sarfedildi¤ini ve bu u¤urda bir hayli vatanperverlerin fazilet ibraz›yla nefislerini ve hatta ailelerini
fedadan çekinmediklerini vurgulad›¤› eser, yak›n tarihimize ›fl›k tutuyor.
T‹MUR KURAN, Mahkeme Kay›tlar› Ifl›¤›nda 17. Yüzy›l ‹stanbul’unda Sosyo Ekonomik Yaflam, 7: Vak›flar,
1661-83 (‹stanbul: Türkiye ‹fl Bankas› Kültür Yay›nlar›, 2012), 677 ss. ISBN 978-605-360-494-5
Modern küresel ekonomik sistemin geliflmeye bafllad›¤› 17. yüzy›lda Do¤u Akdeniz’de sosyo-ekonomik yaflam›n kurumsal temelleri nelerdi? Bölge ekonomisinin geleneksel kurumlar› de¤iflmekte miydi?
2003’te bafllayan ve bu sorular›n yönlendirdi¤i bir veri derleme projesi, sa¤l›kl› yan›tlar gelifltirmeye yard›mc› olacak özgün kaynaklar içeren bu çal›flmayla sonuçland›. On ciltlik bu yap›t, Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’nun baflkenti ve Do¤u Akdeniz’in ticari merkezi olan ‹stanbul’un o döneme ait 15 fler’i mahkeme defterindeki binlerce hükmün günümüz yaz›s›na aktar›lmas›, Türkçe ile ‹ngilizce özetlerinin haz›rlanmas› ve
yedi ana bafll›kta tasnif edilmesiyle ortaya ç›kt›.
T‹MUR KURAN, Mahkeme Kay›tlar› Ifl›¤›nda 17. Yüzy›l ‹stanbul’unda Sosyo-Ekonomik Yaflam, 8: Vak›flar,
1689-97 (‹stanbul: Türkiye ‹fl Bankas› Kültür Yay›nlar›, 2012), 651 ss. ISBN 978-605-360-495-2
Modern küresel ekonomik sistemin geliflmeye bafllad›¤› 17. yüzy›lda Do¤u Akdeniz’de sosyo-ekonomik yaflam›n kurumsal temelleri nelerdi? Bölge ekonomisinin geleneksel kurumlar› de¤iflmekte miydi?
2003’te bafllayan ve bu sorular›n yönlendirdi¤i bir veri derleme projesi, sa¤l›kl› yan›tlar gelifltirmeye yard›mc› olacak özgün kaynaklar içeren bu çal›flmayla sonuçland›. On ciltlik bu yap›t, Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’nun baflkenti ve Do¤u Akdeniz’in ticari merkezi olan ‹stanbul’un o döneme ait 15 fler’i mahkeme defterindeki binlerce hükmün günümüz yaz›s›na aktar›lmas›, Türkçe ile ‹ngilizce özetlerinin haz›rlanmas› ve
yedi ana bafll›kta tasnif edilmesiyle ortaya ç›kt›.
399
400
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
fiEF‹KA KURNAZ, Balkan Savafl›’nda Kad›nlar›m›z (‹stanbul: Ötüken Neflriyat, 2012), 114 ss. ISBN 978975-437-896-2
Balkan Savafl› (1912) insanlar›m›z aras›nda büyük bir panik yarat›r. Kad›nlar taraf›ndan kurulan
yard›m dernekleri, cephedeki askerlere para, eflya veya gönüllü hastabak›c›l›k yard›m›n› organize ederler.
Böylece, sosyal hayattaki kad›n faaliyetleri yeni bir boyut kazan›r. Bu faaliyetlerden birisi de Müdafaa-i
Millîye Cemiyeti Han›mlar Heyeti taraf›ndan gerçeklefltirilmifltir. Heyet, 8 ve 13 fiubat 1913 tarihlerinde
Darülfünun konferans salonunda kad›nlar›n konuflmac› ve dinleyici olarak kat›ld›klar› iki toplant› düzenler. Konuflmac›lar aras›nda Halide Edip, Fatma Aliye, Nigar Han›m, ‹hsan Raif gibi meflhur isimler de vard›r. Toplant›ya 4-5 bin kad›n kat›l›r. Salon a¤z›na kadar dolar. Oldukça muhteval› ve heyecanl› konuflmalar yap›l›r. Bunun sonucunda önemli miktarda yard›m toplan›r. Toplant›da, yap›lan konuflmalar›n kitap halinde yay›nlanmas› kararlaflt›r›l›r. Bu çal›flmada, bu konuflmalar›n yeni harfle çevirisi verilmifltir.
ÜM‹T KURT, Türk’ün Büyük, Biçare Irk›: Türk Yurdunda Milliyetçili¤in Esaslar›, 1911-1916 (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 256 ss. ISBN 978-975-051-039-7
Balkandaki karam›z› al kan›nla sen bugün, flan rengine boyad›n. O ma¤lûbiyet i¤nesi, en nihayet ruhumuzu kanatt› ve bak flimdi, gülüyoruz, art›k yalan saatleri hep dünün. Felâketler bazen böyle saadetler
do¤urur. Ac›l›klar tatl›l›¤› iyi tatmak içindir. Kin atefli en kuvvetli haflmetleri eritir. Gö¤sün fliflsin kahraman Türk, art›k bizim flan, gurur. Düflman›n›n sana hürmet etmesini istersen, çal›fl, terle, medeniyet perisine kucak aç. Buradaki patetik sat›rlar, 1915 y›l›nda Türk Yurdu dergisinde yay›mlanan bir yaz›dan. Dönemin h›nçla, intikam hissiyle ve ölüm-kal›m fliddetinde bir azimkârl›l›kla yüklü milliyetçi kalk›flma ruhunu yans›t›yor. 1911-1916 y›llar›nda, yani Balkan Savafllar› ile Dünya Savafl› aras›ndaki teyakkuz döneminde Türk Yurdu dergisini mercek alt›na alan bu çal›flmada Ümit Kurt, Türk milliyetçili¤inin oluflumundaki
›rkç› damar› ortaya koyuyor.
GÜNAY KUT ve FATMA BÜYÜKKARCI YILMAZ, Kandilli Rasathanesi El Yazmalar›, 2: Arapça-Farsça Yazmalar (‹stanbul: Bo¤aziçi Üniversitesi Yay›nevi, 2012), 615 ss. ISBN 978-605-423-871-2
Yaklafl›k on alt› y›l önce bafllayan Kandilli Rasathanesindeki 1340 adetlik yazma eseri kataloglama
projesi UNESCO’NUN Dünya Belle¤i program› çerçevesinde destekledi¤i ilk on projeden birisiydi. 2007
y›l›nda yay›mlanan 1. ciltte astronomi, astroloji ve matematik konular›ndaki Türkçe yazmalar yer al›yordu. Bu ciltte ise ayn› konulardaki Arapça ve Farsça eserlere yer verilmekte.
HENR‹ LEFEBVRE, Gündelik Hayat›n Elefltirisi:1 [çeviren Ifl›k Ergüden] (‹stanbul: Sel Yay›nc›l›k, 2012),
272 ss. ISBN 978-975-570-571-2
“Aflina olunan bilinmez,” diyor Hegel. 20. yüzy›l›n önemli düflünürlerinden Henri Lefebvre, ‘politik
dram›n’ gündelik temelinin unutuldu¤u, felsefecilerin hakikati baflka yerde arad›¤›, edebiyatç›lar›n mucize
ve macera peflinde kofltu¤u bir dönemde aflina olunana bak›yor: “As›l de¤iflim nerede olup biter? Gündelik
hayat›n esrars›z derinliklerinde!” ‹ktidar iliflkilerinin, meta fetiflizminin ve yabanc›laflman›n her gün yeniden
üretildi¤i, buna ra¤men de¤iflimin ve devrimlerin gerçek temeli olmaya devam eden gündelik hayat›n elefltirisine odaklan›yor. Marksist elefltirinin temelinde yer alan yabanc›laflma teorisinden yola ç›kan ve onu mo-
NEW BOOKS
dern hayattaki tüm yönleriyle ortaya koyan Lefebvre: Befleri bilimler, felsefe, politika ve ideoloji; bireysel
ile toplumsal; bilinç ile eylem aras›ndaki bütünlü¤ü gündelik yaflam›n yal›nl›¤› içinde yeniden kuruyor. Düfl,
sanat, oyun, ahlak, hayal gücü, politika, bilim… Bunlar› ç›kard›¤›n›zda geriye kalan gündelik hayat›n ‘c›l›z
tortu’sudur ama bu ‘yüksek’ faaliyetlerin yeflerdi¤i toprak da odur: “Tek yapmam›z gereken fley, gözlerimizi açmak, gündelik hayat›n en mütevaz› olgular›n›n engin insani içeri¤ini basitçe keflfetmektir.”
P‹ERRE LOTI, Do¤u Düflleri Sona Ererken [çeviren Faruk Ersöz] (‹stanbul: Kitap Yay›nevi, 2012), 143 ss.
ISBN 978-975-870-402-6
“Bo¤az›n sular›nda kaymaya bafll›yoruz, ard›m›zda ipekten k›r›lmalar b›rakarak” diyordu Pierre Loti. ‹stanbul’a yapt›¤› son iki yolculukta bir günlük tutmufltu. 1910’daki ziyaretinde ‹stanbul’un art›k eskisi
gibi olmad›¤›n› gözlemleyerek hay›flan›yordu. Günlü¤ün bu k›sm›nda, Loti’nin bir tekkede izledi¤i sema
töreni hakk›nda yazd›klar› belki de bu konuda yaz›lm›fl en etkileyici sat›rlar› oluflturmaktayd›. 1913’te, ‹talyanlar›n Trablusgarb’a sald›r›s› ve ard›ndan patlak veren Balkan Savafl› s›ras›nda ise farkl› bir yazarla karfl›lafl›r›z. Do¤u’nun gizemine tutkun, Türklere duygusal yak›nl›k duyan Pierre Loti de¤il, siyasal tav›r sergileyen bir yazard›r art›k. Sonunda 13 Eylül 1913 Çarflamba günü, o¤lu ile birlikte bir daha dönmemek
üzere ‹stanbul’daki evinden ç›k›p gider. Rochefort’da açt›¤› bavulundan, ‹stanbul’daki mezarl›ktan getirilmifl çak›rdikenler ç›kar. Loti’nin günlüklerinden oluflan ve ölümünden sonra derlenen bu kitap Türkçe’de
ilk kez yay›mlan›yor.
KENNETH JOHN MACKSEY, 2. Dünya Savafl›nda Askeri Hatalar [çeviren M. Tanju Akad] (‹stanbul: Türkiye
‹fl Bankas› Kültür Yay›nlar›, 2012), 316 ss. ISBN 978-605-360-576-8
Savafl, sonuçlar› önceden kestirilebilen bir sanat de¤ildir. Ne denli maharetli komutanlar taraf›ndan
yönetilirse yönetilsin, savafl›n gidiflat›n›n öngörülememesine korku ve endifleler de eklenince, akla hayale
gelmedik bir kaosa haz›rl›ks›z yakalanmak iflten bile de¤ildir. Hele muharebe alan›ndaki performans›n bilimsel operasyonel analizlere tabi tutulmas›ndan ve yeni teknolojilerden önce, komutanlar›n kararlar›n› salt
tarihe, sezgi ve tahminlere dayand›rmak zorunda olduklar› bir dönemde. Askeri tarih alan›nda uzun ve baflar›l› bir kariyer sürdüren Kenneth John Macksey, bir ‹ngiliz askeri olarak bizzat kat›ld›¤› II. Dünya Savafl› boyunca sa¤duyudan yoksun kararlardan; harislik, kibir, kay›ts›zl›k, afl›r› özgüven ya da düpedüz yeteneksizlikten kaynaklanan veballerin bütün üst düzey komutanlar›n nas›l bafl›n› a¤r›tt›¤›n› anlat›yor. Hitler’in 1940’ta Britanya’n›n istila edilmesini ertelemesinden Bat› Çölü’ndeki s›k›nt›lara, Müttefiklerin Arnhem’de u¤rad›klar› baflar›s›zl›ktan Leyte Körfezi Muharebesi’ne kadar bu hatalardan bütün harekât alanlar›nda, yenilgiye u¤rayanlar kadar zaferi kucaklayanlar›n da nasibini ald›¤›n› bize gösteriyor. II. Dünya Savafl› s›ras›nda, komutanlar ve siyasi liderler taraf›ndan yap›lan on alt› ölümcül hatay› ayr›nt›lar›yla aktar›rken, kritik bir noktada at›labilecek yanl›fl bir ad›m›n bazen bütün bir orduyu çökertebilece¤i gerçe¤ini de
ortaya koyuyor.
MICHAEL MANN, Demokrasinin Karanl›k Yüzü [çeviren Bülent Do¤an] (‹stanbul: ‹thaki Yay›nlar›, 2012),
660 ss. ISBN 978-605-375-191-5
‹ki rakip etnoulusal hareket ayn› topraklarda kendi devletini istedi¤i zaman tehlike do¤ar. Bu eserde ortaya konan yeni etnik temizlik teorisi en korkunç vakalar› sömürgelerdeki soyk›r›mlar, Ermenistan,
401
402
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
Nazi Holokostu, Kamboçya, Yugoslavya, Ruanda ve nispeten hafif fliddet vakalar›n› ilk dönem modern
Avrupa, ça¤dafl Hindistan ve Endonezya temel al›yor. Cinai etnik temizlik moderndir demokrasinin karanl›k yüzüdür. Demos (demokrasi) ile ethnosun (etnik grup) birbirine kar›flt›r›ld›¤› yerlerde meydana gelir.
‹ki rakip etnoulusal hareket ayn› topraklarda kendi devletini istedi¤i zaman tehlike do¤ar. Zay›f taraf boyun e¤meyip d›flar›dan yap›lan yard›m sayesinde savaflmaya bafllad›¤›nda ya da güçlü taraf ani ve ezici bir
kuvvet kullanabilece¤ine inand›¤›nda çat›flma fliddetlenir. Ama devlet de hizipleflmifl ve savafl türünden d›fl
bask›lar yüzünden radikalleflmifl olmal›d›r. Önceden planlama nadirdir, zira suçlular nispeten yumuflak
planlar› suya düflünce fliddeti art›rmak zorunda kald›klar›n› hissederler. fiiddetin art›fl› basitçe kötü elit tabakan›n ya da ilkel halklar›n ifli de¤ildir. Liderler, militanlar ve etno-milliyetçili¤in çekirdek oy tabanlar›
aras›ndaki karmafl›k etkileflimlerden do¤ar. Bu karmafl›k süreci anlamak, gelecekteki etnik yan›lsamalardan sak›nacak politikalar üretmemize yard›mc› olabilir.
