Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time: Bergson, Tanpinar, Benjamin, Walser 3031352017, 9783031352010

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NEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE

Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time Bergson, Tanpinar, Benjamin, Walser

Ozen Nergis Dolcerocca

New Comparisons in World Literature Series Editors

Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee Department of English Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Coventry, UK Sharae Deckard School of English, Drama & Film Studies University College Dublin Dublin, Ireland

New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing that registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the historical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that take up the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar new modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result. Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect. We welcome proposals for monographs, edited collections and Palgrave Pivots (short works of 25,000-50,000 words). Editorial board Dr Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA Dr Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden Dr Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK Dr Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA Dr Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, USA Dr Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK

Özen Nergis Dolcerocca

Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time Bergson, Tanpınar, Benjamin, Walser

Özen Nergis Dolcerocca University of Bologna Bologna, Italy

ISSN 2634-6095     ISSN 2634-6109 (electronic) New Comparisons in World Literature ISBN 978-3-031-35200-3    ISBN 978-3-031-35201-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35201-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

This book is a belated product, or as they say, it has long been in the making. I wholeheartedly agree with my favorite protagonist Hayri Irdal that “some people spend their lives making good use of time, but in my life it has always stuck a foot out in front of me. I have tripped over time.” And in this long process of tripping over this manuscript, I have incurred many debts. It began as a dissertation at New  York University, Department of Comparative Literature. First, I would like to thank Emily Apter, whose intellectual example and friendship I will always cherish. To Elias Khoury, I also owe a special debt of gratitude. He has nurtured my work in literary modernism in the Middle East, and has provided constant intellectual and personal support. Several people read and commented on drafts of my work at different stages and they deserve special mention: Toral Gajarawala, Ilya Kliger, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Nergis Ertürk, Tiphaine Samoyault, and Bilal Hashmi. I would like to thank NYU Global Research Initiative in London and the British Library for their support. I am also grateful to Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle, and especially to Tiphaine Samoyault, for hosting me as a visiting scholar for a year in Paris. I thank the wonderful staff at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, both Richelieu and François-­ Mitterrand. Thanks to Koç University Seed Fund Research Program, I was able to visit the libraries and archives in Bern, with special thanks to the staff at the Robert Walser Zentrum. My colleagues and friends Meliz Ergin, Sooyong Kim, and Mert Bahadır Reisoğlu made my life in Istanbul a special one both intellectually and socially. Finally, I would like to thank v

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Antonino Rotolo and Paola Puccini for making me a part of the intellectual dreamland called Bologna. My deepest gratitude goes to Antoine, who has prevented me from tripping over time, again and again. I am especially grateful to my family, Aysel and Nursal Seçkin, Asiye and Fatma Yılmaz, Annie, Jean-Pierre and Catherine Albano, Denise Maran, and my friends Banu Karaca and Serkan Aka for their support. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the kind permission of editors and publishers to use material from “‘Free Spirited Clocks’: Modernism, Temporality and the Time Regulation Institute.” Middle Eastern Literatures 20, no. 2 (May 4, 2017) and “Chronometrics in the Modern Metropolis: The City, the Past and Collective Memory in A.H.Tanpınar,” MLN, vol. 130 no. 5, 2015.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Transnational Modernism, Comparative Methodologies, and Theories of Time on the World Literary Stage  1 1.1 The Time-Mind of Modernism  6 1.2 World Literature and the Problem of Eurochronology  8 1.3 Comparative Modernism and Time Studies 14 1.4 Overview 17 References 27 Part I Philosophy of Time  33 2 Bergson,  Modernity, and Philosophy of Time in Fin-de-Siècle Europe 35 2.1 Introduction 35 2.2 Science and Mathematics 40 2.3 Duration 43 2.4 The Persistence of the Past 48 2.5 Time is Hesitation 52 2.6 Bergsonisms: Missed Encounters 54 2.7 Conclusion 57 References 60

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Part II Chronometrics in the Modern Capital: The City, the Past, and Collective Memory  63 3 Chronometrics  in the Modern Capital: Walter Benjamin’s Fairy Tale 65 3.1 Awakening 65 3.2 The Arcades Project, a Brief Introduction 70 3.3 The Theory of Street Names 73 3.4 Jeztzeit and the Critique of Historicism 75 3.5 Memory, Blitzhaft, Bergson 78 3.6 Wish Images (Wunsch-Bilder) 83 References 89 4 Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Istanbul 91 4.1 Introduction: Memory Politics of the Little Square 91 4.2 Tanpınar’s Urban Dream, Benjamin’s Fairy Tale 95 4.3 Five Cities  97 4.4 Istanbul: Transformation and Daüssıla 99 4.5 Tanpınar’s İkinci Zaman 101 4.6 Ruins/Residues107 References120 Part III The Literary Clock and Chronophobia 123 5 Chronostasis:  Critique of Managed Existence in The Time Regulation Institute125 5.1 Introduction125 5.2 The Time Regulation Institute 127 5.3 Critical Reception130 5.4 Mechanization and Zeitkritik137 5.5 The Clock-Setting Institute: The Absurdity of Presentism143 5.6 The Temporal Void150 5.7 The Time of Psychoanalysis: “A taboo encircled by a web of complexes”151 5.8 How to Fill the Void: The Building on the Freedom Hill154 5.9 Repetition and Difference: “We all ride the Carousel”155 5.10 Time and Authenticity: Duration on Trial159 References176

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6 The  Clockwork Language: Temporal and Linguistic Modernity in Robert Walser’s The Assistant181 6.1 Introduction181 6.2 The Assistant 183 6.3 The Narrative Time184 6.4 The Time of the Clerk: Vorübergänglichkeit187 6.5 The Advertising Clock191 6.6 Clockwork Language195 References207 Afterword211 Index217

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Transnational Modernism, Comparative Methodologies, and Theories of Time on the World Literary Stage

In 1937 Henri Bergson (1859-1941) was the honorary president of the International Congress of Philosophy in Paris. There were two philosophers and devoted readers of Bergson in the hall during his address to the Congress: Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Mustafa Şekip Tunç (1886-1958), a Turkish philosopher and psychologist. Tunç was a member of the Turkish delegation and addressed the congress with a controversial statement: that Turkey has constituted itself in the way Bergson defined. The philosopher was possibly surprised to hear that his writings had political and social ramifications in translation. This came five years after the Urdu poet Mohammad Iqbal’s (1877-1938) meeting with Bergson in Paris, and during the adaptation of his philosophy by the French and the Russian avant-garde. This historical moment of transnational and translational exchange has led me into questions on conceptualization of time in the early twentieth-century culture: What made Bergson’s theory of time such a widely read and translated text in the first half of the twentieth century? What were the regionally marked concepts and tropes that resonated with it when it traveled elsewhere? How did literature, particularly literary modernism, respond to this dominant question of time at the turn of the century? Modernism and Poetics of Time: Bergson, Tanpınar, Benjamin, Walser is about modernists from Turkish, French, and German literary traditions,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Ö. N. Dolcerocca, Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35201-0_1

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who were burdened by an extreme consciousness of time and who shared a common skepticism of modernity’s temporal ideology that valorizes newness, rupture, and linear teleological conception of time. The book explores the conceptualization of time in early twentieth-century literature and thought, based on a transnational and translational model of literary history. These uneasy modern writers—Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962), and Robert Walser (1878-1956)—each from different linguistic, cultural and national backgrounds, provide a radical critique of time regimes, or chronometries, which calibrate time in singular temporal narratives. Foregrounding the major texts of the Turkish modernist A.H. Tanpınar, who provides a unique and particularly relevant insight into the crisis of time, I argue that the modernists in this study invite us to rethink time in a period of devastating transformation and war, and to consider temporal multiplicities in cultural periodicity and in political modernities. Modernism and Poetics of Time traces the philosophical strand of this critical chronometry from Henri Bergson’s conception of duration, through Walter Benjamin’s ambivalence toward decay of tradition, and finally to A.H. Tanpınar’s and Robert Walser’s modernist fiction. Negotiating among regionally marked concepts and topoi of temporality, such as durée, élan vital, ikinci zaman, daüssıla, dialectical images, Erfahrung, and Geistlosigkeit, it discusses networks of cultural circulations and disseminations of concepts in Western Asia and maps a revised intersection of Turkish and Western European literary histories, revealing constitutive convergences as well as essential discontinuities between the two. The terms these authors introduce designate nonsynchronous and heterogeneous temporalities, flowing at different speeds and belonging to different systems of reference, against the teleological narrative of modernity. Modernism and Poetics of Time is a wide-ranging study that expands the horizon of compositional, intellectual, and political ventures in modernism’s engagement with time. Scholars of modernism have repeatedly treated the question of time and temporality as a fundamental aspect of modernist fiction, but mostly without moving beyond a handful of canonical figures, such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. While recognizing this major modernist legacy, which has dominated the critical work on the relation between philosophy of time and literature, I aim to draw a polycentric and plural map of modernist temporality in this book. These signature topoi of the modernist aesthetic, I argue, are not the only

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examples provided by early twentieth-century literature of the diversity and fragmentation of temporal experience. Non-canonical and non-­ European works have produced parodies of managed existence, poking holes in any stable form of timekeeping, or chronometry, including the cardinal modernist mode of recovering lost time and streaming it back to consciousness. The theoretical and methodological framework of Modernism and Poetics of Time blends literary history, philosophy, and critical theory with an emphasis on interactions between languages, thus aiming to open up spaces to rethink the discipline of comparative literature and transnational modernist studies. It widens the horizon of literary and philosophical ventures in modernism’s engagement with time to the Turkish literary context. Finally, it answers the need for new paradigms of comparative literary history by addressing the eurochronology problem, shifting temporal and cartographic frames of modernism, establishing coevalness in its historiography, and enacting a ‘contrapuntal reading’ of modernism. Scholarship in the humanities remains deeply invested in the self-proclaimed exceptionalism of modernity, which results in repeating and elaborating on the grand narratives on and of the period. Focusing on works from the global periphery, so far constituted as objects of knowledge for comparative literature, and on the undercurrents of Euromodernism documents modernism’s heterogeneity and reevaluates established categories of comparative literary history. Each of the chapters is organized around an untranslatable temporal concept. Each introduces a particular encounter with modernity as self-­ conscious temporal difference and identifies the critical quandary of these writers in their conception of time. The transnational influence of Bergson’s thought his philosophy of creative time with unprecedented explorations into memory, duration, and the survival of the past in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (1889) and Matière et mémoire (1896). The notion of durée, which permits us to think of the survival of the past in the present, comes together with the idea of évolution créatrice and élan vital in his later work titled L’évolution créatrice (1907). Bergson’s spontaneous, elusive, and virtual experience of the past gains a transformative and utopian potential that “explodes” in the present in Das Passagenwerk (written between 1927-1940) in the flash-­like moments (Blitzhaft) and in the now of recognizability (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit). Benjamin’s and Tanpınar’s experiments in the chronometrics of urban

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histories in Five Cities (1946) expose the time fragments of the modern capital, as manifest in urban ruins, residues, decay, obsolescence, homelessness, and ghosts—against the grain of linear-progressive historical time. The last two chapters look at the aesthetic experiments in temporal disorders, irregularities, and chronopathologies, through parody, pathos, satire, narrative instability, and mutually canceling ambiguities, epitomized as a state-sponsored frenzy in The Time Regulation Institute (Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 1954), and the clerical disorder of Vorübergänglichkeit (non-permanence) in The Assistant (Der Gehülfe, 1908). It is often said that to be modern is to live in an age where the new becomes out of date at an astonishing and unprecedented pace. Thanks to Reinhart Koselleck’s influential work, there has been a growing consensus that modernity is best understood as a temporal ideology. Koselleck has argued that by the nineteenth century Europeans became conscious of living within “new times” (neue Zeit). The present is now experienced as something unprecedented and distinctive, with the acceleration in the rhythm of temporal experience: “a moment that immediately and, perhaps, necessarily marks off its location from what came before and distinguishes discontinuous times contained within the same chronology.”1 Departing from this idea, almost all our stories about modernity begin with an account of transition, rupture, and acceleration. It has become commonplace to note that modernity is conscious of itself as a present soon to become past and therefore it is the epoch that is most conscious of history and its own historicity. This experience of the now as something unique and forever passing promotes anxiety and nostalgia as well as the need for constant self-definition vis-à-vis the past. Yet once we delve into the history of modernism, we realize that philosophical and aesthetic engagements with time are far more complicated, that in the first decades of the twentieth century an alternative understanding of time is to be had that radically questions modernization’s temporality of speed and novelty, focusing on problems of memory, continuity, ruins, and genealogies. This analysis becomes all the more pressing in the context of twentieth-­ century Europe transitioning from the Second Industrial Revolution to the great thirty years of European warfare. This is the period of cultural modernism that witnesses remarkable breaks with the past, the celebration of material culture and advanced technology, imperial ventures, and late nineteenth-century globalization, all of which culminated in crisis with the First World War.2 After all, as the process of modernization transforms life

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in Europe, its intellectuals are confronted with the task of negotiating between the liquidation and conservation of the past. Thus conceived, the modern rupture of continuity gives everyone the sense that they belong to two eras: there is the past, which is neither abolished nor forgotten, but it is a past that fails to orient us in the present, or to help us imagine the future.3 Bergson’s philosophical interventions, Benjamin’s theoretical insights, and Tanpınar’s essays in sections I and II reflect on this historical conjuncture. The fiction examined in Modernism and Poetics of Time illustrates the distinction proposed by Paul Ricœur, borrowed from A.A. Mendilow, between “tales of time” and “tales about time.”4 All fiction is a tale of time, as all narrative configurations, the development of situations and characters, take time. There is, however, a certain kind of fiction which takes off at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and wherein the very experience of time becomes the center of narrative development. These narrations are “tales about time,” which can easily be situated in the family of stream-of-consciousness novels, while in German literary history, they came to be called the Zeitroman, with such prominent examples as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) and Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities (1930–1943). As many authors of these novels perceive their epoch as a crisis of time and transformation, their works are often referred to as Zeitkritik or social criticism. The novels discussed here, The Time Regulation Institute and The Assistant, are precisely such tales about time. What these works also have in common is their exploration of the idea of clock-time as an empty and uniform resource that lends itself to be exploited by rational and calculative behavior. The appearance of the clock in the thematic cluster of modernist writing is tightly bound up with modernity and its machine culture. Echoing Leo Marx’s depiction of the “machine’s sudden entrance into the garden,” the clock appears uproariously, a monster always already full-grown.5 The machine ushers into Tanpınar’s protagonist Hayri’s life in the form of a watch, which then completely transforms his mind, and Walser’s protagonist Joseph is confronted by it for the first time at Tobler’s office. Finally, each of these works explores and critiques modernity and its temporal ideology, one that valorizes speed, novelty, and linear plot lines. A fundamental assumption underlies most of the writing about modernity, an assumption Bruno Latour formulates in his critique of modernist logic:

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modern is the idea of a time that passes irreversibly and annuls the entire past in its wake.6 It affirms the conviction and compulsion that il faut absolument être moderne (one must be absolutely modern), to quote Arthur Rimbaud’s famous declaration from 1873.7 Underlying this exhortation is the uncontested belief in a sudden temporal break common to all modernity narratives. It denotes a temporal ideology of rupture that manifests itself in historical, cultural, and political discourse since the late nineteenth century. The modernists in this study, by emphasizing the diversity and fragmentation of temporal experience, the inner flow of consciousness, and the continuity with the past implied in the topos of clocks, challenge the rhetoric of newness and rupture, offering new ways of imagining time and social process. While time is a dominant theme in modernist literature and thought, few scholarly works have explored this anti-chronometric understanding of time.8 In literary studies, it has mostly been treated within stream-of-consciousness narratives and the Proustian mémoire involontaire, while other critical works have generally focused on issues of memory, nostalgia, and psychoanalysis. Without an understanding of a shared modernity and its particular temporal imaginations, we fail to grasp the heterogeneity and inherent contradictions of literary modernisms. In order to overcome such limitations of the national canon framework, on the one hand, and to avoid a comparatism reduced to questions of originality and mimicry, on the other, we need to examine the diverse forms of time-consciousness shared, albeit asymmetrically, by French, German, Swiss, and Turkish literature and thought.

1.1   The Time-Mind of Modernism The relationship between modernity and time-consciousness has extended accross many scholarly fields. Within cultural history, scholars such as Krzysztof Pomian, David Harvey, Paul Virilio, Elizabeth Grosz, and François Hartog have explored what has happened to temporality and its orders with the onset of modernity.9 Within literary studies, meanwhile, scholars such as Paul Ricœur, George Poulet, and Gilles Deleuze have emphasized a static treatment of historical linearity, fostering Eurocentric aesthetic categories.10 More recently, scholars Martin Hägglund and Michael Clune have taken on the complication of the past in psyche and in the time of the subject.11 However, few of these recent works have developed a dialectical approach to the question of modern temporal

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imagination. Modernity is a historical and evolutionary process, in which the progressive and the regressive impulse are inextricably combined. Its development as the logic of the new with an inherent yearning for lost time constitutes its own inevitable destruction. In this historical process we call time-consciousness of modernity, how did early twentieth-century literature and thought imagine its connection with the past and with tradition? In thus taking up the question of the persistence of the past and temporal multiplicities, Modernism and Poetics of Time contributes to the emerging wave of scholarship on humanities and time studies, which has generally focused on issues of memory, nostalgia, and psychoanalysis. The question of time and temporality as a fundamental aspect of modern literature has been studied in detail in various national and linguistic contexts. The Proustian oeuvre, in addition to its trademark device of mémoire involontaire, is taken as an extensive menagerie of other temporal devices: omnitemporality and complex anachronies, the recall and advance mention, the singulative and iterative, the pause and ellipsis.12 The celebrated device of stream of consciousness, on the other hand, lets time flow through subjectivity, and it also slows down the flow of time to arrest the present. With James Joyce, the epic enlargement of a single day is introduced, with an overwhelming sense of temporal density, while Virginia Woolf makes time progress by slowing it down. The world of experience is thick with perception and with the labor of recovering lost time. These signature topoi of the modernist aesthetic, however, are not the only examples provided by early twentieth-century literature of the diversity and fragmentation of temporal experience. Other works have produced parodies of managed existence, subverting any stable form of timekeeping, or chronometry, including the cardinal modernist mode of recovering lost time and streaming it back to consciousness. These works, two of which by Walser and Tanpınar are examined here, exemplify a multiplistic treatment of the temporality question in modernism, by carrying a greater irony through parody, pathos, satire, narrative instability, and mutually canceling ambiguities. At the same time, other experiments in the chronometrics of urban histories, as we shall see in Benjamin and Tanpınar’s nonfiction, expose the time fragments of the modern city. We need to therefore widen the horizon of compositional, intellectual, and political ventures in modernism’s engagement with time. Modernism and Poetics of Time addresses the central question of what Shannon Lee Dawdy has called the anti-modern temporal imagination13— namely, the thematic and theoretical challenges by modernists to

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modernity’s rhetoric of temporal break and of the irreversibility of time. The terms introduced here highlight temporal pluralities, flowing at different speeds and belonging to different systems of reference, against the teleological narrative of modernity in which such divergent temporal (and historical) experiences are understood as belated emulations. While discussing different forms of chronometry, namely how time is produced and ordered in different systems of temporal ideologies, we will see how these particular works by four writers treat singular and quantitative measures of time with skepticism: the time of modern efficiency and ‘development to come,’ the time of the Bildungsroman and autobiography, the chronometrics of old and new time regimes, and the time of the subjective flow and its vocation of memory are all called into question. Drawing attention to the terms and concepts introduced by these writers foregrounds the nonsynchronous and heterogeneous temporalities these distinct works commonly propose. These terms suggest a sense of temporal disorder, irregularity, or chronopathology, such as chronostasis—a temporal dilation and suspension—experienced under the force of the new and the rupture with the past. In fiction, these conceptual irregularities are institutionalized as progress in The Time Regulation Institute, and pathologized as Vorübergänglichkeit (non-permanence) in The Assistant.

1.2   World Literature and the Problem of Eurochronology James Joyce’s vision of hell, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is a “great hall,” dark and silent, with a “great clock” ticking unceasingly. Marcel Proust’s memorable narrator in In Search of Lost Time complains of the insolent indifference of a clock that chatters on at the top of its voice as though he is not there.14 Virginia Woolf in Orlando points out the extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind.15 All three examples by canonical figures of modernism show a pronounced preference for time of the mind over time on the clock. Clock-­ time is perceived as an empty and uniform resource that lends itself to be exploited by rational and calculative behavior, utterly detached from the particular. Periods, like the clocks of these modernists, are convenient terms of time measurement: they are retrospective temporal concepts that we use to understand and interpret past events. Some chronotypes are insolent and indifferent to histories of different regions, chattering at the top of their voice as though those histories were not there. Some are

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visions of hell for historical thought, imagined as one great clock ticking nonstop in a universal telos. The discrepancy outlined by Woolf between the time on the clock and time in the mind might as well be imagined between periodizations and the multiplicity of the lived experience in the past. These modernists’ concern for temporal calibration is thus not far from problems of periodization in historiography. Modernism is a critical term that is, and has always been, subjected to a number of descriptions and definitions. While the term refers to a body of innovative works produced during a period of extraordinary cultural, social, economic, and political transformation, critics disagree about almost every aspect of its definition, including its nature as an artistic phenomenon, as well as its cartography and chronology. Hence, we now refer to modernisms in the plural.16 The engagement with time, however, is an established characteristic of literary modernisms more generally. It is a dominant concern, if not a signature aspect, of modernist fiction on many levels. Modernists are attentive to the time of history that surrounds and permeates their works, as they problematize the representation of time and temporality, and finally, as they experiment with narrative time in their fiction. Modernity’s own temporal logic, that is, modernity as always new, as a break with the past and as an experience of accelerating time, contrasts with the time of subjective consciousness in modernist narrative. The literary modernist reacts to the ruptured chronologies of modernity by deliberately confusing (and breaking) the teleological progress of the narrative, thus resisting the linear temporal regime that modernity would impose. This signature characteristic of the modernist aesthetic begs the following question: What are the historical periodizations and chronotypes attributed to the history of a literary and artistic movement that is so engaged with time? Let us consider the periodization of modernism in literary history. When does modernism start? When does it end? Where does it end? Or does it refuse to die, casting a long shadow over post-modernism in a linear succession? If the ‘post’ in question is a temporal marker, then what is late modernism? ‘Early’ modernism? ‘High’ and ‘low’ modernism? The answers to these questions regarding the periodization of this artistic movement are generally debated and contested, much like the term modernism itself. In this work, I would like to revisit these historiographical questions, particularly that of periodization and geographic scope, regarding the history of literary modernism, and offer a transnational perspective that, I argue, would enable us to critically reassess literary historiography.

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Modernism constitutes a unique movement where philosophy, art, literature, and historiography come together around the question of time, be it historical, narrative, phenomenological, or mnemonic. Yet, for this literary movement that problematizes historical time, such problematization is not afforded to it in literary history. In other words, modernists who critically engaged with time are contingent on arbitrary periodization in literary history. Modernism remains first and foremost a Euro-American endeavor, generally squeezed into the inter-war period, characterized by what some critics have called Eurochronology. Bringing together history, literary studies, and, to some extent, also art history, Modernism and Poetics of Time asks cross-disciplinary questions regarding modernism and its contested chronologies and cartographies and argues for an approach to research in the humanities that includes, without appropriation, a number of different voices which may well remain in conflict, and advocates multi-lingual and translational research practices. The discipline of Comparative Literature has much to offer when rethinking historical periodizations, and when reworking historical categories that go beyond nation-centric interpretive paradigms. It is in many ways a meta-discipline, always in search of new identities and self-­ definitions, of new methodologies, genealogies, and typologies. Initially, the field was (and it partially still is) defined by Eurocentric assumptions, a concerted effort to consolidate European universal literary and cultural values, assimilating, appropriating, or directly marginalizing other societies and their literary and cultural creativity. It now attempts to define a more transnational and interdisciplinary literary sphere beyond the nation-­ state and center-periphery models, with remarkable studies that cross chronological, cartographic, and linguistic boundaries. Edward Said, who himself was first and foremost a comparatist, once said of the field: “To speak of comparative literature therefore was to speak of the interaction of world literatures with one another, but the field was epistemologically organized as a sort of hierarchy, with Europe and its Latin Christian literatures as its center and top.”17 He thus highlights and questions the conflict within the discipline of Comparative Literature (and Comparative Humanities more generally). The discipline tries to keep Western European histories at the center, while, on the other hand, it also spreads out its limits, finding other cores, and thus building transnational geohistories. This study argues for this second movement in the study of modernism, expanding periods and cartographies not epistemologically organized

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around a European core, but around the formal, stylistic, and historical aspects of the literary movement. The question of periodization has recently taken on a new urgency for the discipline of Comparative Literature around the question of world literature. Chris Prendergast, in his edited volume on world literature, borrows the term Eurochronology from Appadurai’s Modernity at Large, to describe the “ethnocentrism of literary-historical periodisation.”18 He is concerned with the adaptation of the long temporal and spatial reach of world history to the idea of world literature since the parameters of inquiry are not identical. As an example of the prominence of Eurochronology in the study of world literature, he cites the prioritization of printed literature, particularly modern cosmopolitan literatures, over oral and traditional literatures. He argues that the study of world literature in practice has been concerned with printed literatures that, by some mechanism or other, have entered into relations with others, whose historical point of departure was usually the European Renaissance and the development of national literary traditions, and whose terminus was the literary world ‘marketplace’ of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Prendergast is here referring to Pascal Casanova’s La République Mondiale des Lettres, a book that has many merits, although its Eurochronologic assumptions have incited fierce debates on global literary comparativism— much like Patrick Boucheron’s L’Histoire Mondiale de la France.19 Hence, the ‘world’ in world literature does not encompass the global (in the sense of including all literatures in the world), but rather reflects specific international structures and transactions with their inbuilt chronologic disorders. Building on the concept of Eurochronology, Emily Apter has recently drawn attention to the Eurocentric assumptions inherent in literary categories, and to overcome these has proposed a transcultural approach to world literature that would rely on the ‘untranslatable’—a conscious mapping and mining of conceptual difference across languages.20 Despite recent efforts to broaden its scope, the humanities in the global north have largely remained within the traditional bounds of Eurochronology, which implies the idea that diverse literary traditions and historical practices unfold on a single predestined course, following the Western European calendar that serves as a universal measurement of time, its hereditary disorders, that is, its inborn categories and typologies, like ‘Renaissance,’ ‘world literature,’ or genre histories, such as the European genealogy of the novel. The term Eurochronology is useful as it displays a time–space continuum in literary history, uncovering the

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Eurocentric in its chronologics, and illustrating how certain ideological and political cartographies determine certain periods. A Eurocentric geography also leads to a Eurocentric understanding of literary periodization. Therefore, a literary movement like modernism, defined by its extreme consciousness of time, remains essentially a European category, while its chronology depends entirely on European history. In the Eurochronology of modernism, the geography contains British and French literatures; it may include some token authors writing in German or from North America, but anything West or East of these literatures features only marginally, if at all. The treatment of Spanish modernism in literary history as a marginal or aberrant case is a good example of this exclusionary logic.21 Once modernism is periodized as such, the non-Western European or any literary agencies outside of that cartography inevitably and necessarily figure as ‘deviations,’ ‘failures,’ or ‘late emulations.’ Modernism, in this regard, is a strongly contested typology: from the debate about when and where it begins and ends, to its less known Latin American etymology, it has become a literary category where Eurochronology is practiced most frequently—as is evident from the commonly used terminology such as “Late Modernism,” “Inter-War Literature,” or “Men of 1914”—and is simultaneously most contested, as in geo-modernisms and planetary modernisms.22 Susan Friedman, who coined the term ‘planetary modernism,’ details the spatial politics that periodize modernism in her essay “Periodizing Modernism.”23 She shows that whether conceived as a loose affiliation of aesthetic styles, or as a literary/artistic historical period with at least debatable beginning and end points, inherent in modernism is always the presence of an unacknowledged spatial politics that suppresses its global dimensions through time, and the interplay of space and time in all modernisms. Friedman therefore calls for spatializing the literary history of modernism, and reminds us of the agencies of those writers, artists, philosophers, and other producers of culture in the postcolonial world, who are cut off from the mainstream by way of unproblematized periodizations. Although Friedman’s main concern here is the interplay of cultural differences in postcolonial contexts, other studies have followed in complicating histories and maps of modernisms. Despite the plethora of attempts at defining modernism under different agendas, literary critics and cultural historians seem to agree on three aspects: a period, a cultural response to modernity, and a particular style. The first defines modernism as the literature of a particular chronology, which is again inflected with a specific geography. While the British

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genealogy, which constitutes the early scholarship on the movement, sets 1910 as its birthdate, later studies emphasize cultural production in France dating it back to nineteenth-century Paris. The movement is considered to have declined after the Second World War, although some critics argue that it still continues, especially outside of Euro-America. It is particularly important to reconsider this last point: the continuing legacy of modernism into the present is reserved for the global south, thus confirming the ‘late emulation’ chronotype mentioned earlier. My reconsideration should in no way be seen as an attempt at delegitimizing these chronologies, as each works within its particular cartography, and any definition or history inevitably includes implicit or explicit exclusions. Rather, what is proposed here is a heightened awareness of the internal logics of periodizations. Modernism is also defined as a reaction and response to modernity and the changing conditions of modern life. Literature that is concerned with mechanization, urbanization, and impending wars and conflicts, and that responds to new ideas in philosophy, psychology, and science, is considered modernist. Finally, modernism is considered to be a particular style: the new literature that employs experimental styles and techniques, such as stream of consciousness, fragmentation of narrative time, and a multiplicity of perspectives. If we consider these last two definitions, many works outside of the initial chronological definition can be considered modernist. However, few of these make it to acclaimed anthologies, curricula, or critical works. Moving scales creates different periodizations.24 If we scale modernisms according to the last two categories (i.e., modernism as a response to modernity and modernism as a particular style), we will see that the particular chronology of modernism, too, would have to change. National and local modernisms have tried to limit the scale to a particular geography while extending modernism to outside of Europe-­ America. National frameworks, such as studies on Brazilian or Chinese modernism, have developed their own canon. These studies, however, do not necessarily challenge Eurochronology. For instance, as long as the non-­ European claim to modernism is inflected with select few locations or authors, even a Swiss-German modernist like Robert Walser at the heart of European cartography will only figure marginally within modernism in the German language, which is reserved for Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, based on an albeit problematic logic of resemblance. Aijaz Ahmad, in “Show me the Zulu Proust,” demonstrates this point with sarcasm.25 Ahmad argues here for the re-invention of ‘World Literature’ from a South-South perspective rather than from a periphery-center one. The

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formula criticized here is clear: show me the Zulu Proust, so that I can appreciate, and appropriate, the Zulu author, through his or her resemblance to the ‘authentic’ modernist. This understanding demonstrates a kind of illogical periodization which rewrites the literary history of the non-West through Eurochronologies. There are many other examples of this rationale in critical studies: the Balzac of the Arabic novel is deemed to be Naguib Mahfouz, which is an effortless translation of the nineteenth-­ century French realism chronotope into the twentieth century Arabic novel—which is in itself a problematic cartography. In the Eurochronology of modernism, Tanizaki figures as Japan’s Kafka, and Tanpınar as the Turkish Proust. This is not a comparative methodology, but rather, in Aamir Mufti’s terms, the logic of orientalism re-packaged as world literature,26 which produces narratives of European ‘diffusionism’ and ‘influence studies.’

