The Time Regulation Institute

352 Pages·2014·1.66 MB·English

by  Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

About the Authors
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE TIME REGULATION INSTITUTE
AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR (1901–62) is considered one of the most significant Turkish novelists of the
twentieth century. Also a poet, short-story writer, essayist, literary historian, and professor, he created
a unique cultural universe in his work, combining a European literary voice with the Ottoman
sensibilities of the Near East.
MAUREEN FREELY was born in the United States, grew up in Istanbul, studied at Radcliffe, and now
lives in England, where she teaches at the University of Warwick. The author of seven novels, she is
the principal translator of the Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk.
ALEXANDER DAWE is an American translator of French and Turkish. He lives in Istanbul.
PANKAJ MISHRA is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose writing appears frequently in The
New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and the London Review of Books.
AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR
The Time Regulation Institute
Translated by
MAUREEN FREELY
and
ALEXANDER DAWE
Introduction by
PANKAJ MISHRA
PENGUIN BOOKS
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This translation first published in Penguin Books 2013
Copyright © 2013 by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Pankaj Mishra
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Published in Turkish as Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitusu by Dergah Yayinlari
Published with the support of the Turkish Ministry of Culture / Translation and Publication Grant Program of Turkey
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi.
[Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü. English]
The Time Regulation Institute / Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar ; translated by Alexander Dawe and Maureen Freely ; introduction by
Pankaj Mishra.
pages cm. — (Penguin classics)
ISBN 978-0-14-310673-9 (pbk.)
eBook ISBN 978-1-101-61367-2
PL248.T234S19513 2014
894'.3533—dc23
2013033709
Version_1
Contents
Introduction by PANKAJ MISHRA
A Note on the Translation
Suggestions for Further Reading
Chronology of Turkish History
THE TIME REGULATION INSTITUTE
Part I: Great Expectations
Part II: Little Truths
Part III: Toward Dawn
Part IV: Every Season Has an End
Appendix
Notes
Introduction
Orhan Pamuk has called Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–62) the greatest Turkish
novelist of the twentieth century. From the evidence of this novel—and Huzur (A
Mind at Peace)—Tanpınar may have a strong claim to this distinction.
Born and educated in the old Ottoman Empire, Tanpınar was clearly a major
artist and thinker—a strong influence, among other Turkish writers, on Pamuk
himself. However, it is difficult for the anglophone reader to verify Pamuk’s
judgment. Translations from twentieth-century Turkish literature are scarce. The
unique history and culture of modern Turkey is not immediately familiar to
readers in English: how, for instance, in the 1920s the Muslim-majority Ottoman
Empire was radically and forcibly reorganized into a secular republic by Mustafa
Kemal (better known as Atatürk), and everything in its culture, from the alphabet
to headwear and religion, hastily abandoned in an attempt to emulate European-
style modernity.
There is another, even steeper, hurdle to understanding Atatürk’s drastic
cultural revolution: this is the basic assumption, shared by many Western
readers, that societies must modernize and become more secular and rational,
relegating their premodern past to museums or, in the case of religion, to private
life. This idea—that modernization makes for enhanced national power and
rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness—has its origins in
the astonishing political, economic, and military successes of Western Europe in
the nineteenth century. It was subsequently adopted in tradition-minded societies
by powerful men ranging from autocrats such as Atatürk and Mao Tse-tung to
the more democratic-minded, if paternalistic, Jawaharlal Nehru.
They felt oppressed and humiliated by the power of the industrialized West
and urgently sought to match it. It did not matter that their countries lacked the
human material—self-motivated and rationally self-interested individuals—
apparently necessary for the pursuit of national wealth and power. A robust
bureaucratic state and a suitably enlightened ruling elite could quickly forge
citizens out of a scattered mass of peasants and merchants, and endow them with
a sense of national identity.
But there was a tragic mismatch between the intentions of these hasty
modernizers and the long historical experience of the societies they wanted to
remake in the image of the modern West. No major Asian or African tradition
had accommodated the notion that human beings could shape a meaningful
narrative of evolution, or that the social order, too, contained the general laws
discovered by modern science in the natural world, which, once identified, could
be used to bring about ever-greater improvements—the potent and peculiarly
European prejudice that gave conviction to such words as “progress’ and
“history” (as much ideological buzzwords of the nineteenth century as
“democracy” and “globalization” are of the present moment). Time, in fact, was
rarely conceptualized as a linear progression in Asian and African cultures.
Nevertheless, scientific and technological innovations, as well as the great
triumphs of Western imperialism, persuaded many Asians that they too could
rationally manipulate their natural and social environment to their advantage.