ERTU⁄RUL MAV‹O⁄LU, Cenderedeki Medya, Tenceredeki Gazeteci (‹stanbul: ‹thaki Yay›nlar›, 2012),
264ss. ISBN 978-605-375-186-1
Kitab›n konusu gazetecilik ülkemizde son y›llar›n en tart›flmal› konusu bu flüphesiz. Özellikle Ahmet
fi›k ve Nedim fiener’in bilinen ama bilinmeyen nedenlerle tutuklanmalar› ve KCK operasyonlar›yla bafllayan kitlesel tutuklamalarla gündeme oturan otoriterleflme ve siyasal alan›n daralt›lmas›-imhas› tart›flmalar›n›n da dü¤üm noktalar›ndan biri. Ertu¤rul Mavio¤lu, gazetecilik mesle¤inin dününü ve bugününü; Türkiye’nin toplumsal, siyasal, ekonomik de¤iflim ve dönüflümleriyle paralel bir biçimde ele ald›¤› bu son çal›flmas›nda demokratik toplumlar›n sine qua non koflulu olan haber alma özgürlü¤ünün güncel durumunu gözler önüne seriyor. Gazeteci kimdir? Haber ve haber alma özgürlü¤ü nedir? Tarafs›zl›k ne anlama gelir? ‹fade özgürlü¤ünün s›n›rlar› var m›d›r? Yazma ve yay›nlama özgürlü¤ü ne anlama gelir? Medya, sermaye ve
iktidar iliflkileri nas›l tan›mlanmal›, nas›l ele al›nmal›d›r? Tüm bu iliflkiler, yap›lar ve haklar kurumsal düzeyde nas›l düzenlenmelidir? Hak gasplar› nas›l engellenmelidir? K›sacas› ‘‘quo vadimus’’ nedir?
HÜSEY‹N MEVS‹M, Bulgar Gözüyle Edirne [çevirenler Füsun Kiper ve Gökhan Gençay ] (‹stanbul: Kitap
Yay›nevi, 2012), 101 ss. ISBN 978-605-105-085-0
Azizlerin yaflamöykülerinden kroni¤e, öyküden romana, ama özellikle an› ve gezi notu türlerinde
Edirne’yle ilgili Bulgar edebiyat›nda yüksek say›da tan›kl›k ç›kar karfl›m›za. Edirne’yle ilgili tan›kl›klar›n,
kentin 19. yüzy›l›n ortalar›na do¤ru Bulgarlar aç›s›ndan önemli bir ticaret, e¤itim ve kültür merkezi olarak
geliflmeye bafllamas›yla artt›¤›n› görürüz. Tan›kl›klarda art›k kentin konumu, tarihsel geçmifli, güncel durumu, sosyal yaflam›, dini mabetleriyle ilgili bilgi ve verilere, hatta tasvirlere yer verilmeye bafllan›r. Örne¤in Konstantin Fotinov (1790-1858) K›saca Genel Dünya Co¤rafyas› (1843) adl› kitab›nda, Trakya bölgesini tan›t›rken ‹stanbul’dan sonra en çok Edirne’ye odaklan›r. Mihail Macarov da (1854-1944), gezi notu ve an›lar›nda 1860’l›, 1870’li y›llar›n Osmanl› Edirne’sini ustaca canland›r›r. Derlememizde yer alan
Dobri Minkov ise (1856-1942) an›lar›nda Edirne vilayet merkezinde 1870’in bafllar›nda düzenlenen Umumi Meclis toplant›s›n› anmakla yetinmeyerek, kentin mahalleleri, toplumsal yaflam›, tarihsel an›tlar›, bunlarla ilgili yayg›n söylenceler, Bulgarlara ait e¤itim ve din kurumlar› hakk›nda da yal›n bilgiler verir. Bir
baflka yazar, Pet›r Karapetrov da (1845-1903) Edirne’de geçirdi¤i 1878-1879 y›llar›yla ilgili an›lar›n› bütün ayr›nt› ve canl›l›¤›yla aktarmaya çal›fl›r. Hakk›nda çok az fley bildi¤imiz Andon Dimitrov’un an›lar› da
1878-1879 y›l› Edirne’sini kapsar. Çal›flmam›zda yer alan metinler kentteki e¤itim, yay›nc›l›k, kültür ve ticaret hayat›yla ilgili bilgiler de içerir. Bu anlat›larda Osmanl› idaresi hakk›nda bazen övgü, bazen de elefl-
NEW BOOKS
tiri ve yergilere rastlar›z. Ama her fleye ra¤men 1870’li y›llar›n Edirne’sinde etnik katmanlar aras›nda iyi
iliflkiler egemendir. M. Macarov, P. Slaveykov, D. Minkov, P. Karapetrov ve A. Dimitrov’un bu kitapta
bir araya getirilen an› ve gezi notlar› 1870’ler Edirne’sini bütün özgünlü¤ü, renklili¤i ve canl›l›¤›yla günümüze aktar›yor.
EM‹NE GÜRSOY NASKAL‹, ‹stimlak Davas› (‹stanbul: Kitabevi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 540 ss. ISBN 978-605539-726-5
Demokrat Parti’nin iktidarda iken gerçeklefltirdi¤i en önemli icraatlardan birisi ‹stanbul’un yeniden
imar edilmesi olmufltur. Bu konu Baflbakan Adnan Menderes taraf›ndan, 1956 y›l›n›n Eylül ay›nda Liman
Lokantas›’nda yap›lan bir bas›n toplant›s›yla kamuoyuna duyurulmufl ve akabinde çal›flmalara bafllanm›flt›r. Neticede Eminönü Bal›kpazar›, Millet Caddesi, Vatan Caddesi, Topkap›, Aksaray, Beyaz›t, Yenikap›,
Ataköy, Befliktafl, Bebek, Bo¤az, Yeniköy, ‹stinye, Üsküdar ve Kad›köy’de genifl çapl› imar faaliyetleri
gerçeklefltirilmifl,‹stanbul’un atardamar› olan üç anayol bu giriflim sayesinde ortaya ç›km›flt›r. Yass›ada
darbe mahkemesinde görülen ‹stimlâk Yolsuzlu¤u Davas›, imar faaliyetleri s›ras›nda ‹stanbul’da yap›lan
istimlâklerde istimlâk bedelinin peflin ödenmedi¤i, y›k›m öncesi gerekli tebligat süresinin verilmedi¤i ve
böylece Anayasan›n 74. maddesinin ihlal edildi¤i gerekçesiyle aç›lm›flt›. ‹stimlâk Yolsuzlu¤u Davas›nda
Baflbakan Adnan Menderesin Anayasay› ihlal etti¤i iddia edilmifl ve idam› istenmifltir.
EM‹NE GÜRSOY NASKAL‹, Yass›ada Zab›tlar›, 10: Topkap› Olaylar› Davas›, 2 Cilt (‹stanbul: Kitabevi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 1236 ss. ISBN 978-605-539-739-5
Topkap› olaylar› davas›, 4 May›s 1959 günü ‹smet ‹nönü’nün ‹stanbul’a girifli s›ras›nda Topkap›’da
‹nönü’ye bir suikast tertiplendi¤i iddias›yla aç›lm›flt›. ‹ddiaya göre, ‹nönü’yü ortadan kald›rmak suretiyle
muhalefetin ortadan kald›r›lmas› ve dikta rejiminin kurulmas› amaçlanm›flt›. ‹damlara gerekçe oluflturma
gayretiyle, Baflsavc›, Topkap› olaylar›n› Anayasay› ihlal olay› biçiminde formüle etmifl ve Anayasan›n ihlal edildi¤ini iddia etmifltir. Baflta Celal Bayar ve Adnan Menderes olmak üzere 60 kiflinin “san›k” olarak
yarg›land›¤› dava süresince 184 flahit dinlenmiflti. ‹flportac› tespihçiden, seyyar esansç›dan, CHP dönemi
baflkvekili fiemsettin Günaltay’a kadar neredeyse tamam› CHP’li olan flahitler mahkemeye getirilmifl ve bu
flahitlere sizce ‹nönü arabadan ç›ksayd› hayat› tehlikeye girer miydi sorusu sorulmufltu. Bütün dava ‹nönü’nün etraf›nda kurulmuflken ve san›k Vali ethem Yetkiner’in avukat› Naim Yener ‹nönü’nün flahit olarak dinlenmesini talep etmiflken, mahkeme “‹smet ‹nönü’nün dinlenmesine mahal olmad›¤›na” karar vermiflti. ‹nönü flahitli¤e ça¤r›lmam›flt›r.
DAVID NICOLLE, Osmanl› Piyadesi, 1914–18 [çeviren Osman Çakmakç›] (‹stanbul: Türkiye ‹fl Bankas›
Kültür Yay›nlar›, 2012), 64 ss. ISBN 978-605-360-577-5
Tarihin en büyük savafllar›n›n ayr›nt›l› dökümleri, çarp›flan kuvvetlerin komuta stratejileri, muharebe taktikleri, askerî harekâtlar›n dü¤üm noktalar›. Savaflç›lar›n günlük yaflamlar›, talimleri, taktikleri, silahlar› ve muharebe deneyimleri. Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u, felaketle sonuçlanan Balkan Harbi’nin ard›ndan, orduda genifl çapl› bir reform bafllatt›. Birçok askerî tarih çal›flmas›nda, Osmanl› ordusunun muharip gücünün yetersizli¤inden söz edilmekle birlikte, as›l sorun askerlerin vas›flar›ndan çok, liderlik ve lojistik alan›ndaki eksiklerden kaynaklan›yordu. Mehmetçik, dayan›kl›, iyi e¤itimli ve cesurdu. Savaflma azmi yük-
403
404
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
sekti. ‹yi bir komuta alt›nda neler yapabilece¤ini Çanakkale ve Kutülamare baflta olmak üzere, birçok cephede göstermiflti. Bu cephelerde hem ‹tilaf ordular›n›n nizami, hem de örne¤in Arap Ayaklanmas›n›n gayrinizami kuvvetleri karfl›s›nda gelifltirilen muharebe taktiklerine uyum sa¤lamay› bilmifl, cephe hatt›nda
mutlaka dikkate al›nmas› gereken bir muharip güç oldu¤unu defalarca kan›tlam›flt›. I. Dünya Savafl›’nda
Osmanl› piyadesini günlük yaflam›ndan teçhizat›na, talim sisteminden ordudaki reformlara kadar çeflitli
yönleriyle ele alan bu eser, döneme ait foto¤raflar, k›yafet ve teçhizat› yans›tan illüstrasyonlar, savafl sahneleriyle zengin bir görsel malzeme de sunuyor.
CEM‹L OKTAY, Modern Toplumlarda Savafl ve Bar›fl (‹stanbul: ‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yay›nlar›,
2012), 174 ss. ISBN 978-605-399-242-4
Cemil Oktay’›n Modern Toplumlarda Savafl ve Bar›fl adl› çal›flmas›, kadim toplumlardan günümüze kadar uzanan süreç içinde savafl ve bar›fl olgusunu ve bunun yaratm›fl oldu¤u kültürün ülkelerin toplumsal özellikleri üzerindeki yans›malar›n› ele al›yor. Oktay, savafl ve bar›fl durumlar›n›n toplumsal yap›yla
olan iliflkilerini de¤erlendirirken, Montesquieu’dan Kant’a, Spencer’den Comte’a, Hegel’den Marx’a ve
Nietzche’ye kadar farkl› görüfllerden düflünürlerin de bu olguya bak›fl aç›lar›n›, gerçekleflen kimi öngörülerini ve yan›lg›lar›n› irdeliyor.
MERYEM ORAKÇI, Rodos Müslümanlar› [çeviren Bülend Tuna] (‹stanbul: Kitap Yay›nevi, 2012), 112 ss.
ISBN 978-605-105-082-9
Rodos Trablusgarp savafl› sonucu ‹talya’n›n eline geçene kadar 390 y›l Osmanl› topra¤› olarak kald›. ‹talyan döneminde, Adan›n ikinci büyük nüfus grubunu oluflturan ‹slam cemaati az›msanmayacak say›da esnaf kitlesine sahipti, yani Müslümanlar Rodos ekonomisinde önemli bir yer teflkil ediyordu. ‹slam cemaati adan›n yeni hakiminin koydu¤u kurallara uyuyor ve getirdi¤i yenilikleri benimsiyordu. 1923’de Mario Lago gibi ›l›ml› bir kiflinin On iki Adalar valili¤ine tayin edilmesi Rodos Müslümanlar›n›n, ‹talyan hakimiyeti alt›nda, dini ve kültürel olarak en özgür dönemlerinin bafllamas›n› sa¤lad›. 1926’ya gelindi¤inde
Lozan anlaflmas› gere¤ince Yunanistan Müslümanlar› mübadeleye tabi tutulurken Rodos Müslümanlar› zor
bir tercihle karfl› karfl›ya kald›. Müslümanlar ‹talyan topra¤›nda yaflad›klar› için zorunlu mübadeleye tabi
de¤illerdi ama onlara seçim yapma hakk› tan›n›yordu. ‹sterlerse Türk vatandafll›¤›n› seçip Türkiye’ye gidebilirler veya ‹talyan vatandafll›¤›n› seçip Rodos’ta kalabilirlerdi. Müslüman nüfusun seçimle göreve getirdi¤i ‹slam Cemaati Heyeti say›lar› geçmifle göre zaten azalm›fl olan Müslümanlar›n adadan gitmesini istemiyor, Müslümanlar›n bu konuda ortak bir karara ulaflmas›n› savunuyordu. Bu s›ralarda Rodos’ta üç gazete yay›nlan›yordu. Bunlar›n ikisi Rumlara aitti. Di¤eri ise ‹talyancayd›. Müslümanlar yönetimin kararlar›ndan zaman›nda haberdar olamad›klar› gibi, tercih hakk› gibi bir konuda ortak fikir oluflturam›yor, Türkiye’nin ve ‹talyan hükümetinin tutumundan haberdar olam›yordu. Bu da Türkçe bir gazete ihtiyac›n› ortaya ç›kar›yordu. Öte yandan Türkiye’deki ink›laplar adadaki e¤itimli Müslümanlar›n dikkatini çekiyordu.