1.3  Comparative Modernism and Time Studies We need a renewed understanding of time studies, crossed with the comparative literary history of modernism. In this sense, foregrounding thematic, narrative, and philosophical treatment of time in Tanpınar’s work in this book offers a fresh perspective on the time-consciousness of modernity. In Tanpınar’s work, time in its linearity is radically disrupted, exposing the coexistence of past and present but without the possibility of dwelling in either of them. His philosophy of time thereby helps us re-read the unique moment in literary history where philosophy and literature came together around the question of temporality. In this regard, I follow Emily Apter’s critique of literary history, which points out that national literary traditions privilege the works of canonical authors as peaks in the world-literary landscape, while non-European literatures are subject to Eurocentric standards of literariness and readability. Modernism and Poetics of Time is informed by the canonical genealogy of Euromodernism, not because it aims to create yet another diffusionist or belatedness story,27 but because it aims to revise the literary history of modernism (without claims for a new systematic literary history) by introducing the creative agency of an author outside of the European canon. Prevailing studies of non-European modernism view Western artists as the innovators and the cultures of the rest as traditional. With some notable

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studies—Simon Gikandi’s Writing in Limbo and Roberto Schwarz’s Misplaced Ideas come preeminently to mind—the creative agencies of colonial and postcolonial subjects as producers of modernism have been reinstated.28 The exclusion of these agencies deeply affects modernist studies, ignoring the absence of the very texts that would transform an understanding of the field in general.29 Drawing on the work of Tanpınar alongside his contemporaries writing in the first half of the twentieth century—Bergson, Benjamin, and Walser—this book uncovers affinities between their treatments of modernist temporality. These authors write at the historical moment when the very division between the old and the new is consolidated and when the ‘cult of the new’ ushers in its own sentimental longing for the past. The sense of the fleeting present creates the need to re-capture the past through remembrance, which literature, philosophy, and historiography are all called upon to meet. Despite many differences between these four authors and their partial unawareness of each other’s work, examining resonances in and affinities between their thought illuminates aspects of modernism, pointing to yet more avenues of approaching it through and together with a ‘non-Western-canon’ writer and thinker. It is important to note that Modernism and Poetics of Time does not make an essentially cultural argument, nor does it try to insert yet another token non-Western author into the established canon of European modernism. Some claims to “alternative modernity,” which are based on such culturalist approaches to criticism, explicitly renounce the most fundamental assumptions of modernity, charting out temporalities and spatialities that are essentially cultural, and therefore incommensurable with Euromodernity. Such an approach would not only exclude any ground for comparative analysis, but it would also run the risk of repudiating any claims to universalism, secularism, human rights, and other goals of the “alternatively” modern culture in question.30 Peter Nicholls, in his seminal literary guide to modernisms, argues that the beginnings of modernism, like its endings, are largely indeterminate, a matter of traces rather than of clearly defined historical moments.31 He stresses rather the multiplicity and the complexity of the various cultural innovations that come to be understood as different sorts of modernisms. Although the multiplicity in question here is abandoned in favor of a canonical genealogy, Nicholls’ attention to the polycentric and plural, along with many other field-defining critics of modernism, is essential to this study. In reading the representations of modernity and history

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inscribed in Tanpınar’s writings, the works of Walter Benjamin or Henri Bergson serve not necessarily as an interpretive context but as works of comparison in which authors from different linguistic, cultural, and national backgrounds are put into a dialogue of which they themselves were not necessarily aware. Such a form of comparison, unshackled from theories of influence and center–periphery dichotomies, recalls the idea of a “missed encounter,” presented by Nergis Ertürk as a new comparatist paradigm in Turkish Studies.32 The encounter may not necessarily be a “missed” one, however. These different national literary fields have many connections, deep affiliations, and historical trajectories that are yet to be discovered. The extended method of comparative modernism in Modernism and Poetics of Time aims to shift focus from genealogies of influence to a more historicized literary analysis, exploring the ways in which Tanpınar’s work provides a means to reconsider modernist temporality. There is clearly direct influence between some of these writers: Bergson’s influence on Tanpınar and on Benjamin is unmistakable. The methodological risk to be recognized in exploring such histories of influence is that such interpretations look for an influential figure as a false prior and as a result (re)create temporal and aesthetic hierarchies.33 The method proposed in this book is therefore at odds with recent influential Eurocentric and Eurochronological models such as “Greenwich Mean Time” of literary history, particularly pervasive in conceptualizations of world literature in the last two decades.34 Another methodological shortcoming in current models is that the peculiar case of Turkish literature does not easily yield itself to postcolonial interpretations. The principal instigators of modernization in Turkey were first the Ottoman imperial and then the Turkish Republican elites. This points to yet another periodization problem, as it is a process that dates back to the 1830s, almost a century before the Kemalist Revolution, which is generally hailed as the milestone in modernization in Turkey.35 Following Auerbach’s idea of “the potential ground for a shared culture in fragmentary modernity,” I suggest that the discursive context of modernism itself links the European and Turkish literary fields, rather than essentialized and “imported” categories such as “the modernist novel.”36 Why time now? Time-consciousness of the twenty-first century has generated its own type of temporal anxieties. In the age of information and communication technologies, human experience is dramatically restructured around high-tech machines. We constantly stay updated and upgraded. Life is speedily and conveniently systematized, gathered,

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processed, analyzed, and shared. We are now obsessed with doing more at once, which simultaneously triggers feelings of chaos, anxiety, and insecurity. Many scholars of time studies have examined how new technologies mediate time today.37 With the acceleration of the tempo at which new products are introduced, philosopher Bernard Steigler draws attention to the mass synchronization of consciousness and memory today as a result of what he calls “temporal objects,” such as smartphones, movies, and television programs.38 Jonathan Crary takes this analysis even further and identifies 24/7 consumption models in which “the condition of communication and information access on an everyday level ensure the systematic erasure of the past as part of the phantasmatic construction of the present.”39 Newness and progress today are not necessarily an illusion, but they certainly produce an empty and cyclical temporality of presentism, “a monotonous sameness in temporal patterns and segmentations.”40 Judy Wajcman, in her recent book on acceleration of time in digital capitalism, argues that the temporal logic of the new technologies is the result of our human schemes and desires, and not necessarily the other way around. She challenges the notion that the digital world is completely different from the industrial one and argues for “exploring both the things that have stayed the same, and the things that are particular to our time.”41 Complementing these recent works on time-consciousness today, Modernism and Poetics of Time demonstrates that such temporal anxieties of outmodedness and speed today are not exactly new: roughly a century ago many writers expressed their concern with modernity’s logic of obsolescence in similar terms, detailing the damaged relationship to the past and memory. There are countless aspects of temporality as a response to modernity, whether as developments in literature; in arts; in scientific theory; in information and communication technologies; in photography and cinema; in philosophy; or in the organization of the workday under the capitalist mode of production. The specific concern in this book is the crisis of time engendered by the transformation of individual and societal relationship to the past, manifest in problems of memory, continuity, tradition, ruins, as well as commodification and alienation in these quintessentially modernist works.

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1.4  Overview In Part I ,“Philosophy of Time,” Chap. 2 (“Bergson, Modernity, and Philosophy of Time in fin-de-siècle Europe”) contextualizes the increased interest in time and narration in literature of the early twentieth century and demonstrates its direct relation to the prevalent philosophy of time in fin-de- siècle Europe. Indisputably the most influential intellectual figure of the time, French philosopher Henri Bergson presents a systematic critique of the temporal ideology of modernity epitomized in his idea of durée pure, or duration. Bergson becomes the most dominant figure in French philosophy for much of his lifetime, and the accessibility of his writing eventually gives him a large international audience, even outside the academic community. His key notions of duration and creative evolution as élan vital are widely disseminated within and outside of Europe, capturing the imagination of artists and intellectuals in the early twentieth century . What is at the root of the widespread interest in philosophy of time in the early twentieth century and what makes Bergson a unique figure in the wider historical conjuncture? Bergson, like many other thinkers of the twentieth century, was burdened by an extreme consciousness of time. The idea of duration emerged not just within the context of modernity but also in response to it—much like modernism itself. It not only suggests an alternative arrangement of the relationship between past and present, as opposed to the prevalent idea of progressive continuities that imagine a continuous development, but it also works against the homogenous, systematic, and spatial treatment of time. Hence, duration is not an exclusively philosophical question, but an aesthetic, social, and political one. The objective view of time is reflected in the growing predominance of clock-time in daily life, in the study of remote periods of history, and in science as it relates all scientific phenomena and natural processes to measurable time. It systematically excludes the fundamental question of the true relationship between man and time. It is Bergson who most strongly contests this view by distinguishing between two forms of multiplicity and continuity. He develops a new understanding of time as duration, which suggests the totality of experience, as well as the idea of the elasticity, expansion, and relativity of temporal consciousness. What is essential to this notion of time as duration is the movement and the process of becoming itself. Space-based chronometries, such as clock-time, only establish superficial relations between phenomena: to measure time becomes a

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practical function of the intellect that projects time into space. Pure duration, on the other hand, is unrelated to space and quantity. According to this view of time, the past is not irretrievable, and the future is uncertain. Bergson invites us to reconsider the absolute “knowability” and “measurability” of time in the scientific and philosophical sense. Part II (“ Chronometrics in the Modern Capital: The City, the Past, and Collective Memory ”) moves the focus of analysis from philosophy of time to alternative cultural histories that, unlike official historiographies, register the past that has been oppressed, repressed, rejected, and forgotten. Chapter 3 (“Chronometrics in the Modern Capital: Walter Benjamin’s Fairy Tale”) examines Benjamin’s understanding of time and memory in its relation to the large collection of urban objects he unravels in The Arcades Project (Passagenwerk, 1927–1940). Paris, for the German philosopher, is the locus of transformation of experience and perception in urban capitalist modernity. No other city offers such abundance of sensory and intellectual experience: the material culture of the nineteenth century, with its urban subjects and forms of experience. He argues for a philosophy of time based on matter, on outmoded or obsolete urban objects, ruins, and other linguistic and cultural traces. The chapter analyzes Benjamin’s core reflections on time and his concern for the disregard of temporal relations. It addresses the inherent complexity of his theory of time and locates it within the critique of modernity’s temporal ideology that develops as a countertendency in early twentieth-century philosophy and literature. Benjamin’s writings on time are part of the larger body of modernist works that address questions of connection with and survival of the past, and foreground modernity’s slow and uninterrupted times. While emphasizing the alternative temporalities evoked by Benjamin in the Arcades, the chapter offers a holistic reading of the project with a focus on underexamined entries such as Convolutes C “Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris,” D “Boredom, Eternal Return,” and P “The Streets of Paris.” It also makes use of other material that was originally intended to be part of the project, including “Some Motifs on Baudelaire” and “On the Image of Proust.” Published in 1946, only six years after Benjamin left the manuscript of the Arcades behind, Tanpınar’s collection of essays on five historical capitals, particularly the Istanbul segment, maps a cultural history of modernity within urban landscape and material objects. He attempts to rewrite the urban history of the historically charged capital undergoing devastating transformation. With the increasing interest in Tanpınar’s work in the

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Anglophone world, partly as a result of the recent translation of his last novel into English, Chap. 4 (“Chronometrics in the Modern Capital II: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Istanbul”) revisits the legacy of his work and offers a new scholarly perspective on the Turkish modernist. It places his text within contemporary discourse on memory, the past, and temporal experience, and reconsiders the author in the current framework of comparative modernism and world literature. It revamps Tanpınar studies in light of a discussion on “the ruins of modernity,” inspired by the rediscovery of Benjamin. Regardless of the disparate histories in the Arcades and the Five Cities, Istanbul, exhausted with grand histories of conquests and emperors, and Paris as the locus of national pride offer for both authors ‘shocking’ sites of rupture from historical continuity. Several critics have recently argued for the urgency of bringing them together as critics and writers of “melancholia of modernism’s fallen languages.”42 Part II supplements the recent work on “crucial differences and the remote continuities’” between these two authors, which might eventually help us figure new modes of comparison outside hierarchical and monolithic comparative categories. Although it is hard not to give in to safe genealogies of modernism—even so as to invert them—in which the European original precedes the non-­ European work, in a comparison between two literatures overdetermined by cultural hierarchies, the work of Tanpınar and Benjamin cannot be reduced to such uneven relations. This section does not revisit such genealogies or hierarchies between the two modernisms. It explores, using Benjamin’s account of nineteenth-century Paris as a point of departure, Tanpınar’s direct or unintentional questioning of modern illusions, cultural myths of progress, of historical causality, of a sanctified tradition, and of a dead past. Part III, “The Literary Clock and Chronophobia,” carries over into fiction the philosophical, historiographical, and cultural questions explored so far. Experiments in the chronometrics of urban histories expose the time fragments of the modern capital, as manifest in urban ruins, residues, decay, obsolescence, homelessness, and ghosts—as against the grain of linear-progressive historical time. Yet such narrative experiments in the temporality of punctuated existence do not belong to the historico-­ philosophical discourse alone. Literature provides countless examples of the diversity and fragmentation of temporal experience. The modernist canon offers an extensive picture of memory and trauma, from stream-of-­ consciousness novels to the Zeitroman, while other works, mostly outside

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the Euro-American avant-garde, carry—at times in unsettling terms—a greater irony through parody, pathos, satire, narrative instability, and mutually canceling ambiguities. The former sustains the idea that fragments of lost time can be retrieved and streamed back into consciousness, while the latter produces a parody of managed existence, poking holes in any stable form of chronometry. Such parodies relate a chaotic multiplicity of temporalities. They offer none of the optimism of Bergsonian duration, the nostalgic ideal of Tanpınar’s terkip (synthesis), or the promise of Benjamin’s messianic time. If anything, they mark the deferral and delay of all such hopes. In contrast to the heroic model of recovering lost time, as in stream-of-consciousness novels, this model produces and functions with offset heroes: ordinary people without qualities, such as clerks, assistants, housewives, or vagabonds. This section on fiction, with two chapters on two novels from different national literatures, focuses on just such an anti-heroic and multiplistic treatment of the temporality question in modernism. As we move from the idiosyncratic chronometries of capitals to these literary works, we will find in the latter’s complex treatment of time the radical critique and the ultimate failure of any model of chronometry, including the high modernist, stream-of-consciousness rendering of time, and the nineteenth-century realist, naturalist, psychological, and historical novel. Chapter 5 (“Chronostasis: Critique of Managed Existence in The Time Regulation Institute”) offers a close reading of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s 1954 novel The Time Regulation Institute as an inherently modernist text. It provides a nuanced interpretation of the novel against conventional Tanpınar scholarship, which predominantly reads it as a straightforward satire, and inserts it into an overdetermined philosophy of civilization attributed to the author. The chapter shows that Tanpınar’s poetics in the novel presents a philosophical alternative to the principle of cultural dualities of East and West, and that it reveals the damaging effects of modernization in the first half of the twentieth century, articulated in the novel as resistance to calibrating forms of temporal order. The Time Regulation Institute engages with problems of time and memory, experimenting with the plurality of temporal experience, flowing in different speeds, and belonging to different systems of reference. This section shifts critical emphasis from traditionalism to his aesthetic explorations, turning from “social” questions of identity, authenticity, and cultural theory to representational issues in his writing: novelistic imagery, narrative time, thematic features, and stylistic preferences. By foregrounding its modernist

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elements, it argues that Tanpınar’s novel deemphasizes the idea of continuity with the Ottoman past, in favor of a more critical and modernist approach. The Time Regulation Institute is a remarkable example of modernist Zeitkritik written in the comic-ironic mode. A pseudo-autobiographical account written by an anti-hero, the novel records different stages in the ̇ life of its protagonist Hayri Irdal, leading up to his involvement in the absurd project of the Clock-Setting Institute founded by Hayri’s employer and benefactor Halit Ayarcı. The Institute is a parody of accelerating modernization in a nation plagued by its belatedness: it regulates the citizens’ timepieces, synchronizing all cultural clocks with the world historical time—a Bergsonian ordeal. Behind the idea of the ‘Institute’ lies a farcical obsession with accuracy and the devices of temporal measurement, and an absurd and unconditional belief in the art of calculation—all of which the author exposes as an attempt at synchronizing the time of the nation that unfolds in homogenous empty time. The German-speaking Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) provides a similar antagonism between an anti-hero and an absurd modernizer we see in The Time Regulation Institute. Walser is a singular and enigmatic figure in modernist literature. Although he was prolific and influenced many modernists, like Franz Kafka, he has largely remained at the margins of literary history. Despite the recent revived interest in his work, most of his corpus is still understudied. Chapter 6 (“The Clockwork Language: Temporal and Linguistic Modernity in Robert Walser’s The Assistant”) reads Walser’s novel as a foundational text in the history of modernism for its treatment of the crisis in time as the crisis in language. Published in 1908, the novel is based on a master–servant structure, between a deranged, incompetent, and arrogant entrepreneur and his loyal assistant. The assistant, Josef Marti, enjoys a pampered existence in the home of his employer but is never paid, and finds himself in a position of uncomfortable intimacy within a household being destroyed by bankruptcy and failure. Josef comes from the city, where he has been living in poverty, to take a post in the country at the Toblers, on a small town on Lake Zurich. Engineer Tobler was earlier employed in a factory but now hopes to make his fortune as the inventor of an “advertising clock.” We follow their story from spring until winter, when the assistant abandons his position and leaves the Tobler household, ruined by debts. The chapter demonstrates the affinities between Walser’s understanding of time and the other modernists discussed in this book. The chapter discusses Walser’s

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exploration of the mechanization and rationalization of temporal experience in relation to the logistics of capitalist production, and to the monotonous reproduction and circulation of clerkly language in the service of the present. Hayri and Josef are both fictional embodiments of a category of people prevalent in the history of modernity: the office workers. People who are in the way, as Marshall Berman puts it, of history, of progress, of development; people who are classified, and disposed of, rendered obsolete by modernity’s temporal logic.43 The analysis of alternative times and temporal worlds in these novels opens new venues for understanding modernism’s critique of ‘standard time.’ Scholarship still remains deeply invested in the self-proclaimed exceptionalism of modernity, in the unquestioned belief that ‘things have never been the same,’ which results in repeating and elaborating on the grand narratives of the period. Focusing on non-­ canonical works and the undercurrents of European modernism, however, documents its heterogeneity, and reevaluates established categories in comparative literary history and theory.

Notes 1. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), 95. 2. For recent work on technology and modernist aesthetics, see David Bradshaw, Laura Marcus, and Rebecca Roach, eds., Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2016), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198714170.001.0001. On modernism and the literary market, see Rod Rosenquist, Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New (Cambridge University Press, 2009). On modernism and empire, see Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby, Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality 1890–1940 (Manchester University Press, 2000); John Marx, The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Jon Hegglund, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Saikat Majumdar, Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). On modernism and war, see Paul K. Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (Oxford University Press, 2015). 3. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook: Velocity,

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Pleasure, Modernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Mark Currie, About Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Adam Barrows, The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Ricardo J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Randall Stevenson, Reading the Times: Temporality and History in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 4. Paul Ricœur, Temps et Récit, 3 vols., L’Ordre Philosophique (Paris: Seuil, 1983). 5. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 35th Anniversary edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 365. 6. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). 7. Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud: Poésies—Une saison en enfer—Illuminations (Paris: Folio, 1999). 8. See Paul Giles, Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1093/ oso/9780198830443.001.0001; Tyrus Miller, Time Images: Alternative Temporalities in Twentieth-Century Theory, Literature, and Art (Newcastle-­ upon-­Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). 9. Krzysztof Pomian, L’ordre Du Temps, Bibliothèque Des Histoires (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford UK; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991); Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, 2006 ed., (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006); E. A. Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003). Also see Johannes Fabian’s seminal work on time in anthropology, Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), and Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London; New York: Verso, 1995). 10. Ricœur, Temps et Récit; Georges Poulet, Études Sur Le Temps Humain, vol. 2, Agora 43 (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1990); Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, 12. éd. (Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 2011). 11. Martin Hägglund, Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012); Michael W. Clune, Writing against Time (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013).

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12. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). Also see Levenson Michael, “The TimeMind of the Twenties,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-­Century English Literature, Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, eds. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 13. Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (December 2010): 761–93, https://doi.org/10.1086/657626. 14. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time, ed. Christopher Prendergast, trans. Lydia Davis, (New York: Penguin, 2004), 8. 15. Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995), 47. 16. For transnational approaches initiated by the new modernist studies, see the September 2006 special issue of Modernism/modernity 13, no. 3 (2006) ‘Modernism and Transnationalisms.’ 17. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 45. 18. Christopher Prendergast, ed., Debating World Literature, (London; New York: Verso, 2004), 6; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Public Worlds, v. 1 (Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30. 19. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 2007); Patrick Boucheron, Nicolas Delalande, and Cécile Rey, Histoire mondiale de la France, Ed. illustrée et augmentée (Paris: Seuil, 2018). 20. Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, (London; New York: Verso, 2013). 21. For a compelling collection of essays that address this question, see Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monleón, eds., Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999). José Monleón, ed., Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America, 2133 (New York: Garland Publ., 1999). 22. See Laura Doyle and Laura A Winkiel, Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 23. Susan Stanford Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies,” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 425–43. For a similar analysis of periodization of modernism, see Eric Hayot, “Chinese Modernism,

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Mimetic Desire, and European Time,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 24. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “13. Conclusion. Region, Nation, World,” 2022, https://doi.org/10.17885/HEIUP.607.C15143. 25. Aijaz Ahmad, “‘Show Me the Zulu Proust’: Some Thoughts on World Literture,” Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, no. 17 (2010): 11–45. 26. Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016). 27. For an example of such study, see Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed., Alternative Modernities, 2nd edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2001). 28. Simon Gikandi, Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992); Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992). 29. For new directions in comparative modernism studies, see Charles W. Pollard, New World Modernisms: T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004); Doyle and Winkiel, Geomodernisms; Mark A Wollaeger and Matt Eatough, The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 1, 2008): 737–48; Jessica Berman, Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Harsha Ram, “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local,” PMLA 131, no. 5 (October 1, 2016): 1372–85, https://doi.org/10.1632/ pmla.2016.131.5.1372; Neal Alexander, Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); and Sjef Houppermans et al., eds., Modernism Today (Leiden: Brill, 2013). 30. For a compelling critique of “alternative modernities,” particularly in the context of Turkey, see Arif Dirlik, “Twin Offspring of Empire, Neoliberalism and Authoritarian Neotraditionalism: Thoughts on Susan Buck-Morss’s ‘Democracy: An Unfinished Project,’” Boundary 2 42, no. 3 (August 1, 2015): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-­2919459. Also see Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, (London: Verso, 2012). 31. Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1. 32. Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, (Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 33. Particularly in a case of comparison between Western and non-Western literary production, the Eastern influence is commonly categorized as

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i­ntertextuality while a non-Western text is characterized as mimicry. We should also keep in mind that both notions of intertextuality and mimicry assume an awareness of anteriority and therefore a false prior. 34. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters. 35. Turkey was never directly colonized by the European powers. The process of Westernization and modernization started in the early nineteenth century with the Tanzimat (Reorganization) period. Therefore, post-­colonial literary criticism does not provide adequate/sufficient tools for interpretation of the heterogeneous history of Turkish modernism. See Güven Güzeldere and Sibel Irzık, Relocating the Fault Lines: Turkey Beyond the East-West Divide, Vol 102 No 2/3 Spring/Summer 2003 edition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2003). 36. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, ed. Edward W. Said, trans. Willard R. Trask, (Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 552. 37. In addition to the works mentioned in this section, see Maren Hartmann et al., Mediated Time: Perspectives on Time in a Digital Age (Springer Nature, 2019); Johan Fornäs, “The Mediatization of Third-Time Tools: Culturalizing and Historicizing Temporality,” International Journal of Communication, no. 10 (October 14, 2016): 20; and Peter Nagy, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn, “Time Hacking: How Technologies Mediate Time,” Information, Communication & Society 24, no. 15 (November 18, 2021): 2229–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1758743. 38. Bernard Stiegler, De la misère symbolique (Paris: Editions Flammarion, 2013). 39. Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep,(London: Verso, 2013), 45. 40. Crary, 54. 41. Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism, Reprint edition (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 3. 42. Nergis Ertürk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 123, no. 1 (2008): 41–56. 43. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Reissue edition (New York, N.Y.: Penguin Books, 1988).

References Ahmad, Aijaz. “‘Show Me the Zulu Proust’: Some Thoughts on World Literature.” Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, no. 17 (2010): 11–45. Alexander, Neal. Regional Modernisms. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

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Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Public Worlds, v. 1. Minneapolis, Minn: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London; New York: Verso, 2013. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Edited by Edward W. Said. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013. Barrows, Adam. The Cosmic Time of Empire: Modern Britain and World Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2: Das Passagen-Werk. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 9. Auflage. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2020. Bergson, Henri. L’évolution Créatrice. Edited by Frédéric Worms. 12° édition. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France - PUF, 2013. Bergson, Henri. Matière et Mémoire : Essai Sur La Relation Du Corps à l’Esprit. 72nd ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965. Bergson, Henri. Oeuvres: essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books, 1988. Booth, Howard J., and Nigel Rigby. Modernism and Empire: Writing and British Coloniality 1890–1940. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Boucheron, Patrick, Nicolas Delalande, and Cécile Rey. Histoire mondiale de la France. Paris: Seuil, 2018. Bradshaw, David, Laura Marcus, and Rebecca Roach, eds. Moving Modernisms: Motion, Technology, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Chibber, Vivek. Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. London: Verso, 2012. Clune, Michael W. Writing against Time. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013. Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso, 2013. Currie, Mark. About Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (December 2010): 761–93. https://doi. org/10.1086/657626. Deleuze, Gilles. Différence et répétition. 12. éd. Paris: Presses Univ. de France, 2011.

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Dirlik, Arif. “Twin Offspring of Empire, Neoliberalism and Authoritarian Neotraditionalism: Thoughts on Susan Buck-Morss’s ‘Democracy: An Unfinished Project.’” Boundary 2 42, no. 3 (August 1, 2015): 1–17. https:// doi.org/10.1215/01903659-­2919459. Doyle, Laura, and Laura A Winkiel. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Duffy, Enda. The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Ertürk, Nergis. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fornäs, Johan. “The Mediatization of Third-Time Tools: Culturalizing and Historicizing Temporality.” International Journal of Communication, no. 10 (October 14, 2016): 5213-5232. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 3 (2006): 425–43. ———. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Galison, Peter. Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, ed. Alternative Modernities. 2nd edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2001. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. Gikandi, Simon. Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. Giles, Paul. Backgazing: Reverse Time in Modernist Culture. Oxford ; New York, NY; Oxford University Press, 2019. Grosz, E. A. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Irzık, Sibel, and Güven Güzeldere, eds. Relocating the Fault Lines: Turkey Beyond the East-West Divide. Spec. issue of the South Atlantic Quarterly 102.2–3 (Spring/Summer2003): 283–666. Hägglund, Martin. Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012. Hartmann, Maren, Elizabeth Prommer, Karin Deckner, and Stephan O. Görland, eds. Mediated Time: Perspectives on Time in a Digital Age. Springer Nature, 2019. Hartog, François. Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Seuil, 2003.

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Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford England; Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 1991. Hayot, Eric. “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hegglund, Jon. World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction. Oxford ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA, 2012. Houppermans, Sjef, Peter Liebregts, Jan Baetens, and Otto Boele, eds. Modernism Today. Leiden: Brill, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401209953. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York : Penguin Books, 1976. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1983. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Majumdar, Saikat. Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz. “The New Modernist Studies.” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 1, 2008): 737–48. Marx, John. The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2005. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Michael, Levenson. “The Time-Mind of the Twenties.” In The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, edited by Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Miller, Tyrus. Time Images: Alternative Temporalities in Twentieth-Century Theory, Literature, and Art. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. Monleón, José, ed. Modernism and Its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America. 2133. New York: Garland Publ., 1999. Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literature. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016. Nagy, Peter, Joey Eschrich, and Ed Finn. “Time Hacking: How Technologies Mediate Time.” Information, Communication & Society 24, no. 15 (November 18, 2021): 2229–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1758743. Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London; New York: Verso, 1995.

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Pollard, Charles W. New World Modernisms: T.S. Eliot, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Pomian, Krzysztof. L’ordre Du Temps. Bibliothèque Des Histoires. Paris: Gallimard, 1984. Poulet, Georges. Études Sur Le Temps Humain. Vol. 2. Agora 43. Paris: Presses Pocket, 1990. Prendergast, Christopher, ed. Debating World Literature. London; New York: Verso, 2004. Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way: In Search of Lost Time. Edited by Christopher Prendergast. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York: Penguin, 2004. Quinones, Ricardo J. Mapping Literary Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Ram, Harsha. “The Scale of Global Modernisms: Imperial, National, Regional, Local.” PMLA 131, no. 5 (October 1, 2016): 1372–85. https://doi. org/10.1632/pmla.2016.131.5.1372. Ricœur, Paul. Temps et Récit. 3 vols. L’Ordre Philosophique. Paris: Seuil, 1983. Rimbaud, Arthur. Rimbaud: Poésies—Une saison en enfer—Illuminations. Paris: Folio, 1999. Rosenquist, Rod. Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Schwarz, Roberto. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Edited by John Gledson. London: Verso, 1992. Stevenson, Randall. Reading the Times: Temporality and History in Twentieth-­ Century Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Stiegler, Bernard. De la misère symbolique. Paris: Editions Flammarion, 2013. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “13. Conclusion. Region, Nation, World,” 2022. https:// doi.org/10.17885/HEIUP.607.C15143. ̇ Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. Beş Şehir. Istanbul: YKY, 2000. Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2006. Walser, Robert. Der Gehülfe. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010. Wajcman, Judy. Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Wollaeger, Mark A, and Matt Eatough. The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995. Nergis Ertürk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 123, no. 1 (2008): 41–56.