As evident in Iran under Reza Pahlavi, as well as in Mao Tse-tung’s China,
these single-minded authoritarian figures, who saw themselves as bending
history to their will, ended up inflicting immense violence and suffering on their
societies. The outcome was always ambiguous (as is now clear in Turkey’s own
turn to a moderate Islamism after decades of a secular dictatorship and the recent
embrace by Chinese Communists of a worldview they previously scorned:
Confucianism). For as Dostoyevsky warned, “No nation on earth, no society
with a certain measure of stability, has been developed to order, on the lines of a
program imported from abroad.”
Dostoyevsky was speaking from the experience of nineteenth-century Russia,
the first society to be coerced by its insecure rulers into imitating the West: the
result was uprooted and “superfluous” men, such as those he and his compatriots
wrote about, bloody revolution, and a legacy of authoritarian rule that persists to
this day. Japan had then followed Russia—and preceded Turkey—in trying to do
in a few decades what it took the West centuries to accomplish. Japanese writers
in the last century—from Natsume Sōseki to Haruki Murakami—have attested to
the profound psychic distortions and widespread intellectual confusion caused
by the Japanese attempt at Westernization that peaked with the rise of Japanese
militarism and, after the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, turned
Japan into an American client state. Novelists as varied as Jun’ichirō Tanizaki
and Yukio Mishima sought a return to an earlier “wholeness.” Tanizaki tried to
recreate an indigenous aesthetic by pointing to the importance of “shadows”—a
whole world of subtle distinctions banished from Japanese life by the modern
invention of the lightbulb. Mishima invoked, more dramatically, Japan’s lost
culture of the samurai. Both were fueled by rage and regret that, as Tanizaki
wrote in In Praise of Shadows, “we have met a superior civilization and have
had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for
thousands of years.”
In recent times, Orhan Pamuk’s fiction has, as he writes in his novel The White
Castle, eloquently attested to the alienation wrought by “the transformation of
people and beliefs without their knowledge” and the pathos of “witnessing the
superiority of others and then trying to mimic them.” But what Tanpınar
identified as a peculiar “fatality of Turkish history” was not particular to his or
Turkey’s experience. Both China’s Lu Hsün and India’s Rabindranath Tagore
confronted what Tanpınar described as “the awful thing we call belatedness”;
that is, the experience of arriving late in the modern world, as naive pupils, to
find one’s future foreclosed and already defined by other people’s past and
present. There is much literary, historical, and sociological evidence attesting to
the spiritual and psychological as well as political damage of top-down
modernization. Still, most commentators in the West continue to insist that non-
Western societies, especially Islamic ones, ought to quickly become modern: in
other words, be more like the West. These reflexive and unexamined prejudices
emerge, understandably, from the exceptional experience of Western Europe and
America. But at least some of them have to be overcome before we can
understand the nature and extent of Tanpınar’s achievement—his sense of
foreboding and loss, and his evocation, in particular, of the melancholy, or
hüzün, of those doomed to arrive late, and spiritually destitute, in history. It
requires sympathy with the trauma of writers who witnessed the devastation of
their familiar landmarks, for whom the new world conjured into being by their
great leaders remained agonizingly meaningless, denuded of the consolations of
tradition and heaving with the tawdry illusions of modernity. It requires
understanding that though Tanpınar knew his European literature—his
Baudelaire, Gide, and Valéry—the anguish, as Pamuk writes, “that sustains all of
his work arises from the disappearance of traditional artistry and lifestyles.”
The anguish—and the resentment of being in permanent tutelage to Europe—
was all the more keen for Tanpınar, who had grown up in the Ottoman Empire
and knew something of the old ways before they were violently suppressed by
Atatürk. He grew up, for instance, with the Ottoman music and poetry that
Atatürk’s cultural engineering made inaccessible to later generations. His teacher
was Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, a much-loved Turkish writer, who authored nostalgic
epics relying on traditional Persian aruz rhythm instead of the newly invented
Turkish one. Tanpınar seems to have recognized that Atatürk’s new republic
could not be a tabula rasa, no matter how hard the state tried to eradicate the fez,
Muslim calendar, and Arabic numerals and measures, and replace them with the
European clock, calendar, numerals, and weights and measures.
But Tanpınar did not respond to this feckless program of Westernization with
a conservative or backward-looking project like Dostoyevsky’s pan-Slavism.