Bu e¤itimli kesim, Müslümanlar›n art›k kendi içine kapan›k halinden kurtulmas›n› istiyordu. Nihayet
1926’da çok ihtiyaç duyulan Türkçe bir gazete için ö¤retmen Mehmet Kadri’nin vali Mario Lago‘ya yapt›¤› izin baflvurusu kabul edildi ve ‹slam cemaatinin resmi yay›n organ› Selam yay›nlanmaya bafllad›. Fakat gazetenin editörü Musevi Cemaati baflkan› Hizkia Franko’ydu ve yazar kadrosunun önemli bir k›sm›
da Musevi cemaatine mensuptu. Yani gazete Rodos Müslümanlar› kadar Rodos Musevilerine de ulaflmay›
amaçl›yordu. ‹flte bu kitap 1926 ve 1936 aras›nda ç›km›fl olan bu ilginç gazetenin ›fl›¤›nda Rodos Müslümanlar›n›n 10 y›l›n› anlatmaya çal›fl›yor.
NEW BOOKS
MEHMET AK‹F OKUR, Emperyalizm, Hegemonya, ‹mparatorluk (‹stanbul: Ötüken Neflriyat, 2012), 463 ss.
ISBN 978-975-437-866-5
Emperyalizm, Hegemonya, ‹mparatorluk, uluslararas› politik ekonomi literatürünün en önemli bafll›klar›n›, Irak’›n ABD taraf›ndan iflgalini merkeze alarak tart›fl›yor. Kitapta bu üç kavram, önce s›rtlar›nda
tafl›d›klar› zamand›fl›l›k z›rhlar›ndan Gramscigil/Coxgil tarihselcili¤in nezaretinde s›yr›l›yorlar. Ard›ndan
da Braudel’i hat›rlayarak bir buçuk asr› aflan uzun vade boyunca ard›fl›k dünya düzenlerinin bafll›ca karakteristiklerini özetliyorlar. Bu yolculuk s›ras›nda Bat› yay›lmac›l›¤›n›n kolonyalist ve emperyalist evreleri,
Marksist ve Liberal geleneklerin elefltirisi etraf›nda inceleniyor. Daha rafine iktidar mekanizmalar›n›n mercek alt›na yat›r›ld›¤› hegemonya ve imparatorlukla ilgili k›s›mlarda da, kurulufl döneminden bafllayarak
Amerikan hâkimiyet mant›¤›n›n temel kodlar› ve içine düfltü¤ü kriz üzerinde duruluyor. Yap›lan tüm de¤erlendirmelerin ›fl›¤›nda, fikirler ve ç›karlar›n iflgal karar›nda nas›l bulufltu¤u sorusu ise son bölümde cevaplan›yor. Burada yaln›zca Avrupa’n›n özgürlük aray›fl›, Bat› d›fl› dünyan›n yükselifli ve ulusafl›r›laflmadan oluflan dinamikler demetiyle “emperyal eylem” aras›ndaki ba¤lant› sorgulanm›yor. Söz konusu sistemik çerçeveyi anlamland›ran tarihsel blo¤un ana bileflenleri de tahlil ediliyor. H›ristiyan Sa¤›, H›ristiyan
Siyonistler ve Yeni Muhafazakârlar gibi gruplar›n oluflum ve koalisyon kurma süreçleri, kendi alt zamanlar›na odaklan›larak anlat›l›yor.
EBRU DEN‹Z OZAN, Gülme S›ras› Bizde: 12 Eylüle Giderken Sermaye S›n›f›, Kriz ve Devlet (‹stanbul: Metis
Yay›nc›l›k, 2012), 216ss. ISBN 978-975-342-849-1
12 Eylül Darbesi’ne giden süreçte, sermaye s›n›f›n›n oynad›¤› rolü ve bu darbe sonucu devlet biçiminde gerçekleflen de¤iflim ile 1970’li y›llar boyunca sermayenin çeflitli kesimlerinin sürekli dile getirdi¤i
talepler aras›ndaki yak›n iliflkiyi inceliyor. 1970’lerin bafllar›nda bütün kapitalist ülkelerde yaflanan iktisadi kriz Türkiye’de, yükselen s›n›f mücadelesinin de bafll›ca amillerinden oldu¤u bir siyasal krizle birleflince ortaya ç›kan hegemonya krizine sermaye s›n›f›n›n nas›l bir çözüm bulmaya çal›flt›¤›n› son derece titiz
ve ayr›nt›l› bir çal›flmayla gözler önüne seriyor. Darbelerin sadece ordu içine yuvalanm›fl baz› kötü niyetli generallerin ve derin devletin örtülü faaliyetleriyle aç›klanmaya çal›fl›ld›¤›, tarihsel analizlerin merkezine s›k s›k ceberrut devlet gelene¤i kavram›n›n yerlefltirildi¤i bir dönemde son derece uyar›c› bir çal›flma.
ERGUN ÖZBUDUN, 1924 Anayasas› (‹stanbul: ‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 96 ss. ISBN 978-605399-239-4
Daha çok Polonya ve Fransa anayasalar› örnek al›narak haz›rlanan 1924 Anayasas›, gerek anayasa
görüflmeleri esnas›nda yaflanan tart›flma hürriyeti, gerekse ço¤unlukçu demokrasi anlay›fl›na tamamen uygun olarak demokratik bir ruhla haz›rlanm›fl olmas› aç›s›ndan ilginç bir anayasad›r. Di¤er taraftan, 1946 ve
sonras›nda çok-partili hayata geçilirken bu anayasan›n noktas›na ve virgülüne bile dokunulmad›. Bu nedenle 1924 Anayasas›n›n hem otoriter bir rejimin, hem de çok-partili bir demokrasinin temel kanunu ifllevi görmüfl olmas› flafl›rt›c› bir olayd›r ki, bu otoriter rejimlerden demokrasiye geçifllerde bir istisna olarak
kabul edilebilir. Ergun Özbudun, 1992de kaleme ald›¤› 1921 Anayasas› adl› çal›flmas›ndan sonra, Türkiye’nin anayasalar›n› incelemeye devam ederek, 1924 Anayasas› adl› bu kitab›nda da haz›rlan›fl aflamas›ndan kabulüne, anayasa tasla¤› üzerine yap›lan tart›flmalardan kabul edilifl koflullar›na kadar 1924 Anayasas›n› ayr›nt›lar›yla inceliyor.
405
406
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
RIDVAN ÖZD‹NÇ, Osmanl› Modernleflmesi ve Hersekli Arif Hikmet (‹stanbul: Kitabevi Yay›nlar›, 2012),
163 ss. ISBN 978-605-539-733-3
Osmanl› modernleflmesinin din ve devlet birlikteli¤i etraf›nda cereyan eden maceras›n›n en önemli
taraf›n› hukukî modernleflme oluflturur. Halife/sultan merkezli bir yap›dan farkl› bir devlet ve toplum organizasyonuna geçifl yaparken, Tanzimatla bafllayan sürecin de¤iflerek ve dönüflerek ulaflt›¤› neticelerden
biri olan ve bat›ya ve bat›l› olana üst düzeyde bir cevap teflkil eden Mecelle, ayn› zamanda ‹slamc›l›k fikrinin en önemli metinlerinden birisidir. Hali, tavr›, mizac› ve flahsiyetiyle bütün bir devri doldurmaya namzet biri olarak son devir Osmanl› fikriyat›n›n, irfan›n›n temsilcisi, tafl›y›c›s› ve bunun yan›nda belki de daha mühim bir flekilde üreticisi olan Hersekli Arif Hikmet Bey nev-i flahs›na münhas›r bir zatt›r. Jöntürklerin Osmanl› fikir hayat›na dâhil etti¤i birçok yeni düflünceyi ‹slamî ve yerli bir hale kavuflturan Ârif Hikmetin Mecellenin baz› maddelerini flerh ve yer yer tenkit eden bu eseri, bütün bir devrin etraf›nda döndü¤ü meselelere dair izahlar ve ikazlar tafl›maktad›r.
OKTAY ÖZEL, Dün Sanc›s› (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf› Yurt Yay›nlar›, 2012), 184 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-279-8
Dün Sanc›s›, Türkiye’de genel tarih alg›s›n›n oldu¤u kadar, tarihçilik mesle¤i ve tarih yaz›m›n›n da
zorunlu bir alan oldu¤unu kabul ederek söze bafll›yor. Oktay Özel, Türkiye’deki tarihçilik prati¤ini tarihsellefltirmeye giriflirken asl›nda bugüne ayna tutuyor. Tarihçiyi, tarihsel bilginin içinde üretildi¤i güncel/
tarihsel ortam› analizinin merkezine yerlefltiriyor. Kendi ifadesiyle, tarihçili¤in oda¤›ndaki öznenin, yani
tarihçinin ifl yapma tarz›na, kavramsal donan›m› ve terminolojisine, güncelle, siyaset kurumuyla ve nihayet
devletle kurdu¤u tehlikeli ontolojik-pragmatik iliflkiye, bu ba¤lamda kulland›¤› bilimd›fl› dilin ideolojik
keskinli¤i ve fliddetine yak›ndan bak›yor. Sanc›n›n esasen meslek eti¤inin, tarihsel bilginin demokratik ve
ço¤ulcu do¤as›n›n, çoklu okuma yöntemlerinin meflrulu¤unun unutulmas›ndan kaynakland›¤›n› ileri sürüyor ve meslektafllar›n› yapt›klar› iflin do¤as›na dair düflünmeye, temel ilkeleri hat›rlamaya davet ediyor.
Ancak Özel, her koflulda zor olana talip olarak kolay(c›) bir çözümün olmad›¤›n› da gösteriyor. Di¤er yandan, Dün Sanc›s› flafl›rt›c› derecede iyimser bir kitap. Çünkü Türkiye’de akademik tarihçili¤in bütün marazi
ve yap›sal sorunlar›yla asl›nda kurulufl devrini tamamlad›¤›n›, kendini sessizce do¤as›na daha uygun koflul
ve temellerde yeniden kurmakta oldu¤unu düflünüyor. Ancak bu k›r›lgan bir iyimserlik; çünkü yazar, bu
y›k›l›fl ve yeniden kuruluflun kendi sorunlar›yla birlikte gelece¤inin ve gelmekte oldu¤unun da fark›nda.
Dün Sanc›s›, alan›nda flimdiden temel okumalar aras›na girmifl bir baflvuru kitab›. Dün Sanc›s›, söyleyecek
sözü olan ve sözünü etkili bir flekilde söyleyen çok yönlü bir hesaplaflma, keskin bir manifesto. Tarihçiler,
tarih ö¤rencileri ve tarih merakl›lar› için vazgeçilmez bir çal›flma. Ama en çok da, tarihte, tarihçilikle
sadece kullan›m de¤eri üzerinden araçsal iliflki kuran siyaset kurumu mensuplar› için gerekli. Onlar için de
adeta bir gölge etmeyin kitab›.
SABAHATT‹N ÖZEL, Milli Mücadelede Trabzon (‹stanbul: Türkiye ‹fl Bankas› Kültür Yay›nlar›, 2012), 496 ss.
ISBN 978-605-360-499-0
Birinci Dünya Savafl›’nda Osmanl› Devleti’nin de saflar›nda yer ald›¤› ‹ttifak Devletleri’nin yenilgiye u¤ramas›, Avrupa’n›n sömürgeci devletlerine Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’nu paylaflma projelerini uygulama f›rsat› vermiflti. Esasen savafl s›ras›nda imzalanan gizli paylaflma antlaflmalar› uyar›nca, Trabzon ve
yöresi daha 1916 ilkbahar›nda Rus iflgaline u¤ram›flt›. Savafl henüz sona ermeden, Bolflevik Devrimi’nin
de yard›m›yla Trabzon ve yöresi iflgalden kurtar›lm›flt›. Fakat Avrupa’n›n güçlü devletleri savafl›n sonun-
NEW BOOKS
da Osmanl› Devleti’ne Mondros Mütarekesi’ni kabul ettirmifller, fiark Meselesini çözdüklerinden emin bir
flekilde Anadolu’nun paylar›na düflen k›s›mlar›n›n iflgaline giriflmifllerdi. Bu oyunu Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’ün 19 May›s 1919’da Samsun’a ç›kmas›yla bafllayan Milli Mücadele bozdu. Atatürk’ün “milli intibah” deyimiyle ifade etti¤i ulusal uyan›fl, yurdun birçok yerini kapsamakla birlikte, Trabzon ve yöresi bu
konuda öncülük etme onurunu paylaflan bölgelerden biri oldu. Prof. Dr. Sabahattin Özel’in çeflitli belge ve
kaynaklar›n yan› s›ra, özellikle Milli Mücadele bas›n›na ve Trabzon’da yay›mlanan ‹stikbal gazetesi koleksiyonuna dayanarak haz›rlad›¤› Milli Mücadele’de Trabzon, ulusal mücadelenin Trabzon ve yöresindeki tezahürlerini ortaya koymay› amaçl›yor. Birinci Dünya Savafl› ve Rus iflgalinden Milli Mücadele’nin nihayetine kadar olan dönemde Trabzon’da yaflananlar› anlatan eserde, ayr›ca tamam›na yak›n› henüz Milli
Mücadele literatürüne mal olmam›fl belge niteli¤indeki otuz iki metin de ekler halinde sunuluyor.
fiULE ÖZMEN, A¤ Ekonomisinde Yeni Ticaret Yolu e-Ticaret (‹stanbul: ‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yay›nlar›,
2012), 555 ss. ISBN 978-605-309-088-8
Prof. Dr. fiule Özmen bu eserinde, internetin yaratt›¤› de¤iflimin ekonomik hayata yans›yan sonuçlar›n› ve yeni ticaret yollar›n› ele al›yor. E-ticaret, geleneksel ifl modellerinden farkl› bir geliflim gösteriyor.
Sanal ma¤azalar, müzayede siteleri, elektronik pazaryerleri, ve portal modellerine her geçen gün yeni bir
e-ifl modeli ekleniyor. Bloglar, sosyal a¤lar, paylafl›m siteleri kuruluyor. Markalar› yönetme gücünü sahip
olmaya aday, sosyal bir mecra olufluyor. Web 2.0 ve üstü sürümlerle etkileflimli, kullan›c› dostu uygulamalara her geçen gün bir yenisi ekleniyor. Mikro siteler kurularak gelifltirilen kampanyalar›n, e-posta ve
mobil pazarlaman›n, arama motoru pazarlamas›n›n art›k çok daha etkin ve verimli yönetilmesi gerekiyor.