PART I

Philosophy of Time

CHAPTER 2

Bergson, Modernity, and Philosophy of Time in Fin-de-Siècle Europe

2.1   Introduction In 1900, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, the then newly appointed Chair in Philosophy at the Collège de France, attends the first International Congress of Philosophy in Paris. Interestingly enough, the Congress is timed to coincide with the Exposition Universelle of 1900 that showcases the most recent inventions, machines, and architecture. Prominent philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians of the time, including Maurice Blondel, Georg Cantor, Louis Couturat, Henri Poincaré, and Bertrand Russell, are among the participants of the Congress. In his opening speech, the President of the Congress, Emile Boutroux, Bergson’s mentor and the Chair in the History of Modern Philosophy at the Sorbonne, addresses the anxiety experienced by “the men of the mind” in the face of the overbearing celebration of material culture at the Exposition. The fear (la crainte) of philosophers, he argues, is that the pompous manifestations in the exposition of industry and mechanics are simply celebrations of matter, and that glory and authority belong to la jouissance matérielle, rather than to science and virtue. Boutroux, however, is optimistic, because the Congress of Philosophy is, after all, a part of the Exposition, and it is an example of le triomphe que l’avenir réservait, dans nos sociétés en apparence absorbées par l’exploitation de la matière, aux idées nobles et généreuses [the

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triumph that the future reserved, in our societies ostensibly absorbed by the exploitation of matter, to noble and generous ideas].1 Although the Exposition seems to reflect the immersion of modern society in material culture, in fact, according to Boutroux, it brought together industry and science, work and thought, utility and beauty, and most importantly the real and the ideal. Thirty-seven years later, the Congress, held in Paris for the second time with a more diverse array of participants from all over the world, is chaired by the honorary president, Henri Bergson. In his speech, delivered in absentia due to his deteriorating health, Bergson addresses the same fear, albeit without his advisor’s optimism. He suggests that our most marvelous discoveries and inventions will turn against us if we are not careful to dominate them, that the increasing size of the body of humanity will simply render it incapable of walking unless it is accompanied, for its direction and even support, by a surplus of moral energy.2 The Cartesian dualism invoked here is more than a reference to the theme of the Congress held in honor of the 300th anniversary of the publication of Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Geometry. It also points to a larger question prevalent in Bergson’s oeuvre. The mechanistic worldview epitomized in the Exposition immobilizes our experience as occurring in the temporal flow and prevents us from grasping the temporal nature of reality. The image of “the increasing size of the human body,” referring to Descartes’ human machine, embodies immobility engendered by mechanistic thinking, invoking expansion of space in a strange timeless universe with a crushed sense of duration. For Bergson, the Exposition trumpeted automatons of humanity at a spatial and temporal standstill. Bergson’s criticism of the annexation of the International Congress of Philosophy, this time, to the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne in 1937, could be interpreted as an idealist and anti-­ materialist intervention, for which the French philosopher has been typically accused. Bergson, partly due to the immense popularity he enjoys during his lifetime, and partly due to the origins of his thought in the spiritualism school of Paris, has been associated with dualism, vitalism, idealism, and irrationalism at the expense of analytical reason. Bergson, however, is keenly interested in the scientific and technological developments of his day and the way they transform modern society. His crainte is the extension of scientific modes of thinking, particularly determinism, to the inner temporal experience. We cannot measure, count, store, catalogue, register, utilize, prove, or define what we experience as duration. A

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genuine temporality, or la durée pure, is inherent in a conscious being and its flow is not irrevocably determined, nor is it devoid of any creative potential on our part. There is a dynamic relation between freedom and duration; without duration, we are merely conscious automatons, like Descartes’ human machines but entirely immobile. Finally, contrary to what his critics might expect, Bergson does not conclude his speech at the Congress by praising the triumph of ideas against the machine. Rather, he argues that the machine worsens inequality between men and produces more and richer elites. What starts as an ontological critique of mechanization ends with the social critique of industrial culture. Bergson is concerned with the social and political problems of the contemporary society; he undertakes diplomatic missions during the First World War, supports scientific internationalism of the League of Nations, and struggles against the rise of fascism in the years leading up to the Second World War. However, none of this has prevented voices from all ideological positions from marginalizing Bergson. Susan Guerlac notes that Bergson was attacked “by representatives of the far right (Charles Maurras and Pierre Lasserre), of the left (George Politzer and Georg Lukács) and even by the Catholic Church, which put his works on the Index in 1914.” She reports that Bertrand Russell accused Bergson of being a committed enemy of rational thought.3 There have been various forms and movements of Bergsonisms, as well as anti-Bergson critiques, some based on misconceptions about Bergson’s thought. His philosophy has been appropriated under a wide range of ideological, political, aesthetic, and spiritual agendas. It was embraced in bits and pieces and tailored to diverse ideological needs. Today, there exist many academic works on Bergsonisms with little direct reference to his texts. Bergson, it seems, is one of those philosophers whom everyone knows but very few actually read. This chapter aims to work against such appropriations and adaptations of Bergson’s work by grounding its claims in close textual analysis and discussing the central concepts in his philosophy of time. In order to do that, it is important to historicize Bergson’s work within the developments in philosophy, science, and technology at the turn of the century. Creative Evolution cannot be isolated from Spencer’s mechanistic evolution, nor can his theory of memory be examined without considering the philosopher’s five years of research in neuropsychology. Bergsonian philosophy of duration, movement, and indeterminacy, where everything—and not just the human mind—endures in a constant

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flux, cuts all recognized philosophical divisions, whether empiricist, realist, or phenomenological. This unassimilable aspect of Bergson’s philosophy has also led to some confusion as to the characterization of his work. Bergson receives the Nobel Prize in literature in 1927 and is nominated for a second one the following year. The prize committee argues that unlike “his contemporaries in their strictly objective search for truth,” Bergson cultivates “a spirit of freedom which, breaking the servitude that matter imposes, makes room for idealism.”4 Aside from his reception primarily as “a stylist and a poet” by the literary prize committee, later characterizations of his work as an idealist conveniently ignore his clinical studies in neurophychology on memory dysfunction, which suggests another form of ‘servitude’ to ‘matter.’ These numerous and occasionally incongruous receptions of his work have followed Bergson and his legacy to this day. Bergson’s standing in philosophy, in the study of the modernist novel, in musicology, and in visual arts has been subject to the same fate as his fame during his lifetime. After having been hailed as deeply important, his influence was subsequently criticized and dismissed, and only relatively recently has he become relevant to critical theory and the visual arts again, especially thanks to Gilles Deleuze’s influential revival of Bergsonism. This chapter also complicates the image of Bergson primarily as a figure of influence in twentieth-century European philosophy. It is true that Bergson remains the most dominant figure in French philosophy for much of his lifetime and the accessibility of his writing gives him a large international audience, even outside the academic community. His notion of duration and the exploration of evolution in terms of élan vital capture the imagination of fin-de-siècle intellectuals and are disseminated within and outside of Europe. This, however, does not overshadow the fact that his philosophy is grounded in a historical moment. It directly responds to contemporary trends in thought (i.e., the positivists’ rejection of metaphysics, as well as the idealists’ hyper-intellectualism), which are also closely linked to developments in science and technology, and with social and political implications. Any analysis of Bergson’s thought needs to be grounded in the transformation of the intellectual, social, and private life, without reducing it to the function of contemporary reactions against scientism and positivism. This is the period in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cultural modernity that witnesses remarkable breaks with the past in the arts, reorientations of the sciences in post-Newtonian physics, reconceptions of mathematics, and dramatic transformations in

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the experience of everyday life driven by new technologies. As Susan Guerlac puts it, we need to situate Bergson in the fold between a modern triumph and a crisis of modernism.5 The crisis of modern temporality lies in the tension between perpetual transformations that are characteristic of the era and the persistence of the past in the eternally changing present. Bergson, like many of his contemporaries, is burdened by an extreme consciousness of time and resolves this crisis in the idea of duration, by calling into question central assumptions of modern science, and of modernity more generally. The idea of duration emerges not just within the context of modernity but also in response to it—much like modernism itself. It suggests an alternative understanding of the relationship between past and present, as opposed to the prevalent idea of progressive continuities that imagine a continuous development, always in the future. It also works against the homogenous, systematic, and spatial treatment of time by contemporary science and technology. Duration is therefore not an exclusively philosophical intervention. It speaks to questions of aesthetics—mainly treated in conventional Proust scholarship—and of culture and society. It might even be considered a political question, as demonstrated in Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s work Bergson postcolonial, which analyzes the cultural and political implications of Bergsonian duration in Léopold Sédar Senghor and Mohammad Iqbal. Bergson is one of those rare intellectuals who enjoyed national and international fame during his lifetime. After the publication of his bestseller L’Évolution créatrice in 1907, the idea of duration becomes a popular topic in intellectual circles. His lectures at Collège de France become so crowded that many Parisian socialites send their servants in advance to reserve seats. Among the listeners are Charles Péguy, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot. Péguy later describes Bergson’s lectures as “Friday at quarter to 5—the best hour of my week.”6 In 1913, Bergson delivers a lecture at Columbia University which allegedly creates the first traffic jam in the history of Broadway. This fame follows him until 1922, when he publishes Durée et simultanéité, in which the philosopher’s treatment of relativity fails to satisfy some scientists and thinkers alike. This chapter will touch upon the three early works of Bergson that focus on time: Time and Free Will (1889), Matter and Memory (1896), and Creative Evolution (1907), together with Duration and Simultaneity (1922), which is based on his first work, and his collection of essays. Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), which demonstrates the philosopher’s disillusionment between the two world wars, and Laughter (1900)

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are not included due to their different focus, although both works indirectly treat the question of time. In order to follow the movement of his thought, his works are treated chronologically.

2.2   Science and Mathematics Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein meet at Collège de France in Paris in April 1922, with the initiation of the Commission of Intellectual Cooperation, a forerunner of UNESCO. The physicist and the philosopher attempt to exchange their views on time: while Einstein digresses on the idea of a plurality of times governing our world, Bergson places emphasis on the direct and immediate experience of duration. In the public’s mind, Einstein wins the high-profile debate. He concludes by saying that “there was an unbridgeable gulf between the time of the physicist and the time of the philosopher, the latter being a complete mystery to him.”7 Contrary to the physicist’s dismissive reaction that conforms to the solidified dualism between science and philosophy—the latter being a “mystery” to the former, Bergson’s arguments attempt to bridge the gulf in question. Einstein and his followers embark on a public attack on Bergson and his philosophy in the years that follow, arguing that philosophy has nothing to add to our understanding of time.8 Their attempts prove successful: by the end of his career, Bergson has been condemned for his lack of knowledge in physics and mathematics, and lost his international popularity. Ironically, Einstein later on assumes the role of a physicist-­philosopher and is still discussed mostly for the philosophical consequences of his theory. The high-profile debate between the two prominent intellectuals with public and international fame does not merely cover relativity. Historian Jimena Canales in her seminal work on the debate argues that it is a manifestation of the epistemological tension between philosophy and physics, and over who has the authority to speak for nature.9 Implicit in the debate with Einstein is Bergson’s life-long critique of the prevailing scientism of his day by means of the study of time. Bergson argues for the philosophical treatment of time in order to bring out the difference between psychological and physical time. Contrary to the commonly held idea about his philosophy, Bergson poses a larger challenge to science than a mere phenomenological intervention.10 His work proposes more than a critique of the objectivist and mechanical understanding of time in favor of a phenomenological concern for lived time. Underlying the emphasis on the incommensurability of temporality—lived time—with

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physical time is the philosopher’s challenge to the closed systems of science that are only interested in the discontinuous, the discrete, and the immobile as opposed to the movement itself. Bergson writes against the homogenizing, systematizing, and objectifying approach of science that has an alienating effect on the temporality of the modern life. Although Bergson’s thought employs a critique of science and rationalism, the initial criticism of his work as anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, irrational, and essentially vitalist is partial and problematic. It is hard to classify his philosophy as mystic or spiritualist: first, due to the complex and unsystematic character of his thought, to which I will return later in this chapter, and second, due to his commitment to science and scientific method. Bergson shows a true interest in science by calling attention to its blind spots. In his analysis of the notion of velocity in Time and Free Will, for instance, he argues that duration and motion are always and necessarily left out of the scientific equation, because duration and motion are mental syntheses and not objects, and therefore, the interval of duration itself cannot be considered by science. Thinking about motion itself is Bergson’s primary inquiry and, since he is unable to express that which is essentially a mental synthesis in analytic language, he turns to the idea of ‘inner life’ as the point of reference for understanding time. For Bergson, we cannot conceive movements in terms of a calculable difference of direction and velocity. If we are to assume that what science excludes defines what it is, then, it is right to call Bergson’s thought unscientific for inviting science to think about motion itself, outside of immobile measurements. Science and mathematics play an important part in Bergson’s life. His original training is in mathematics, and he wins the first prize in mathematics in Concours Général. However, he chooses to pursue his studies in philosophy at École Normale Supérieure rather than mathematics. In 1888, he submits his doctoral thesis “Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience,” which undergoes countless revisions and is finally published as a book in 1889. His account of duration in his first book is criticized for privileging the philosophical treatment of continuity over the mathematical one by prominent mathematicians, including Bertrand Russell.11 Ironically, Bergson would be attacked by Einstein and his followers decades later for not knowing enough mathematics to understand relativity. Ultimately, both camps seem to agree on the same premise: science seeks to construct continuity out of discreteness, that is, science can only explore time by projecting it onto space.

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Science and technology, from the nineteenth century on, make of time a means of external measurement and coordination, which is part of the larger project of modernity to coordinate life in space and time. The objective view of time is reflected in the growing predominance of clock-time in daily life, in the study of remote periods of history, and in scientific method as it relates all scientific phenomena and natural processes to measurable time. It systematically excludes fundamental questions on the relationship between man and time. Ernst Renan in 1890 expresses his wish that un jour [l’humanité] saura le monde métaphysique et moral, comme elle sait déjà le monde physique [one day the humanity will know the metaphysical and the moral world, as it already knows the physical world].12 The verb Renan uses here is crucial: the ideal condition of modernity is ‘knowing’ ethics and metaphysics, that is, the domain of philosophy, as we know physics today. The desire to produce a unified and systematic type of knowledge and to treat time as an object are the symptoms of atemporal and spatial reason. It is Bergson who most strongly contests this atemporal view by distinguishing between two forms of multiplicity and continuity. He describes a new vision of time as duration, which suggests the totality of experience, as well as the idea of the elasticity, expansion, and relativity of temporal consciousness. His refreshing views on time, for this reason, are timely: the tendency to divide, use, and control time reaches a climax right when Bergson challenges it with the idea of unity arising from the interpenetration of past and present. His thought reinforces the idea that the past is not a discrete object of study, nor can the future be reduced to the level of the present. What is essential to understanding time is the movement and the process of becoming itself. It is important to note that science starts to abandon its mechanistic views and determinism at the beginning of the twentieth century. With advances in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, positivism and the certainty of knowledge are replaced by principles of indeterminacy, relativity, and uncertainty. Quantum mechanics invalidates the concepts that have been essential to the epistemology of classical (including Einsteinian) physics: that all reality is ultimately describable in terms of matter and motion, and that the position and momentum of material particles is the basic reality of the phenomenal world.13 In her introductory book to Bergson’s philosophy, Suzanne Guerlac points to this shift “from certainties of mechanism to the anxieties of indeterminism” and places the thinking of Bergson within this cadence.14 The mastery of science over the

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physical world with its mechanistic and pragmatic approach is challenged by the principle of uncertainty, which strips the former of its efficacy and arrogance. Bergson is the philosophical epitome of this crisis in science, providing a new way of thinking within (or outside) this dualism.

2.3  Duration Bergson immediately becomes the center of attention with his study on duration. Senghor calls the publication of Time and Free Will (TFW) in 1889 “la révolution de 1889,” in order to emphasize its importance in the history of Western philosophy.15 One notable aspect of Bergson’s doctoral thesis is the dedication to Jules Lachelier (1832–1918), whose work has a profound impact on the intellectual development of many French thinkers. Bergson enters the intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century France divided into two divergent currents of thought. Suspicious of the first, positivism, Bergson draws much inspiration from a diverse number of thinkers sometimes collectively known as the spiritualists, among whom are Lachelier and Émile Boutroux.16 Bergson introduces his notion of duration in the second chapter of TFW through conceptual mathematics in order to outline the distinction between two kinds of multiplicities: the numerical and the non-numerical. When we speak of time, we generally think of a homogenous medium in which our conscious states are set side by side in order to form a discrete multiplicity, similar to clock-time counting seconds. However, everything is not counted in the same way, Bergson argues. While arithmetic teaches us to split up the units of a number infinitely, common sense is inclined to build up a number with indivisibles. Far from being separate, successive states of consciousness merge into each other without sharp boundaries, forming a continuous and non-numerical multiplicity. Discrete multiplicities that count in units like a clock, on the other hand, do not correspond to non-numerical multiplicities, such as our mental states. It is not possible to divide them into discrete units of analysis. This essential difference between the two multiplicities also translates into another major conceptual distinction in Bergson’s thought, which is the one between extensity and intensity, marking the difference between physical causality and inner states. In a nutshell, Bergson sets out to dismantle scientific discourse from its very nucleus: the number. Numbers, like time or inner states, are part of the same spatialization process, preventing us from grasping any

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non-numerical multiplicity. The two conceptions of time, namely duration and spatial time, are defined in relation to such multiplicities. Our conception of number is limited to spreading out in space everything that can be directly counted, notes the philosopher.17 Hence, in a numerical (discrete) multiplicity, things change only in nature, that is, change is quantitative. Number divides without changing in kind. Bergson, on the other hand, is interested in change that divides in kind, a non-numerical multiplicity that is beyond the spatializing logic of science, as well as our own ‘reflective consciousness’ that tends to think in symbols and spatial terms. In a non-­ numerical multiplicity, “number exists only potentially.”18 This distinction constitutes the conceptual backbone of Bergsonian duration and is the source of attacks leveled against Bergson for disregarding the scientific method. Deleuze disputes such attacks, including the commonly held idea that Bergsonian duration merely uses dualistic logic and duration simply corresponds to the indivisible and non-measurable. Bergson does not confine himself to opposing a philosophical vision of duration to a scientific conception of space but formulates his theory within the sphere of two multiplicities, without denying legitimacy to any.19 What, then, is duration? Pure duration, Bergson argues, is the form that the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live. That is, without distinguishing these states from one another, either by being absorbed in one of them or recalling them as distinct states, our consciousness forms both the past and the present into an organic whole. In pure duration, our mental states permeate and melt into one another without contours and without any affiliation with space and number. There are only qualitative changes in our consciousness which hold pure heterogeneity: comme il arrive quand nous nous rappelons, fondues pour ainsi dire ensemble, les notes d’une mélodie, writes Bergson, like a unity in the notes of a melody.20 Music provides key metaphors for illuminating the concept of duration in Bergson’s writing. Time, Bergson stresses, can only be conceived of as duration or lived time, of which the progress is total and indivisible. The whole of our inner duration, considered from the first to the last moment of our conscious life, is like the fluid continuity of a melody which you may appreciate while listening to a stretch of music en fermant les yeux, en ne pensant qu’à elle, en ne juxtaposant plus sur un papier ou sur un clavier imaginaires les notes que vous conserviez ainsi l’une pour l’autre (with your eyes closed, thinking of it alone, no longer juxtaposing on paper or an imaginary keyboard notes which you thus preserved one for the other).21

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If we dwell longer than necessary on one note of a tune, we will interrupt the totality and the ‘qualitative change’ in our experience will warn us of our mistake. We perceive the notes in their totality. Although they are distinct, they penetrate each other as the direct result of their unity. A melody converges the past, the present, and the future in such a way that it highlights a wholly unusual type of unity—a unity of a process, undivided and fluid. Bergson’s reflection on musical continuity influenced many thinkers and musicologists, including A.H. Tanpınar, although it is important to note that Bergson does not offer a theory of music, but rather bases his theory of time on music. Bergson frequently draws on musical metaphors due to the non-­ representational nature of duration. It seems that linguistic tools available to the philosopher fail to define the idea of duration. As soon as we intend to imagine duration, our minds necessarily spatialize it. In order to explain this conundrum, Bergson draws a distinction between the real, and its non-immediate perception and representation. There exists a strong parallel between the activity of our minds which perceives reality in terms of extensity (space), and linguistic representation. Bergson thereby demonstrates not only the dual nature of scientific thinking but also that of the human mind: La vie conscience se présente sous un double aspect, selon qu’on l’aperçoit directement ou par réfraction à travers l’espace. Considérés en eux-­ mêmes les états de conscience profonds n’ont aucun rapport avec la quantité; ils sont qualité pure (conscious life displays itself under two aspects, in the way we perceive it directly or by refraction through space. Considered in themselves, the deep-seated conscious states have no relation to quantity, they are pure quality).22 The mind perceives what is given as qualitative heterogeneity in the form of extensive (spatial) homogeneity, while deep-­ seated conscious states have no relation to quantity. Reflective consciousness, which acts on our need to understand and represent in terms of space, gives quantitative features to what immediate perception takes in as qualitative (e.g., sensations). Unlike Cartesian and Kantian definitions of consciousness, the distinction drawn by Bergson between reflexive and deep consciousness shows that consciousness assumes une activité réelle, which lies at the basis of the Bergsonian intuition. Central to Time and Free Will is the essential divergence between the inner experience of durée and the space we are surrounded by, which imposes its own forms on our minds. In contrast to the qualitative, heterogeneous, and dynamic nature of the psychological durée, space is

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quantitative, homogenous, and static. Bergson frequently and unreservedly uses sets of contrasts that would reveal differences of kind, and not just degree, between time and space: duration-space; instinct-intelligence; intensity-­ extensity; quality-quantity; heterogeneous-homogeneous; continuous-­discontinuous; inner-outer multiplicities; recollection-perception; and matter-memory. These contrasts are mostly responsible for limited interpretations of Bergson’s philosophy of time. Bergson’s method, rather than establishing dualisms, untangles the composites of the human experience of time, which are almost indistinguishable its contemporary understanding. Bergson invites us to imagine, or rather connect with, the inner self that has no affiliation with numbers. He uses the term “reflexive consciousness” in order to define our analytic and mechanic intelligence that substitutes symbol for reality and perceives reality only through such symbols. Duration, however, belongs to the “vital” consciousness in which we grasp time in its organic totality. This particular understanding arises not from mechanistic spatial thinking but from intuition. Bergson interprets this separation between the mechanistic and the intuitive as a requirement of social life in general and language in particular: L’intuition d’un espace homogène est déjà un acheminement à la vie sociale […] La tendance en vertu de laquelle nous nous figurons nettement cette extériorité des choses et cette homogénéité de leur milieu est la même qui nous porte à vivre en commun et à parler (the intuition of a homogeneous space is already a step toward social life […] Our tendency to form a clear picture of this externality of things and the homogeneity of their medium is the same as the impulse which leads us to live in common and to speak).23 The separation between social life and inner duration indicates the incommensurability of duration with any social form including language. The self that is adapted to the requirements of social life gradually loses sight of le moi fondamental, the fundamental self. Duration is the lived experience of change once the communicating surface between le moi and external objects becomes relaxed. The real self is confused, ever changing, and inexpressible. Linguistic representation is unable to appropriate the true nature of the self as infinite flux and fluid becoming. “Language cannot get hold of it without arresting its mobility” [sans en fixer la mobilité], Bergson writes, “or fit it into its common-place forms without making it into public domain [le faire tomber dans le domaine commun].”24 Bergson’s critique on the limits of language also raises the question of socio-cultural and political repercussions of his thought. The critique of le

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domaine commun (translated here as “public domain”) brings to attention that which remains outside the common domain, public opinion, and language—all of which function in different capacities as providers of form and legitimacy. Bergsonism’s main intervention in the history of Western philosophy is giving voice to that which is excluded from analytic and mechanistic understanding. Diagne’s study Bergson postcolonial, which discusses Bergson’s influence on the cultural projects of Senghor and Iqbal, demonstrates this inclusive capacity of Bergson’s thought for “the others” of liberal humanism and modern industrial society. Diagne argues that for Senghor, it is this language of l’intelligence-qui-comprend that expresses the ideas and concepts of the African world, especially the works of art produced in Africa.25 Similarly, in the idea of le moi fondamental, which indicates a perpetual state of becoming, some thinkers located unsolidified forms of cultural and political expression. Before going into the political and cultural influence of Bergson’s thought, it is important to discuss his work after the publication of TWF, namely his respective theorizations of memory, intuition, and élan vital through the idea of duration. Duration is an experience of qualitative change—a dynamism that becomes confused when mathematical time is projected onto that experience: Je reconnais d’ailleurs que c’est dans le temps spatialisé que nous nous plaçons d’ordinaire. Nous n’avons aucun intérêt à écouter le bourdonnement ininterrompu de la vie profonde. Et pourtant la durée réelle est là. C’est grâce à elle que prennent place dans un seul et même temps les changements plus ou moins longs auxquels nous assistons en nous et dans le monde extérieur. 26 I recognize moreover that it is in spatialized time that we ordinarily place ourselves. We have no interest in listening to the uninterrupted humming of life’s depths. And yet, that is where real duration is. Thanks to it, the more or less lengthy changes we witness within us and in the external world take place in a single identical time.27

Real duration is life in its unmeasured movement of ceaseless qualitative change and constant invention. It is the Élan of the inner life: any attempt at imagining it tends to solidify its flow; any attempt to analyze it tends to spatialize its fluid quality; any attempt to substantialize it interrupts its melody. For Bergson, it is not possible to think about life in simultaneities. If, for instance, the melody and my consciousness were to exist in space only in mutual externality, that is, exist simultaneously without succession

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and interpenetration, in its notes I would simply hear simultaneities with no trace of its past positions. However, because I endure, I can connect the past notes with the present one spilling into the immediate future. At its most basic, this is what Bergson has in mind when he imagines life, that is, it is not possible to think about life in externalities; it is rather the interpenetration of elements that is in constant change.

2.4  The Persistence of the Past Life, for Bergson, constitutes constant movement and the past is part of this non-state of perpetual change. If change is constitutive of reality, then the question is: How do we envisage the past? If the past survives and change is indivisible, is it possible to imagine discontinuity and rupture? How does continuity and the survival of the past reconcile with élan, the creative force? These are questions that arise from two currents in Bergson’s understanding of duration that ostensibly run against one another. From the perspective of this tension, his philosophy of time seems to foster a dialectical understanding of time, where time progresses between the opposing axes of creative force and the persistence of the past. It is, however, quite clear that Bergson’s philosophy necessarily rules out any form of dialectical thinking and that the holistic notion of duration by definition excludes dialectics.28 Bergson does address these questions in his later work, which will be explored in the following sections. These questions on dialectics are still valid today and they are key to understanding modernist temporality, which is unmistakably touched by Bergson’s philosophy. The fundamental antinomy in modernist temporality is located in the dialectical tension between the idea of eternal newness and survival of the past. Bergson attempts to resolve this antinomy in the idea of duration. Bergson develops the notion of the persistence of the past in Matter and Memory, which is published seven years after Time and Free Will. Here, Bergson explores the mind–matter dualism, as the title suggests, from his revolutionary framework of duration. He introduces the dimension of time into questions relative to subject–object relations and replaces the category of the mind in the Cartesian equation with memory. Guerlac notes that Bergson spent these years between the two publications studying neuropsychology in order to introduce a scientific, as well as a social-­ scientific, perspective into his analysis.29 For this reason, it is an interesting and highly complex work of philosophy, which Fredric Jameson calls “the strangest of all modern idealistic texts.”30 Different critics have tried to

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determine the precise character of Bergson’s position in Matter and Memory. His radical use of the term ‘image’ in the text, particularly in the opening, justifies Jameson’s characterization. However, the following chapters, where Bergson shifts his attention to memory, reveal the complicated nature of his philosophy of matter and memory. The question of memory concerns the way in which the past survives in the present. It is part of Bergson’s greater intervention in Western epistemology with duration. The philosopher develops his well-known theory of different types of memory based on clinical studies. Ansell-Pearson notes that even a hostile critic such as Russell could bring himself to credit Bergson with making a major contribution to the study of memory.31 Bergson’s theory of memory demonstrates that the past is preserved under two types of recollection: bodily memory (motor formations) and independent recollections. However, there remains a third category which refers to a form of unrecollected pure memory independent of these recollections. The past responds to the practical requirements of the present which is the field of action that occupies the living body. We act and recollect through motor mechanisms (i.e., repeating an action by habit) and through independent memories (i.e., those we recall with an intellectual effort). These two types of recollection are part of the plane of action, while pure memory is virtual. Recollections are the links that connect pure memory with the real. This three-part model of memory, that is pure memory, memory-images, and perception, enables Bergson to separate perception from representation: while the latter is bound up with action and movement of our body, the former concerns pure memory, which interests no distinct part of the body. The past remains virtual until it becomes actualized into memory images and mixes with the body and its actions. For Bergson, the past does not cease to exist but simply ceases to be useful. If we want to know the past as past, that is, with no relation to the present, we need to follow the movement by which it expands into a memory image. This is not an easy thing to do as the pure past is obscured by necessities of the present plane of action: La conscience éclaire donc de sa lueur, à tout moment, cette partie immédiate du passé qui, penchée sur l’avenir, travaille à le réaliser et à se l’adjoindre. […] C’est dans cette partie éclairée de notre histoire que nous restons placés, en vertu de la loi fondamentale de la vie, qui est une loi d’action: de là la difficulté́ que nous éprouvons à concevoir des souvenirs qui se conserveraient dans l’ombre. Notre répugnance à admettre la survivance intégrale du passé tient donc à

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l’orientation même de notre vie psychologique, véritable déroulement d’états où nous avons intérêt à regarder ce qui se déroule, et non pas ce qui est entièrement déroulé́.32 Consciousness, then, illuminates, at each moment of time, that immediate part of the past which, impeding over the future, seeks to realize and to associate with it. […] It is in this illuminated part of our history that we remain seated, in virtue of the fundamental law of life, which is a law of action: hence the difficulty we experience in conceiving memories which are preserved in the shadow. Our reluctance to admit the integral survival of the past has its origin, then, in the very bent of our psychical life, —an unfolding of states wherein our interest prompts us to look at that which is unrolling, and not at that which is entirely unrolled.33

Bergson insists that action (which interests body and matter) is fundamental to life. The pure past, like duration, remains outside of this plane of action. Pure memory is only called into consciousness when it has a link to the real; those that are useless in or indifferent to the present remain in the dark behind the insurmountable barrier of consciousness. Our reluctance to admit the survival of the past and the continuity of duration is due to the necessity of our psychic life to stay in the ‘light’ of action. Here, Bergson draws an opposition between pure memory, which remains in obscurity, and the recollections that corrupt this memory in the process of recollection. The significance of this opposition is that it reveals the true essence of pure memory, which is not a mental duplicate of the historical past. Rather, the past does persist in the present and it can only manifest itself in our recollections. As some critics have already argued, this is a radically realist position.34 Memory is not simply a weak perception of past reality; it is the past itself that survives. Our psychical life endures; it survives as an indivisible whole. While our past could potentially manifest all of itself in the present, only the most useful images are retained. This does not mean that pure memory is irrecoverable or entirely destructible as long as it is useless. Pure memory is virtual. For example, referring to the clinical trials he studies, Bergson observes that lesions of the brain do not erase memories that were somehow stored in a particular area of the brain. They only hinder the actualization of memories.35 Here Bergson points at the contemporary psychologists' mistakefor thinking of memory in static terms. If we could isolate life from such practical interests and static thinking, the philosopher notes, life would include in an undivided present the entire past

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history of the conscious person—not as instantaneity, like clusters of simultaneous parts, but as something continually present and continually moving. Hence, at every present moment, we carry the entire past, censured by our interest in life. If pure memory is virtual, how, then, can the past, which by hypothesis has ceased to be, preserve itself? According to Bergson, as long as we take into consideration the continuity of inner life and consequently of its indivisibility, we no longer have to explain the preservation of the past, but rather its apparent abolition. We shall think of all change, all movement, as being absolutely indivisible. This is the only way to reestablish continuity in our knowledge and psychic life as a whole—not as a constructed continuity, but experienced and lived. Therefore, the persistence of the past does not present a contradiction in the élan of life, but it is part of the absolute indivisibility of change. The notion of the prolongation and persistence of the past in an undivided present brings us to the question of discontinuity and rupture that has been widely analyzed by critics of Bergson. Ansell-Pearson notes that there is a common prejudice running from Gaston Bachelard to Alain Badiou that Bergson is unable to think discontinuity.36 The question is a crucial one in Bergson’s thought because it informs the link between the notion of duration and creative evolution. Bergson provides a radical answer to the question as to how to understand the new. It is only through duration that we can imagine interruption and discontinuity: Or, plus on fixe son attention sur cette continuité de la vie, plus on voit l’Évolution organique se rapprocher de celle d’une conscience, où le passé presse contre le présent et en fait jaillir une forme nouvelle, incommensurable avec ses antécédents.37 Now, the more we fix our attention on this continuity of life, the more we see that organic evolution resembles the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past presses against the present and causes the upspringing of a new form of consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedents.38

Bergson’s notion of discontinuity can best be analyzed in his theorization of creative evolution, discussed in the next section. Élan vital is the link between the inner moments of duration; it is the continuity of life and the driving force that underlies all life at the same time, creating an incommensurability between what goes before and what follows.