Tanpınar hoped for a synthesis of past and present that went beyond secularist
slogans and state programs for modernization. In opposition to a parochial
nationalism, Tanpınar invoked the cosmopolitanism of Istanbul—something that
has become a tourist-brochure cliché in our own time but wasn’t so obvious in
the 1930s, when the city was disdained by secular Kemalists for its centrality to
the superseded Ottoman Empire. The old city brought the traditional together
with the modern, the foreign with domestic, and the “beautiful with ugly”—an
intermingling originally forged by “the institutions of Islam and the Ottoman
Empire.” And it was important to emphasize this because, Tanpınar wrote,
echoing many writers in Japan and other parts of Asia, it was of no use to keep
thinking of the East and West as separate; they had to be seen as “an invitation to
create a vast and comprehensive synthesis [terkip], a life meant for us and
particular to us.”
Tanpınar’s brooding and intricate novel A Mind at Peace (1939) attempts such
a synthesis—one reason why it became popular in the 1980s as Turkey began to
emerge from decades of soulless Kemalism. Its most cherished character is
Istanbul itself—the city’s poor neighborhoods, dramatic sunsets, and long
Ramadan evenings—celebrated with no less lyrical intensity than Baudelaire had
showered on his Paris. It is against the backdrop of the city in the 1930s that
Mümtaz, a young writer, pursues a nearly mystical romance with a musically
gifted woman named Nuran, while staving off the intellectual and romantic
challenge of Suad, a Nietzschean dandy. His cousin, the cultivated Ihsan,
introduces the conventionally Westernized Mümtaz to the works of Ottoman
poets and composers. As though fulfilling Proust’s maxim that what we love in
others is the particular world we think they represent, Nuran embodies, in the
rapturous eyes of Mümtaz, the superseded Ottoman-Turkish culture.
The symbolism is rendered in a dense, opaque prose and unchronological
sequences that speak of a very deliberate attempt to appropriate the techniques of
modernism—the artistic movement that set itself against the great rational
ideologies and epistemologies of the nineteenth century. The Kemalists had tried
to enlist Turkish writers into the national task of creating new role models and
educating a loyal and intelligent citizenry. But Tanpınar, with his poetics of the
indolent flaneur, rejects the social-realist tradition that was dominant in Turkey
(and indeed in all new national societies in the twentieth century). He seems to
have taken to heart Baudelaire’s dictum that the modern artist is “the painter of
both the passing moment and everything in that moment that smacks of eternity.”
He lingers defiantly on classic Istanbul scenes: ferries with melancholy foghorns
and broken marble fountains.
This literary archeology seeks to excavate different histories and memories
buried within the old city. But Tanpınar’s self-chosen project of synthesis in A
Mind at Peace doesn’t survive his scrupulous attention to the tormented inner
lives of his characters. Failure dogs the romantic and professional life of
Mümtaz, a writer entrusted with the task of developing a suitable intellectual
history (biographies of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Turkish figures) for
modern Turkey. Most characters seem paralyzed by their inability to transcend
their divided selves. Mümtaz’s mentor, Ihsan, talks—channeling Tanpınar—
about the “necessity of constructing a new life unique to us and compatible to
our conditions without closing ourselves to the West and by preserving our ties
with the past.”
But everywhere there are signs of the Turkish “intellectual indigestion.” Once
discarded, Tanpınar implies, tradition cannot always be retrieved and used to re-
enchant the world—a warning to those who today rummage through Istanbul’s
cosmopolitan past for clues to their identity.
As Mümtaz looked at this shop, involuntarily, he recalled Mallarme’s line: “It’s ended up here through
some nameless catastrophe.” Here, in this dusty shop, in this place on whose walls handmade tricot
stockings hung . . . In neighboring shops with wooden shutters, simple benches, and old prayer rugs
rested the same luxurious and, when seen from afar, occult insights of tradition, in an order eternally
alien to the various accepted ideas of classification, on shelves, over bookrests or chairs, and on the
floor, piled one atop another as if preparing to be interred, or rather, as if being observed from where
they lay buried. The Orient, however, couldn’t be authentic anywhere, even in its grave. Next to these
books, in laid-out hawker cases, were lapfuls of testimonials to our inner transformation, our desire to
adapt, and our search for ourselves in a new context and climate: pulp novels with illustrated covers,
school textbooks, French yearbooks with faded green bindings, and pharmaceutical formulas. As if all
the detritus of the mind of mankind had to be hastily exposed in this market . . .
The suicide of Suad, the Nietzschean radical, who hangs himself while
listening to Beethoven, further hints at the impossibility of synthesis. The Orient
is doomed to inauthenticity, to be forever seeking fragments it can shore against
its ruins.