Dördüncü bask› ise, geçti¤imiz birkaç y›l içinde meydana gelen birçok geliflmenin yan› s›ra, tamamen
ayr› bir bölüm olarak olmasa da, e-devlet uygulamalar›na yer verildi. 18 Aral›k 2008 de, e-devlet portal›
e-turkiye.gov.tr Türkiyenin k›sa yolu slogan›yla, hizmetleri konusunda bilgi vermek amac›yla haz›rlanm›fl kullan›c› dostu yard›m videolar›yla yay›na bafllam›flt›. Birinci bölümün sonuna E-Devlet Portal› ve
E-Devlet Projeleri bafll›¤›yla bir bölüm eklendi. Kitab›n son iki bask›s›nda bir baflka önemli de¤ifliklik de
ilgili kaynaklara, özellikle web sitelerine ve güncel bilgilerin paylafl›ld›¤› bloglara daha fazla at›fta bulunulmufl olmas›d›r. Okuyucular›n kendi bilgi birikimlerini art›rmalar› ve de¤iflimleri izlemeleri konusunda
en az›ndan kitab›n bir sonraki bask›s›n› beklemelerine olan ihtiyac› azaltmak amaçlanm›flt›r.
GÜVEN GÜRKAN ÖZTAN, Türkiye’de Çocuklu¤un Politik ‹nflas› (‹stanbul: ‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Yay›nlar›,
2012), 320 ss. ISBN 978-605-399-229-5
Çocuklu¤un sosyal, siyasal ve kültürel tarihi, toplumda cinsiyet ba¤lam›nda biçimlenmifl egemen
söylemin yaratm›fl oldu¤u rol da¤›l›m›n› ve bunun sonucunda oluflan de¤er yarg›lar›na kaynakl›k eden zihniyet dünyas›n› ö¤renmemizi sa¤lar. Modernizmin günümüzde ulaflt›¤› çocukluk alg›s› ise, sadece çocu¤a
ait ve naiflik içeren bir tespitin d›fl›nda, ayn› zamanda yetiflkinli¤i de içine alan, daha genifl ve ideolojik verilerle yüklenmifl bir çerçeveyi de çizer. Bir baflka deyiflle modern çocukluk paradigmas›, tahayyül edilen,
bu anlamda hedeflenen yetiflkinli¤in ve yarat›lmak istenen toplumsal yap› içinde en baflta e¤itimde ulafl›lmak istenen ulvi amaçlar›n da varaca¤› s›n›rlar› belirler. ‹stanbul Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi ö¤retim üyesi Dr. Güven Gürkan Öztan, Türkiye’de Çocuklu¤un Politik ‹nflas› adl› bu eserinde, Türkiye
Cumhuriyetinin uluslaflma sürecinde Tanzimat ile bafllayan dönüflümleri, bunlar›n Meflrutiyet ve Cumhuriyet dönemlerinde ald›¤› farkl› biçimlenmeleri, yurttafl çocuktan milliyetperver çocukla ve son kertede
cumhuriyet çocu¤una kadar uzanan de¤iflik nitelendirmelerin ideolojik temellerini ele al›yor. Yazara göre
407
408
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
Türkiye’de çocuk için itaat, erdem oldu¤u kadar kaç›n›lmaz bir zorunluluktur. Kültürel kodlara, tüm milliyetçi ve militarist unsurlar›yla ulus-devlet olma çabalar›n›n politik veçheleri eklendi¤inde, çocuk hem bir
kez daha çocuklafl›r hem de beklentiler aç›s›ndan çocuktan fazla bir fley oluverir. Geleneksel evlât rolüne,
yeni rejime uygun milli sorumluluklar eklenir. Otoriteye ba¤l›l›k, çocuk için bu topraklar›n kökleflmifl lider kültünü daha anlaml› bir hale getirerek, yaflam›n vazgeçilmez ö¤esi haline sokar. Yetiflkinlerin dahi birer talebe oldu¤u bir toplumda çocuklar hiç büyümez.
EVREN BALTA PAKER, Küresel Güvenlik Kompleksi Uluslararas› Siyaset ve Güvenlik (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim
Yay›nlar›, 2012), 190 ss. ISBN 978-975-051-044-1
Endüstriyelleflmifl topyekûn savafl, bilgi savafl›, kahramanl›k sonras› savafl, fazilet savafl›, gösteri
savafl›, post-modern savafl, medeniyetler savafl›, teröre karfl› savafl, a¤ savafl› yeni zamanlarda savafl›n ald›¤›
biçimler için önerilen kavramlar bunlar. Savafllar›n ve güvenlik politikalar›n›n radikal dönüflümlerden geçti¤i bir dönemdeyiz. Savafl, hiçbir zaman sadece askerî bir mesele olmad›, toplumsal yap›lar›n biçimlenmesinde, devlet ve ulus-devlet infla süreçlerinde rol oynad›. Evren Balta Paker, günümüz dünyas›nda savafl›n
ald›¤› yeni biçimlerin çok yönlü bir politik analizini yap›yor. Uluslararas› düzenin tesisinde savafllar nas›l
bir rol oynuyor? Küresel Güvenlik Doktrini, Teröre Karfl› Savafl gibi sihirli terimler, politikan›n ve
uluslararas› müdahalenin çerçevesini nas›l çiziyor? ‹nsan haklar›n›n bu çerçevedeki gerçek anlam› ne?
Kitab›n önemli bafll›klar›ndan biri de ordular›n dönüflümü ve yeni güvenlik endüstrisi. Bu endüstrinin üretti¤i güvenlik hizmeti ve bununla beraber sürekli yeniden üretti¤i güvensizlik alg›s›, belki de bu meselenin
kalbini oluflturuyor.
DO⁄U PER‹NÇEK, 28 fiubat ve Ordu (‹stanbul: Kaynak Yay›nlar›, 2012), 28ss. ISBN 978-975-343-292-4
28 fiubat’›n Özet Tarihçesi Biny›l›n Meydan Okumas› 28 fiubat nerede ve nas›l bafllad›, nerede devam ediyor ABD ve ‹srail 28 fiubat’›n neresinde Bosna Operasyonu, Erbakan, Tansu Çiller 28 fiubat ve
Bat› Destekli ‹rtica 28 fiubat ve Susurluk “Ayd›nl›k ‹çin Bir Dakika Karanl›k” eylemleri 28 fiubat MGK
Kararlar›n›n kökeni 28 fiubat’›n zaaflar› ve elefltirisi Tayyip Erdo¤an-Abdullah Gül ve 28 fiubat’› anlat›yor.
ROGER PRICE, Fransa’n›n K›sa Tarihi [çeviren Özkan Akp›nar] (‹stanbul: Bo¤aziçi Üniversitesi Yay›nevi,
2012), 472 ss. ISBN 978-605-423-874-3
Ortaça¤dan günümüze, Charlemagne’den Chirac’a kadarki genifl bir dönemi kuflatan ve Fransa tarihi konusunda sarih ve kapsaml› bir rehber olan bu kitap, Fransa’n›n bir devlet olarak tarih sahnesinde beliriflinin ve sahip oldu¤u otoritenin geniflleyip yay›lmas›n›n mahiyetini ve sebeplerini aç›klamaya çal›fl›yor;
bunu yaparken de, devlet ve toplum aras›ndaki kesintisiz etkileflime odaklan›yor. Fransa’n›n K›sa Tarihi,
ele ald›¤› her bölümünde, ekonomik ve toplumsal yap›lar›n yan› s›ra siyasal sorunlar›n geliflim sürecini de
ortaya koymaya çal›fl›yor. Devlet ve toplum iliflkileri, savafllar›n etkileri, siyasal güç sahipleri ve onlar›n
bu güçlerini nas›l kulland›¤› gibi pek çok can al›c› meseleye de¤iniyor. Philip Augustus, IV. Henry, XIV.
Louis, Robespierre, Napoleon, de Gaulle gibi Fransa tarihinin önemli flahsiyetleri kadar sosyal tarihçilerin
konu edindikleri s›radan insanlar, sosyal yap›lar, inançlar ve ekonomik faaliyetler de bu k›sa tarih içinde
kendine yer buluyor.
NEW BOOKS
MUSA QASIMLI, SSCB-Türkiye ‹liflkileri [çeviren Abdülkerim Üregen] (‹stanbul: Kaknüs Yay›nlar›, 2012),
464 ss. ISBN 978-975-256-351-3
SSCB-Türkiye iliflkilerinde 70’li y›llar›n sonundan itibaren yeniden gerileme ortaya ç›kt›. Buna yol
açan faktörler nelerdi? Afganistan’a Sovyet askeri müdahalesi karfl›l›kl› iliflkilere nas›l etki etti? Mevcut
duruma niçin yeni so¤uk savafl deniliyor? Yolunda olmayan Sovyet-Türk iliflkileri-nin karakteristik yönleri nelerdi? K›br›s problemi karfl›l›kl› iliflkilere nas›l etki etti? SSCB Karadeniz bo¤azlar› konusunu neden
yeniden gündeme getirdi? 12 Eylül 1980 darbesi karfl›l›kl› iliflkilere nas›l etki etti? Taraflar birbirlerine karfl› gizli savafl› nas›l yürütüyorlard›? Bulgaristan Sovyet-Türk iliflkilerine nas›l etki ediyordu? Ermenistan
SSCB liderleri merkez karfl›s›nda tarihte hiçbir zaman olmayan uydurma “Ermeni soyk›r›m›” ve Azerbaycan’a karfl› as›ls›z toprak iddialar›n› nas›l ileri sürüyorlard›? Bunlar›n aras›nda iliflki var m›yd›? Sovyet liderlerinin bu as›ls›z iddialara yaklafl›m› ne idi? Mehmet Ali A¤ca’n›n Papa II. John Paul’a karfl› suikast
gerçeklefltirmesi Sovyet-Türk iliflkilerinde gündeme geldi mi? Körfez krizi Sovyet-Türk iliflkilerine nas›l
etki etti? ‹ki ülkenin yak›nlaflmas›nda Azerbaycan hangi rolü oynuyordu? Sovyet lideri Mihail Gorbaçov
Sovyet Türk cumhuriyetlerinin liderlerine niye güvenmiyordu? Bu ve baflka sorulara Azerbaycan, Rusya,
Türkiye, Gürcistan arflivlerinde uzun y›llarca “çok gizli”, “gizli” ve “hizmete özel” damgalar› ile korunan
belgelerine, ABD D›fliflleri Bakanl›¤›n›n ve Merkezi ‹stihbarat ‹daresinin bas›l› belgelerine, Ermenistan
kaynaklar›na dayal› olarak yaz›lm›fl monografide cevap veriliyor. Yararlan›lm›fl olan kaynak ve eserlerin
nerede ise tamam› bilim dünyas›n›n dikkatine ilk kez sunuluyor.
DAVID M. RAUP, Yok Olufl Kötü Olan Genlerimiz mi fians›m›z m›? [çeviren Nivart Taflç›] (‹stanbul: Bo¤aziçi
Üniversitesi Yay›nevi, 2012), 197 ss. ISBN 978-605-423-864-4
Yok Olufl, yaflam›n yeryüzündeki tarihini konu almaktad›r ve biyolojik kökenlerimizin, en az evrenimizin fiziksel kökenleri kadar önemli ve ilginç oldu¤u inanc›yla yaz›lm›flt›r. Kitap bütünüyle, organik
evrimin az ilgi gören bir yüzü olan yok olufl, yani tür ölümü üstünde durmaktad›r. Ortaya att›¤› temel soru fludur: Jeolojik geçmiflte ölmüfl olan milyarlarca tür, s›rf yeterli olmad›klar› için mi (kötü genler yüzünden mi), yoksa yaln›zca yanl›fl zamanda yanl›fl yerde olduklar› için mi (kötü flans yüzünden mi) yok oldu?
Türler hayatta kalmak için mücadele mi eder yoksa kumar m› oynar? Bu soru baflka bir soruyu daha do¤urmaktad›r: Bizler, do¤al bir üstünlükten ötürü mü buraday›z (serçe parmakla birleflebilen baflparmaklar›m›z, büyük beyinlerimiz gibi), yoksa sadece flansl› oldu¤umuzdan m›? Di¤er bir ifadeyle, en uygun olan
hayatta kal›r doktrininin üzerine basa basa söyledi¤i gibi, yaflam›n evrimi gerçekten de adil bir oyun mu?
M‹CHAEL D. RICHARDS, Dünya Tarihinde Devrimler [çeviren Gül Ça¤al› Güven] (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf›
Yurt Yay›nlar›, 2012), 160 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-274-3
Devrimler, yüzlerce y›ld›r siyaset yapman›n bir biçimidir. ‹deolojileri, önderleri, baflar› ya da baflar›s›zl›klar›, dünyan›n her yerinde uluslar›n tarihini biçimlendirmifltir. Befl önemli örnek olaya odaklanan bu
karfl›laflt›rmal› inceleme, 17. yüzy›l ‹ngiliz Devrimlerinden bafllay›p Meksika, Rus, Vietnam ve ‹ran devrimleriyle devam ediyor. Dünya Tarihinde Devrimler bu devrimlerin kökenlerinin, geliflmelerinin ve sonuçlar›n›n izini sürerek, küresel ba¤lamda bir devrimci gelenek kavray›fl› sunuyor. Araflt›rma, devrimlerin
saiklar›n› ve ideolojilerini sorguluyor. En önemlisi, bu devrimlerin ve bir kavram olarak devrimin kal›c› siyasal de¤iflimler do¤urmadaki etkilili¤ini inceliyor.
409
410
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
JEAN PAUL ROUX, Cengiz Han ve Mo¤ol ‹mparatorlu¤u [çeviren Ali Berktay] (‹stanbul:Yap› Kredi Yay›nlar›, 2012), 144 ss. ISBN 978-975-082-282-7
XII. yüzy›l›n ikinci yar›s›nda steplerde yetim büyümüfl bir çocuk, klan›ndan d›fllanacak, hayat›
boyunca göçebe bir flekilde yaflayacak, Mo¤olistan› birlefltirecek ve cihan› fethetmek için çabalayacakt›.
Cengiz Han›n ard›llar› ve sonras›nda gelen binlerce atl› göçer savaflç› tüm zamanlar›n en genifl imparatorlu¤unu kurmay› nas›l baflarabilmiflti? Mo¤ol ‹mparatorlu¤u, gücünün doru¤undayken, Orta Asyay›, Güney Sibiryay›, Çini, Güneydo¤u Asyay›, ‹ran, Irak ve Suriyeyi, Orta Avrupan›n ve Rusyan›n tüm steplerini kapl›yordu. Bu kadar küçük bir halk nas›l olmufltu da böylesi büyük fetihler yapm›flt›? Fiziken güçlü
ve disiplinli olmalar›na, ata binmelerindeki benzersizli¤e, hanlar›n›n dehas›na ve ordusunun gerçeklefltirdi¤i propoganda ve teröre karfl›n, Mo¤ollar, halklar› bir arada tutmay›, yo¤un bir diplomasi faaliyeti gerçeklefltirmeyi, düzeni ve bar›fl› tesis etmeyi, etkili bir yönetim ortaya koymay› ve çarp›c› bir dini hoflgörü
göstermeyi bilmifllerdi. Jean Paul Roux bizi, Avrupal› seyyahlar›n büyülenerek döndü¤ü Mo¤ol ‹mparatorlu¤unun en flatafatl› döneminde bir yolculu¤a ç›kar›yor.