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2.5  Time is Hesitation In Time and Free Will, Bergson limits his analysis of duration to consciousness, where mental states constitute a whole, permeating one another and binding the past to the present. In Creative Evolution, he reaches the conclusion that the universe endures, and duration is the key notion for understanding the creative impulse of evolution. The philosopher no longer considers duration exclusively as the ‘immediate data of consciousness’ or the experience limited to one’s mind; it is at once the process of becoming of the evolutionary life as a whole. The model of consciousness developed in TFW is now extended to the world at large. He likewise extends the subject of duration from consciousness to all living forms: the more we study the nature of time, he argues, the more we shall comprehend that duration means innovation, creation of forms, and the continual elaboration of the absolutely new. Bergson thereby shifts his focus to connections between philosophy and biology, having discussed the limits of the epistemology of physics in his earlier work. Creative Evolution explores the temporal property of biological phenomena, expanding the idea of qualitative change to evolutionary biology as the most basic and universal form of change in life. Bergson demonstrates that we cannot understand life only in terms of stable, unchanging frameworks, and argues against the idea that evolutionary change necessarily proceeds along a pre-determined path. The philosopher’s reaction to biological determinism is only a part of his larger critique of closed and isolated systems of thinking, whichruns through his oeuvre. TFW explores the reality of human freedom through an analysis of the immediate experience of time. The English translation of its original title Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience as Time and Free Will might in fact reflect its theme better, an interesting detail as to the translator’s, or the publisher’s, choice. It might, however, also be a misleading title, as the concept of free will (l’acte libre) employed by Bergson does not have the same implications as the rational choice of a unified, rational subject as ‘free will.’ For Bergson, l’acte libre is a force of time and it only happens when we get back to our fundamental selves and away from le domaine commun. Free will belongs to the creative force of duration and it overcomes the symbolic necessities of social life with a creative impulse. Bergson, with the particular expansion of his philosophy of time in his later works, subverts both determinism and libertarianism by introducing the idea of qualitative difference in duration, conscious states, and freedom.

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What is worthwhile in the idea of free will for understanding Bergson’s theory of time is that inherent in the idea of free will is the impossibility of going back (retour en arrière). Evolution implies a real persistence of the past in the present, and the philosopher stresses that it is a duration which is, as it were, a hyphen, a connecting link.39 Although the idea of duration necessitates preservation of the past in the present, it does not amount to a conservative impulse. Nothing remains the same for a living being in time; the lived time is irreversible. The past is a gain for a living being and it is a force. While it coexists with the present, it does not act as a regressive force. It is rather part of the creative force within the process of constant becoming. Evolution is an interplay between the persistence of the past and new situations. In short, duration preserves the past while containing an unpredictable and indeterminate creation of novelty—a complex and inspiring idea that found social, political, and aesthetic echoes elsewhere. A coherent conception of evolution requires the notion of duration. Evolution cannot be construed strictly in terms of a set of discrete mechanisms that will automatically produce adaptations through natural selection. Limiting evolution within a set of possibilities is inadequate, argues Bergson; it deprives evolution of any inventiveness and creativity. In a closed system, novel forms are always foreseeable. In the case of the open system, however, the process is that of invention and creative adaptation rather than the mere realization of pre-existing possibilities. The openness of any living being to becoming also means openness to creation and invention. There is no duration, memory, or consciousness without life. Time is this opening up of life to possibilities where the new can occur. Bergson stresses that any living being essentially has duration: “it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping” [il dure, justement parce qu’il élabore sans cesse du nouveau et parce qu’il n’y a pas d’élaboration sans recherche, pas de recherche sans tâtonnement], and he then concludes, “time is this very hesitation, or it is nothing” [le temps est cette hésitation même, ou il n’est rien du tout].40 As in the case of the melody metaphor, Bergson once again draws examples from the basic human senses in order to explain duration without taking recourse to spatial analogies. Bergson in La Pensée et le Mouvant argues that the sense par excellence is the sense of sight because the eye has the habit of separating; in the visual field, the relatively invariable figures therefore have a direct relation to the spatial understanding of time. He employs metaphors of vision, sight, and blindness in order to explain that

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which is no longer part of our present perceptions, such as pure memory and duration. Here, the sense of hesitation in the act of tâtonnement, which loses its expressive capacity in English translation as “groping” or “adjustment,” lies at the center of his time theory. Bergson calls the endeavor to capture pure memory and duration un travail de tâtonnement, a matter of trial and error like a man finding his way in the dark. Rather than a dialectical or a linear one, duration implies a process of suppositions, experiences, trials, and errors. It is a form of avancer à tâtons, moving forward with successive hesitations in obscurities and obstacles. Time is this hesitation, or it is nothing at all.

2.6   Bergsonisms: Missed Encounters The International Congress of Philosophy in Paris, which takes place shortly before the Second World War in 1937, could be regarded as part of the effort to initiate cooperation among intellectuals from all nations. International forums of science and philosophy are organized with the hope that they will triumph over base nationalist passions. Bergson is one of the rare politically committed intellectuals of his time, although he never writes directly on politics.41 He openly supports the internationalist efforts of European intellectuals in the 1930s, and he serves as the president of the Commission for Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations for a limited period. There are two philosophers and adamant readers of Bergson in the hall during the delivery of his address to the Congress: Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and Mustafa Şekip Tunç (1886–1939). Tunç is a philosopher and psychologist who, as a life-long disciple of Bergson, translates most of his work into Turkish. He attends the Congress as a member of the Turkish delegation and addresses the Congress with a controversial statement: that Turkey has constituted itself in the way Bergson defined.42 Walter Benjamin, on the other hand, is not very enthusiastic about the Congress. He has been summoned away from San Remo to report on the Congress. In a letter dated August 5, 1937, he writes, “this congress doesn’t leave me with a minute of free time all day.”43 He attends the Congress in Naples, which certainly gives him hope, when he follows the news of Nazi congresses at the same time. The presence of the delegation from Turkey at the Congress is a direct result of the emergence of a national intellectual milieu that actively and systematically seeks to establish the philosophical foundations of the new

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republic. In the late 1920s, with the consolidation of the Republic, the republican leadership sets out a systematic process of transformation of the political and social structures of the previous monarchy. The ideological foundations of this transformation have been under constant debate with various, often conflicting, interventions across the political spectrum. Republican ideology has never been a homogenous one. Various paths to modernity have been considered in order to sidestep the polarizing and restricting mindset of the East–West divide. The prevalent republican position until after the Second World War has been rationalism and positivism combined with Enlightenment thought and nineteenth-century theories of progress. There has been, however, a certain group of intellectuals, whom we might call conservative modernizers, who aimed to define Turkey’s path to modernity against Ottomanist and Islamist poli̇ tics, and simultaneously against rationalist European tenets. Nazım Irem, in his study on the intellectual life of the early republican period, demonstrates that the republican conservative milieu rejects both future-oriented positivist radicalism and past-oriented Ottomanist and Islamist reactionism. This republican conservative movement, spearheaded by Bergsonian intellectuals, has been active during the one-party rule between 1923 and 1946. Their primary concern was to draw parallels between the mainstream undercurrents of European modernity and the idiosyncratic nature of the Turkish Revolution. M.S. Tunç, who addressed the International Congress of Philosophy in 1937, is one of these Bergsonian intellectuals, organized around the publication of Dergah journal (1921–1924). Located at the periphery of the Kemalist power structure, the Bergson-­ inspired republican intellectuals have argued for the national authenticity of the republican project of modernity, a unique and authentic path for progress. For the Bergsonian conservatives, the republican revolution and its ideals can only be properly realized once they are understood with and through the “Other West,” the West of spiritualism and romanticism, that undermined the classical vision of liberal modernity in the 1920s.44 In this respect, Bergson’s thought has offered a philosophical vocabulary to the newly formed society to meet its needs for positive construction and ensured its members that its path is not predetermined. Positivist models imply that there is a blueprint for modernity, which then necessitates imitating the Western models. Bergsonian activism, however, in its challenge of progressive teleology, has opened up the possibility for a creative construction of an authentically Turkish modernity. However, based ̇ on Irem’s study, one can safely say that Bergson’s impact seems to have

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amounted to catchphrase philosophizing feeding an essentially reactionary agenda, albeit in the guise of a positive program. In this sense, Turkish Bergsonism is yet another Bergsonism, adopted in bits and pieces, selectively culled, and reshaped according to different ideological agendas. Hence, when Tunç concluded his address to the Congress with the claim that Turkey has constituted itself in the way Bergson defines, probably no one, including Bergson himself, had any clear idea of what that definition might be. For most intellectuals in and outside of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, a time when Paris is the cultural capital of the Western world, it is impossible not to engage with Bergson’s philosophy. The Bergsonian challenge emerges as a philosophical resistance to positivist theories, which then goes through social and political appropriations. For the intellectuals of the ‘non-West,’ where modernity is generally configured as an archetype of progressivism and rationalism, Bergson’s thought offers a way out of the East–West dichotomy by introducing an alternative philosophy that challenges determinism and positivism. Some even considers Bergson’s thought as a modern revolt against the grand European rationalist philosophies and the cult of reason. The Bergsonian vocabulary of intuition, creativity, dynamism, élan vital, and spontaneity captures those intellectuals who believe in the dynamic creative evolution of society—that a nation can be freed from determinism and there are alternative and authentic paths to modernity. Mohammad Iqbal, who introduces Bergson’s thoughts to the Muslim world, finds in Bergson a philosophy of movement, which understands the universe in constant movement and change; Senghor associates it with négritude and Tunç locates in it an authentic national identity.45 Following the patterns of influence of Bergson’s thought is a tempting, and conventional, critical practice. Bergson’s philosophy, however, cannot be reduced to its echoes in various Bergsonisms. Creative Evolution, for instance, is essentially written as a response to the application of the principles of mechanism to life processes in evolutionary biology. The philosopher hardly has any national and cultural identities in mind when he argues against subsuming the philosophy of becoming—evolution—under a static mechanistic analysis. Nor can the oeuvre of writers influenced by Bergson’s thought be totally subsumed under Bergsonisms. One such example, as we will see in the following chapters, is Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Although Tanpınar does read Bergson and mentions his thought occasionally in his writing, the nature of the parallel between the two thinkers is less of influence than a moment of historical confluence.

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2.7  Conclusion In Bergson, argues Deleuze, there is something that cannot be assimilated, which enables him to provide a shock, to be a rallying point of all opposition, the object for so many hatreds. This is, Deleuze adds, due to the theory and practice of becomings of all kinds, of coexistent multiplicities.46 Bergson gives priority to the dynamic movement of irreversible becoming over the positivist understanding of time as an abstract constant within a measurable framework. He insists on the incommensurability of duration with any structure of definition, measurement, analysis, and utility. Bergson’s philosophy rejects the spatialized view of time, which only understands time in its regulation, calibration, and translation into spatial forms of measurement. It is this insistence on the untranslatable and unassimilable aspects of temporality that makes Bergson the object of so many misconceptions and “hatreds.” Bergson shares a keen awareness of time with the early twentieth-­century writers and scientists. It is the experience of time that Bergson, along with Benjamin, Heidegger, Husserl, and others, cannot simply avoid, or transcend. Duration is essentially a continuation of what no longer exists into what does exist. This is real time, perceived and lived. His philosophy of time invites us to consider the question of lived time as a problem of and in modernity. The theory of duration and becoming emerges within, and as a response to, the linear and empty time of modernity. It argues directly against the systematic and analytic treatment of time by the scientist tradition, and indirectly against progressive understandings of the secular humanist tradition of the Enlightenment. The originality of Bergson’s thought stems from his introduction of a philosophy of creative time with memory, duration, and the survival of the past. The past entails neither irretrievable moments nor backwardness in a progressive frame, and much less a regressive force against novelty. The notion of duration permits us rather to think of the survival of the past in the present together with the idea of creative evolution and the élan of life. Time is un travail de tâtonnement; it is the hesitation of becoming and the insecurity of indetermination.

Notes 1. “International Congress of Philosophy” (Bibliothèque du Congrès International de Philosophie, 1900); translation mine. 2. Henri Bergson, Key Writings, Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Mullarkey, eds. (New York: Continuum, 2002), 372–375.

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3. Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson, 1 edition (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2006), 12. 4. Nobel Lectures: Literature: 1901–67 (Amsterdam; New York: Elsevier Science Ltd, 1969). 5. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 210. 6. Cited in Eugène Weber, France, Fin de Siècle (Belknap Press, 1988), 237. 7. Quoted in Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Introduction,” in Key Writings (New York: Continuum, 2002), 26. 8. Thomas Hanna Ed, The Bergsonian Heritage (Columbia U Press., 1962). 9. Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time, Reissue edition (Princeton, NJ Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016). 10. See Ansell-Pearson’s “Introduction” in Key Writings (2002). 11. Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, 1 edition (London; New York: Routledge, 2009). 12. Ernest Renan, cited in Richard Glasser, Time in French Life and Thought, trans. C. G. Pearson, First edition (Manchester, Eng. Totowa, N.J: Manchester University Press, 1972), 289; translation mine. 13. See Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 14. See Chapter 2 “From the Certainties of Mechanism to the Anxieties of Indeterminism” in Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 14–41. 15. Quoted in Souleymane-Bachir Diagne, Bergson postcolonial, CNRS edition (Paris: CNRS, 2011), 11. 16. Michel Foucault, in an essay where he outlines twentieth-century French philosophy, points to this “dividing line” between “a philosophy of experience, of sense, and of the subject,” like that of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and “a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality, of the concept,” like Bachelard’s and Cavaillès’. Foucault dates the division back to the nineteenth century, to Jules Lachelier and Auguste Comte, and he poses, as inaugural figures, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Bergson and Poincaré. This famous interpretation has been the reason for marking Bergson’s thought as “vitalist mysticism” or the “the philosophy of the vital interiority” up until Deleuze, who initiated the return to Bergson in contemporary criticism. See Michel Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science” in The Normal and the Pathological. 17. Henri Bergson, Œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France—PUF, 1991), 53. 18. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, trans. Reissue edition (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 42. 19. Deleuze, 40. 20. Bergson, Œuvres, 67.

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21. Henri Bergson, Durée et simultanéité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France—PUF, 2009), 47; Bergson, Key Writings, 208. 22. Bergson, Œuvres, 91; translation mine. 23. Bergson, 91; Bergson, Key Writings, 76. 24. Bergson, Œuvres, 85; Bergson, Key Writings, 72. 25. Diagne, Bergson postcolonial, 20. 26. Bergson, Œuvres, 1384. 27. Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics (Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 2010), 125. 28. See Gaston Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration (Manchester: Clinamen Press Ltd., 2000). 29. Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 123. 30. Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality” 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 712. 31. Ansell-Pearson, “Introduction,” 17. According to Edward Casey, Bergson’s introduction of habit-memory was potentially revolutionary for Western theorizing about memory. Edward S. Casey, “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty,” Man and World 17, no. 3 (September 1, 1984): 280, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01250454. 32. Tanpınar, Yaşadıg ̆ım Gibi, “Lodos, Sis ve Lufere Dair.” 33. Bergson, Key Writings, 131. 34. John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy: An Introduction (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 79. 35. Bergson, Œuvres, 191. 36. For a detailed discussion of the critiques of Bergson on the notion of continuity, see chapter three “Duration and evolution: the time of life” in Keith Ansell-Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life (London; New York: Routledge, 2001), 70–96. 37. Bergson, Œuvres, 517. 38. Bergson, Key Writings, 184. 39. Bergson, Œuvres, 183; Bergson, Key Writings, 131. 40. Bergson, Œuvres, 1332–33 (“La pensé et le mouvant”); Bergson, Key Writings, 224. 41. Some critics consider The Two Sources of Morality and Religion as a political turn in his writing. See Alexandre Lefebvre and Melanie White, eds., Bergson, Politics, and Religion (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2012). ̇ 42. “International Congress of Philosophy.” See also Nazim Irem, “Undercurrents of European Modernity and the Foundations of Modern Turkish Conservatism: Bergsonism in Retrospect,” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 4 (July 1, 2004): 79–112, https://doi.org/10.108 0/00263200410001700329. 43. Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, eds. Manfred R. Jacobson

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and Evelyn M. Jacobson, trans. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 543, https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/ bo3636298.html. ̇ 44. Irem, “Undercurrents of European Modernity and the Foundations of Modern Turkish Conservatism.” 45. See Howard Damian, Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview, 1 edition (Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y., N.Y: Routledge, 2011); Diagne, Bergson postcolonial. 46. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 15.

References Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “Introduction.” In Key Writings. New York: Continuum, 2002. ———. Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual: Bergson and the Time of Life. London; New York: Routledge, 2001. Bachelard, Gaston. Dialectic of Duration. Manchester: Clinamen Press Ltd., 2000. Benjamin, Walter. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940. Edited by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Bergson, Henri. Durée et simultanéité. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France— PUF, 2009. ———. Key Writings. Edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson and John Mullarkey. New York: Continuum, 2002. ———. Œuvres. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France—PUF, 1991. ———. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 2010. Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981. Canales, Jimena. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton, NJ Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016. Casey, Edward S. “Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty.” Man and World 17, no. 3 (September 1, 1984): 279–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/ BF01250454. Damian, Howard. Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y., N.Y: Routledge, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

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Diagne, Souleymane-Bachir. Bergson postcolonial. CNRS edition. Paris: CNRS, 2011. Glasser, Richard. Time in French Life and Thought. Translated by C. G. Pearson. First edition. Manchester, Eng. Totowa, N.J: Manchester University Press, 1972. Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2006. Hanna, Thomas, Ed. The Bergsonian Heritage. Columbia U Press., 1962. “International Congress of Philosophy.” Bibliothèque du Congrès International de Philosophie, 1900. ̇ Irem, Nazim. “Undercurrents of European Modernity and the Foundations of Modern Turkish Conservatism: Bergsonism in Retrospect.” Middle Eastern Studies 40, no. 4 (July 1, 2004): 79–112. https://doi.org/10.108 0/00263200410001700329. Jameson, Fredric. “The End of Temporality” 29, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 699. Lefebvre, Alexandre, and Melanie White, eds. Bergson, Politics, and Religion. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2012. Mullarkey, John. Bergson and Philosophy: An Introduction. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000. Nobel Lectures: Literature: 1901–67. Amsterdam; New York: Elsevier Science Ltd, 1969. Russell, Bertrand. Our Knowledge of the External World. London; New York: Routledge, 2009. Weber, Eugène. France, Fin de Siècle. Belknap Press, 1988.

PART II

Chronometrics in the Modern Capital: The City, the Past, and Collective Memory

CHAPTER 3

Chronometrics in the Modern Capital: Walter Benjamin’s Fairy Tale

Awakening is the great exemplar of memory: the occasion on which it is given us to remember what is closest, tritest, most obvious. What Proust intends with the experimental rearrangement of furniture in matinal half-slumber, what Bloch recognizes as the darkness of the lived moment, is nothing other than what here is to be secured in the level of the historical, and collectively. There is a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been: its advancement has the structure of awakening.

3.1   Awakening In the entry to the “K” convolute in The Arcades Project (Arcades), Benjamin reveals the central metaphor for the experience of the revolutionary “nowtime”: awakening (Erwachen). One of Benjamin’s most powerful and enigmatic concepts, awakening has been widely discussed as a theoretical promissory note which has proved difficult if not impossible to redeem. It

Entry K1,2 in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002); Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2: Das Passagen-Werk, Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, eds. 9. Auflage, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2020). Further references to The Arcades Project refer to entry numbers, unless cited otherwise. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Ö. N. Dolcerocca, Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35201-0_3

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lies at the heart of Benjamin’s idea of dialectical images, which awakens the collective consciousness from its dream-like state into historical consciousness. What I would like to emphasize here is the metaphor itself, with connotations of sleep, darkness, and dream, in order to illuminate Benjamin’s philosophy of time, which until recently has been subsumed under his cultural history. Awakening is an odd and distinct form of remembering. It suggests meta-temporality, a sudden temporal awareness that is otherwise lost to consciousness—individual and collective. It is a temporal concept with a before (the state of dream) that bleeds into an after (wakefulness), signifying the state of  awakening from a dream, but without being fully awake, a transitory experience between two realms of consciousness. The temporality of awakening marks the coincidence of two distinct times that are otherwise at a point of rupture. The space-time of transition between the time of dream consciousness and the time of waking consciousness, between the “not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been” and the present, and between the nineteenth century and today, is not a point of rupture, but rather what Benjamin calls dialectics at a standstill.1 While his idea of the dialectical image as a method has been the subject of quite a few works of dedicated scholarship, Benjamin’s core reflections on time and his concern for the disregard of temporal relations could benefit from further analysis. This chapter addresses the inherent complexity of his theory of time and locates it within the critique of modernity’s temporal ideology that develops as a countertendency in early twentieth-­ century philosophy and literature. Benjamin’s writings on time are part of the larger body of modernist works that address questions of connection with and survival of the past, and foregrounds modernity’s slow and uninterrupted times. While anaylyzing the modes of alternative temporalities that Benjamin evokes in the Arcades, this chapter offers a holistic reading of the project with a focus on some of the underexamined entries such as Convolutes C “Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris,” D “Boredom, Eternal Return,” and P “The Streets of Paris.” It also makes use of other material that was originally intended to be part of the project, including “Some Motifs on Baudelaire” and “On the Image of Proust.” The main function of awakening, a “now of recognizability,” is to bring out the dialectical relation of what has been to the now, and to recognize and restore the severed dialectic between the recent past and the present. Benjamin understands lived time as a mode of becoming in an ongoing dialectic of the past and the present. The relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical; it takes a form not of a progression but an image,

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suddenly emergent in the moment of awakening (N2a, 3). This dialectical image exposes “the eternal return of the same” in the representation of the modern as the new. “The sensation of the newest and most modern” is only an illusion that covers up the persistence and the recycling of the past forms. Hence, the dialectic of awakening unmasks the illusionary reality inherent in modern temporality and exposes its dialectics of novelty and sameness in an eternal repetition. The awakening metaphor thereby allows Benjamin to rethink the temporal ideology of industrial capitalism by imagining modernity as a dream-world, and to uncover the mythical nature of the present.2 A significant image in Benjamin’s treatment of the larger awakening metaphor is darkness and a form of confusion and blindness he attributes to perception of time. There seem to be two different approaches to time at work here: an ontological question on the blindness of temporality (or the nature of time as darkness) and an epistemological concern for temporal blindness. The key passage from Convolute K above exposes the former: we are blind to the most recent past; the closest point in time is the darkest and it can only be remembered in “matinal half slumber.” Borrowing Ernst Bloch’s striking image of the “darkness of the lived moment,”3 Benjamin lays stress on the immediacy of the lived moment as it emerges and immediately fades. In Bloch’s words, it is not the most distant but the nearest that is still completely dark. Their precursor, Henri Bergson, called this peculiar form of being in time un travail de tâtonnement, a matter of trial and error like a man finding his way in the dark, moving forward with successive hesitations in obscurities and obstacles. The immediacy and close proximity of temporal experience renders the mind unable to grasp the present, which is always in the process of becoming the (recent) past. The lived experience of the present, therefore, is only implicit, outside of representation. Benjamin overcomes the darkness of the lived moment through historical knowledge, which is expressed in the metaphor of awakening that provides access to an otherwise inaccessible present. In Benjamin, blindness of temporality signifies not only the impenetrability of lived time but also of the historical. In the Convolute N, in which Benjamin lays out the methodological foundations of his project, he describes the nineteenth century as a dark, impenetrable forest with an “undergrowth of delusion and myth.” The forest metaphor conveys the unknowability of the recent past, which is neither the past per se nor yet the future. The task of the critic is to clear the thick “terrain of the nineteenth century” of layers of

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myths and illusions with reason and historical knowledge (N1,4). In order to bring those layers to light, he recalls the image of the awakening self in Proust carrying it to the level of the historical and the collective. “What Proust, as an individual, directly experienced in the phenomenon of remembrance,” he writes, “we have to experience indirectly (with regard to the nineteenth century) in studying “current,” “fashion,” “tendency”— as punishment for the sluggishness which keeps us from taking it up ourselves.”4 This brings me to the epistemological sense of the awakening metaphor: temporal blindness.5 It signifies the critic’s concern with the sluggishness or inertia (Trägheit) of his epoch to remember, where the connection to “what-has-been” is severed by modernity’s myth of newness and rupture. At a time when the recent past is submerged by the rush of novelty, in “a downstream flow” with crushing “violence”, Benjamin attempts to capture the recent past, the closest, the tritest, the most obvious that is lost to (collective) consciousness (K2a,3). Trapped simultaneously in the dragging force and the inertia of the flow, modern society embraces the temporality of the modern, which, as exposed by Benjamin, is an endless repetition of the new as always the same. The “sensation of the newest and the most modern” is a problem of a certain perception of time that fetishizes progress for Benjamin. The acceleration of the pace of social and technological change at the turn of the century creates the cult of the new, a form of false consciousness, a “dream sleep” that falls over Europe. The critic illustrates this temporal blindness with obsolete objects derived from the shops and streets of Paris: “in the nineteenth century, the number of “hollowed out” things increases at a rate and on a scale that was previously unknown, for technical progress is continually withdrawing newly introduced objects from circulation” (N5,2). The illusion of newness hides the eternal recurrent, while the outdated is cast into oblivion. Against the time-myth of modernity, hollowed out commodities and urban objects of the industrial culture, among them “the last fiacres,” “the Sunday of the poorer classes,” “the déjeuner of dressmakers’ assistants,” “saddlers,” “harness makers,” and “the stonework of the arcades” that has the effect of “crumbling papier-mâché,” reveal the fusion of the old within the new. Benjamin takes commodity culture seriously rather than dismissing it as false consciousness, and recognizes the modern condition in these secondary lost forms of the nineteenth century. Through his interaction with objets du jour in the streets and shops of Paris, Benjamin uncovers the illusory nature of modernity’s temporality.

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The centrality of time and temporality in the Arcades provides the theoretical underpinnings of Benjamin’s broader critique of capitalist modernity. His theory of time, particularly the methodological novelty in the idea of dialectical image, constitutes the backbone of the projects’ increasingly complex and convoluted structure. Scholars from different disciplines, such as Stathis Gourgouris and Shannon Lee Dawdy, have reflected on Benjamin’s “persistent ruminations on the significance of time” throughout his writing. The significance of the Arcades within the context of theories of time in the early twentieth century remains to be explored in detail.6 In the Arcades Benjamin’s dialogue with contemporary thinkers on time can best be observed in his distinct theoretical concepts: nowtime (Jeztzeit); now being/waking being (Jetztsein); flash-like moment (Blitzhaft); now of recognizability (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit); dream-time/ space-time (Zeit-traum/Zeitraum); time of awakening (Erwachen); dialectics at a standstill (der Dialektik im Stillstand); differentials of time (Differentialen der Zeit); and recent past/what-has-been (das Gewesen). The list itself suggests Benjamin’s engagement with the question of time as an epistemological and ontological category regarding modern existence. It also suggests clear affinities with the works of Henri Bergson, Ernst Bloch, Martin Heidegger, and Marcel Proust. However, rather than determining the influence of these thinkers on Benjamin (and vice versa), or conducting academic hermeneutics—that is, defining his theories in terms of another’s,7 this chapter aims to rethink Benjamin as a philosopher of time. If Proust’s remembering “in merely an isolated, scattered, and pathological way” is, as Benjamin argues, a symptom of an age, one “that had lost all bodily and natural aids to remembrance,”8 what, then, is Benjamin’s angst about temporal blindness if not such a symptom? Does the prevalence of the idea of awakening against the “sluggishness to remember” not expose Benjamin’s anxiety to retrieve the past and establish a unity of experience? The recent past is inaccessible in its nature. It is the lost temporal and historical connection that the philosopher seeks to establish or retrieve, while exposing the mythic essence in the discourse of progress and temporal ideology of modernity. What Bergson describes as non-­ dialectical flow in duration Benjamin theorizes as “dialectics at a standstill,” a flash of recognition of the recent past in the moment of awakening. In his interpretation of cultural forms, Benjamin uncovers heterogeneity and complexity of temporalities, revealed in the emergent and residual

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aspects within urban objects and commodities. Hence, in a symptomatic attempt similar to that of Proust, Benjamin tries to recover those “aids” in the Arcades by creating, with archival material and urban objects, an extensive, encyclopedic montage of nineteenth-century Paris.