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER, Eristik Diyalektik (Hakl› Ç›kma Sanat›) [çeviren Ülkü H›ncal] (‹stanbul: Sel Yay›nc›l›k, 2012), 88 ss. ISBN 978-975-570-550-7
19. yüzy›l felsefesinin önemli figürlerinden, Kant’›n ö¤rencisi, Alman filozof Arthur Schopenhauer,
1830’da kaleme ald›¤› bu metinde, kökleri antik Yunan felsefesine uzanan, tart›flmalarda her koflulda hakl›
ç›kma sanat› olan “Eristik Diyalektik” yöntemini tariflendiriyor. Bir tezin objektif olarak “do¤rulu¤u ve
hakl›l›¤›ndan” ziyade dinleyicilerin gözünde “geçerlili¤ine” odaklanan, savunu, tart›flma ve argüman kullan›m›nda karfl› taraf› alt etmenin yollar›n› felsefi “hileler” ile aç›klayan Schopenhauer, kaç›n›lmaz olarak
di¤er filozoflar›n konu üzerine fikirlerini ve yöntem sorunlar›n› da yorumluyor
AMY S‹NGER, Müslüman Toplumlarda Hay›rseverlik [çeviren Ali Özdamar] (‹stanbul: Kitap Yay›nevi,
2012), 328 ss. ISBN 978-605-105-078-2
“‹yilik yap denize at, bal›k bilmezse Hâlik bilir!” ‹slam inanc› on dört yüzy›l› aflk›n bir süredir
hay›rseverli¤i vaaz ediyor olmas›na ra¤men ‹slamiyet tarihi bu bak›fl aç›s›ndan hemen hemen hiç araflt›r›lmad›. Oysa sultanlar›n, servet sahiplerinin, hatta orta halli insanlar›n hay›r için kurdu¤u vak›flar her
ça¤da Müslüman toplumlar› ve kültürleri biçimlendirmiflti. ‹slamiyetin do¤uflundan bugüne kadar tarihsel
koflullar›n, toplumsal statünün, toplumsal cinsiyetin, yafl›n ve birçok di¤er faktörün dini ideallerle etkileflim
içinde hay›rseverli¤in bir çok biçimini yaratt›¤›n› görüyoruz. Yazar bu kitab›nda Müslüman toplumlardaki hay›rseverli¤in temel kavram ve kurumlar›n› aç›kl›yor, toplumun her katman›nda süregelen gönüllü
faaliyetleri anlat›yor. Yaz›l› metinleri, yap›lar›, imgeleri ve objeleri kullanarak hay›rseverli¤in ard›ndaki
güdüleri, vars›l› ve yoksulu nas›l etkiledi¤ini ve bunun nas›l siyasi hayat›n bir parças› oldu¤unu gösteriyor. Kitab›n birinci bölümü zekâta yak›ndan bak›yor. ‹kinci bölümde, Müslümanlar›n hayat›nda önemli bir yer tutan gönüllü hay›r ifllerine vesile olan günler ve Müslüman dünyada hay›r iflinin herhalde en
belirgin ve tan›nm›fl flekli olan vak›flar irdeleniyor. Üçüncü bölümde ise ba¤›fl alanlar›n ba¤›fllar›n flekillenmesindeki rolünü anlamaya ve hay›r iflinin etkisini de¤erlendirmeye çal›fl›l›yor. Dördüncü bölümde
ba¤›fl alanlar›n en büyük grubu olan yoksullarla muhtaçlar ele al›n›yor. Nihayet beflinci bölümde devlet
ile sivil toplum örgütleri veya özel kurulufllar›n toplumsal refah alan›ndaki katk›lar› tart›fl›l›yor. ‹slam
toplumlar› tarihinin hay›rseverli¤in prizmas›ndan bak›larak yeniden okunmas›, yönetimler ile yönetici-
NEW BOOKS
lerin rolü, bireysel ve toplumsal sorumlulu¤un mahiyeti, dini ö¤retinin gücü, ailenin ve daha genifl hanelerin yap›s› ve ifllev tarz›; akrabalar, komflular ve yabanc›lar aras› ba¤lant›lar; cinsiyetin bireysel roller
ve statü üstündeki derin etkisi ve servetin uygun kullan›m›na iliflkin tutumlara dair yeni bir perspektif
sunuyor.
ISABELLE SOMMIER, Devrimci fiiddet [çeviren Ifl›k Ergüden] (‹stanbul :‹letiflim Yay›nlar›, 2012), 149 ss.
ISBN 978-975-051-034-2
1960’lar›n ortalar›ndan itibaren dünyan›n birçok yerinde, efl zamanl› olarak, fliddete, yani silahl›
mücadeleye yönelen toplumsal hareketler ortaya ç›kt›. Bu hareketler genellikle, mevcut siyasi, ekonomik
ya da kültürel düzene bir itiraz olarak, ço¤unlukla ö¤renci ve iflçi gruplar› içinden do¤du ve zaman içinde
silahl› mücadeleye dönüfltü. fiiddet ve toplumsal hareketler uzman› Isabelle Sommier burada özel olarak
sanayileflmifl, kapitalist ve demokratik ülkeleri ve bu ülkelerdeki silahl› örgütleri ele al›yor: ‹talya’da K›z›l
Tugaylar (BR), Almanya’da K›z›l Ordu Fraksiyonu (RAF), Japonya’da Japon K›z›l Ordusu (ARJ), Fransa’da Do¤rudan Eylem (AD), ABD’de Weather Underground Organization (WUO). Devrimci fiiddet böylece, demokrasi kültürünün en geliflmifl biçimde yafland›¤› bu ülkelerdeki siyasi durumla, bugün var olan
iletiflim kanallar›n›n sözünün bile edilemeyece¤i o günlerde özellikle üniversite ö¤rencisi gençlerin, Japonya’dan ABD’ye, ayn› anda ve hayatlar› pahas›na toplumu kurtarmak için eyleme geçmeleri aras›nda da bir
ba¤lant› kurmufl oluyor.
BEVERLEY SOUTHGATE, Tarih: Ne ve Neden Antik–Modern ve Postmodern Yaklafl›mlar [çeviren Ça¤dafl
Dizdar, Erhan Baltac› ve Didem Saliho¤lu] (Ankara: Phoenix Yay›nevi, 2012), 246 ss. ISBN 978605-573-898-3
Tarih nedir? Dahas› bir flekilde onun üzerine neden çal›flma yapmak gerekir? Birbirine ba¤lant›l› bu iki soru, tarihçileri iki karfl›t ve bazen de düflman iki ayr› kampa bölen tart›flman›n merkezinde durur ve bu, oldukça genifl kapsaml› sonuçlar› olan bir tart›flmad›r. Tarih disiplini her zaman felsefe, pratik olan ya da gelecekle ilgilenen bir fley olarak alg›lanmaz ve bu çal›flmada asl›nda tam da böyle alg›lanmas› gerekti¤i söylenmektedir. Tarih Ne ve Neden, nas›l bir tarih sorusuna bir cevap ve tarihin nas›l
araflt›r›l›p yaz›ld›¤›na iliflkin bir rehber de¤ildir; ayr›ca kitab›n burada tarih yaz›m›n›n kapsaml› bir tarihini vermek gibi bir niyeti de yoktur. Aksine tematik bir yaklafl›m üzerinden as›l niyet, neden ve nas›l
tarih sorular›yla ilgili günümüz sorular›n› daha genifl bir kronolojik ve disiplinli perspektife oturtmakt›r.
Bu nedenle kitap, ister uzman bir tarihçi isterse felsefe, dilbilim, edebiyat ya da di¤er bilimlerin çal›flma alanlar›yla ba¤lant›l› olarak konuya yaklaflan biri olsun, tarih çal›flmas› ile ilgilenen her ö¤renciye
hitap etmektedir.
LÜTF‹ SUNAR, Marx ve Weber’de Do¤u Toplumlar› (‹stanbul: Ayr›nt› Yay›nlar›, 2012), 284 ss. ISBN 978975-539-658-3
Sosyoloji tarihi Marx ile Weber aras›nda oluflturulan karfl›tl›k ekseninde infla edilmifltir. Weber’in
daha sa¤l›¤›ndan bafllayarak Marx’›n karfl›s›nda konumland›r›lmas› ve Marksizme bir cevap olarak sunulmas› sosyolojik teoriyi biçimlendirmifltir. Modern ça¤›n meseleleriyle ilgilenen Marx ve Weber’in
temel amac› kapitalizmin do¤uflu ve geliflimi etraf›nda modern toplumun yap›s› ve iflleyiflini çözümle-
411
412
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
mektir. Böylece modern toplumu tan›mlanma ve tarihsel olarak konumland›rma peflindedirler. Bu amaç
çerçevesinde Do¤u toplumlar› çözümlemesi her ikisinde de önemli bir konumdad›r. Bat›’daki siyasi meselelere yaklafl›mlar› bak›mdan birbirleriyle farkl›laflan Marx ve Weber, Do¤u karfl›s›nda modern toplum biçiminin aç›klanmas› söz konusu oldu¤unda birbirlerine yak›nlaflmaktad›rlar. Weber’in yetiflti¤i
ortamda ve entelektüel çevresinde Marx’›n düflünceleri oldukça yayg›nd›. Bu ba¤lamda onun Marx’la
iliflkisi iki z›t biçimde geliflmifltir. Birincisinde Alman burjuvazisinin s›n›f bilincine sahip bir mensubu
olarak Weber’in Alman devletinin gelece¤i sorunsal› etraf›nda biraz da ça¤dafl Marksizmin durumundan
hareketle Marx’a olumsuz yaklaflmas› söz konusudur. Weber’in ikinci temas noktas› ise bir bilim adam›
olarak Marx’la olan iliflkileridir. Onun gelifltirdi¤i çerçevenin geniflli¤inin ve Bat› kültür dünyas› için
öneminin fark›nda olan Weber, Marx’› önemsemektedir. Bu anlamda ilk ele al›nmas› gereken Marx ve
Weber’in hangi saiklerle Do¤u toplumlar›na dair çözümlemeler yapt›klar›d›r. Onlarda Do¤u toplumlar›
incelemelerinin temel meseleleri ayn›d›r. Bu temel mesele modern toplum biçiminin neden sadece Bat›’da ortaya ç›kt›¤› etraf›nda flekillenmektedir. Marx bu ba¤lamda ‹ngiltere’de toprak düzeninin ve sermaye birikiminin özel bir biçimine referansla aç›klamalar yaparken, Weber, Bat› zihniyetinde yaflanan
devrimleri ve hayat›n her alan›nda yaflanan paralel ve birbirini tamamlayan ak›lc›laflmalar› iflaret etmektedir. Do¤u toplumlar› söz konusu oldu¤unda bu soru modern toplum biçiminin neden Do¤u’da ortaya
ç›kmad›¤› flekline bürünmektedir. Elinizdeki kitapta bu konular› ele alan Lütfi Sunar, zengin kaynaklara ve bu tart›flman›n yans›malar›na yo¤unlaflarak, Marx ve Weber’in Do¤u toplumlar›na bak›fllar›n› incelemektedir.
fiEMSETT‹N fiEKER, Sad›k Bir Muhalif Yeni Osmanl›lardan Menapirzade Nuri Bey (‹stanbul: Dergâh Yay›nlar›, 2012), 339 ss. ISBN 978-975-995-289-1
Yeni Osmanl›lar Cemiyeti’nin yak›n devir siyaset, fikir ve edebiyat›n›n gelifliminde hâliyle Türk
modernleflmesinin oluflumunda önemli bir yeri vard›r. Memleketimizde ilk muhalif siyasî organizasyonlardan biri olarak takdim ve tebcil edilen bu cemiyetin mensuplar›ndan biri de Menâpirzâde Nuri Bey’dir. Nuri Bey’i irtibatl› oldu¤u muhit, fikir ve kiflilerden hareketle okuyan elinizdeki çal›flma; onun flahs›nda Cemiyet’le ilgili galat-› meflhur hâline gelmifl hükümleri sorgulamaktad›r. Bu kitab›n hareket noktas› ise, büyük hâl tercemesi müellifi ‹bnülemin’in kaleme ald›¤› Nûru’l-Kemâl’dir. Bugüne kadar ihmal edilmifl olan
‹bnülemin’in bu yazma eseri; hiç flüphesiz Türk edebiyat, fikir ve siyaset tarihi sahalar›nda yap›lacak araflt›rmalar için mühim bir kaynakt›r.
HÜSEY‹N SERDAR TABAKO⁄LU, XVIII. Yüzy›lda Osmal›-‹spanya ‹liflkileri (‹stanbul: Dergâh Yay›nlar›,
2012), 147 ss. ISBN 978-975-995-267-9
Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’nun etraf›ndaki dünyayla kurdu¤u politik ve ticari iliflkiler pek çok çal›flmaya konu olmufltur. Bu eserde ad›ndan da anlafl›laca¤› üzere Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u ve ‹spanya’n›n XVIII.
yüzy›ldaki diplomatik iliflkileri karfl›laflt›rmal› olarak belgelerle ele al›nmakta ve iki taraf›n tav›r ve tutumlar›n› masaya yat›r›lmaktad›r. Kitap dar çerçevede ‹spanya Kral› III. Carlos’un 1778 y›l›nda Don Juan de
Bouligny’yi bir ahitname imzalamak üzere Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’na göndermesinin ard›ndan yaflanan
süreci mercek alt›na al›yor. Üst çerçevede ise XVIII. yüzy›lda ‹mparatorlu¤un baflka bir devletle kurdu¤u
iliflkide nas›l bir mant›k yürüttü¤ü sat›r aralar›nda iflleniyor.
NEW BOOKS
SOYALP TAMÇEL‹K, K›br›s’taki Çat›flman›n Hukuki Boyutu (‹stanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat Yay›nc›l›k, 2012),
490 ss. ISBN 978-975-255-351-4
K›br›s meseleyle ilgili olarak bugüne kadar birçok resmi kurulufl sivil toplum örgütü üniversite ve
siyasi parti vb. kurumlar çal›flmalar yapm›fllar veya buna dair projeler gelifltirmifllerdir. Ancak söz konusu
çal›flmalar ve aç›l›mlar için teknik ve bilimsel verilerin eksikli¤i hep dikkati çekmifltir. Bu yüzden K›br›s’la
ilgili olarak gelece¤e yönelik vizyonunun oluflturulmas›na hedeflerin belirlenmesine ve bununla ilgili yöntemlerin gelifltirilmesine her zamankinden çok ihtiyaç duyulmufltur. Özellikle K›br›s meselesiyle ilgili
çal›flmalarda süreklili¤i sa¤lamak için bu konuda gelece¤e yönelik stratejik yaklafl›mlar›n ve aray›fllar›n
öne ç›kart›lmas› bunun bilimsel projelerle iffla edilmesi yay›nlarla tebli¤ edilmesi ve karar al›c›lar›n istifadesine sunulmas› temel amaçlardan olmufltur. Bundan hareketle bu çal›flmada K›br›s’la ilgili olarak
gündemdeki ve tarihteki bilgiler bütün çözüm planlar›yla birlikte mukayese edilmifl son verilerle yeniden
incelenmifl tan›mlanm›fl de¤erlendirilmifl veya yol gösterici ilkelere dönüfltürülmüfltür. Böylece K›br›s
meselesinin çözümüyle ilgili metodolojik tan›mlar kavramlar ve olgular incelenmifl kurulmak istenen
federal devletin hukuk sistemi ve anayasal yap›s› ele al›nm›fl ve bununla ilgili olarak federal devletin
organlar› ayr›flt›r›larak de¤erlendirilmeye çal›fl›lm›flt›r.
‹ZZET TANJU, ‹slam’dan Bat›’ya Düflüncenin Yolu (‹stanbul: Ötüken Neflriyat, 2012), 128 ss. ISBN 978975-437-877-1
Avrupa kendine bir kimlik biçmifl ve giderek bay›lm›fl o kimli¤e. Eski Yunanla modern Avrupa
aras›nda bir süreklilik varm›fl. Bin y›l kadar uyuklam›fl Yunan bilgisi, sonra bir s›çray›p Rönesans’a ulaflm›fl.
Bat› Uygarl›¤›’n›n özelli¤i, ak›lm›fl. “Bat› akl›n›” eski Yunan bulmufl, H›ristiyanl›k gelifltirmifl. Yunan
kültürünün apayr›l›¤›, Bat›’y› öteki uygarl›klardan üstün k›l›yormufl. Eski ça¤daki Yunanlar›n ard›ndan
yaln›zca Bat›l›lar, akl›, düflüncenin ve dünya bilgisinin hizmetine vermifl. Bat›’y› baflka k›lan, rasyonalizme
yatk›n olmas›ym›fl. Hem rasyonalizm, Bat›’ya Yunan’dan miras yani onun hakk› imifl. En hofla giden
düflünce, Do¤u ile Bat› aras›nda s›zd›rmaz bir duvar oldu¤u düflüncesi: Kültürler aras›nda uçurum var,
deniyor. Son çözümde, beyinler aras›nda fark gözetiliyor. Böyle bir fark gözetilince de, uygarl›klar çat›flt›r›l›r. Ne var ki, Arapça ve Latince alan›nda yap›lan araflt›rmalar derinlefltikçe, felsefe ve bilimler tarihçileri anlad›lar ki, Yunan ve Arap çevre bilinmeden, ne “Rönesans” anlafl›labilir, ne de akl›n evrimi. Orta ça¤
denilen yüzy›llar›n Arap-‹slam görünümü art›k iyice ortaya ç›kt›. ‹ki kültür öylesine ayr›lmaz biçimde kaynaflm›fl ki yüzde yüz h›ristiyan bir Bat› hiç bir zaman olmam›fl. Art›k Avrupa’n›n kültür yazg›s›, apayr›l›¤›
tart›fl›l›yor. Orta ça¤ “Bat›l›” de¤il, Arap-Latin bir Orta ça¤. Arap-Latin bilgisi de bir bütün.
AHMET HAMD‹ TANPINAR, On Dokuzuncu As›r Türk Edebiyat› Tarihi (Ankara: Dergâh Yay›nlar›, 2012),
656 ss. ISBN 978-975-995-279-2
Türk edebiyat› tarihlerinin hiçbir zaman vazgeçilmeyecek olan› flüphesiz ki Ahmet Hamdi Tanp›nar’›n On Dokuzuncu As›r Türk Edebiyat› Tarihi’dir. Bundan sonra da ne kadar edebiyat tarihi yaz›l›rsa
yaz›ls›n, Tanp›nar’›n verdi¤i hükümler kültürümüzdeki yerini koruyacak niteliktedir. Çünkü yazar sadece
malzemeyi aktarmakla yetinmemifl, içinde yaflad›¤› devri anlamaya ve anlatmaya çal›flm›flt›r. Uzun 19.
yüzy›l olarak nitelendirilen Türk modernleflmesinin, asl›nda do¤as› gere¤i, edebi metinler üzerinden bir
okumas›n› yapan yazar, Türk düflünce tarihinin meselelerini de masaya yat›rmaktad›r. Bu çerçevede siyasi olaylara paralel olarak, gazetenin yükselifli, roman ve fliirin ald›¤› yeni formlar Tanp›nar’a has bir üslupla metnin içerisine dâhil edilmektedir.
413
414
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
‹LHAN TEKEL‹, Anlatabildikleri ve Anlatamad›klar›yla Yaflam Öyküleri (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf› Yurt Yay›nlar›, 2012), 360 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-281-1
‹lhan Tekeli Toplu Eserlerin 23. kitab›, Tekelinin çeflitli dönemlerde yazd›¤› biyografik yaz›lar› bir
araya getiriyor. Bu kitapta, kadro hareketinin iki önemli ismi Yakup Kadri Karaosmano¤lu ve fievket Süreyya Aydemir; Türkiye’nin 1930lu y›llardan 1981 y›l›na kadar ç›kan ilk mimarl›k dergisi Arkitekt’in kurucusu Zeki Sayar; Türk sosyolojisinin önemli isimleri Behice Boran, Mübeccel Belik K›ray ve Tans› fienyap›l›, ve Tekelinin dostlar›, arkadafllar› Nusret H›z›r, Sudi ‹lkorur, Tului Sönmez, Esat Turak, Yi¤it Gülöksüz ve Tar›k Okyay’›n edebi bir dille yaz›lm›fl yaflam öykülerini okuyacak, bu yaflam öyküleri üzerinden Türkiye’nin geçirdi¤i de¤iflime tan›kl›k edeceksiniz.
‹LHAN TEKEL‹, Türkiye ‹çin STK’lar ve Kat›l›mc› Demokrasi Yaz›lar› (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf› Yurt Yay›nlar›, 2012), 356 ss. ISBN 978-975-333-276-7
Tekeli, 22. kitab›na ald›¤› yaz›larda, de¤iflik yükümlülükler ald›¤› STK’lar ve yerel yönetimler alan›nda kendi öyküsünü anlat›rken, bu alanlar› anlama ve kuramsallaflt›rma çabalar›n› sergilemeye çal›fl›yor.
Bu ba¤lamda kitapta, Tarih Vakf›’n›n k›sa bir öyküsü, 1996 y›l› Habitat Zirvesi deneyimleri, Türkiye’de
STK’lar alan›ndaki hukuki düzenleme sorunlar› ve bu alan için etik öneriler, yönetim kavram›n›n yan› s›ra yönetiflim kavram›n›n yükselifli, yerel demokrasinin kavramlaflt›r›lmas› ve gelifltirilmesi için öneriler,
yerel demokrasinin kalitesinin gelifltirilmesi için yerel yönetimler ve STK’lar›n bütünleflmesi gereklili¤i,
çok kademeli yönetiflim konular› ele al›n›yor. Kitab›n son bölümünde “onurlu bir yaflam biçimi için” aktif
yurttafll›k, yerelli¤i merkeze alan bir siyasetin olanakl›l›¤› ve getirece¤i üstünlük araflt›r›l›yor. Temsili demokrasinin s›f›r toplaml› siyaset anlay›fl›n›n afl›lma yollar› üzerinde duruluyor. Temsili demokrasi ve kat›l›mc› demokrasinin birlikte var olabilmesinin koflullar› temellendirilmeye çal›fl›l›yor.
‹LHAN TEKEL‹, Türkiye ‹çin E¤itim Yaz›lar› (‹stanbul: Tarih Vakf› Yurt Yay›nlar›, 2012), 368 ss. ISBN
978-975-333-271-2
Türkiye ‹çin E¤itim Yaz›lar› kitab›nda Tekeli, bir yandan kendi ö¤renim/e¤itim deneyimi s›ras›nda
bir ö¤renci olarak bu ö¤renim/e¤itim sürecine iliflkin fark›ndal›klar›n›n nas›l geliflti¤ini, öte yandan ö¤retim üyesi olduktan sonra geçen k›rk dört y›l içinde ö¤retmenin zorluklar›n› nas›l kavrad›¤›n› ve ö¤retimin
kurumsallaflmas›na nas›l müdahale edilebilece¤ine iliflkin bilincinin nas›l olufltu¤unu anlat›yor. Tekeli’nin
yaz›lar›, ö¤retim/e¤itim sürecinin pedagojik boyutundan çok kurumsal düzenleme boyutu üzerinde duruyor, e¤itim reformundan beklentilerinin zaman içinde nas›l de¤iflti¤ini sergiliyor, siyasetle nas›l iliflkilendirildi¤i üzerinde duruyor.
GÖRAN THERBORN, Dünya Bir K›lavuz (‹stanbul: Versus Yay›nlar›,2012), 296 ss. ISBN 978-605-569-153-0
Bat›’n›n merkezi öneminin art›k genel kabul gören bir veri olmaktan ç›kt›¤› bugünlerde yirmi
birinci yüzy›l›n dünyas› neye benziyor? Bugünün dünyas›n›n toplumlar› ve kültürleri, aralar›ndaki ba¤lant›larla birlikte nas›l olufltu? ‹nsanl›k zaman›m›za nas›l geldi? K›sacas› yirmi birinci yüzy›l›n ikinci on
y›l›na girerken dünyam›z ne halde? Bu kitap, gezegenimizdeki toplumlar› ele alan ilk kitap. Bat›’n›n ve
küreselleflmenin ard›ndan dünyay› tan›maya yönelik bir k›lavuz. “Tarihçiler ve ekonomistlerin, giderek
mesleki uzmanlaflmalar›n›n yaratt›¤› duvarlar›n gerisine çekildi¤i bir dönemde, moderniteye var›fl ve mo-
NEW BOOKS
derniteden ç›k›fl yollar›yla, küresel eflitsizlik süreçleriyle ve olas› de¤iflim dinamikleriyle ilgili karfl›laflt›rmal› sorular› cevaplama ifli büyük ölçüde sosyologlara düflüyor.
O⁄UZ TOPAK, Refah Devleti ve Kapitalizm: 2000’li Y›llarda Türkiye’de Refah Devleti (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim
Yay›nlar›, 2012), 358 ss. ISBN 978-975-051-040-3
Baz› düflünürler, refah devletinin kapitalizmin uzun tarihinde birkaç on y›ll›k döneme s›k›flan geçici
bir olgu oldu¤unu ve art›k geride kald›¤›n› ileri sürüyorlar. Baz›lar› ise refah devleti politikalar›n›n biçim
de¤ifltirerek kapitalizmin uzun tarihi boyunca geçerliliklerini korudu¤u kan›s›ndalar. Refah devleti, kapitalizmin nispeten yumuflak, uzlaflmac›, nezih oldu¤u döneme özgü bir istisnai oluflum muydu? Yoksa,
kapitalist emek ve sermaye birikim rejiminin yap›sal bir etmeni midir? K›sacas› kapitalizme içsel midir
refah devleti, yoksa ona d›flsal m›d›r? Sosyal güvenlik, sa¤l›k, e¤itim baflta olmak üzere birçok alanda
sosyal refahla ilgili hizmetlerin piyasalaflt›¤› bir dönemde, acil sorular bunlar. O¤uz Topak, bu sorular
etraf›nda sa¤lam bir teorik tart›flma yürütüyor. Refah devletinin somut tarihsel biçimlerindeki farkl›l›k ve
de¤iflimleri, bu teorik ve politik tart›flma ekseninde analiz ediyor. Türkiye’de refah devleti politikalar›n›n
tarihsel analizine de genifl yer veriliyor. Osmanl›ya uzanan kökenlerinden ald›¤› refah kurumlar›n›n ve
politikalar›n›n nas›l bir tarihsel de¤iflim geçirdiklerine bak›l›yor.
FAHR‹ TÜRK, Türkiye ile Almanya Aras›ndaki Silah Ticareti 1871-1914 (‹stanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat Yay›nc›l›k, 2012), 299 ss. ISBN 978-975-255-352-1
Türk Alman iliflkileri köklü bir gelene¤e sahiptir. Türkiye ile Almanya aras›ndaki silah ticareti alan›ndaki iliflkileri 1871 1914 döneminde Alman arfliv belgelerinin ›fl›¤›nda ele alan bu çal›flma Türk A ‹mar› iliflkilerinin flimdiye kadar ayd›nlat›lmam›fl bir boyutuna ›fl›k tutmaktad›r. Bu çal›flma özellikle silah
transferi ve askeri uzmanlar›n devletleraras› iliflkilerin geliflmesinde ne denli önemli bir rol oynad›¤›n› ortaya koymakta ve bunun sonucunda da teknolojik olarak silah ithal eden ülkenin zamanla silah ihraç eden
ülkeye ba¤›ml› hale geldi¤ini göstermektedir.
H. BAHADIR TÜRK, Çoban ve Kral: Siyasetnamelerde ‹deal Yönetici ‹mgesi (‹stanbul: ‹letiflim Yay›nlar›,
2012), 262 ss. ISBN 978-975-050-986-5
E¤er hükümdarlar olmasayd› insanlar birbirlerini yerlerdi! T›pk› çoban olmay›nca sürünün y›rt›c›
hayvanlar taraf›ndan yenilmesi gibi. Ebû Mansur Es-Seâlibi, Âdabu’l-Mulûk köklü tecrübelerden hareketle egemenlere ö¤üt ve ak›l veren siyasetnameler, Ortaça¤’da Do¤u ve ‹slam siyasal gelene¤ine ayna tutan
metinlerdir. “‹deal bir hükümdar nas›l olmal›?” sorusuna cevap getirirken, asl›nda tümüyle bir iktidar anlay›fl›n›n çerçevesini çizerler. Çoban-Hükümdar idealini olufltururken, sürü gibi güdülmesi gerekti¤ini düflündükleri ahaliye dair bir imge de kurarlar.