3.2   The Arcades Project, a Brief Introduction The Arcades Project is a vast collection of quotations and a massive assembly of research material, which consists of fragments of historical data gleaned primarily from nineteenth- and twentieth-century sources. It traces the prehistory of modernity in the material culture of the nineteenth century, with the primary aim to create historical consciousness about the present. The project is extremely ambitious in its professed attempt to capture the material history of Paris by way of conducting philosophical history (Geschichtsphilosophie), reconstructing historical material as philosophy. Benjamin understands modernity as a devastating transformation of social reality and the corresponding urban phenomena: the crowd, the  transfigured urban scenery, the alienating impact of industry and machine culture, the catastrophic changes that occurred in the name of history—wars, demolitions, ruins—they all exist as fossilized relics in the quotidian experience.9 What is equally significant for Benjamin is the way these realities are manifested through technologies of representation and historical accounts that organize space and time in the city, an approach which suggests plurality and complexity of urban temporality and introduces new, and occasionally incommensurable, ways of knowing the city. The modern city is the epitome of a civilization profoundly rooted in the logic of destruction and nostalgia. Incessant movement and agitation due to ongoing urban transformation is part of the recurrent cycles of creation and destruction of modernity marked by an accelerated, sequential scheme of time. Benjamin’s project searches for sites of recognition where past and present lose their familiar contours and where the old dialectically interpenetrates with the new against this modern urban setting. He is particularly drawn to the spaces of the arcades, which are the paragon of the consumer dream-worlds in the nineteenth century, and which mostly appear in the twentieth merely as commodity graveyards, containing the ruins of a discarded past. They become the hallmark of the modern city and its gradual immersion in commodity fetishism and reification. The space of the arcades offers a phantasmagoria of the city as interior landscape: “an arcade is a city, a world in miniature.”10 In the

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half-forgotten and half-ruined state of the arcades, Benjamin locates discarded past and its revolutionary potential. These now neglected and alienated areas offer an awakening from commodity phantasmagorias. By “changing from a place of splendor to a place of decay”, the arcades, according to Benjamin, change from an unconscious experience of illusion to “something consciously penetrated.”11 Benjamin does not merely focus on the arcades, which are themselves only one theme among many. While the fading arcades are the primary focus of the Arcades, where novel architectural styles and fashionable shops resided before their destruction by Hausmann’s project, Benjamin extends the list of the refuse of history also to markets, schoolrooms, shopping excursions, cafes, mirrors, street vendors, fires, and the lunch hour for dressmakers’ assistants—which he lists with a note in parenthesis, “fairy tale motif.”12 All these small pieces of historical experience, which would otherwise be dismissed as insignificant, are precisely the material for Benjamin’s primal history of nineteenth-century Paris. How do intellectuals of the early twentieth century understand and interpret literary, cultural, and political transformations and tensions? What is the historiographic model in analyzing devastating transformations of the long nineteenth century? How do they resolve the antinomy between rupture and continuity? Benjamin, in his massive collection of notes on Paris and its industrial culture, regards the world of urban and industrial objects in their abandoned state as the proof of organic time and living history. For the first time, the most recent past became distant as a result of the drive toward incessant novelty, with its origins in the capitalist-­ industrial culture of the nineteenth century. While the collective imagination deflects upon the primal past, evoking myths and symbols from a more distant ur-past, it simultaneously breaks from the recent past, masking the origins of the current historical moment. Part of Benjamin’s endeavor in the Arcades is to recover this recent past, challenging the notion of rupture, of the collective belief that nothing is ever the same again. His interest in the past is motivated by the need to understand his generation and to reveal its mythic theories of history. In his critique of modernity, Benjamin draws attention to the transitory nature of historical objects, as modernity inflicts a radical break with the recent past, rendering the origins of the current historical moment illegible. In the discarded and overlooked phenomena of this era, the critic finds the origins of the early twentieth century, thereby setting out the dialectics of continuity and rupture in his idiosyncratic historiography.

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Benjamin searches for traces of the past in the concrete and the particular. The study of things, objects, commodities, and relics gives singular historical clues that any theoretical reflection would fail to provide. His fascination with the world of objects is nowhere more evident than in the addendum section titled “Materials for Arcades,” which involves the notes and sketches containing a catalogue of objects and themes from the “First Sketches.” In what he terms the “conveniences and inconveniences such as tobacco, mailboxes, tickets, poster pillars,” Benjamin tracks down signatures of the past epoch.13 While new commodities and inventions are rapidly becoming outmoded, Benjamin calls attention to the obsolescence of objects—ruins, waste, debris, detritus, and junk—in order to expose the phantasmagoric nature of modern temporality and, concomitantly, of the commodified object itself. He collects evidence of the ur-history like a detective to whom the objects reveal themselves in their secret meaning. This unearthing of history, within the bounds of the concrete, works against the predominant philosophy of progress and its material manifestations in the rapidly growing urban junkyard. The obsolescence of the material object, which has lost its fetish character, and which is no longer part of the phantasmagoria of progress, has the potential to reveal the true picture of the past. The French capital provides the ‘dialectical images’ of the nineteenth century—the historical material necessary for an interpretation of the recent past. It is the locus of transformation of experience and perception in urban capitalist modernity. No city other than Paris offers such abundance of sensory and intellectual experience: the material culture of the nineteenth century (monuments, arcades, metros, railroads, catacombs, department stores, fashion, souvenirs, casings); urban subjects and forms of experience (masses, consumers, crowds, boredom, the flâneur, the collector, the gambler); individual artists and writers (Baudelaire, Proust, Hugo, Fourier). Although London eclipses it when it comes to technological innovation and the pace of the Industrial Revolution, Paris nonetheless shelters modernity’s cultural roots and political aspirations. It is the birthplace of artistic modernity and the locus of modern revolutions and political transformations. It houses most of the figures and traits considered to be the origins of Euromodernism: the powerful and influential aesthetics of Charles Baudelaire and Louis Aragon; the dream and the collective unconscious in Charles Fourier’s Phalanstère; the demolition sites created by Haussmann and the class warfare symbolized therein, all make their way into Benjamin’s body of work.

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3.3   The Theory of Street Names Part of Benjamin’s fascination with Parisian urban phenomena comes from the architectural transformations the city undergoes during the nineteenth century. The ambitious reconstruction of the city starts early in the century with the construction of arcades, panoramas, department stores, railway stations, and cafes. A few decades later, Baron Haussmann, “the demolition artist,” along with other Second Empire reformists, radically transforms the city: entire neighborhoods, mostly ‘slums,’ are torn down to build boulevards, public parks, sewers and water works, city facilities, and public monuments.14 This concrete sense of change, which is not unique to the French capital, showcases modernity’s urge to destroy and to construct anew. The state-led destruction and reconstruction of Paris monumentalize the idea of historical progress at the heart of the city as a social utopia, rearranging buildings and streets, while creating artificial sites of communal spaces with parks, squares, and public gardens. The state leaves its mark on the city, like a seal, imposing a new urban experience. Reinforcing social inequalities by clearing out working-class neighborhoods from the city center, the massive demolition of old Paris wipes out its inhabitants’ “aids to remembrance.”15 Benjamin is fascinated with Haussman’s sites of demolition, and understands them as sources for teaching the theory of construction, citing Théophile Gautier: “A curious spectacle, these open houses, with their floorboards suspended over the abyss, their colorful flowered wallpaper still showing the shape of the rooms, their staircases leading nowhere now, their cellars open to the sky, their bizarre collapsed interiors and battered ruins.”16 The detritus and ruins of modernity, such as this demolished house Gautier describes with curiosity and nostalgia, along with glass-­ covered passageways, junk shops, and other material remains, are the architectural relics Benjamin explores and records in his project. The abandoned and underused spaces that lost their aura of the new become sites for the display of the past against the Hausmannian “scorn for historical experience.”17 Their significance lies in precisely such dialectical transition from a place of splendor to a place of decay. In January 1928, Benjamin writes to his friend Gershom Scholem that he is working on a text called “Parisian arcade—a Dialectical fairyland” (Pariser Passage—eine dialektische Feerie). The motif of the fairy tale, originally placed in the title of the Arcades, is an important element in Benjamin’s historiography. The death of the Parisian arcades, the

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disintegration of their original aura, and their final state of ruin radically transform their historical meaning. Their quickly effaced functionality, transformed from being home to abundance to an alienated decaying structure, unmasks their “illusory dream image” quality. The arcades are “fairy palaces at the height of their magic” until they lose their aura in the collective imagination. Nothing of them remains except the name, as in, for example, the Passages des Panoramas, which now evokes an enchanted world that once was. The arcades withdraw into their name, Benjamin contends, but the name is now like a filter which lets through only the most intimate, the bitter essence of what has been (D°, 6). These historic shopping centers retreat from their aura into empty signifiers, radically disconnected from their original signification. Being past, being no more, is passionately at work in things […] Arcades are such monuments of being-no-more. And the energy that works in them is dialectics. The dialectic takes its way through the arcades, ransacking them, revolutionizing them, turns them upside down and inside out, converting them from abodes of luxury to (x). And nothing of them lasts except the name: passages. (D°, 4) Vergangen, nicht mehr zu sein arbeitet leidenschaftlich in den Dingen […] Solche Denkmäler eines nicht mehr seins sind Passagen. Und die Kraft die in ihnen arbeitet, ist die Dialektik. Die Dialektik durchwühlt sie, revolutioniert sie, sie wälzt das oberste zu unterst, macht da sie nichts mehr von dem blieben was sie sind, aus Luxusstätten sie zu (x). Und nichts von ihnen dauert· als der Name: Passagen. (D°, 4)

Despite the loss of their aura, these abandoned urban sites acquire intensely complex meanings as they age and become ruins. Far from being empty and lifeless, they gradually become powerful semiotic vessels. A whole world lies in the name of old streets, a world of “what-has-been” (Gewesenen) withdrawn into its name. Benjamin’s goal is to draw this world into an awakened state, that is, to consciousness of historical knowledge. Urban topography has the force of memory traces in the sleeping consciousness of its dwellers. Benjamin therefore attempts to construct a “theory of street names” in Convolute P, citing  Leo Spitzer: “proper names have an effect that is conceptually unburdened and simply acoustic…[they] are ‘bare formulas’ which Proust can fill up with feelings because they have not yet been rationalized” (P1a,7). He lists names of old squares, streets, theaters, and restaurants. One example is the entry on

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Place Maubert where writer Etienne Dolet was tortured and burnt to death in the sixteenth century. It is described as a historical square whose thirteenth-century name “even the lips sully themselves in pronouncing” because it “exhales an odor of iniquity.”18 The list of streets in the Convolute P include Rue Courtaud-Villain (Short Villain Street), Rue Tire-Boudin (The Sausage Puller Street), Rue Mauvaises-Paroles (Street of Dirty Words), Rue Femme-sans-Tête (Headless Woman Street), Rue du Chat qui Pêche (Street of the Fishing Cat), and Rue des Mauvais-Garçons (Street of Bad Boys)—all of which, reports Benjamin, particularly offended rationalism.19 The names of these abandoned, destroyed, underused, and reused spaces in post-Hausmannian Paris have residual meanings. Once uttered, they awaken past associations from a bygone era. Their historical essence is not fully visible, or accessible to consciousness, but is nonetheless crucial to the urban “linguistic cosmos” (P3,5). The power in the names of the streets, squares, and theaters persists despite their topographic displacement. During the Revolution, when saints’ names are removed from Parisian streets—the rues Saint-Honoré, Saint-Roch, and Saint-Antoine were, for a while, Honoré, Roch, and Antoine; “a hiatus opened up that to the ear of the Frenchman was unendurable,” Benjamin writes.20 The past persists as a detectable trace, in an iniquitous odor or in the unendurable utterance of a street name.21

3.4  Jeztzeit and the Critique of Historicism Is  the redemption of the semantic potential of past forms a nostalgic yearning for a vanishing aura? Is it a conservative, anti-modernist lament over the decay of tradition and experience? Is Benjamin fostering a nostalgic, purely negative sense of modernity as loss—the loss of unity with the past, nature, and the collective? Does the Arcades hold “nostalgic consciousness,” in Fredric Jameson’s terms, a “painful straining” amid mid-­ century Europe’s crises “towards a wholeness or unity of experience which the historical situation threatens to shatter at every turn?”22 Or, as Theodor W. Adorno critically notes, is the idea of dialectics at standstill idealistic and  “undialectical?”23 There seems to be a fundamental antinomy in Benjamin’s thought between the redemptive approach to tradition that embraces nostalgia for the lost communal life of the past, and the revolutionary stimulus that implies a radical break from tradition. Asa result of this, Benjamin’s diverse positions have often been appropriated and over-­ simplified, frequently and inconsistently characterized as metaphysical,

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materialist, theological, nostalgic, political, and apolitical. According to Susan  Buck-Morss, Benjamin himself recognizes the problem: without theology (the axis of transcendence) Marxism falls into positivism; without Marxism (the axis of empirical history) theology falls into magic.24 “My life, as well as my work, moves in extreme positions,” Benjamin writes to Adorno, to whom Benjamin feels the need to justify his work’s Marxist quality, “the breath it thereby claims, the freedom to move into conjunction things and thoughts that are considered incompatible.”25 Benjamin attempts to overcome this incompatibility, albeit with marginal clarity, through the idea of the dialectical image, which negates and overcomes both methods. Buck-Morss reports that Benjamin’s thought is generally broken down into three stages: the first is the metaphysical and theological at the beginning of his career, the second is the Marxist and materialist stage in Berlin during late Weimar, and the third occurs when, exiled in Paris, he tries to sublate these two antithetical positions in an original synthesis. It is in The Arcades Project that this final attempt is most distinct, where he tries to resolve the ambiguities between the messianic and materialist strands in his earlier works. “Paris Arcades …to tell the truth […] the theater of all my battles and all my ideas,” his 1930 letter to Scholem explains.26 The Arcades  project draws together critical materialist history—dialectical images—with an emancipatory vision of collective critical remembrance, which he terms awakening. This convoluted and theoretically underdeveloped attempt at synthesis eventually dissatisfies, if not scandalizes, both theologians and Marxists alike. Quite like in the case of Henri Bergson and A.H. Tanpınar, a controversy pursues Benjamin’s legacy for having conflicting tendencies, paradoxes, and reversals in his work. The simultaneous celebration and mourning regarding the destruction of traditional culture has been associated with cultural conservatism.27 While there are many facets to Benjamin’s work, what I want to focus on here is his theory of time that develops out of this tension and ambivalence toward modernity. One critic who recognizes this contradictory and incommensurable aspect in Benjamin’s approach to time is Jürgen Habermas. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas draws attention to Benjamin’s comprehension of temporality in the early twentieth century that is different from the comprehensions of temporality articulated in science and in the Hegelian philosophy of history. Benjamin, he argues, with his “singular mixture of surrealist experiences and motifs from Jewish mysticism [that] enter unmistakably into his notion of ‘now-time,’” is

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struggling with “two conceptions” of time. One is implicit in the homogeneous and empty time of science with “the stubborn belief in progress” of evolutionism and the philosophy of history. The other is the metaphysical progressivism of Hegel and historicism, which imprisons history in the museum and “tells the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary.”28 These two frameworks of time come to crisis by the end of First World War. Benjamin is convinced that the encouragement of blind faith in historical progress by both the scientific and the historicist camps disguises historical regressions—as well as cycles, longues durées, and other “constellations” and “collusions” of temporality—beneath the dazzling mask of change and novelty. Benjamin responds to this with what came to be called a “crisis of historicism,” in the form of a theory of time. Benjamin reverts the radical future-orientedness of modern times and provides a critique of history when viewed with a backward gaze, with an orientation toward the past. The present as now-time offers “in a flash” a past that has been suppressed. This is particularly evident in his notion of the Jeztzeit that forms the junction through which the lines of his “time differentials” run: the flash-like moment (Blitzhaft); the now of recognizability (Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit); the time of awakening (Erwachen); and the dialectical image (Dialektishes Bild). “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past,” he writes in the Convolute N, “rather, the image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”29 The now-time is bombarded with fragments of the recent past, illuminated with the shock of a flash (Blitzhaft). It ‘blasts’ the continuum of historical succession, revealing historical objects in an explosive ‘constellation’ of the past and the present as an image flashing up in the now of recognizability. The Jeztzeit is therefore a pillar of the critique of historical materialism. It reveals “the crystal of the total event” in the analysis of this small, discrete moment, thus breaking with “vulgar versions of historical materialism” (N2,6). Benjamin counts on the impact of this recognition to ‘awaken’ the dreaming collective as “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”30 The notion of now-time provides the temporal paradigm for the figure of the oppressed in Benjamin’s thought: oppressed time and the time of the oppressed. The past in ‘freely associated’ and ‘long-forgotten images’ awakens not what was experienced in the past, not even what is remembered in the present, but what has been forgotten. The motifs of awakening and remembering underscore the simultaneity of the present with the

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past because the true image of the present is locked up somewhere within it: “we recognize today’s life, today’s forms, in the life and in the apparently secondary, lost forms of [the past] epoch.”31 In the lost forms of the past epoch we have seen earlier, such as “the last fiacres,” “the Sunday of the poorer classes,” “saddlers,” and “harness makers,” Benjamin recognizes the potential to awaken the collective from the recent past, the nineteenth century, to what has been forgotten, neglected, left in oblivion.32 The past that has been oppressed, rejected, and forgotten is a second time that runs independently of clock-time, dissociated from everyday life and visible only in outdated fragments. Benjamin maintains that the outmoded signifies a resistance to the oppressive artifice of the present with its constant call for the new.

3.5  Memory, Blitzhaft, Bergson Implicit in Benjamin’s emphatic conception of now-time is the radical critique of Enlightenment modernity, which presupposes  that time is always and everywhere the same, a succession without content; that time does not affect the events taking place within time; and that the individual subject of knowledge and experience is atemporal. Benjamin’s attack on the ‘harmonious façade’ of historical progress (in Baudelaire’s words) through restoring the severed relation with the past strikes a deep resonance with Henri Bergson’s conception of time. It is Bergson who most strongly contests this façade of continuity by distinguishing between two forms of multiplicity and memory. The French philosopher calls for a new vision of time as duration, which suggests totality of experience, as well as the elasticity, expansion, and relativity of temporal consciousness. What is essential to understanding time is its perpetual movement and the process of becoming itself. The scientific method only establishes superficial relations between phenomena: to know, in this case, is a practical function of the intellect that projects time into space. Pure duration, on the other hand, is unrelated to quantity and quantifiable units. According to this view of time, the past is not irretrievable, while the future is uncertain. Bergson invites us to reconsider the absolute knowability and measurability of time in the scientific and philosophical sense. Benjamin challenges this notion of knowability through his critique of historicism. Such history, he claims, has been “the strongest narcotic of

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the [nineteenth] century” (N3,4). The hermeneutical understanding of the past “as it actually happened” serves a similar practical function to what we see in Bergson, which sketches a developmental and universal history. The Arcades is Benjamin’s attempt to ‘rescue’ the discredited and neglected phenomena of the recent past from deluded, misguided, and ideologically interested nineteenth-century historicism, and ‘blast’ the course of progressive historical time. Benjamin constructs an alternative and unorthodox conception of historical time based on the connection, “not between the past and the present” he insists, but between “what-has-­ been” and “now,” as brought together in images of the past. While Proust is an acknowledged figure of influence in Benjamin’s writings, their link to Bergson’s hermeneutics, particularly in the methodology of the Arcades, has not been so commonly recognized. Part of this oversight is due to the simplified characterizations of their positions: while Bergson, after 1920, was deemed an anti-science spiritualist, Benjamin’s intellectual alliances positioned him between the messianic and materialist schools of thought. We owe most of this misguided reception to Adorno, who insisted that Benjamin’s work lay squarely within the tradition of the Institute for Social Research.33 Unmistakably, by contrast with Bergson, Benjamin is not interested in phenomenological attention to consciousness; he proclaims a radically historical approach to the present’s connection to the past. Benjamin criticizes Bergson for rejecting any historical determination of memory and shutting out the most essential experience of modernity, which he describes as the experience of “the inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism.”34 In fact, Benjamin levels a similar criticism at Proust: the author’s recollections are confined to a subjective bourgeois experience, which is fundamentally and exclusively personal. It is part of the modern bourgeoisie ideology that promotes cultivation of the self and privileges the private world. Benjamin is more concerned with the idea of collective awakening than with private recollections in his conception of awakening as an essential principle of history writing. Despite these disparities in their thought,  convergences between Bergson’s and Benjamin’s work go beyond the thematic connections concerning the progressive and representative view of time. In fact, the theme of memory comes to play a central role in Benjamin’s late work, when he develops the methodology of the Arcades and his study on Charles Baudelaire. This is also the period in his life when he demonstrates a decisive shift to ground the project in Marxist terms—as both works were commissioned by the Institute. As Buck-Morss reports, Benjamin’s original conception, a politicized version of the Sleeping Beauty as a fairy tale

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of awakening, was to be retold along Marxist lines, to “set free the huge powers of history that are asleep within the once upon a time of classical narration.”35 Benjamin gradually supplements his early notes with the idea of disintegration of modern memory. In the idea of awakening, Benjamin reworks Proust’s conception of mémoire involontaire, in which his childhood confronts Proust unexpectedly with the taste of a madeleine. It is a moment when the internal coincides with the external sensory experience, bringing back fragmentary reminiscences from the past. In his analysis of Proustian memory, Benjamin does not neglect to discuss the precursor of the idea, Henri Bergson. It is important to note that Proust himself maintained all his life that his understanding of memory was not influenced and indeed contradicted by the work of Bergson, to the dismay of critics. Yet,  what Proust calls mémoire involontaire and mémoire volontaire Bergson already develops, long before the novelist, respectively as mémoire pure or spontanée, and mémoire-habitude. Although essential differences exist in their accounts, Bergson’s work has a formative influence on Proust.36 There are many distinctive features of Proust’s method of retrieving the past which Benjamin specifies in “The Image of Proust.”37 It is spontaneous: not a deliberate, purposive form of remembering, but an “actus purus of recollection itself.” Its occasions are incidental: “the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour.” It happens “in a flash:” recollections appear unexpectedly in a “painful shock of rejuvenation,” and then “fade and slumber.” Finally, it is anchored in the sensory experience, as in the madeleine moment, outside of verbal and representative experience.38 In these emphatic traits of involuntary memory, we can discern the groundwork for the conception of dialectical images in Benjamin’s later work, particularly in the Convolute N and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Here, the link to Bergson’s philosophy is unmistakable. Although Bergson does not call the traits of memory voluntary or involuntary, he identifies one type of memory with habit and utility, and another with images and with specific concreteness of lived experience. Bergson writes, “the first [the memory of habit and repetition], conquered by effort, remains dependent upon our will; the second, entirely spontaneous, is as capricious in reproducing as it is faithful in preserving.”39 Bergson’s attention to the important connection between experience and the structure of memory has an impact on Benjamin’s way of thinking about the transformation of perception and experience. In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin illustrates that Bergson’s philosophy of life attempts to capture

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true experience, particularly at a time when experience is becoming increasingly standardized and regulated (156). The following passages, the first from Bergson’s Matière et Mémoire (1896) and the second from Benjamin’s Convolute N (circa 1937), demonstrate the extent to which the critical historian comes close to the French philosopher’s formulation: Spontaneous recollection is perfect from the outset; time can add nothing to its image without disfiguring it; it retains in memory its place and date. On the contrary, a learned recollection passes out of time in the measure that the lesson is better known; it becomes more and more impersonal, more and more foreign to our past life […] Of the two memories, then, which we have just distinguished, the first appears to be memory par excellence. The second, that generally studied by psychologists, is habit interpreted by memory rather than memory itself.40 Le souvenir spontané est tout de suite parfait; le temps ne pourra rien ajouter à son image sans la dénaturer; il conservera pour la mémoire sa place et sa date. Au contraire, le souvenir appris sortira du temps à mesure que la leçon sera mieux sue; il deviendra de plus en plus impersonnel, de plus en plus étranger à notre vie passée. […] Des deux mémoires que nous venons de distinguer, la première paraît donc bien être la mémoire par excellence. La seconde, celle que les psychologues étudient d’ordinaire, est l’habitude éclairée par la mémoire plutôt que la mémoire même. It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, an image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural. Only dialectical images are genuinely historical … (N3,1)41 […] The dialectical image is an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash. What has been is to be held fast—as an image flashing up in the now of its recognizability. The rescue that is carried out by these means—and only by these— can operate solely for the sake of what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost. (N9,7)42 Nicht so ist es, daß das Vergange wirft, sondern Bild ist dasjenige, worin das Gewesene mit dem Jetzt blitzhaft zu einer Konstellation zusammentritt. Mit andern Worten: Bild ist die Dialektik im Stillstand. Denn während die

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Beziehung der Gegenwart zur Vergangenheit eine rein zeitliche ist, ist die Gewesnen zum Jetzt eine dialektische: nicht zeitlicher sondern bildlicher Natur. Nur dialektiche Bilder sind echt geschichtliche… (N3,1)43 […] Das dialektische Bild ist ein aufblitzendes. So, als im Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit aufblitzendes Bild, ist das Gewesene festzuhalten. Die Rettung, die dergestalt—und nur dergestralt—vollzogen wird, läßt immer nur an dem, im nächsten Augenblick schon unrettbar verlornen (sich) vollziehen. (N 9,7)44

These passages demonstrate the extent to which Benjamin establishes a connection between Bergsonian epistemology, philosophical history (Geschichtsphilosophie), and political awakening. Although Benjamin does not adopt Bergson’s terms per se, we can nevertheless discern the philosopher’s substantial reflection, if not influence, in Benjamin’s own statements about history and memory. Bergson’s spontaneous, elusive, and virtual experience of the past gains a transformative and utopian potential that ‘explodes’ in the present in the Arcades. For Benjamin, like Bergson, while the past exists virtually, outside representation, it is nevertheless actualized in images. The dialectical image brings the recent past into the most immediate present. Its spontaneous, non-representational and transient nature could be read as an expression of durée pure, which Benjamin takes up and transforms from its non-dialectical flow into what he calls the dialectics at a standstill. The dialectical image as perceptual experience is immediate and therefore intuitive. As a historical method, however, the work of the German critic and the French philosopher diverges. While Benjamin gives us an image of modern experience, Bergson lays out les données immédiates de la conscience, an ontology outside of history. Despite Benjamin’s efforts to connect what-has-been with the present, there can be no question of timelessly conserving the past, or simply establishing a continuity, because the dialectical images are inherently elusive and distorted. In Bergson’s perspective, time only denatures them and makes them stranger. In the Arcades, the yearning for totality and unity of experience at a time when it is constantly “hollowed out” is unmistakable. However, before categorizing this yearning as nostalgia, it is important to differentiate between the historical condition (the transformation of experience and perception) and the historical/philosophical method. Unity or continuity in the presentation of the past is unattainable. The redemption of revolutionary potential of the past is not an act of nostalgia. Even if it is, it is a “nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless

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dissatisfaction with the present” that “furnishes revolutionary stimulus,” as Jameson admits.45 Benjamin does not lament the rupture of tradition but recognizes its revolutionary potential, as long as modern temporality that produced this rupture is overcome. John Joseph McCole in his study on Benjamin’s ambivalence toward the decay of tradition and experience, which Benjamin understands as the hallmark of his times, demonstrates that the idea of temporal constellations conceptually achieves a paradoxical conjunction of continuity and discontinuity. The dialectical image represents Benjamin’s resolution of the antinomy of tradition. It mobilizes the antinomic tensions in his thinking successfully and productively.46 Modernity as forgetting of the aura comes under attack by retrieving the past in dialectical images, yet at the same time, Benjamin attacks archaism—as nostalgia for the aura—through animating the desire for utopia to which humanity has persistently given expression, and “rescuing” the oppressed fragments of the past “from the discredit and neglect into which they have fallen” (N9,4).

3.6  Wish Images (Wunsch-Bilder) No history recounts living experience (Erlebnis). The past in its entirety lies in an archaic realm of ur-history, while (H)istory manifests itself as progress, fashion, and newness. What is a critical historian to do in order to awaken the collective from this dream-world of modernity? Benjamin in the Arcades investigates new forms of human experience that emerge in the nineteenth century and the way these find echoes in the collective unconscious. Against modernity’s rupture of experience through novelty, Benjamin’s fairy tale is conceived as a response to the need to organize the device of remembering collectively. In industrial culture, revolutionary consciousness exists in a mythic dream state, which needs historical knowledge to awaken itself. The critical historian rescues the fragments of this knowledge from their suppressed and neglected state. Theorization of awakening as an experience of the collective, rather than an individual act of remembering, sets Benjamin apart from contemporary Surrealists and modernists alike. Although Surrealism has had a great effect on Benjamin’s work, particularly in his conception of dream images and myths, it does not reconcile with the idea of ‘the dreaming collective.’ This is also the case for Proust, albeit his influence on the central premise of the Arcades belongs to the Zeittraum (spacetime/dreamtime) “in which the individual consciousness more and more secures itself

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in reflecting, while the collective consciousness sinks into ever deeper sleep” (K1,4). Sleep incongruously signifies “extravagantly heightened inner awareness.” The evocation of uniquely individual experiences, with which Proust’s recollections, Surrealism’s “mythology,” and other modernist sensibilities could be associated, stands in contrast to Benjamin’s intent to awaken the collective consciousness from its dreaming state. Experiencing the collective only in an isolated and alienated state is an essential component of the commodity dream-world. Behind the idea of wish images lie elements of a classless society, stored in the unconscious of the collective. It is the utopia that had left its trace in different configurations of lived experience. The old and the new interpenetrate in the collective unconscious as ‘wish images.’ Benjamin collects evidence of this fusion in fashion, poetry, technological innovations, and even in utopian narrativesof Fourier, in which the new continuously draws on the past. He locates archaic elements in the construction of the new, as in the toll collector at the gates of Paris conjures up images of the gates of Rome or of Athens (C4a,2) and the archaic drama of the Greeks is reborn in the booths of the trade fair (C3,1). These wish images are attached to industrial and technological forms and are symbolic representations of the utopian wish within these entirely modern forms. Benjamin’s conception of wish images as they relate to the archaic is informed by Karl  Marx’s observations on the relation between times of dramatic change and the revival of symbols of antiquity. Buck-Morss brings the following passage from Marx to attention: “Just when [human beings] seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and objects, in creating something that has never existed before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up to their service the spirits of the past and borrow them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.47” Benjamin takes up this idea of resurrecting the past during times of radical transformation and applies it to the consumer culture of nineteenth-century Paris: At the entrance to the arcade, to the skating rink, to the pub, to the tennis court: penates. The hen that lays the golden praline-eggs, the machine that stamps our names on nameplates and the other machine that weighs us (the modern gnōthi seauton), slot machines, the mechanical fortuneteller—these guard the threshold. They are generally found, it is worth noting, neither on the inside not truly in the open. They protect and mark the transitions; and

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when one seeks out a little greenery on a Sunday afternoon, one is turning to these mysterious penates as well. (C3,4) Vorm Eingang der Passage, der Eisbahn, des Bierlokals, des Tennisplatzes: Penaten. Die Henne, die goldene Pralineeier legt, der Automat, der unsern Namen stanzt und jener andere, der uns wiegt—das moderne γνῶθι σεαυτόν— Glücksspielapparate, die mechanische Wahrsagerin hüten die Schwelle. Sie finden sich, bemerkenswerterweise, so stetig weder im Innern noch eigentlich im Freien. Sie beschirmen und bezeichnen die Übergänge und die Reise geht Sonntagnachmittags nicht nur ins Grüne, sondern auch zu diesen geheimnisvollen Penaten. (C3,4)48

The entrance to the arcade, where the image of the modern is cast, is protected by mythic Roman gods of household. The entry into the new is thereby marked by archaic images of the collective. The collective fantasy, that reaches back to an ur-past, is released in the architecture of the new as a gate-keeper. The new is introduced with images of the ancient, mythic origins. It is not a restored form of representation of Roman deities, but their reenactment in the collective fantasy. The hen fulfills the ur-old wish symbol of leisure and plenty, while the nameplates and measuring of the body offers a renewed form of the ancient principle of self-knowledge. The machine fortuneteller, along with the rest, attaches utopian desires to the experience of the new. These wish images, according to Benjamin, pertain to a classless society because the human desire for happiness presupposes an end to material scarcity, social inequalities, and exploitative labor. Nameplates, emphasizing the uniqueness and significance of each individual, carry a wish to subvert social hierarchies, while the hen of the golden egg and the slot machines eradicate material scarcity and excessive labor. Located neither inside nor outside, these penates are signposts in a state of transition. They are utopian desires but paradoxically manipulated as a force of domination. “Each epoch dreams the one to follow,” quotes Benjamin from Jules Michelet in the “Exposé of 1935.” In the course of social development, he argues, the new, in order to distance itself from the recent past— the recently outmoded—deflects back on the primal past, to the ur-past. Hence, the dream images of the coming era are intermingled with elements of primal history. These constitute what Benjamin terms the ‘collective wish images.’ The revolutionary power in collective consciousness comes from the archaic images of the collective, but never by way of their restoration. It is a dream that has not been realized; therefore, it does not call for a mythic restoration of the past but rather its redemption.