ORHAN TÜRKDO⁄AN, Günümüzde Toplumsal fiiddet ve Türkiye Gerçe¤i (‹stanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat Yay›nc›l›k,2012), 688 ss. ISBN 978-975-255-350-7
Günümüzde Toplumsal fiiddet ve Türkiye Gerçe¤i” adl› bu eser, 1968’li y›llar›n anarflik olaylar› ve
ideolojik kutuplaflmalar›n bir oldu bitti tarz›nda alg›lanmamal›d›r. Bu nedenle, olaylar›n birbirileriyle ba¤lant›l› tarihsel bir yaklafl›mla yorumlanmas› zorunludur. Günümüzde, Güneydo¤u sorunlar›n›n alt yap›s›
415
416
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
bir dönemin toplumsal fliddet olaylar›n›n bir yans›mas›d›r. Bu nedenle, etnik bölünmelerin efli¤inde ç›rp›nan bir toplum sisteminin bu optimum noktaya nas›l geldi¤ini yöntem ve teknikleri de kullanarak ayd›nlat›c› bir yaklafl›mda bulunmak tarihsel bir zorunluluktur.
ORHAN TÜRKER, Selanik’ten Thessalonike’ye: Unutulan Bir Kentin Hikâyesi, 1912-2012 (‹stanbul: Sel Yay›nc›l›k, 2012), 96 ss. ISBN 978-975-570-559-0
Günümüzden yüz y›l önce h›zl› bir da¤›lma sürecinin bafl›nda olan Osmanl› ‹mparatorlu¤u’nun Rumeli topraklar›nda baflkent ‹stanbul’dan hemen sonra gelen en büyük, canl› ve renkli flehri Selanik’ti. 1430
y›l›nda Sultan II. Murat taraf›ndan Venediklilerden al›narak Osmanl› topraklar›na kat›lan ve 1912’de Sultan Reflat döneminde Yunanistan’a terk edilen Selanik, 2012 y›l›nda Yunanistan’a kat›l›fl›n›n 100. y›l›n›
kutluyor. Balkanlar›n bu büyük ve tarihi kenti son bir yüzy›ld›r tüm dünyada eski Yunanca ad›yla, Thessaloniki olarak an›l›yor. Selanik’in 482 y›ll›k Osmanl› yönetimi y›llar›nda oluflmufl olan çok uluslu yap›s›,
Yunan yönetimine girdikten sonra 30 y›l içinde inan›lmaz flekilde de¤iflmifltir. 20. yüzy›lda nüfus yap›s›n›n neredeyse dörtte üçü tamamen farkl›laflm›fl flehirlerden biridir; Selanik. Bugün flehrin Yahudi, Dönme,
Türk ve Bulgar kökenli halk›ndan söz etmek, bir avuç Yahudi d›fl›nda mümkün de¤ildir. Thessaloniki,
özellikle II. Dünya Savafl›’ndan sonra sadece Yunanlar›n yaflad›¤› bir flehre dönüflmüfltür. Daha önceki kitaplar›nda ço¤unlukla Rumlar›n yaflad›¤› ‹stanbul’un kadim semtlerinin nas›l Türklefltirildi¤ini araflt›ran
Orhan Türker, bu kez hikâyesini tersten anlat›yor.
MUSTAFA UYAR, Cengiz ‹mparatorlu¤u Hakk›nda ‹lk Tarih Kay›tlar›: Meng Ta Pei Lu ve Hei Ta Shi Lu
(‹stanbul: Ötüken Neflriyat, 2012), 189 ss. ISBN 978-975-437-897-9
Mo¤ollar›n Gizli Tarihi ve Altan Topçi adl› Mo¤olca kaynaklar; Ata Melik Cüveynî’nin Târih-i C‹hângüflâ’s› ve Reflîdüddin Fazlullah Hemedânî’nin Câmi-el-Tevârîh’i gibi Farsça eserler; Plano Carpini,
William von R›bruk ve Marco Polo gibi Bat›l› seyyahlar›n notlar› Mo¤ol ‹mparatorlu¤u tarihinin muas›r
kaynaklar› konumundad›rlar. Bu çal›flmada yer alan Shao Hung’un, Meng Ta pei lu (Mo¤ol Tatarlar›n
Umumî Tarihi) adl› eseri ve Peng Da Ya ile Xiu Ting’in kaleme ald›¤› Hei Ta shi lu (Kara Tatarlara Dair
Muhtasar), yukar›da ismi geçenlerden önce telif edilmifl olmalar› ve içerdikleri malumat bak›m›ndan, en az
onlar kadar önem arz etmektedir. Meng Ta pei lu ve Hei Ta shi lu, 1221 ve 1237 y›llar›nda Mo¤ol ülkesini bizzat ziyaret eden elçilerin gözlemlerini içermektedir. Söz konusu iki eser, Mo¤ol ‹mparatorlu¤unun
ilk devresi kadar, bu dönem Mo¤ol Çin ve Mo¤ol Türk iliflkileri hakk›nda da önemli malumat vermektedir. Her iki eser de, Mo¤ollar›n maddi ve manevi kültürüne iliflkin birçok veri sunmaktad›r. Ayr›ca, elinizdeki eserde, kaynaklardaki bilgilerin aç›klanmas› s›ras›nda, Mo¤ollar hakk›nda bilgi veren di¤er Çin kaynaklar›na da müracaat edilmifltir; bu sayede baflka kaynaklarda yer alan Mo¤ollar ile ilgili malumattan da
haberdar olunabilmektedir. Bir k›sm›n› sayabildi¤imiz sebepler haiz olduklar› öneme binaen, bu iki kaynak eserin Türkçeye kazand›r›lmas›n›n faydal› olaca¤› düflünülmüfltür. Bu çal›flman›n, ülkemizde yap›lan
Mo¤ol tarihi araflt›rmalar›na ve ilgili çal›flmalara, önemli bir katk› sa¤layaca¤› kanaatindeyiz.
MERM‹ UYGUR, Kuram-Eylem Ba¤lam› Çözümleyici Bir Felsefe Denemesi (‹stanbul:Yap›kredi Yay›nlar›,
2012), 166 ss. ISBN 978-975-363-493-9
Nermi Uygur’un yetmiflinci yafl›n›n çeflitli etkinliklerle kutland›¤› 1995 y›l›nda ilk kez yay›mlanan
“Tad› Dama¤›mda” ile bafllad›¤›m›z “Bütün Yap›tlar›na Do¤ru” dizisi, “Felsefenin Ça¤r›s›”n›n yeni (üçün-
NEW BOOKS
cü) t›pk›bas›m›ndan sonra, “Kuram-Eylem Ba¤lam›, Çözümleyici Bir Felsefe Denemesi”nin t›pk›bas›m›yla sürüyor. Türkçenin bu benzersiz düflünürünün “Felsefenin Ça¤r›s›”nda gelifltirdi¤i çözümleyici “gelenek”, bu kitapta daha da gelifliyor. Nermi Uygur’un “En Can Kitaplar›mdan Biri” dedi¤i “Kuram-Eylem
Ba¤lam›”, 1975’te ilk kez yay›mland›¤›nda, o günlerin “afl›r›l›klar ve ideolojiler ortam›nda pek göze çarpmam›flt›.“
LOIC WACGUANT, Kent Paryalar›: ‹leri Marjinalli¤in Karfl›laflt›rmal› Sosyolojisi [çeviren Mehmet Do¤an]
‹stanbul: Bo¤aziçi Üniversitesi Yay›nevi, 2012), 365 ss. ISBN 978-605-423-866-8
Kent Paryalar›, Amerikan “Kara Kufla¤›”n›n günümüzdeki dokusu ile Fransa’da “K›z›l Kuflak”taki,
yani iflçi s›n›f› kenar mahallelerindeki mülksüzleflme sürecinin yap›s›n›, dinamiklerini ve yaflanm›fl olaylar›
en ince noktas›na kadar karfl›laflt›rmal› olarak incelemektedir. Wacquant’›n buradaki esas amac›, Birleflik
Devletler’de ›rk tahakkümünü, 1960’larda metropolü kas›p kavuran ayaklanma dalgas›na yakalanan Afrikal›-Amerikal› gettosunun geçirdi¤i kurumsal dönüflümü tan›mlamak ve aç›klamakt›r. Analizinin ikinci
hedefi ise Amerika’n›n “hipergettolar›” ile Fransa’n›n gerileyen “flehir çeperlerinin” sergiledi¤i benzerlik
ve farkl›l›klardan, ileri marjinalli¤in sosyolojik eskizine dair unsurlar› dam›tmakt›r. Wacquant’›n, ileri
marjinallik tabiriyle kastetti¤i fley, kapitalist ekonomilerin eflitsiz geliflimi ile refah devletlerinin küçülmesi
sonucu post-Fordist flehirlerde billurlaflm›fl toplumsal ve mekânsal sürgün ile d›fllay›c› kapatma hadiselerinin ortaya ç›kt›¤› yeni düzendir. Wacquant, 90’lar›n bafl›nda kötüleflen Amerikan gettosu ile Frans›z iflçi
s›n›f› banliyölerinin tarihsel bütünler oldu¤unun alt›n› çizmekte ve bunlar›n dura¤an tipolojiler içinde
yapay olarak dondurulmamalar› gerekti¤ini öne sürmektedir. Zira Wacquant’a göre Amerikan gettosu ile
Frans›z iflçi s›n›f› banliyöleri; piyasa, devlet, s›n›f ve etnik köken etkenlerinin kesiflim kümesinin d›fl›nda
kendi kendini sürdürebilir yap›lar olarak görülmemelidir. Wacquant’a göre, söz konusu etkenler fiziki uzama
nüfuz ederek bu mahalleleri sürekli olarak dokumaktad›r. Wacquant’›n analizi, kent marjinalli¤inin envanterini ve bu marjinalli¤e biçim veren güçlerin bilançosunu ortaya koymakta ve böylece günümüzün tarihsel sosyolojisine katk›da bulunmaktad›r. Ayr›ca geçmiflten bugüne gözlemlenmifl ya da varsay›lan evrimlerin flifresini k›rmak için kavramsal ve deneye dayal› bir temel meydana getirmektedir.
SHERRY WOLF, Cinsellik ve Sosyalizm: LGBT Özgürleflmesinin Tarihi, Politikas› ve Teorisi [çeviren Sungur Savran] (‹stanbul: Sel Yay›nc›l›k, 2012) 288 ss. ISBN 978-975-570-563-7
“Modern toplumdaki; homofobik, cinsiyetçi, ›rkç›, milliyetçi ve di¤er ayr›mlar egemen s›n›f›n
ç›karlar›n› yans›t›r.” diyen Sherry Wolf cinsel özgürlük mücadelesi ile insan›n özgürleflme mücadelesi aras›ndaki ba¤› gözler önüne seriyor. Hem LGBT bireylere karfl› hem de LGBT hareketinde ezberlenmifl
tarihi, politik, toplumsal ve “bilimsel” önyarg›lar› da güçlü biçimde sars›yor. Eflcinsellik konusunda do¤ufltan m›, tercih mi yoksa çevresel faktörlerin sonucu mu gibi k›s›r tart›flmalara meydan okuyarak, cinselli¤in, toplumsal cinsiyetlerin ve cinsel kimliklerin nas›l “infla edildiklerini” inceliyor.Cinsellik ve Sosyalizm, yaln›zca LGBT tarihi, politikas› ve teorisini de¤il; cinsellik ve toplumsal cinsiyet konusundaki mitleri, bu konudaki toplumsal yarg›lar›n ifllevlerini, kad›n/erkek ikili¤inin kapitalizmde neden sürekli yeniden üretildi¤ini aç›k bir biçimde ortaya koyuyor. Marksizm’in LGBT konusuna ve cinsel özgürleflmeye
bak›fl›n›n zamanla nas›l çarp›t›ld›¤›n›, Ekim Devrimi’nin hemen ertesindeki söylemleri, sosyalizm iddias›ndaki ülkelerin kapitalist rejimlere dönüflümüyle konuya yaklafl›mlar› aras›ndaki paralelli¤i sergilerken
ayn› zamanda postmodern kimlik politikalar›n›n ve queer teorinin LGBT mücadelesinde yaratt›¤› sonuçlar› da elefltirel bir gözle de¤erlendiriyor.
417
418
YEN‹ K‹TAPLAR
ARZU PEHLEVAN YILDIZ, Rize fier’iyye Sicilleri: 2 1495 No’lu Sicil - Metin ve Tahlil (‹stanbul: Dergâh Yay›nlar›, 2012), 934 ss. ISBN 978-975-995-280-8
Kad›lar taraf›ndan tutulduklar› için Kad› sicilleri de denen fieriyye sicilleri Osmanl› tarihi çal›flmalar›n›n en önemli ve en teferruatl› bilgiler ihtiva eden kaynaklar› aras›ndad›r. Kad› bugün oldu¤u gibi
sadece yarg›ç de¤il, bulundu¤u yerin en üst yöneticilerinden biri olarak ayn› zamanda idari ve beledi
görevleri olan, nerede ise bütün sosyal hayat› düzenleyen vak›flarla ilgilenen bir yetkilidir. Onun görev ve
yetki alanlar›n›n geniflli¤i hesaba kat›ld›¤›nda fleriyye sicillerinin muhtevas›n›n uzanabilece¤i s›n›rlar›
anlamak kolaylaflacakt›r. Rize fleriyye sicilleri de hukuk ve iktisat tarihi, sosyal tarih ve mahalli tarih sahalar› baflta olmak üzere Rize ve civar›n›n nüfus hareketlerinden folklor ve edebiyata, tekke ve vak›flardan
yollara, yaylaklara, kadar birçok konuda birinci elden güvenilir bilgiler sunmaktad›r.