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The fragile moment of awakening is a dialectical moment for Benjamin because it lies along the ambiguous line between unconscious imagery and critical lucidity. The past, the truly historical, is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and the known. Although there is no ‘timeless truth’ as truth is bound to time, there is still an invisible nucleus of time, “hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach, of intellect, in some material object…which we do not suspect,” in Proust’s words quoted in the Arcades.49 It is hidden in the ‘ruffle on a dress,’ a street name, or in the wish image of a vending machine. Benjamin carries over the question of modern temporality and consciousness from Bergson and Proust to historical and cultural analysis and to urban objects with the expressive character of the material product. It is through the intensive study of these objects in the streets of Paris that Benjamin develops the critique of the temporality of modernity as an illusion. Only an empty and homogenous understanding of time can sustain the dream discourse of timeless novelty, simultaneously hiding the persistence of the old and recycling it. Benjamin rejects the progressive and future-oriented temporality of social evolution, for being a part of the empty time of the modern, and therefore being a form of false consciousness. It is precisely this awakening from the auratic dream that exemplifies Benjamin’s new theory of time— the time of Eingedenken, his neologistic translation of mémoire involontaire, interlacing remembrance and mindfulness. Benjamin’s experience of time concerns the pure present, recognizing its revolutionary potential for the future, only through looking backward in mediation on the past.

Notes 1. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 458. 2. Susan Buck-Morrs points to a similar choice of vocabulary by the Nazis in Germany. She argues that the Nazi slogan Deutschland Erwache! (“Germany, Awaken!”) urged something very different from Benjamin’s conception of awakening (das Erwachen), not awakening from recent history, but recapturing the past in a pseudo-historical sense, as myth. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 3. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 4. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 393; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 497. 5. I borrow this term from Shannon Lee Dawdy, who uses it in the context of Benjamin’s attention to the history of the object. Dawdy argues that

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c­ ommodity aesthetics, temporality, and dialectical seeing are connected as phenomena, process, and method (Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (December 2010): 761–793, https://doi.org/10.1086/657626. 768). 6. See Gourgouris and Miller in Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project ed. Hanssen; both essays focuse on temporality of dream and ruin in the Arcades Project; Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity.” Also see Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London; New York: Verso, 1995). 7. For works on the influence of prominent thinkers on Benjamin, see Susan Buck-Morss, Origin of Negative Dialectics, Trade edition (New York: Free Press, 1979); Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995); James McFarland, Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); and Andrew Benjamin and Dimitris Vardoulakis, eds., Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015). 8. Arcades Project, K 1,1. The translator notes that Benjamin uses the word eingedenk coined from the verb gedenken (“remember”), which has a more active sense than Erinnerung (“memory”). Benjamin here focuses on an active, rather than passive, mode of remembering that underlines a conscious and interpretive act of remembering. 9. For an analysis of the idea of ruin and fossil in Benjamin, see Chapter 3 “Natural History: Fossil” in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 58–77. 10. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 3; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 45. 11. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 907. 12. Benjamin, 920. 13. Benjamin, 919. 14. Benjamin, 12; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 57. 15. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 388; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 490. 16. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 95; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 150. 17. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 132; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 193. 18. A.  Delvau (1866) cited  in The Arcades Project [C2a,6]. Alfred Delvau’s work on the history of Paris has significant, albeit unrecognized, influence on The Arcades Project. The anecdotal history of cafes and cabarets, the encyclopedic, if not hoarding, impulse toward the history of the city, his experiments on fragmentary and pastiche form in history writing, all seem to have a role in the project’s peculiar form and structure.

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19. Rue Tire-Boudin was a medieval street known for prostitution. The name is an obscene metaphor for prostitutes. The last two of these street names, Rue du Chat qui Pêche (Street of the Fishing Cat) and Rue des Mauvais-­ Garçons (Street of Bad Boys), exist to this day. 20. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 517; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 644. 21. Benjamin once more quotes Alfred Delvau who mentions the odor of iniquity in the old street names. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 521. 22. Fredric Jameson, “Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia,” Salmagundi, no. 10/11 (October 1, 1969): 52–68. 23. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter W. Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 106–7. 24. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 249. 25. Quoted in John Joseph McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Cornell University Press, 1993), 21. 26. Quoted in McCole, 280. 27. For a detailed analysis of this tension both in Benjamin’s own works and in his reception, see McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition. 28. Habermas is citing “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 11–12. 29. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 576–577. 30. Benjamin, “Theses on History” (Thesis XVII), Illuminations. 31. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 458; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 572. 32. Excerpts from the exhaustive list of fragments Benjamin has recorded in “Materials for the Arcades.” Benjamin and Tiedemann, The arcades project, 918–925. 33. While Adorno’s authority still dominates discussions on Benjamin’s work today, McCole argues that the Benjamin revival in recent decades brings in more nuanced research on the productive contradictions of Benjamin’s work. McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, 13–17. Bergson also had his share of Adorno’s tendentious treatment, solidified in his attack on the idea of “intuition.” However, some claim that there are affinities between the two and that Adorno came to his idea of the negative dialectic only by working through what was problematic in Bergson’s account. See “Failed Outbreak II: Bergson” in Roger Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (SUNY Press, 2012). The ambivalent relation of the Frankfurt School to Henri Bergson has yet to be studied. 34. Benjamin, Illuminations, 157. 35. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 49.

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36. For a discussion of the differences between the two accounts of memory (albeit contestable, particularly in its analysis of spontaneity in Proust) see Anthony Edward Pilkington, Bergson and His Influence: A Reassessment (Cambridge University Press, 1976). 37. “The Image of Proust” in Benjamin, Illuminations, 201–216. 38. For a detailed discussion of these features, see McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, 260–261. 39. Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire: Essai Sur La Relation Du Corps à l’Esprit, 72nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 52; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, eds. (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 88. 40. Bergson, Matter and Memory, 83–84; Bergson, Matière et Mémoire: Essai Sur La Relation Du Corps à l’Esprit, 49. 41. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462. 42. Benjamin, 472. 43. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2 fk, 578. 44. Benjamin, 591–592. 45. Jameson, “Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia.” 46. McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, 296. 47. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 122. 48. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 88; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 141. 49. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 402; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, 509.

References Adorno, Theodor W., and Walter W. Benjamin. The Complete Correspondence, 1928  - 1940. Edited by Henri Lonitz. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Andrew, and Dimitris Vardoulakis, eds. Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2: Das Passagen-Werk. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 9. Auflage. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2020. ———. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. ———. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002. Bergson, Henri. Matière et Mémoire: Essai Sur La Relation Du Corps à l’Esprit. 72nd ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965.

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———. Matter and Memory. Translated by N.  M. Paul and W.  S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995. Buck-Morss, Susan. Origin of Negative Dialectics. Trade edition. New York: Free Press, 1979. ———. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989. Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (December 2010): 761–93. https://doi. org/10.1086/657626. Foster, Roger. Adorno: The Recovery of Experience. SUNY Press, 2012. Gourgouris, Stathis. “The Dream of Reality in the Ruin.” In Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, edited by Beatrice Hanssen, 201–24. London ; New York: Continuum, 2006. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence. Reprint edition. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1990. Hanssen, Beatrice. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. A&C Black, 2006. Jameson, Fredric. “Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia.” Salmagundi, no. 10/11 (October 1, 1969): 52–68. McCole, John Joseph. Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition. Cornell University Press, 1993. McFarland, James. Constellation: Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin in the Now-Time of History. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Miller, Tyrus. “Glass before Its Time, Premature Iron: Architecture, Temporality and Dream in Benjamin’s Arcades Project.” In Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, edited by Beatrice Hanssen, 240–58. London ; New  York: Continuum, 2006. Osborne, Peter. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London; New York: Verso, 1995. Pilkington, Anthony Edward. Bergson and His Influence: A Reassessment. Cambridge University Press, 1976.

CHAPTER 4

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Istanbul

4.1   Introduction: Memory Politics of the Little Square In the opening to the entry “Streets of Paris” in The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin locates “little squares” outside the ordinary temporal relations common to historians: The timeless little squares that suddenly are there, and to which no name attaches. They have not been the object of careful planning, like the Place Vendôme or the Place des Grèves, and do not enjoy the patronage of world history, but owe their existence to houses that have slowly, sleepily, belatedly assembled in response to the summons of the century. In such squares, the trees hold sway; even the smallest afford thick shade.1

Although the covered shopping arcades were Benjamin’s central image for understanding nineteenth-century Paris, “little squares,” like street names, are sites that are unassimilable to urban-industrial culture. The monumental squares of Haussmann’s Paris create an illusion of permanence and novelty, tied to the historical time of the nation and to urban renovation. Benjamin’s nameless little squares, however, suggest spontaneity, quiescence, and a reluctant and tardy responsiveness to the call of progress. A.H. Tanpınar, in Five Cities, describes small squares in Istanbul in strikingly similar terms:2 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Ö. N. Dolcerocca, Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35201-0_4

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There are very few things in the city as attractive and delightful as the little squares. These are compositions of a variety of beliefs, traditions, pleasures that turned into instincts, and they owe their existence to a great deal of coincidence and even to centuries of oblivion. There is no waste or pretension in them, other than the generosity of nature that thrives roses, cypress and sycamore trees. In time they came into being drop by drop.3

Little squares are not candidates for historical meaning: they are the forgotten corners of the city and only belatedly respond to the demands of urban transformation. Both thinkers perceive something natural in these squares: they are not “carefully planned” but have grown up accidentally and effortlessly. They are slow but active and alive, in an organic sense, unlike those monumental urban objects that assert a permanence behind which is a relentless pursuit of novelty. Even nature itself, its trees and roses, can “afford” a thick shade, going unnoticed by urban “renewal.” The temporal order in which these squares exist is fundamentally different from modern temporality, which is conceived, in Benjamin’s terms, as a “phantasmagoria” of progress. These squares assert synchronicity and an alternative temporality: they do not exist in the same “now” as the Place Vendôme or Taksim Square. The small squares make up one of those sites where an alternative history attempts to break through the oppressive surface of the myth of progressive history. They have no connection to the great men and celebrated events of traditional historiography, epitomizing instead the “refuse” and “detritus” of history. In Benjamin’s terms, the past confronts us in these neglected squares as “freely associated” and “long-forgotten images.” Tanpınar, in at times parallel and disparate methods to the German critic, pursues an alternative temporality or historical time that uncovers, “in a flash,” not what was experienced in the past, not even what is remembered in the present, but what has been forgotten. The small squares mentioned by both writers, along with other urban sites and “relics”, hold the power to awaken the collective from the recent past, and bring to light what has been forgotten, neglected, or left in oblivion. The movement and agitation created by enforced urban transformation, the predominant vision of the eternally changing present, events created and destroyed by an accelerated, sequential scheme of time—all these play a role in these thinkers’ search for sites of recognition where past and present lose their familiar contours. The city offers an “archive” of historical phenomena, that is, urban spaces, architectural forms, commodities,

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that suggest alternative histories and novel forms of connecting with the past. The city also opens up the crisis of time to socio-historical and political questions. Paris, for instance, carrying traces of different epochs, despite devastating urban transformation in the nineteenth century, resisted the rupture between the Second Empire and the Third Republic. Similarly, Istanbul bore the imprints of both cosmopolitan imperial capital and Republican metropolis, and underwent urban reformation symbolically charged with an imposed cultural duality. The modern city, for both thinkers, is read as the expression of a civilization profoundly rooted in such a logic of destruction and nostalgia. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962), poet, novelist, essayist, literary critic, and teacher, and author of the novels Huzur (Mind at Peace) and Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (Time Regulation Institute), which have recently appeared in English translation, is a strong influence on many Turkish writers. Born in 1901, he bore witness to a series of momentous historical events including the two world wars, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the British occupation of Istanbul, the Independence War, the replacement of the Monarch by the Turkish Republic, as well as a series of radical reforms in every aspect of life. His first poems appeared in Dergah, a literary magazine published by the prominent poet and Tanpınar’s mentor Yahya Kemal. The political and philosophical debates of the time centered on questions about the cultural aspects of modernity and how to reconcile the then-recent material and cultural changes with a Turkish and Islamic heritage. For Tanpınar, there was no easy answer; he was aware of the obscurity of in-betweenness, and he accepted it as the primary condition of his existence. This condition of constant wavering between two worlds became the central motif in his works without giving way to a dogmatic singularity or relapsing into facile and untroubled syntheses. After graduating from Istanbul University Faculty of Letters, he taught at high schools in Erzurum, Konya, and Ankara, a period that led him to write Five Cities. He was later appointed as professor of modern Turkish literature at Istanbul University. A true comparatist, he taught French surrealism and British modernism along with classical Ottoman and Turkish literature. His History of Nineteenth-Century Literature remains the most comprehensive work on the period. Published in 1946, only six years after Benjamin left the manuscript of the Arcades behind, Tanpınar’s collection of essays on five historical capitals, particularly the Istanbul segment, maps a cultural history of modernity within urban landscape and material objects. Regardless of the

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disparate histories in these two texts, the cities—Istanbul, on the one hand, exhausted with grand histories of multiple conquests and emperors, and on the other hand Paris as the locus of national pride—offer for both authors “shocking” sites of rupture from historical continuity. Using Benjamin’s own method of bringing the past into constellation with the present as a point of departure,4 this chapter explores Tanpınar’s direct or unintentional questioning of modern illusions; cultural myths of progress; historical causality; a sanctified tradition; and a dead past. It revamps Tanpınar studies in light of a discussion on “the ruins of modernity,” inspired by the rediscovery of Benjamin.5 It is particularly important to revisit these texts at a time when there is a growing discussion around public and urban space. The last few years have seen the emergence of public square movements such as the Gezi Park resistance in Istanbul, Occupy Wall Street in New  York’s Zuccotti Park, Los Indignados’ call to “Take the Square” (Toma la plaza) in Madrid, Cairo’s Tahrir Square occupation during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, and so on. These movements, as well as their authoritarian repression by the state,6 have called for a new understanding of the urban space and the politics of everyday life. Tanpınar’s alternative urban history and Benjamin’s method to recover the recent past, distilled here in their depiction of the little squares, could offer such renewed perspectives. Particularly, Tanpınar’s account of Istanbul is more relevant than ever, as the metropolis has been reshaped by global, regional, and local capital and has now become a new model of the global city. Istanbul’s transformation under the authoritarian AKP (Justice and Development Party) regime, committed to neoliberal policies, inequality-inducing economic growth, and ‘progress,’ showcases a contrived and spurious embrace of the Ottoman heritage, at the basis of which is consumerism, global capitalism, and neo-conservative and populist policies. The shrinking and suffocating open space, like the little squares, has gradually turned into condos, shopping malls, and hotels, ruining the urban fabric. This extreme urban development of the past ten years met with environmental sensitivity and denunciation of capitalism with the Gezi Park movement. The collective reaction to the urban modeling projects has demonstrated the expression of alternative histories staged in these parks and squares. Tanpınar’s rewriting of the urban history of the historically charged capital undergoing devastating transformation almost seventy years ago bears striking parallels to the collective resistance to contemporary urban policies. The temporality of the little square, not “carefully planned” but slow and spontaneous,

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with traces of the forgotten past gathered “drop by drop,” is part of the critical consciousness that seeks to protect the urban fabric of Istanbul today. Tanpınar’s writings on Istanbul, contrary to the established reception of the author in Turkey until recently, call for a collective remembering, not of an imagined monumental Ottoman past, but of a forgotten past tucked away in the politics of little squares. Such a remembering can take place in Gezi Park as opposed to the reconstruction of a former Ottoman Artillery Barracks turned into a shopping mall.

4.2  Tanpınar’s Urban Dream, Benjamin’s Fairy Tale An influential literary critic and novelist of the Republican period in Turkey, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar has significantly shaped our understanding of Turkish literary modernity. He approaches modernity as a crisis of time and suggests that the greatest dilemma of his era is where and in what way we are to connect to the past. “We are all children of a crisis of consciousness [şuur] and identity [benlik],” he argues, “being pulled between being and not being more painful than that of Hamlet.”7 Although Tanpınar often frames his concern with “connecting to the past” as an anxiety to bridge the cultural rupture between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Turkey,8 the author’s approach to national origins is thoroughly complex and, at times, ambiguous. Therefore, it would be a mistake to reduce his writing to the buhran (depression) of a national culture. His work points to essential anxieties and problematics of modernity, questioning any possibility of a genuine connection to the past. What attracts us to the past, he argues, is the very void it leaves behind: “regardless of any trace the past may have left, we are looking for the thing we think we lost in our inner conflict.”9 The past is not only an idealized past, now believed to be lost, but also a past that has been truly forgotten, leaving no trace in cultural history or memory. In Beş Şehir, book-length essays on the cultural history of five cities, Tanpınar attempts to “settle accounts” (hesaplaşmak) and to come to a “mutual understanding” (anlaşmak) with the past.10 What the author eventually recaptures is an incoherent archive of urban histories, and of objects, texts, and images. We do not connect with the past, but rather the past confronts us in the void it has left, in neglected areas, such as the small squares, sleepy, belated, and outside the patronage of national histories. Tanpınar is not alone in his concern for the crisis of time. As we have seen in Chap. 3, when Walter Benjamin first sets out to write the history

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of the Parisian arcades in 1928, he embarks on a similar attempt to connect with the Paris of the nineteenth century, a Paris that is now visible only in ruins. Benjamin observes a transformation in the understanding of time, which he calls “the Copernican revolution in historical perception” in Convolute K (K1, 2). For Benjamin, we no longer have access to “what is closest, tritest, most obvious,” and only through a revolutionary form of remembering, which he calls awakening, can we access a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been. Modernity, for Benjamin, is in part about the devastating transformations of social form and the corresponding urban phenomena: the crowd, the transfigured urban scenery, the alienating impact of industry and machine culture, the catastrophic changes in the name of history—wars, demolitions, ruins—they were all fossilized in the relics of everyday city life.11 What is equally significant for Benjamin is the way these realities are manifested through technologies of representation and through narratives, historical accounts of the city that organize its space and time. The Arcades is a large collection of quotations, suggesting the plurality and complexity of city life, and introduces new and sometimes incommensurable ways of knowing the city. Benjamin and Tanpınar both explore the question of the way in which the collective imagination connects with the past. This is a question, with its aesthetic, social, cultural, and philosophical reverberations, that plagued early twentieth-century thinkers. The concern with connection with the past is a symptomatic anxiety of the age. The two thinkers share a similar approach to the question, analyzing the small pieces of historical experience of the collective. Tanpınar’s attention to daüssıla (homesickness), the “second time,” artık (residue), hüzün (melancholy), hasret (nostalgia), and urban decay resonates with a range of Benjamin’s notions, such as wish images, collective awakening, flash of recognition, and the use of theological concepts. For Benjamin, the “sensation of the newest and the most modern” is a problem of a certain “perception of time” that fetishizes progress. The decayed arcades, on the other hand, reveal the fusion of the old within the new. Similarly, Tanpınar argues that in the old parts of Istanbul, even the newest in essence seems utterly obsolete (hakiki manasında yeni olan bile tam manasıyla yaşamış görünür).12 It is important to note that it would be a mistake to push the comparison too far, as there are certain elements in Benjamin’s method that are significantly different from Tanpınar’s approach. After 1934, Benjamin decided to ground the project in Marxist terms, bringing the fetish character of commodities into focus. Hence, the initial title of the project

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“Parisian arcade—a Dialectical fairyland” [Pariser Passage—eine dialektische Feerie] was “impermissibly poetic.”13 The idea of collective awakening, for Benjamin, corresponds to revolutionary class-consciousness. The discarded and forgotten urban objects thus have a politically explosive potential: behind them lies the ideal of a classless society, stored in the unconscious of the collective. Tanpınar’s focus, on the other hand, is not so much on the ideal of a classless society as on the harmonious existence with nature and with the past. He nurtures a belief in traditional models, mysticism being a significant presence in his writing. One aspect that brings the two thinkers together even in this methodological and ideological difference is that a controversy pursues their legacy for having conflicting tendencies, paradoxes, and reversals in their work, particularly concerning mysticism. Benjamin’s conflicting position between celebrating and mourning the destruction of traditional culture has been associated with cultural conservatism, a characterization Tanpınar has been subjected to more often than is justified.

4.3   Five Cities Tanpınar’s pioneering essays on Turkish capitals were first published in 1941. They appeared in segments in the journal Ülkü, with Bursa’da Zaman ve Hülya Saatleri [Time and Hours of Dream in Bursa], and continued to appear in various journals and newspapers. Some of these essays, with the addition of the “Konya” piece, were published in the collection Beş Şehir (Five Cities) in 1946. The collection drew remarkable public and critical interest, and was republished in 1960, two years before the author’s death. Their historical and geographic scope, cultural insight, and distinctive genre have placed Tanpınar’s essays among the most influential works of literature in Turkey, a position they continue to occupy to this day.14 Combining travel writing, memoir, urban historiography, poetry, and fiction, Tanpınar attempts to capture the coexistence of past and present that is so particular to urban sites. Instead of composing a monograph on the city with a claim to objectivity, or offering his readers predominantly personal travel writing, Tanpınar skillfully combines personal experience with cultural history, and urban historiography with literary and fictional narratives, all in an innovative fashion. The story of his random encounter with the writer Ahmet Rasim, followed by a social history of rituals and celebrations, and a discussion of Nerval’s and Gautier’s writing on Istanbul, creates a composite and flexible discourse with competing voices.

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In his preface to the second edition, Tanpınar describes the collection as a conversation born out of the need to “settle accounts with the past.” This idea of reconciliation with the past has been commonly read as an essentially cultural question. Criticism in Turkey has focused, to a large extent, on notions of continuity and rupture as determiners of the relationship between the Ottoman state and the Republic of Turkey, and has read Tanpınar through this cultural and temporal binary. Emphasizing Tanpınar’s idea of terkip as a cultural synthesis, his critics have been tempted to reduce the author’s work to such cultural paradigms, and their aesthetic capacities.15 Although Tanpınar’s texts are not without such monolithic categories as “East” and “West,” this chapter investigates the question of the past, and the idea of duration along the axis of conceptions and ideologies of time. The author’s notion of “settling accounts with the past” is not simply a historico-political question, presumably specific to Turkey, which is generally regarded as a country that suffers from the incommensurability of the imperial past with the secular present—a view eagerly promoted by Orhan Pamuk.16 The relation of duty and debt with the past in Tanpınar is ultimately a modern question, inhabiting both the personal and the collective. He turns to past cultural configurations as a response to the alienation and fragmentation of modernity, putting into doubt the temporal ideology of contemporary civilization. The past that Tanpınar traces has a complex and contradictory nature. The Turkish modernist often yields to a unified construction of the past, a prominent impulse in his writing, which is equally present in Beş Şehir. Occasionally, he gives in to the metaphysical promise of an authentic Turkish identity by invoking Ottoman, cosmopolitan, and Islamic origins. However, the author’s accounts of great men along with their mosques and monuments are interrupted by segments and sites of alternative history that cannot be assimilated into a narrative of restored cultural origins. Unlike Benjamin, Tanpınar does not start his account of Istanbul with the rejects and detritus of the city; rather, they find their way into his complex narrative, such as the cries of street vendors and abandoned factories. “It might have been better to limit the question of the past to an objective discussion of identity,” explains Tanpınar, “but I have come across these questions within the flow of my life. I am concerned as much with these questions themselves as with the way they have come to me, and with their continuity with my inner states.”17 The personal and the collective, the everyday and the philosophical, as well as the artistic endeavor thereby come into a productive dialogue, resulting in a hybrid form in the essays

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in Beş Şehir. Tanpınar does not sever the questions of cultural history from the quotidian—on the contrary, he distills an aesthetic experience out of this unity. This aspect also highlights an essential component of his oeuvre that has been conveniently overlooked by many Turkish critics. Tanpınar is concerned with something more than creating a unified vision of cultural identity in Turkey. His work reflects neither an entirely cultural concern nor an obsession with the self, but rather a holistic understanding, which eventually demystifies such idealizations of past cultural configurations.

4.4   Istanbul: Transformation and Daüssıla Tanpınar claims that Istanbul changed in a more rapid and thorough way than Paris did: he considers that between the years 1908 and 1923, a period of only fifteen years, it completely lost its identity. However, the urban transformation accelerated with the Tanzimat era, and the imperial capital had been undergoing urban redesign from the second half of the nineteenth century on. The “old Istanbul” that Tanpınar associates with myths and fairy tales was in fact an introverted and multi-centered city. The decentralized nature of the traditional Ottoman system, especially in the realms of public health, education, and bureaucracy, was also manifest in its urban structure. The city consisted of smaller units called mahalleler (quarters), without any central hub connecting the units to the center. The public spaces for meetings were mosques, churches, and other sanctuaries, along with their courts. As Turkey integrated herself into global capitalist modernity in the middle of the nineteenth century,18 this traditional fabric in Istanbul was gradually replaced with Western urban patterns.19 The decentralized character of the imperial capital, a city where the cul-de-sac, a private place, was the typical urban element,20 was disrupted by arteries, squares, and parks. In fact, the idea of a public square was so alien to the Ottomans that, when architect Vedat Bey, who was educated in Paris, created a public space in front of the post office he designed in 1909, he was investigated.21 Istanbul under urban reforms, like Paris, lost its characteristic conglomeration of small towns or quarters (mahalleler) with their distinctive ways of life and a strong sense of collective identity. Tanpınar finds unity in the urban and social fabric of these quarters, collectives that live attached to one another like organs of a body (her uzvu ile birbirine bag ̆lı yaşayan topluluk). Today mahalle, Tanpınar notes with resentment, exists only as a

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territorial administrative unit.22 Part of the mandate of the centralization projects was to contain discrete formations and organic self-developments of partly isolated quarters in a totalitarian fashion, connecting them to the center with a traffic hub. This created an artificial city that alienated its dwellers. Benjamin traces this sense of alienation in The Arcades: “small towns where one was born and where one died, where one never dreamed of leaving home, where nature and history had collaborated to realize variety in unity.”23 The centralization created a city, in which inhabitants no longer feel at home, living in a perpetual state of homelessness (daüssıla). Living connections to the place where a generation was born and died were severed, while a uniform structure was imposed on the urban fabric. It is this emphasis on impromptu urban development, its variety and its collective nature, as opposed to calculated landscapes, homogenous sites, and alienated subjects, that brings the two thinkers together in the face of modern urbanism. Istanbul, however, did not suffer the Haussmanian surgical operation and gentrification effect as Paris did: it was gradually transformed from a multi-centered, introverted, mazy urban landscape to a patchwork of traditional and modern urban fabrics. Urban reforms in Istanbul coincided with the Tanzimat reforms (1839–1876), which sought to centralize and rationalize Ottoman rule, reorganizing the central and provincial bureaucracy and building infrastructure.24 This period is usually associated with projects of modernization and Westernization in the empire, which continued until and beyond the declaration of the Republic in 1923. Tanpınar argues that Tanzimat introduced the idea—now a cliché—that Istanbul was a city where two civilizations would meet and unite in a synthesis.25 Urban redevelopment during this period, like that of many other capitals of Europe and its peripheries, was to a large extent inspired by and derived from Paris. Two chief architects of Paris, Haussmann and Bouvard, looked for opportunities to implement projects in Istanbul. With the help of the Ottoman administration, they sought to commission Western design projects. Following his encounter with the Sultan in Paris during the 1867 World Exhibition, Baron Haussmann himself came to Istanbul in 1873 and looked for jobs.26 Although he had a couple of interviews with the Grand Vizier, his projects were rejected because of concerns for the preservation of monuments.27 Bouvard, on the other hand, offered grandiose and unrealizable projects, without paying attention to the topography of the city.28 The idea of the city of Istanbul, where “the East meets the West,” thus proved to be an impossible, almost ludicrous, task. The city

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eventually became a patchwork—rather than a site of synthesis—of different civilizations. Therefore, the struggle and coexistence of the old and the new in Istanbul manifests a more complex pattern than it does in other European capitals and is symptomatically read as a conflict of civilizations. In his writings on Istanbul, Tanpınar tries to portray the transformation the city went through in the last years of the Empire, exploring its grounds, its consequences, and its impact on the psyches of its inhabitants. He starts his narrative by comparing the city to Paris and quotes Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne,” a poem to which Walter Benjamin also pays particular attention in The Arcades:29 Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville/Change plus vite, hélas! que le cœur d’un mortel). Baudelaire’s traumatic experience of remembering the old city parallels a sense of longing and nostalgia for the old Istanbul, and the feeling of homelessness the new city overwhelmingly incites. The old Istanbul is “gone,” and it changes with an unsettling lack of permanence, like “the changing heart of any mortal.” The new Istanbul incites overwhelming feelings of homelessness (daüssıla) and nostalgia (hasret).30 Tanpınar reads the new Istanbul in light of these two notions and contends that it is the feeling of homesickness that reveals the true nature of Istanbul in us.31 These notions, however, do not appeal to a straightforward nostalgia for the past, nor do they demonstrate a hopeless effort of retrieval. Rather than mourning and longing for an idealized past that is home (sıla), they contain a complex and contradictory form of reconciliation with the present: “Hasret is not a feeling that belongs only to the past and that inevitably conflicts with our reason. This complex feeling penetrates into our everyday lives.”32 This exemplifies Tanpınar’s use of more than one voice in his narration. The irrepressible desire to return to the imperial capital manifests itself in the feelings of homesickness, anxiety, and displacement, a desire the author relates to that of Baudelaire. Against this aspiration is also the recognition of its futility and also of reconciliation of the past with the present.

̇ 4.5  Tanpınar’s Ikinci Zaman Tanpınar recognizes that the perception of time is a battlefield in cultural conflicts. In nineteenth-century Istanbul, new clock towers, symbolizing modern and secular lifestyles, emerged in its European part—implemented by Sultan Abdülhamit II who was known for his interest in clock-making.

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The clock towers competed with the skyline of minarets and their muvakkithane (timing rooms for providing prayer time to the public)—just as they did in early modern Europe with its church towers and bells.33 This urban display of clock towers in the city has an unmistakable symbolic significance: metronomization of production and numerous other processes in everyday life. The clock has become a symbol and an agent of modernization.34 In parallel to the symbolic competition for the skyline between the mosque and the clock tower was the conflict between the Ottoman imperial past and the Westernizing cultural revolution35 of the present city—a transition the author himself lived through. Tanpınar’s particular attention to the emerging clock towers and their socio-political, cultural, and symbolic weight led him to write a seminal novel on clocks: The Time Regulation Institute. In Beş Şehir, the narrator introduces the idea of a “second time” much different from everyday life, “a time a lot deeper, one that has no relation to the calendar and the clock.” This dualism—or rather pluralism—of times is prevalent throughout his oeuvre, taking on different meanings and tropes. The conflict between clock tower and muvakkithane parallels the cultural duality experienced by Tanpınar’s generation—a generation that knew how to read and write in both alphabets, which operated in both legal and educational systems, and wore both “oriental” and modern clothes. “Our lives stand in front of us like a tangled skein,” observes Tanpınar, inviting us to see the complex and confused nature of this modern condition, standing between the traditional and the modern, albeit within a culturally charged perspective.36 Living simultaneously in more than one temporal order is a central trope for Tanpınar, and nothing more clearly lays it out than the urban landscape. In the city, Tanpınar finds the “other time”: he depicts this in Bergsonian fashion as rich (velud)37 and whole (yekpare). “Clocks do not measure this time,” the author remarks; “it belongs to things that look outdated from the outside, and to the emotions and beauties that we think are no longer useful in our lives. It pulses through the city, which like an ancient beauty, lives only in her memories.”38 The past is a second time that runs independently of the time of the clock, dissociated from everyday life and visible only in the outdated. The author’s attention to the old and the obsolete as agents of a different temporal order can be compared to Benjamin’s contention that the outmoded signifies a resistance to the oppressive artifice of the present with its constant call for the new. The fragments of the past, outdated and even antiquated, erupt and interrupt the time of the calendar and the clock.

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Tanpınar’s conception of the “second time,” again similar to Benjamin’s understanding of nature,39 draws a distinction not only between the modern and the outdated, but also between the time of nature and the time of history.40 Organic productivity stands in contrast to the mechanical productivity of industrial production. The metaphor of the past as a living body, fertile and prolific, whose pulse carries a rhythm different from that of a modern city, reveals in Tanpınar’s thought a prevalent ideal of an essential connection to—or unity with—cyclical temporalities of ecology. With modernity, not only has the past been suppressed in order to catch up with the eternal call for the new, but also the organic connection to the cycles of nature has been cut off systematically. The trope of longing for the past is analogous to a sense of lost connection with the cyclical time of nature, a time the clock does not and cannot count. This idea of the “second time” entails not just the connection of man to nature but also of man to man, imagining a collective form of living: ‘Teşrinler geldi, lüfer mevsimi başlayacak’ yahut ‘Nisandayız. Bogă z sırtlarında erguvanlar açmıştır’ diyerek düşünmek, yaşadıgı̆ mız anı ̇ efsaneleştirmeye yetişir. Eski Istanbullular bu masalın içinde ve sadece onunla yaşarlardı. Takvim onlar için Heziod’un Tanrılar Kitabı gibi bir şeydi. Mevsimleri ve günleri, renk ve kokusunu yaşadıgı̆ şehrin semtlerinden alan bir yıg ̆ın hayal halinde görürdü.41 Thinking that ‘The Teshreen months are here, the bluefish season starts soon’ or ‘It’s April. Redbuds should be in bloom on the hills of Bosphorus’ is enough to turn the present moment into a myth. The old Istanbulites used to live in this tale and live with it only. For them, the calendar was like Hesiod’s Theogony. They saw the seasons and days as a dream, whose smells and colors are shaped by the neighborhoods of the city in which they live.

The rhythm of natural phenomena, the moment when one season shades into another, and a sense of constant flux mark the time of nature and establish a sense of unity with one’s environment. The old city here is imagined to inhabit a temporal order characterized by an unceasing communion with nature. Although this idea of harmony and unity, here borrowed from nature, lies at the heart of Tanpınar’s understanding of time, it remains as an imkansız (impossible/unattainable) ideal. Tanpınar occasionally borrows stability from similar ideals, which he lacks within himself. Ideals of the past expressed in metaphors of seasons, water (sea, spring, fountain, pool, etc.), and mirrors eventually prove illusory. Nurdan Gürbilek calls this

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trend in his writing an aesthetics of loss. For Tanpınar, the past attracts us because of the feelings its absence arouses in us. Hence, the ideal of communion with the time of nature appears in his writing only in images of myth, tale, and dream. In the old Istanbul, time was marked not only by nature but by urban rituals, and street vendors were one of those markers. Tanpınar devotes a whole section to the cries of street vendors in Beş Şehir, and he repeatedly alludes to them in his other essays on Istanbul.42 They are the central figures in Tanpınar’s imagining of the “second time,” not only because they are part of the urban tradition of the imperial capital, but because vendors’ cries establish various temporal rhythms in the city. “They are a clock in their own right,” the author notes; “in a strange way, they create an exchange between our memory and our recollections.”43 These various cries or chants of vendors, hawking their goods through the streets of Istanbul, do not simply establish a procession of seasons. Dissemination of these sounds throughout the city occupies significant capacities in collective memory. They do more than announce seasons associated, for example, with certain products, or signal a certain time of the day, such as a boza seller who roams the city after dinnertime. They create an acoustic disruption, like a moment of “flash,” locating the collective’s memory within cycles of remembering and anticipation. Paying explicit attention to mobility and sound in the city, exemplified in the image of the street vendor, allows Tanpınar to explore a composite variety of city practices. The street cries radiate throughout the city, following the routes of walking vendors. The vendor, like Certeau’s pedestrian, “weaves places together,” forming “real systems whose existence makes up the city.”44 Their mobility opens directions and meanings that are otherwise obscured. Besides, they also do something beyond what Certeau imagined: instead of marking any urban space by a particular memory or a story, the sound of wandering vendors leaves its signature throughout the city, opened up by their cries. ̇ Eski Istanbul mahallelerinde [satıcı sesleri] bir günü başta başa idare eder, saatlerin rengini verirdi. Tıpkı ucuz bir aynada saçlarını düzelten güzel bir ̇ kadın gibi Istanbul mahalleleri bu seslere egĭ lir, onların yer yer genişleyişinde günün değişmez merhalelerini kabule hazırlanırdı.45 In the old quarters of Istanbul, the vendors’ cries would regulate the day from beginning to the end, and paint its hours. Like a beautiful woman combing her hair in a cheap mirror, Istanbul quarters would lean to these cries, and with their expansion, accept the stages of the day.

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Vendors connect city-dwellers in their experience and conception of the sound. The street cry reflects back to “the collective” their own image, which is possibly distorted and coupled with a sense of belonging. The custom of routinely announcing seasonal goods—yogurt from Silivri meant the end of winter, and salep sellers its arrival—or everyday objects, such as lamps, table clocks, and coffee cups, among others mentioned in the text, creates an ambience, a collective soundscape. It is a cultural force that reminds the city of its rituals, customs, and cycles, a “second temporal order” outside of the calendar.46 Tanpınar, by calling attention to street vendors, invites us to see the city as a map of sound. Instead of limiting his narration to landscapes and urban spaces, he includes aural phenomena within the urban cultural history. His particular attention to aural topography, next to sights, tastes, and smells, shows his concern with the significance of the everyday. These everyday sounds, which survive only in faint echoes, are traces of past practices in the city. Eric Wilson, in his article on street vendors in early modern London, argues that soundscapes, repeatedly categorized as subcultural, have been banished from urban historiography.47 The tuning out of the aural fabrics of the city from its history is overturned by their re-­ inscription into urban memory. In contrast to the regime of “legible overview,” described by Certeau as a means of perceiving the city from the viewpoint of fixed and privileged authority, tracing mobilities and sounds of everyday life resists the totalizing eye of urban reforms. Rendering the city “legible,” for Certeau, “causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.”48 Temporally contingent, the street cries are part of such a state of “dwelling” in the city, denoting totality of experience. Taking up Certeau’s analogy between urban walking and speech acts further, we can say that the cries of street vendors, as marked signs of Istanbul, give back the city its “symbolic order,” albeit ephemerally. The dispersion of street chants in the city, in Tanpınar, is not the only trope that disrupts the legibility of the city imposed by centralizing and regulating impulses of the modern. The blurring of the legibility and visibility of time, locked in linear plot lines of the (Ottoman) past and the present as always new, shows itself in Tanpınar’s use of the tropes of obscurity and dimness, particularly in the image of fog. Seeing through a misty glass (buğulu cam), a bell glass (fanus), or dark waters become common symbols in his writing for an alternative rhythm of life, and for duration, where the visible world becomes less definite and more fluid. Tanpınar, an enthusiast of Impressionist art,49 reconstructs the past in visual landscapes

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through such impressionistic strains. Observing Istanbul on a foggy day, the author perceives other steps, paths, presences that seem to be inhabiting the realm of a lost time: Semtinin dar, yokuşlu, inişli sokaklarında ve caddede insanlar birbirine çoktan unutulmuş hatıralar gibi rastlıyorlardı. Sanki her şey çok derin bir uzaklıktan, hareketi güçleştiren bir maddeyi yararak ve biraz da ona gömülü geliyordu. Yıllar boyunca zaman albümlerinde sararmış fotoğraflar birdenbire canlanmışlar ve hafızamızı kendilerine behemhal bir ad ve hayat hikayesi bulmaya zorluyorlar.50 In the narrow and steep streets and avenues of their quarters, people came across one another as if they were long-forgotten memories. It seemed that everything appeared from a deep distance, through an immobilizing material and also partially buried in it. Fading photographs from antique albums of time suddenly came back to life, urging our memory to find their names and stories. […] This distance, this idea of reaching us through time—because that which slows life down to such extent could only be time—would turn you into the sole agent of a process whose limits were hard to determine.

In this attempt to articulate the dead past in its ineffable and overwhelming form, he uses images of people and landscapes obscured by fog. Covered by clouds of fog, the “planned and readable city” can no longer offer legibility and stability. The only visibility that is left is an impression of memory. A mass of time, in the form of fog, penetrates the material surface of the city, transfusing objects, dissolving life into lights and colors of memories. The past leaves impressions on the surface of the present; even people in the street, alive and mobile, become “long-forgotten memories.” Everything around them is obscured by fog, yet, at the same time, they are made aware of a “ghostly” realm, the “second time.” The dead past, condensed, streaming over the city, haunts its inhabitants. Under fog, the city is haunted by histories, caught up in a confrontation between the living and the dead, a struggle over an unresolved loss in the past that requires an intervention in the present. The past, in the form of old photographs coming back to life, demands its “names and stories.” Nergis Ertürk, looking at a similar passage in Beş Şehir, notes that the anthropomorphized historical past suggests “something of the fundamental ambiguity of relating to the past, juxtaposing the past’s proximity and natural familiarity with its irreducible distance.”51 While traces of the past are discernable when the “other” time of the city emerges, it is

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nonetheless unreachable and ineffable. The call of the past, begging a “name and story,” signals another form of daüssıla, or longing for home, which is irretrievably lost, and which exists only in fractured and hidden form. Surrounded by the call of the past and its faces, the narrator warns us that one might enter into an overwhelming relation of duty and labor that eventually proves elusive (with indeterminable limits). In the passage above, he moves from the collective signifier of the first-person plural to the isolated form of the second-person singular. The dead past surrounds “us” like a fog, as the urban collective, while it is an indeterminate singular52 “you” [sen] that responds to its call. This partially quixotic response to the call of an unfulfilled past, where “you” becomes a sole warrior of decrypting and retrieving lost time, underscores the author’s ambivalence toward nostalgia. The sense of distinct longing for the past is balanced by an understanding of its self-contradictory nature. Although it is tempting to accept nostalgic readings of Beş Şehir, any unified reconstruction of the past in Tanpınar’s text eventually “dissipates” like the fog. The author actively calls attention to his ambiguous approach to the past, and asks, “Why, then, did I talk about all things that are impossible to revive in my writing on the Bosphorus and on Istanbul?” “It is neither them, nor their time that I am looking for,” he contemplates, but “the feeling their loss invokes in us.”53 The sense of duty for the past, which overwhelms the author in its difference and distance, also emerges as an aesthetic source. The past can be represented only in its irretrievably lost nature, through daüssıla, an unquenchable longing for home. Sila connotes home, and also a longing to go back to the beginning, to origins, to the place where one obtains a sense of being and identity. In this respect, it represents a “no time” or timelessness; it dwells in the moment before the order of the time, which neither looking for the dead past nor a sense of duration can fulfill.

4.6  Ruins/Residues Urban decay makes up sites where the violence of modern temporality is most visible. The inexorable production of the new and destruction of the old is nowhere more evident and fragile than in sites of ruin. Just as the importance of arcades for Benjamin lies in their dialectical development from a place of splendor to a place of decay, the centrality of harap semtler54 (run-down quarters) in Tanpınar’s Istanbul lies in such a dialectical process of glory and decay that it endures for centuries. Of such sites of

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decay, Tanpınar asks, “how much time and how many events does it take for one quarter of the city to put on this face? How many victories and defeats, how many migrations, which destructions and constructions gave them their present appearance?”55 The urban site in decay embodies years of dialectical stages—its current state displays simultaneously different layers of the past.56 It confuses linear temporal order, where one epoch seamlessly succeeds into another without a trace. Unlike the short life span of arcades due to their commodity character, these quarters embody diffeṙ (run-down/dingy) quarent epochs and transformations all at once. “Izbe ters in their utterly neglected and ruined state,” the author explains, “gives you all of history in layers. The old Empire, the Tanzimat, and the life of work—the new era that enters these quarters in its strongest form—live together arm in arm.”57 Like the Bréguet-Sabin station Benjamin cites, where the name of a watchmaker and the name of a saint are joined together, things of different temporal orders are intertwined in these quarters, regardless of their historical, or any other, value. While the temporal delusions of the modern regulate time in a succession of epochs and periods, these quarters, precisely because they are neglected and left out of the logic of order, surrender their whole history to our gaze. Tanpınar depicts these neighborhoods with attention to distinctive details of everyday life. With its wooden houses, a fountain with grapevines, laundry hanging under the sun, kids, cats and dogs, these modest urban sites, situated around the ruins of the city walls and mainly home to the working class, are the peripheries of the relatively controlled, orderly city center. Unlike the dome of the Süleymaniye mosque or the biographies of sultans, also depicted by the author in the Istanbul segment, these urban images are not candidates for traditional historical meaning. They are part of a common socio-historical past that resists incorporation into triumphant stories, be it modernity, or fetih—the conquest—of national and religious identity. Tanpınar acknowledges this distinction, and argues that “these squares constitute our true landscape, as the people of Istanbul assembled them for the duration of their lives,” creating an environment that would in turn shape them:58 Üstüste yaşanmış bir zaman içinde, birçok defalar kurulmuş, bozulmuş, çerçevesi küçülmüş, fakat daima kendi kendisi kalmış ve her defasında bir evvelkinin bir yığın artığını, mahiyet ve değerine bakmadan terkibinin içine almış bütün bir hayat.59

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Within a time lived in layers, life in its totality, built and rebuilt so many times, even as its frame was getting smaller, incorporates residues [artık] of previous ages into its composition, regardless of their nature or worth.

Here, Tanpınar seems to carry out Benjamin’s own plan for the Arcades: “to discover the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, particular moments” (N2,6). These anonymous, unclaimed collective spaces evoke layers of the past, incorporating distinct ages, without pretending to represent any of them. Without following any historical hierarchy, they convey various kinds of temporalities, “regardless of their nature or worth.” The slow decay of ancient walls, catastrophic implosions like fires, or short-lived industrial sites like small, abandoned factories or warehouses—all find their way into Tanpınar’s text. They carry no signature of historical break: grand avenues of modernity, or monumental buildings of national triumph stay out of their range. For Tanpınar, these neglected quarters in decay, layered with both historical fragments and new experiences, represent an embodiment of duration. Discards and residues of the past, in visual, aural, or affective form, in peripheral neighborhoods, in ruins, empty streets, old, decrepit konaks (Ottoman mansions), trigger nostalgia for certain aspects of the past lost to modernity. The concept of hüzün, which is later borrowed and exhausted by Pamuk as Istanbul’s collective melancholy, invokes such a sense of mourning the loss of expectations and of the common practices of the urban collective. This collective history, or in Benjamin’s term, “the unconscious of the dreaming collective,”60 underscores Tanpınar’s sense of hüzün: “oil lamps, dimly lit streets with gas lighting, sounds of beggars, batons of patrolmen, the fear of fire, sad whistles of boats, strange psychoses arising from an extreme religious way of life—they all contributed to this feeling, almost mathematically.”61 Tanpınar defines these peculiar pieces of experience as “things that connect us all.” They reveal a secret world of affinities that only Istanbulites could grasp. They invoke a different and deeper dimension of collective temporality, which emerges only according to its own logic. There is a claim to immediacy inherent in them that interrupts what has been constructed as present. Their ephemeral quality is charged with meaning. These images and sounds have the psychic force of memories of shared experience, not of an isolated individual, but of the collective—the people of Istanbul. Hüzün in Tanpınar, however, is not the unifying and uniform experience that Pamuk has made it out to be. Although Tanpınar himself was

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not without nostalgia for an idealized past, these peculiar urban fragments of “collective nostalgia” also evoke a past of violence and pain. The past in Tanpınar is not always a positively evaluated world. His initial and truly nostalgic impulse to return to the past is undercut by its homogenous and equivocal fragments. In his seminal essay “Seasons of Istanbul and our Art,” Tanpınar describes seasons in Istanbul as an allegory for the city’s history, starting with the Spring of conquest and the decline of civilization in the Fall of modern times. In what may seem a straightforward allegory of history as decline and fall, textual particularities reveal the impossibility of recovering a golden age of hopefulness, free from daüssıla. In his list of the “things that connect us all,” echoing the hüzün segment in Beş Şehir, Tanpınar adds “the sound of a hand water-pump like the cries of a wounded animal” and “a young gypsy woman, who would wander always with her son, who had passed away three days ago, now, alone like an orphan (yetim), carrying the smile of modest autumn flowers in the basket.” This morbid description of the city’s “connecting” experience is later coupled with another unsettling description of autumn in Istanbul, “full of colors like ripped-off silk from a pillaged caravan and hundreds of broken mirrors.”62 These images, bearing traces of violence, demolish the harmonious façade created by nostalgia. The disruptive shock of these images parallels the narrator’s shock in recognizing the difference of the past that resists any unified narration. The fragmented past unexpectedly surfaces in the text, here as part of the narrator’s illustration of autumn, as a wounded animal, a dead child, a mother in mourning, broken mirrors, and ripped silk, all of which are charged with symbolic resonance. Literary critic Gürbilek traces such imagery of water and mirrors in Tanpınar, and argues that these are narcissistic tropes, associated with the past. In their reflection, the author expects to find a contained authentic self-image, both personal and societal. Following Gürbilek’s reading, we can argue that the moaning water pump signifies the difficulty of reaching this source of lost time, which would give the present its form as a continuation of the image of the past. Tanpınar shows us that the well is dry, and the mirror is broken; there is now no past to reflect a unifying image. Istanbul is the gypsy woman who lost her son and her father,63 deprived of an authentic connection to both future and past. Traces of the past for Tanpınar are only partially legible; the past is more a haunting and shocking presence than a stabilizing of the historical moment. If the details quoted above show us how nostalgia is subverted

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and how traces of lost time are fragmented, Tanpınar’s persistent and recurring theme of artık (residue) concomitantly displays just such a shocking and disruptive nature of the discarded past. In the conclusion of his essay on the run-down neighborhoods of Istanbul, the narrator cites his unexpected encounter with a group of children playing, equating them and their singing game as residues of a discarded and uncanny past that abruptly resurfaces. ‘Arabistan bug ̆dayları—Severler sevgileri,—Rumeli dilberleri!…—Kız seni almaya geldim…’ ̇ Insana ister istemez bu bahar gününde birdenbire sanki hayatını sarfederek süslenmiş küçük bagd̆ em ag ̆açlarının marazi şenliğini hatırlatan bu ş a rkı ve oyun beni büyülemiş t i. Birdenbire büyük bir hakikate uyanmış gibi oldum. Kimdi bu çocuklar? Hangi hicretin, hangi korkunç felaketin artıgı̆ idiler? Hangi kan ve ölüm kasırgası onları yerinden söküp bu surların dibine fırlatmıştı? Bu suali çoktan unutmuştum. Zihnim ta çocukluğumdan beri tanıdıg ̆ım bu çocuk oyununa, onun garib, hüzünlü türküsüne dalmıştı. Kaç nesil onunla eg ̆lenerek, bu küçük kızların yaptıgı̆ gibi, bu türküyü söyleyerek büyümüştü… Ve daha kaç kız nesli (…) olgun yaşın terbiyesi içinden, onu tekrar duydug ̆u zaman kendisini bir an çocuklugŭ n cennetinde bulacaktı?64 Wheat of Arabia—Lovers in love, —Beauties of Rumelia!…—Girl, I came to take you away I was enchanted by this children’s singing game, which suddenly reminded one, on this spring day, of the morbid festival of small almond trees in full bloom consuming their lives. It was as if suddenly I had awakened to a greater truth. Who were these children? Which exodus, which dreadful disaster were they residues of? What hurricane of blood and death uprooted and threw them away to the edge of these city walls? I had already forgotten about this question. My mind delved into this children’s game and its melancholy far from home. So many generations grew up playing it, as these little girls did, singing this song… And many more generations of girls (…) one day when they will hear it again, through experience of maturity, will they find themselves in the heaven of their childhood?

What Tanpınar finds in the children’s song, which carries both traces of collective memory and individual recollection, is precisely the residual meaning of the past in the present. Bearing marks and wounds of a violent history of exile and homelessness—and not without imperial nostalgia65— the singing game, “a morbid festival,” records the collective experience of

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an epoch. The song, through generations of children who sang it, bears a sense of daüssıla, longing for a home that escapes definition. The idea of home, buried in the passage in images of exodus, uprooting, and melancholy, does not simply refer to a location or to a way of life associated with imperial and Islamic traditions.66 Home is the past that survives only partially, outside of teleological histories, recaptured only in fragments, in the residual meanings of a children’s song. Walter Benjamin regards children’s games as an epoch’s most extreme embodiment.67 Usually regarded as an easy, thoughtless, and sometimes foolish activity, children’s rhyme is a detritus of an ephemeral world. Being an artık, a historical residue, it is unassimilable to narratives of historical development, of nostalgic return, or of synthetic harmony with the imperial past. This insignificant piece of collective history disrupts what is constituted as present, violently introducing a peculiar temporal dimension. Tanpınar describes this experience of “break” and “shock” as a moment of “awakening” to a “greater truth.” The distinctive temporality of awakening, which Benjamin theorizes as a methodological concept in the Arcades, and whose aesthetic potential is extensively explored by Proust, informs the moment of encounter for Tanpınar. It is a fleeting and ambiguous moment between the unconscious imagery evoked by a dream—or the past—and rational lucidity. It opens up a “second time,” a “greater truth” as Tanpınar describes it, where imagery of the past disrupts the repressive rationality of conscious memory. This shock, however, does not resolve itself into an irreversible state of melancholy. These “things that connect us all,” of which the children’s song is a part, although significantly different in content, carry similarities to Benjamin’s idea of “dialectical images” that awaken us from history. Discarded pieces of history, like the children’s song, invoke shock of memory and refusal to return to the past. While the image of the encounter gives Tanpınar the shock of a recollection, there is a dialectical refusal to return to the time of that recollection. In the case of the passage above, although the song “awakens” the narrator to a “greater truth,” he quickly forgets about “these questions,” and turns it into a Proustian moment of personal recollections of childhood. The longing for home, daüssıla, in Tanpınar, sustained by the desire for the reappropriation of the self and of cultural identity, becomes an endless play of a sign that fails to signify anything beyond itself. As Ertürk suggests, Tanpınar’s writing is crowded with empty vehicles, failed symbolizations, and failed comparisons with the imperial past (Ertürk 50).

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Representations of the “second time,” entwined and juxtaposed with the time of the modern—be it the dead or enchanted past, the time of nature, or the time of collective memory—always end with the sense of daüssıla. The irreversibility of time and the consequence of inexorable change and decay in his writing seem to be in conflict with the idea of the “second time” as rich (velut) and whole (yekpare) composition. This points to an essential conflict in Tanpınar’s thought. On the one hand, there is the ideal of duration understood as temporal oneness, associated with ideas of cohesion, synthesis, and harmony. As we have seen, the mythic time in the old Istanbul and the simplicity, authenticity, and spontaneity of the time of nature disclose the author’s dismay over the disappearance of “lifeworlds” characterized by this “second time.” On the other hand, there is the focus on the discarded past and its fragmentary nature: the run-down quarters, soundscapes, ghosts, and residues. In order to throw light on this intricate aspect in Tanpınar’s thought, many critics turned to his conception of terkip, making it the emblem of his idea of duration and synthesis. While Göknar, with an overtly cultural perspective, interprets terkip as a grand synthesis of Ottoman Islam and Turkish secularism, which would resolve the pervasive crisis of this cultural dualism, Gürbilek, with a psychoanalytic approach, sees it as an expression of an “ideal of wholeness” (tamlık hayali). Carrying numerous significations, this notion is a recurring concept in Tanpınar’s essays and novels. In Beş Şehir, he defines Istanbul as “one grand terkip” emerging out of “elements small and large, significant and insignificant, traditional and modern, local and foreign, beautiful and ugly” (157). Thus, terkip refers to a unified composition of different aspects of life, evoking a sense of inner continuity between things that seem to be in conflict on the outside. It connotes a unity of being and a cosmic order, becoming the epitome of Tanpınar’s world of ideals. Particularly important in this concept is the idea of continuity between past, present, and future, albeit relatively different from Bergson’s duration, as it entails a harmonious synthesis between conflicting forces. Tanpınar, however, holds that it is daüssıla, instead of terkip, that determines our experience of time. If the latter connotes a temporal ideal that is truly habitable, the former marks the essential homelessness in the experience of the past in present. In his conclusion to the Istanbul segment, Tanpınar asserts that “daüssıla is a world of its own,” and it is the best way to understand the past: “With it, we can understand the past better; in this silent song of flute, the dead becomes alive in faces that we are attached to,

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and precisely because of this, in their light, we can live in a present that is more insightful and more ours” (235). Time, for Tanpınar, is experienced through a sense of homesickness. Its inexorable flow creates an incessant process of parting and alienation, which the author imagines as a void in need of light and sound. For Bergson, time itself is a travail de tâtonnement, a blind search delineating hesitation, precariousness, and also endless possibilities (Bergson 148). Daüssıla is such a work of tâtonnemen” a search by trial and error, in time, for a home that can never fully be recaptured. Ernst Bloch, most likely borrowing the idea from Bergson, describes this moment of uncertainty as “the darkness of the lived moment” in order to convey the inability of the mind to grasp the present.68 This implies that you can understand the past only when you truly part from it. The present is an opaque and unilluminated moment of experiencing. This suggests that time itself is exile and alienation. Longing for home defines this temporal experience where the flow, the unending dynamism of time, reverses any integrity of a temporal “home.” Daüssıla evokes loss of continuity—not duration—as an exilic condition. For Tanpınar, only in this disquieting sense of homesickness can we connect with the past. Longing for a home in time determines our temporal experience. It is with this telling image of darkness and yearning for home that I want to conclude. Modernity’s myth of newness and progress severs the connection to “what-has-been,” which today is manifest in relentless urban transformation on a global scale, confined in a perpetual present. Tanpınar’s work in this context sets out an alternative temporality—against the predominant version of progressive and chronological time—as interruptions, tâtonnements, aphotic zones, unassimilable moments, repetitions, or lags. The time fragments of Istanbul, illustrated in ideas of urban ruins, residues, decay, obsolescence, homelessness, and ghosts, reflect the author’s concern with the crisis of time, in a similar vein to Benjamin’s analysis of the temporal blindness of his era. Both authors, translating individual recollection into collective memory, attempt to capture the survival of the past urban history within the present. Against the commercialization and transformation of urban life, their alternative urban histories explore nameless squares and other obsolete urban spaces that are not tied to the historical time of the nation and its urban renovation. In the square’s now half-forgotten and half-ruin state, the two thinkers locate the discarded past and its subversive, if not revolutionary, potential. The Gezi Park movement’s struggle to break through the oppressive urban space, in

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this case a gated space of consumption, prescribed by global capitalism and its myth of progressive history, is now imprinted in the collective memory and part of the square’s public history.