BU SAYIYA KATKIDA BULUNANLAR
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE CURRENT ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL
Bircan ÇA⁄LAR ilkö¤retim ve lise e¤itimini Antalya’da tamamlad›ktan sonra üniversite e¤itimine Çankaya Üniversitesi, ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümünde devam etti. Üniversitenin son y›l›nda Erasmus
program› ö¤renci de¤iflimi çerçevesinde ‹spanyan›n Valencia Üniversitesine gitti. Valencia Üniversitesi,
‹ngilizce Çal›flmalar› Bölümünde 6 ay e¤itim gördü. Türkiye’ye döndü¤ünde ODTÜ ‹ngiliz Edebiyat› bölümünde yüksek lisans e¤itimine bafllad› ve derslerini tamamlad›. fiu anda ‹stanbul Gedik Üniversitesi’nde
okutman olarak görev yapmakta ve ayn› zamanda Pat Barker ve iflçi s›n›f› kad›nlar› üzerine yüksek lisans
tezini yazmaktad›r. Çal›flma alanlar› iflçi s›n›f› kad›nlar› ve sosyalist feminism çevresinde flekillenmifltir.
Bircan ÇA⁄LAR completed her elementary and highschool degrees in Antalya. After that, she continued her university education at Çankaya University, English Language and Literature Department. For the
last year of university education, she went to Spain under the Erasmus student-exchange program. In Spain, she studied at Universitat de Valencia for 6 months at English Studies Department. On her return to
Turkey, she became a post graduate student at METU in the Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies. She is currently holding a position at ‹stanbul Gedik University, Department of Foreign Languages as an English language instructor. Meanwhile, she is writing her master’s thesis in English: “Pat
Barker’s Working Class Novels and Conditions of Working Class Women”. She is interested in working
class women and their position in literature and socialist feminism.
Mete ÇAL, Pamukkale Üniversitesi, ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümü’nden 2009 y›l›nda mezun oldu.
2012 y›l›nda ayn› üniversitenin Bat› Dilleri Edebiyatlar›, ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümü’nde yüksek lisans›m› tamamlad›. Tezi “Sam Selvon’un Daha Parlak Bir Günefl ve Yaln›z Londral›lar Romanlar›nda Sömürge ve Sömürgecilik Sonras› Ba¤lam”d›r. Hakkari Üniversitesi’nde Yabanc› Diller Yüksekokulu’nda
‹ngilizce Okutman› olarak görev yapan Mete Çal ayn› zamanda Çankaya Üniversitesinde doktora çal›flmalar›n› sürdürmektedir.
Mete ÇAL graduated from Pamukkale University, Department of English Language and Literature in
2009. He completed his MA at Pamukkale University, Department of English Language and Literature
with the thesis entitled “Colonial and Postcolonial Context in Sam Selvon’s Novels: A Brighter Sun and
The Lonely Londoners” in 2012. He currently works as an English Instructor in Hakkari University and is
pursuing his PhD at Çankaya University.
Ömer Ç‹FTÇ‹ ‹stanbul Üniversitesi, ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› bölümünden 2010 y›l›nda lisans derecesini
ald›. Ayn› y›l içinde ‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi, Karfl›laflt›rmal› Edebiyat yüksek lisans program›’na % 50
burslu olarak girdi. Eylül 2012 y›l›nda yüksek lisans program›n› tamamlad›. Ömer Çiftci’nin bafll›ca ilgi
alanlar› edebiyatta sömürgecilik ve postkolonyal teori oluflturuyor.
Ömer Ç‹FTÇ‹ graduated from Istanbul University with a BA degree in English Language and Literature
in 2010. In the same year, he was admitted to Istanbul Bilgi University for MA programme in Comparative Literature with a % 50 scholarship. He completed MA degree in September 2012. His research interests
are colonialism in literature and postcolonial theory.
Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 9/2 (Kas›m 2012), ss.419–423.
420
Rahime ÇOKAY 2010 y›l›nda Gaziantep Üniversitesi ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümü’nden mezun oldu. fiu anda Ankara Üniversitesi ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümü’nde yüksek lisans yapmaktad›r.
Rahime ÇOKAY graduated from Gaziantep University, Department of English Language and Literature,
in 2010. Currently, she is doing her master’s degree in the Department of English Literature at Ankara University.
Ya¤mur SÖNMEZ DEM‹R ilk ve orta ö¤renimini tamamlad›ktan sonra, K›rflehir Anadolu Ö¤retmen Lisesi’ne gitti ve okul birincisi olarak mezun oldu. Daha sonra, 2006 y›l›nda, ODTÜ’den ‹ngilizce Ö¤retmenli¤i lisans dereceni ald›. Edebiyata ve dillere olan ilgisi sebebiyle, ‹ngilizce Ö¤retmenli¤i ana dal›na ek olarak, Alman Dili’nde yan dal program›n› tamamlad›. 2010 y›l›ndan bu yana Çankaya Üniversitesi’nde ‹ngilizce okutman› olarak görev yapmaktad›r. Çankaya Üniversitesi yüksek lisans program›na tam burslu
olarak kabul edildi ve 2012 y›l›nda yüksek lisans çal›flmalar›n› baflar›yla tamamlayarak, tezini 19. Yüzy›l
‹ngiliz roman› üzerine yazd›. Bu tarihten itibaren Çankaya Üniversitesi, ‹ngiliz Edebiyat› ve Kültür Çal›flmalar› doktora program› kapsam›nda akademik çal›flmalar›na devam etmektedir.
Ya¤mur SÖNMEZ DEM‹R attended K›rflehir Anatolian Teacher Training High School and graduated
from it as the highest ranking student. Then, she came to Ankara in 2006 to complete her undergraduate
education in ELT at METU. Because of her interest in literature and languages, she had a minor in German Language in addition to her major in ELT. Since her graduation in 2010, she has been working as an
English Language Instructor at Çankaya University. She was accepted to MA programme at Çankaya University with full scholarship, and upon the successful completion of her MA studies at Çankaya University, she wrote her thesis dissertation on “19th century English Novel.” Since she received her MA degree
in 2012, she has been studying in the Ph. D. programme in English Literature and Culture Studies at Çankaya University.
fiebnem DÜZGÜN Ankara Üniversitesi ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› program›nda yüksek lisans ö¤rencisidir.
‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› alan›ndaki lisans derecesini 2011 y›l›nda ayn› üniversiteden ald›. Güncelde ilgilendi¤i araflt›rma konular› Kad›n Edebiyat›, Feminist Teori, Psikanaliz ve Ekokritizm’ i kapsar.
fiebnem DÜZGÜN is a post-graduate student in the Department of English Language and Literature at
Ankara University. She received her bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from the same
university in 2011. Her current research interests include Women’s Literature, Feminist Theory, Psychoanalysis and Ecocriticism.
Yeflim MERS‹N Pamukkale Üniversitesi, ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümü’nden 2009 y›l›nda mezun oldu. 2011 y›l›nda ayn› üniversitenin Bat› Dilleri Edebiyatlar›, ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümü’nde yüksek
lisans ö¤renimine bafllad›. Üzerinde çal›flt›¤› tez konusu ise “Charlotte Bronte’nin Jane Eyre ve Jean
Rhys’›n Genifl Genifl Bir Deniz romanlar›nda sömürge ve sömürge sonras› ba¤lam” d›r. Hakkâri Üniversitesi Projeler Birimi’nde ‹ngilizce Okutman› olarak görev yapmaktad›r.
Yeflim MERS‹N graduated from Pamukkale University, Department of English Language and Literature
in 2009. She started her MA at Pamukkale University, in the Department of English Language and Litera-
CONTRIBUTORS TO THE CURRENT ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL
ture in 2011. She studies on the thesis entitled as “Colonial and Postcolonial Context in Charlotte Bronte’s
Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea.” She currently works as an English Instructor in Projects
Unit at Hakkari University.
Esra ÖZ‹LHAN ‹stanbul Kültür Üniversitesi ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümü’nde görmüfl oldu¤u lisans
e¤itimini bölüm birincisi olarak 2009 y›l›nda tamamlam›flt›r. 2011 y›l›ndan bu yana yine ‹stanbul Kültür
Üniversitesi, ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümü’nde araflt›rma görevlisi olarak çal›flmaktad›r. fiubat 2013’te,
‹stanbul Bilgi Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Karfl›laflt›rmal› Edebiyat Bölümü’nden “Sesten Yaz›ya Uzanan Yol: Asl› Erdo¤an Yap›tlar›nda Yazar›n Sessiz Arac›l›¤›yla Dilin Önem Kazanmas›” adl› teziyle yüksek lisans derecesini alm›flt›r. Akademik ilgi alanlar› anlat›bilim, dilbilim ve edebiyatta (öykü, roman) modernizmdir.
Esra ÖZ‹LHAN graduated from the Department of English Language and Literature at Istanbul Kultur
University as the distinguished honour student in 2009. She has been a research assistant at Istanbul Kultur University, Faculty of Science and Letters, Department of English Language and Literature since 2011.
In February 2013, she got her M.A. degree in Comparative Literature at Istanbul Bilgi University with her
thesis titled “From Voice to Words: The Language Gaining Importance Through the Author’s Silent Mediation in Asl› Erdo¤an’s Works”. Her research interests include narratology, linguistics, silence and silencing in literature, modernist literature.
Seyyed Habib MOUSAVI ‹ran, Yazd Devlet Üniversitesi’nde ‹ngiliz Edebiyat› Bölümünden 2010 y›l›nda bu bölümden birincilikle mezun olmufl ve ayn› anabilim dal›nda çal›flmalar›na devam etmek üzere, Tahran’da bulunan Allame Tabataba’i Üniversitesi’ne girmifltir. Yüksek lisans tez savunmas›nda “A” notu alarak birinci olmufltur. Yazm›fl oldu¤u makaleler aras›nda Yerel Filmlerde Sergilenen Maskeli Oryantalizm:
Livre de la Loi’y› Oryantalist Bak›fl Aç›s›yla Okumak vemak ve Shaw’un Pygmalion Adl› Eserinde ‹ki Ana
Karakter Üzerine Sosyo- Linguistik ‹nceleme yer almaktad›r. Dil e¤itimi veren pek çok kurumda 7 y›ld›r
‹ngilizce dersler vermifl olan Mousavi, mesle¤inde önemli baflar›lar elde etmifltir.
Seyyed Habib MOUSAVI was accepted to the State University of Yazd majoring in English Literature.
Mousavi graduated from this university as the top-most student in 2010. In the same year he was also accepted to Allame Tabataba’i University in Tehran to continue his studies in the same major. Mousavi was
the first one to defend his MA dissertation, getting an “A” and being the best among his classmates. He
has authored several articles including “Masked Orientalism Exhibited in Local Movies: An Orientalist
Reading of Livre de la Loi” and “Socio-Linguistic Study of the Two Major Characters of Shaw’s Pygmalion.” He has also taught English in many language institutes for 7 years and has proved being successful
in the profession.
Pradeep SHARMA is an Assistant Professor of English at Northern Border University, Arar (Saudi Arabia) where he teaches English Language and Literature. He is particularly interested in the contemporary
English literature from Britain and America, though he has varied research interests and has published articles on literary theory, post-colonialism, postmodernism, and the possible confluence of Indian philo-
421
422
sophy, physics and Indian psychology. Currently he is working (co-author) on a book Introduction to General Linguistics. In addition, he has published two novels In the Land of Scorching Sun and Archaeology
of A Legacy online through amazon.
Pradeep SHARMA, Sudi Arabistan’›n Northern Border Üniversitesi’nde ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› alan›nda yard›mc› doçent olarak görev almaktad›r. Sharma’n›n özellikle ilgi alan› Amerika ve Britanya Ça¤dafl
edebiyat› üzerine olsa da esasen araflt›rma alanlar› çeflitlilik göstermektedir; Sharma’n›n edebiyat kuramlar›, sömürgecilik sonras› edebiyat, post-modernizim, ve ayr›ca Hint felsefesi, Hint fizi¤i ve Hint piskolojisinin mümkün birleflimleri üzerine yay›nlar› bulunmaktad›r. Halen, Introduction to General Linguistics
adl› kitapta ortak yazar olarak çal›flmaktd›r. Ayr›ca Sharma’n›n internette amazon üzerinden ulaflabilece¤iniz “In the Land of Scorching Sun” ve “Archaeology of A Legacy” bafll›kl› iki kitab› da bulunmaktad›r.
Reyhan ÖZER TANIYAN Pamukkale Üniversitesi Bat› Dilleri ve Edebiyatlar› Bölümünden 2007 y›l›nda mezun olmufltur. 2010 y›l›nda yüksek lisans›n› tamamlam›flt›r. Ayn› y›l, Pamukkale Üniversitesi Doktora program›na bafllam›flt›r. fiu anda, Pamukkale Üniversitesi, ‹ngiliz Dili ve Edebiyat› Bölümünde araflt›rma görevlisi olarak çal›flmaktad›r.
Reyhan ÖZER TANIYAN graduated from Pamukkale University, Department of Western Languages
and Literatures in 2007. She completed her MA in 2010. In the same year, she started the PhD program of
Pamukkale University. Currently, she works as a research assistant in the Department of English Language and Literature at Pamukkale University.
Karuna WARRIER Hindistan Delhi Üniversitesi, ‹spanyol Çal›flmalar› M.Phil alan›nda araflt›rmac›d›r.
Lisans ve lisans sonras› e¤itimini yine Delhi Üniversitesinin ‹spanyol Çal›flmalar› Bölümünde tamamlam›flt›r. Warrier, 2011-2012 akademik y›l›nda Delhi Üniversitesinde bafllang›ç düzeyinde ‹sponyolca E¤itimi ve ‹spanyolca Çal›flmalar› müfredat›n›n bir parças› olarak yüksek lisans seviyesinde çeviri çal›flmalar›
e¤itimi de vermifltir. Warrier, Hindistan›n Pune flehrinde bulunanan ‹leri Düzey ‹ngilizce Çal›flmalar› Enstitüsü’nde “Luis Humberto Crosswaithe’s Border Writing: An Experiment with the Narrative Style” bafll›kl› makalesini sunmufltur. Warrier, son zamanlarda M.Phil: çeviri çal›flmalar›, karfl›laflt›rmal› çal›flmalar,
al›mlama kuram› ve Don Quixote gibi konular üzerine araflt›rma yapmaktad›r.
Karuna WARRIER is a research scholar of M.Phil in Hispanic Studies in the University of Delhi, India.
She did her graduation and post-graduation in Hispanic Studies from the University of Delhi. She has taught Spanish at initial level in the University of Delhi in the academic year 2011-12. She also taught Translation Studies at post-graduation level as part of the Hispanic Studies curriculum. She presented a paper
titled “Luis Humberto Crosswaithe’s Border Writing: An Experiment with the Narrative Style” at the Institute of Advanced Studies of English, Pune, India. Her current research area in M.Phil includes translation studies, comparative studies, reception theory, Don Quixote.

İndir - Çankaya University Journal of Science and Engineering

Transkript

Benzer belgeler