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), 516–517; Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2: Das Passagen-Werk, Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, eds. 9. Auflage, Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2020), 643–644. 2. Tanpınar himself lived in such a small historical square, Narmanlı Han, of Istanbul in his early career. The buildings surrounding the square had been in ruins for decades, but it was still recognized as a witness to a milestone in Turkish literature. With a recent urban transformation project, the inn was destroyed and rebuilt as a shopping center in 2018, which houses retail stores and chains including a Starbucks. ̇ 3. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Beş şehir (Beyoğlu, Istanbul: YKY, 2000), 177. Unless otherwise indicated translations of Tanpınar are my own. The work has recently appeared in English: Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar, Tanpinar’s Five Cities, trans. Ruth Christie (Anthem Press, 2018). 4. Several critics recently argued for the urgency of bringing Benjamin and Tanpınar together as critics and writers of the “melancholy of modernism’s fallen languages.” This study supplements the recent work on “crucial differences and the remote continuities” between these two authors, which might eventually help us figure new modes of comparison outside hierarchical and monolithic comparative categories. Although it is hard not to give in to safe genealogies of modernism, even to invert them in a comparison between two literatures overdetermined by cultural hierarchies, the work of Tanpınar and Benjamin cannot be reduced to such uneven relations. This study does not revisit such genealogies or hierarchies between the two modernisms. See Nergis Ertürk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 123, no. 1 (2008): 41; Nurdan Gürbilek, “Tanpınar’da Hasret, Benjamin’de Dehşet,” in Benden Önce Bir ̇ Baskası: Denemeler (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 2011); Nurdan Gürbilek, ̇ Kör ayna, kayıp şark: edebiyat ve endişe (Beyoğlu, Istanbul: Metis, 2004); Besim F.  Dellaloğlu, Modernleşmenin Zihniyet Dünyası: Bir Tanpınar ̇ Fetişizmi (Istanbul: Kapı Yayınları, 2012). 5. For a compelling discussion of the revival of ruin scholarship in anthropology, see Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of

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Modernity,” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (December 2010): 761–93, https://doi.org/10.1086/657626. 6. One such example of the authoritarian reaction to claim on public space is France’s most recent declaration of state of emergency. Following the tragic attacks of November 13, 2015, in Paris, France has practically suspended any form of open public space, where citizens can no longer manifest freely their presence and interact with each other in the capital. ̇ 7. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Beş Şehir (Beyoğlu, Istanbul: YKY, 2000), 235. 8. For an example of criticism that treats Tanpınar’s work as a symptom of Ottoman imperial loss and anxiety about future-oriented national secularism, see Erdağ M Göknar, “Ottoman Past and Turkish Future: Ambivalence in A. H. Tanpinar’s Those Outside the Scene,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2/3 (2003): 647–61. This chapter argues that the author’s work needs to be recontextualized within the temporal and memory crisis of modernity. 9. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 235. 10. Yahya Kemal, Tanpınar’s mentor, who was dedicated to the idea of connecting with the Ottoman past. Tanpınar dedicates the collection to Kemal and suggests that he has written it within the intellectual tradition Kemal had started. See “Antalyalı Genç Kıza Mektup” in Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, ̇ Yaşadıg ̆ım Gibi (Istanbul: Dergâh, 2000). The divergences of Tanpınar’s work from Yahya Kemal’s tradition have been demonstrated in Oğuz Demiralp, Kutup noktası: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın yapıtı üzerine eleştirel ̇ deneme (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1993). 11. For the analysis of the idea of ruin and fossil in Benjamin, see Susan BuckMorss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 12. Tanpınar, Yaşadıg ̆ım Gibi, 211. 13. See Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 49. 14. The essays have enjoyed a recent revival partly due to Nobel Laureate Pamuk’s acknowledgment of his debt to them, and relatively recent critical work that does not treat the text as a monograph of national history; see Demiralp, Kutup noktası: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın yapıtı üzerine eleştirel deneme; Gürbilek, Kör ayna, kayıp şark: edebiyat ve endişe; Nurdan ̇ Gürbilek, Benden Önce Bir Başkası: Denemeler. (Beyoğlu, Istanbul: Metis, 2011); and Ertürk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy.” 15. See Göknar, Demiralp, Kahraman, and Moran in Abdullah Uçman and ̇ Handan Inci, eds., Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar ̇ (Cağaloğlu, Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002).

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̇ 16. See Orhan Pamuk’s article “Tanpınar Uzerine” in Uçman and Inci; also his novels, particularly The Black Book and Snow. 17. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 24. 18. See Çağlar. Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development (London; New York: Verso, 1987). 19. See Zeynep. Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986); Paul Dumont and François Georgeon, eds., Villes ottomanes à la fin de l’Empire (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992). 20. See Stéphane Yerasimos in Dumont (ed.) Villes ottomanes. 21. Cited in Emel Ardaman, “Perspective and Istanbul, the Capital of the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of Design History 20, no. 2 (2007): 129. 22. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 161. 23. Benjamin cites Dubech and D’Espezel, Histoire de paris par dubech/payot 1926. Cited in Benjamin, The Arcades Project; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, (E3a, 6). 24. See Eric J.  Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London; New  York: I.B. Tauris, 1993). 25. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 150. 26. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 2014), 72. 27. Ardaman, “Perspective and Istanbul, the Capital of the Ottoman Empire,” 112. 28. Çelik, The Remaking of Istanbul, 92. 29. For Benjamin, the poem goes back and forth between modernity and antiquity, while remembrance links the two. Benjamin, The Arcades Project; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2, (J72, 5). 30. For the analysis of the concept hasret in Tanpınar, in the context of the Republican language reforms, see Ertürk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy”; Gürbilek, “Tanpınar’da Hasret, Benjamin’de Dehşet.” 31. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 151. 32. Tanpınar, 151. 33. See David S.  Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983). 34. For a recent analysis of Ottoman temporal culture, see Avner Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 35. The cultural revolution, which is traced back to the Tanzimat Charter in 1839, aimed to secularize and Westernize society, isolating it from Ottoman Islamic practices in state institutions and practices of everyday life, such as

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the change of alphabet, reforms in the legal and educational systems, reorganization of the urban fabric, and the “modernization” of clothes. 36. Tanpınar, Yaşadıg ̆ım Gibi, 43. It is important to stress that this condition of being “tangled” in a cultural (and eventually psychic) division is inherently a modern experience, in order to avoid binary simplification between East West and South/North. The dispersing of clock towers and ubiquity of personal clocks were agents of modernization in the so-called origins of modernity. England and France, in particular, became what Osterhammel calls “clock societies,” where the clock became a “weapon of modernization” (71). Similar cultural reforms followed this process, creating the commonly known duality between the traditional and the modern. Also see Thompson. 37. The translation does not do justice to the Ottoman word velut. The adjective is used for female fertility and for prolific authors. Hence, the second time here for Tanpınar is a time that gives birth, creates, and a time that writes, both referring to its power of reproduction. 38. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 121. 39. For the examination of Benjamin’s philosophico-political understanding of modern culture, revolving around the polar concepts of modernity and antiquity, organic nature and the new nature produced by industry, see Chapter 5 in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989). 40. Nature in recent discourse has been a problematized term, particularly in debates around the anthropocene in geological time. Tanpınar’s particular usage of the term needs to be distinguished from the typical construct of city as an organic unity. 41. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 153. 42. In Section III of the “Istanbul” segment in Beş Şehir, and in “Istanbul’un Mevsimleri ve Sanatlarımız” in Yaşadıgı̆ m Gibi. 43. Tanpınar, Yaşadığım Gibi, 145. 44. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (University of California Press, 1984), 97. 45. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 158. In the first edition published in 1946, Tanpınar uses the word ömür (lifetime), which he replaces with gün (day) in the second edition in 1960. 46. It is worth noting that Uwe Tellkamp’s 2008 novel on the DDR (German Democratic Republic) recounts a similar duality between the tolls that punctuate everyday life and the timeless world outside clock-time. Uwe Tellkamp, The Tower: A Novel (Penguin, 2014). Also see Fredric Jameson’s interpretation, Fredric Jameson, “Dresden’s Clocks,” New Left Review, II, no. 71 (October 2011): 141–152.

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47. Eric Wilson, “Plagues, Fairs, and Street Cries: Sounding out Society and Space in Early Modern London,” Modern Language Studies 25, no. 3 (1995): 39. 48. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97. 49. From Tanpınar’s diaries, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Günlüklerin Işıgı̆ nda ̇ Enginün (Istanbul: ̇ Tanpınar’la Başbaşa, ed. Inci Dergâh Yayınları, 2007). 50. “Lodos, Sis ve Lüfere Dair” in Tanpınar, Yaşadıgı̆ m Gibi. 51. Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, 1 edition (Oxford, UK; New  York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 114. Ertürk reads this section in the context of Turkish language reforms, and the rationalization and mechanization of writing. 52. In Turkish, second-person singular (sen) is distinct from second-person plural (siz), a distinction that gets lost in translation to English. 53. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 233–34. 54. Tanpınar uses the terms harap semtler (quarters in decay) and kenar mahalle (suburban neighborhoods) interchangeably. Kenar, although it literally means border, does not necessarily refer to suburbs; there are kenar neighborhoods at the center of Istanbul, especially around the historical peninsula. Tanpınar is clearly referring to one of these neighborhoods right outside of the ancient city walls. These sites have a common characteristic of urban decay, with classic Ottoman-style houses and working-class inhabitants. 55. Tanpınar, Yaşadıg ̆ım Gibi, 211. 56. For a comparison with destruction and aesthetics of decay in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, see E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin Books, 2018). 57. In “Kenar Semtlerde bir Gezinti” in Tanpınar, Yaşadıgı̆ m Gibi. Tanpınar describes the present time as “the life of work” (iş hayatı), without making any reference to the Republic or the modern per se. This vocabulary has different connotations than earlier references to the present: he describes the current state in Istanbul with respect to socio-economic practices (Istanbul kendi parasını kazanan şehir). 58. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 178. 59. Tanpınar, Yaşadıgı̆ m Gibi, 212. 60. A trait Benjamin admired in the Surrealists and developed with his idea of the unconscious of the dreaming collective. See Buck-Morss (33). 61. Tanpınar, Beş Şehir, 128. 62. Tanpınar, 154–156. 63. The adjective yetim refers specifically to an orphan who has lost her father and not her mother. 64. Tanpınar, Yaşadıgı̆ m Gibi, 213.

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65. Tanpınar here seems to refer to expulsions and migrations during the transition from empire to nation-state. The most significant in size and effect were the population exchanges with Greece and Bulgaria, that is, Rumelia, in the 1920s uprooting people from both sides based on ethnic-­national identities. It is safe to assume that these children are exiles from those regions, who were forced to live on the outskirts of Istanbul, beyond the city walls. The game in question is a member exchange game between two groups, a parallel that is not likely coincidental. 66. Tanpınar uses the term melancholy, instead of hüzün or hasret. It is important to note that, although melancholy and nostalgia are easily confused and often seen as synonyms, there are important differences between these two terms. A.D. Ritivoi, following Freud’s description, states that the melancholics sever themselves from their surroundings; they want to escape or take refuge away from a state in disarray. The nostalgics, on the other hand, have already been severed from their initial surroundings, and they keep wishing for a reattachment. Melancholy sends one away, but nostalgia calls one back. Here I follow Tanpınar’s vocabulary at the risk of overlooking a rich literature distinguishing these concepts; Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 27–28. 67. In a letter to Scholem, cited in Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 262. 68. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 193. Benjamin uses the phrase in the Arcades (K2a, 4).

References Ardaman, Emel. “Perspective and Istanbul, the Capital of the Ottoman Empire.” Journal of Design History 20, no. 2 (2007): 109–30. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Band 5 Teil 2: Das Passagen-Werk. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser. 9. Auflage. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2020. ———. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989a. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989b. Çelik, Zeynep. The Remaking of Istanbul: Portrait of an Ottoman City in the Nineteenth Century. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. University of California Press, 1984.

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Cioran, E. M. A Short History of Decay. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Penguin Books, 2018. Dawdy, Shannon Lee. “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (December 2010): 761–93. https://doi. org/10.1086/657626. Dellaloğlu, Besim F. Modernleşmenin Zihniyet Dünyası: Bir Tanpınar Fetişizmi. Istanbul: Kapı Yayınları, 2012. Demiralp, Oğuz. Kutup noktası: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın yapıtı üzerine eleştirel ̇ deneme. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1993. Dumont, Paul, and François Georgeon, eds. Villes ottomanes à la fin de l’Empire. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992. Ertürk, Nergis. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ———. “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 123, no. 1 (2008): 41. Göknar, Erdağ M. “Ottoman Past and Turkish Future: Ambivalence in A. H. Tanpinar’s Those Outside the Scene.” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2/3 (2003): 647–61. ̇ Gürbilek, Nurdan. Benden Önce Bir Başkası: Denemeler. Istanbul: Metis, 2011. ̇ ———. Kör ayna, kayıp şark: edebiyat ve endişe. Beyoğlu, Istanbul: Metis, 2004. ———. “Tanpınar’da Hasret, Benjamin’de Dehşet.” In Benden Önce Bir Baskasi: ̇ Denemeler. Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 2011b. Jameson, Fredric. “Dresden’s Clocks.” New Left Review, II, no. 71 (October 2011): 141–52. Keyder, Çağlar. State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development. London; New York: Verso, 1987. Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu. Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Tanpinar, Ahmed Hamdi. Tanpinar’s Five Cities. Translated by Ruth Christie. London: Anthem Press, 2018. ̇ Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. Beş şehir. Istanbul: YKY, 2000. ̇ ———. Günlüklerin Işıgı̆ nda Tanpınar’la Başbaşa. Edited by Inci Enginün. ̇ Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2007. ̇ ———. Yaşadıg ̆ım Gibi. Istanbul: Dergâh, 2000c. Tellkamp, Uwe. The Tower: A Novel. London: Penguin, 2014. ̇ Uçman, Abdullah, and Handan Inci, eds. Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar ̇ Üzerine Yazılar. Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002.

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Wilson, Eric. “Plagues, Fairs, and Street Cries: Sounding out Society and Space in Early Modern London.” Modern Language Studies 25, no. 3 (1995): 1–42. Wishnitzer, Avner. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Zürcher, Eric J. Turkey: A Modern History. London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 1993.

PART III

The Literary Clock and Chronophobia

CHAPTER 5

Chronostasis: Critique of Managed Existence in The Time Regulation Institute

5.1   Introduction Modernist aesthetics, even in its most avant-garde forms, typically treat time in a heroic mode. Marcel, the renowned protagonist of À la recherche du temps perdu, sets out on a quest for his past through the dense thicket of involuntary memory and regains it in the last volume. James Joyce in Ulysses takes epic enlargement of a single day to its extreme in an overwhelming sense of temporal density. Naturally, being the finest examples of modernist fiction, these works challange narrative conventions . In this section, I aim to demonstrate that there is a non-heroic mode of modernism—characterizable as comic-ironic and grotesque—that imagines a modernist treatment of time in a less prodigious and more playful form. Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar’s Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute, trans. 2013), in this regard, provides a remarkable example of such Zeitkritik in the comic-ironic mode.1 A pseudo-­ autobiographical account written by an anti-hero, the novel records diffeṙ ent stages in the life of its protagonist Hayri Irdal, leading up to his involvement in the absurd project of the Clock-Setting Institute.2 The Institute is a parody of accelerating modernization in a nation plagued by its belatedness: it regulates the citizens’ timepieces, synchronizing all cultural clocks with the world historical time—a Bergsonian ordeal. Behind the idea of the ‘Institute’ lies a farcical obsession with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Ö. N. Dolcerocca, Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35201-0_5

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accuracy and with devices of temporal measurement, and an absurd and unconditional belief in the art of calculation—all of which the author exposes as an attempt at synchronizing the time of the nation that unfolds in homogenous empty time.3 However, this mode of irony and parody, through which Tanpınar achieves his critique of modernization and mechanization, lends itself to an effortless interpretation of the novel as critique of Republican ‘secular modernity.’ Contrary to such established interpretations, this chapter argues that The Time Regulation Institute (hereinafter The Institute) offers more than a satirical critique of the temporal ideology of global modernity that synchronizes the nation’s time with the universal time of capitalism. The novel engages with the philosophy of time, in line with the high modernist tradition, experimenting with a plurality of temporalities, each flowing at different speeds and belonging to different systems of reference. What comes to the fore is the inquiry into how time is produced and ordered in different systems of temporal ideologies: time of global capitalism claimed by the Institute, eschatology of old timekeeping practices, and individual and collective temporal experiences, practices, and forms. What sets the novel apart from Tanpınar’s earlier work is that this plurality of temporal regimes no longer invites the cautious optimism  the author sustains in Beş Şehir (Five Cities), written more than a decade earlier, as we have seen in Chap. 4. In his final work, any hope in crafting alternative ways of ordering and experiencing time is eventually subjected to the novel’s subversive logic of irony. The novel, with its closely linked structure and theme, experiments with different forms and methods of chronometrics, or time keeping. It caricatures the time of the Bildungsroman and autobiography on the narrative level; it parodies traditional and modern time regimes (such as Islamic timekeeping, the time of mysticism, capitalism, and bureaucracy) on the thematic level; and on the extra-diegetic level, it defamiliarizes subjective time and memory. The coming-of-age story of the protagonist Hayri turns out to be a masquerade in cyclical repetition, while the Clock-Setting Institute, the embodiment of the missionary globalization of modernity and ‘development to come,’ proves to be another form of temporal illusion: a future promise that will never be fulfilled. Hence, the overemphasized ‘social’ or ‘political’ aspects of the novel in critical reception cannot be understood without the underlying aesthetics of Tanpınar’s work. The Institute invites us to rethink the idea of simultaneity as a heterogeneous multiplicity: simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, contemporariness of the noncontemporaneous.

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I foreground the chronostatic temporal irregularities in the novel in order to suggest two things. First, I suggest that The Institute is an important episode in modernism and its entanglement with the problem of temporal experience.4 Along with other narrative experiments in punctuation of experience, such as Robert Walser, Samuel Beckett, and Italo Svevo, Tanpınar’s novel maintains an aesthetic that records cacophonous multiplicity of temporalities, beside and beyond the subjective flow and its vocation of memory. This aesthetic configuration is as much a question on philosophy of time as a question of form and style. In fact, the former determines the latter. What is singularly distinctive in Tanpınar’s philosophical approach to time in the novel is that no alternative chronometry emerges that is free of parody, except for the least likely and most profusely ̇ disguised possibility: the anti-hero Hayri Irdal himself. My second aim is to offer a close reading of the novel contextualized within its contemporary modernist aesthetics and philosophy of time in order to offer a new interpretive framework beyond the established scholarship on the novel at home and abroad.

5.2   The Time Regulation Institute Born and raised during the fall of Empire, overwhelmed by chaotic and ceaseless social, political, and cultural transformation, the protagonist Hayri is an anti-hero with an anxiety-driven compulsion for stability. Trapped in a cycle of infernal repetition, he inhabits a series of roles and eventually exhausts himself in the effort to stand still and survive in the face of his rapidly changing world. Tanpınar’s idiosyncratic narrator produces an erratic narrative of his life story: from his “Clock Villa,” or possibly from an asylum (as the novel has two endings),5 he looks back on fifty years of his life as an observer who claims to have been compelled by forces beyond his control, namely those of tesadüf (coincidence/accident) and talih (destiny/chance). Hayri is afflicted with paralyzing irony. He overplays his inadequacies (“I am just an uneducated man,” he repeatedly declares) and indulges in passivity and procrastination. This self-­proclaimed simple-mindedness, however, must not be taken at face value. In a complex use of irony, he latently subverts the authority of Halit the Regulator and his other master-models. Hayri is both the fictionalized author of the memoirs and the character whose birth, employment (and unemployment), marriage, and family life form the major sequence of the narrative events. Hayri’s memoir allegedly aims to “discredit all who have slandered

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and scorned” the Institute and its late founder, Halit Ayarcı, and “to assert a small truth,” that is to say, his equally significant involvement in the foundation of the Clock-Setting Institute.6 This historical account of the Institute, penned to honor its founder, as well as to assert Hayri’s role in its foundation, is in fact an act of rewriting the self, in the aftermath of the master’s death. Hayri sets out to write his chronicle three weeks after his benefactor’s death, and as he notes, he finds out that he is no longer as invested in eulogizing the Institute or its founder. Hayri’s fragmentary story does not tell us a great deal about the Institute until much later in the novel. Instead, it focuses on different stages in his life story that lead up to his career as a high-level bureaucrat at the Institute. The novel reads like a picaresque adventure story: a tale of social ascent set against a background that moves between different social realms seemingly opposed to one another. The four segments of the novel introduce these ostensibly incompatible worlds populated with various stories of initiation and master–servant relationships. The first section, entitled “Great Expectations,” begins with the narrator’s childhood years, during the final decade of the nineteenth century. This section is populated with father figures who represent different aspects of the Ottoman past: the watchmaker-philosopher Nuri Efendi, who introduces Hayri to clockmaking and chronometrophilia; Abdüsselam Bey, the Ottoman patriarch of a formerly large household, who accommodates the newlywed Hayri and his wife; the fabulist Seyit Lütfullah, who initiates the narrator into the occult and magic; and the Greek pharmacist and alchemist Aristidi Efendi. Hayri states that he would never be able to escape their hold on his life. “Little Truths,” the second segment, is the story of Hayri’s coming of age, beginning with his residence in Abdüsselam’s household after his return from fighting in the First World War in 1918. Once Abdüsselam passes away, his countless wills create a chain of misunderstandings, as a result of which Hayri finds himself criminally charged for having stolen a diamond from Abdüsselam’s estate. Following a nervous breakdown at the court hearing, Hayri is sent to a mental institution and put under the care of psychiatrist Doctor Ramiz, whose influence leads the narrator to the Spiritualism Society. He marries a second time, after his first wife dies, and continues to live in poverty with his new wife, her sister, and his two children  from the previous marriage. In the novel’s third segment, “Towards Dawn,” Hayri meets Halit Ayarcı.7 Inspired by Hayri’s passion for clocks and Nuri Efendi’s teachings, the Regulator decides to establish a Clock-Setting Institute in Istanbul and proposes Hayri to be its assistant

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director. The final and the shortest segment, “Each Season Has Its End,” tells the story of the foundation of the Institute and its short-lived modernization activities. Following a foreign delegation’s visit, Hayri and Halit the Regulator receive a government order to dissolve the Institute. The Institute concludes with the appointment of the “Permanent Liquidation Committee.” The now fifty-year-old Hayri recounts certain parts of his personal history, including some that took place before his own birth, drawing on memories, stories he was told, and bits and pieces of hearsay. One of those stories is about Mübarek (the Blessed One), a strange and quirky clock that haunts Hayri’s household. The story goes that Hayri’s great-­ grandfather Ahmet Efendi had once vowed to fund the construction of a mosque, as it was common practice at the time to build a legacy for one’s family name.8 However, due to a “series of unfortunate events” (a recurrent thread in Hayri’s storytelling), it remained “intrinsically incomplete” (kendiliğinden geri kalmıştı). The phrase literally means ‘the mosque stayed behind time, of its own accord.’9 The word kendiliğinden here is revealing. It paradoxically assigns the mosque a form of agency that is outside of causality: it is automatically (sua motu), spontaneously (sua sponte), and by itself (per se) belated, which undermines Ahmet Efendi’s plans to build it. If anyone asked when the mosque would be completed, he would reply: “God willing, sometime in the next year” (Takriben gelecek sene inşallah), which earned him the name Takrîbi Ahmet Efendi (Ahmet Efendi the Some Timer). The debilitation of Ahmet the Some Timer’s agency due to unfortunate events and the “inherent belatedness” of the mosque results in the perpetual deferral of his debt and responsibility. Ahmet Efendi was forced to pass on the fulfillment of his good deed to the next generation, which consequently ruined his son’s and grandson’s (Hayri’s father) lives. The family had to live in the stable and servant quarters of the villa, purchased as a foundation building for the mosque. This half-finished building was furnished with numerous objects intended for the mosque, including the clock Mübarek, which Hayri’s father perceives as a “creditor” and holds responsible for his misfortune. The unfinished mosque turns into a chronic synchronization problem that passes from one generation to the next, like an inherited disease or a tragic miasma with contagious power. The burden of the debt is transferred from father to son for two generations, plaguing the living with the retrospective demands of the dead.

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On this story of the half-done mosque which eventually ruins his father’s life, Hayri comments: “For in the life of one individual, there are more imperfections than any imagination could ever concoct; and over an individual’s lifetime these flaws congeal to define his character” (Her insanın hayatında hiçbir muhayillenin icat edemeyeceg ̆i kadar aksaklık vardır, ve bu aksaklıklar o insanla beraber yetişmiş, büyümüş, şahsi, nevi kendine mahsus şeylerdir).10 Hayri’s tragicomical family genealogy of “some timers,” which he presents as a congenital chronopathology, takes on a universal quality. Everyone has a personal (şahsi) and sui generis (nevi kendine mahsus) temporal flaw originating in inherited traits and a host of diverse influences over which one is often not in control. The term aksaklık,11 translated here as disorder and imperfection, is key to understanding Tanpınar’s view on temporality in the novel: each individual has her own belatedness, slumps, and temporal irregularities. A variation on Bergsonian durée wherein the past, present, and future all virtually coexist, aksaklık runs against the traditional understanding of time as sequential. It is a case of chronopathology where the many limpings and syncopations of the characters—in the form of voluntary and involuntary recollections of Hayri; intrusive memories of his father; untimely revelations of Seyit Lütfullah; sudden daydreaming of his wife Pakize; the resurrected aunt from the grave; belated reactions of Dr Ramiz; and confused genealogies of Abdüsselam Bey—create uneven sequences in the novel.

5.3  Critical Reception Tanpınar’s legacy as a writer and a critic has been primarily shaped by the critical debates about Ottoman Islamic cultural heritage in the newly founded Republic of Turkey, a dualism that is readily translated into a ‘clash of two civilizations’ narrative. The persistent emphasis on Tanpınar’s nostalgia for a glorious past could be traced back to the strong influence of his mentor Yahya Kemal on his earliest poems, as well as to his student Mehmet Kaplan, who wrote the first critical works on Tanpınar, most of which were published after Tanpınar’s death, influencing the author’s early reception. Tanpınar’s poetry, Kaplan argues, “leads his readers to great sources, to history, nature, art and of course to the divine” and offers a unique insight into “our thousand year old civilization.”12 This critical emphasis on the spiritual aspects of his work was repeated in the 1973 debate between S. Hilav, a Marxist sociologist, and Hilmi Yavuz, a ‘conservative’ poet, in which the former offered a nuanced reading of the

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Turkish modernist, bringing out social and materialist aspects of his work, while the latter emphasized his “spiritual cultivation” (ruh terbiyesi) and “moral thinking” (ahlaki düşünce). More recently, contemporary critics have discussed his thought in relation to the critique of Turkish cultural modernity by a group of Republican-conservatives, of which Tanpınar is considered a member.13 Whether influenced by Yahya Kemal’s overshadowing prominence or by the rise of liberal ideology after the 1980s and its critique of Republican modernization, Tanpınar’s critical readers often share the verdict that establishing continuity with the Ottoman Turkish cultural memory represents the author’s most notable achievement. These critics’ readings all regard the writer’s thoughts on cultural duality as the key measure of Tanpınar’s aesthetics. His literary works have been forced into the neat binary between Ottoman Islamic and Western humanistic traditions, foregrounding the idea of synthesis between the two as the main tenet of his oeuvre. These debates have certainly proved instructive on Tanpınar’s thought and his cultural philosophy. It is true that Tanpınar considers modernization efforts of both the Ottoman and Turkish state as a cultural rupture, an abrupt transformation of the society to realize a universal civilizing project, and he emphasizes the ideas of continuity and duration over any form of radical break with tradition. However, these aspects also overdetermine critical approaches to Tanpınar’s varied body of work. For the most important writer of the Republican period, there is still little written on his fiction outside such debates on the civilizational shift. The pervasiveness of this perspective in critical discourse on Tanpınar overshadows his most powerful considerations on modernism. He is unduly considered a cultural theorist before a novelist or a poet: Huzur (A Mind at Peace), a notable work of philosophical fiction, a collection of his columns and essays (Yaşadığım Gibi), and his letters (particularly to N. Nayır) and diary entries have become the primary source for the writer’s cultural concepts.14 I suggest a different direction and argue that the social element in Tanpınar’s work cannot be read without the mediation of the aesthetic. Except for the remarkable studies by Nergis Ertürk and Nurdan Gürbilek,15 few critical assessments have discussed the way in which his works give expression to historical changes or traumas, and offer an aesthetic alternative as a point of resistance to the instrumentality and alienation of modernity.16 In this chapter, I aim to show that such reflections are distinctly present in Tanpınar’s literary works and that they represent his most profound thinking about modernism in Turkey. I focus here on narrative

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themes and novelistic techniques in The Time Regulation Institute, Tanpınar’s last complete novel and a text reflecting on the conditions of social and cultural modernity. In its unheroic and ironic mode of expression, the novel represents Tanpınar’s most critical (and disillusioned) response to the civilizational duality debate and sustains the idea of simultaneity, rather than unifying synthesis, of different—often conflicting and contradictory—cultural forms. Written during the disintegration of the First Republic in the 1950s (along with its interrupted cultural revolution) and the emerging populist and counter-revolutionary discourse in the political arena,17 the novel moves the question of cultural identity away from an ostensibly authentic Ottoman Islamic heritage and toward a  fragmented and coexisting cultural practices referring to divergent origins and traditions. At the same time, The Institute engages with problems of time and memory, in line with the modernist tradition Tanpınar adamantly followed,18 experimenting with the plurality of temporal experience, each flowing at different speeds and belonging to different systems of reference. Shifting critical emphasis from traditionalism to his aesthetic explorations thus reorients ‘social’ questions of identity, authenticity, and cultural theory as representational issues, such as novelistic imagery, narrative time, thematic features, and stylistic preferences. By foregrounding its modernist elements, I argue that Tanpınar’s novel abandons the idea of continuity with the Ottoman past, in favor of a more critical approach. Emphasizing parody, humor, irony, satire, and narrative instability, The Institute presents a literary mode that fits neither the category of the socially conscious nor the metaphysically grounded aesthetics outlined in the Hilav-Yavuz debate. Much like Bergson and Benjamin, the problem of occupying an unclear position in the intellectual milieu of this time, which the author himself resentfully notes in his diary,19 is certainly the main factor in the narrow reception of his work. Tanpınar’s poetics in The Institute reveals the extent to which his work presents a philosophical alternative to the principle of cultural dualities (i.e., Eastern and Western, traditional and modern, Islamic and secular)—whether sustained as such or resolved in synthesis (terkip). It also reveals the damaging effects of modernization in the first half of the twentieth century, articulated in the novel as resistance to calibrating forms of temporal order. The Institute offers remarkable insights into modernism and theories of time, exploring how time is produced and ordered, and how that ordering simultaneously involves

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machines and myths, systems of belief and of power, as well as different ideologies and forms of enchantment. The Time Regulation Institute has been typically interpreted as a straightforward satire within the framework of clash of civilizations discourse attributed to the author.20 It is a Zeitkritik in the form of a memoir narrated by an ostensibly “simple-minded” man from a modest Istanbul community. Although its misleading title suggests that the Clock-Setting Institute constitutes the main story line, which appears only in its second ̇ half, the novel in fact focuses on the life story of Hayri Irdal. The Institute is a parody of accelerating modernization in a nation plagued by its belatedness: it regulates the citizens’ timepieces, synchronizing all cultural clocks with the world historical time. Like its author’s thought, it does not fit neatly into an interpretive framework. The novel is considerably different from Tanpınar’s earlier work in both tone and content. Tanpınar, in this novel, seems to openly contradict some of his earlier aspirations for an idealized unity between past and present, and he no longer invites the cautious optimism we encounter in A Mind at Peace and Five Cities. Thus, the novel has either been roundly ignored and dismissed as an aberration or interpreted strictly as social commentary and straightforward satire by many critics.21 Although the text has elements that support such claims, more remains to be said about its narrative strategies, complexity, and range of themes. Pankaj Mishra’s analysis exemplifies such common interpretive moves that see The Institute as a satire of the Republican modernization project.22 In his introduction to the novel’s recent English translation by the leading global publishing house Penguin, Mishra presents Tanpınar’s work to English-speaking readers by resorting to traditional/modern and East/ West binaries. In an attempt to conform to the cultural view of world literature discourse, he expresses a post-secularist and post-humanist view on “tradition-minded societies,” which is later clarified as “non-Western, especially Islamic ones.” These countries, Mishra explains, are forced to “modernize and become more secular and rational,” which is in conflict with their “long historical experience.” According to this view, Tanpınar is an author who “knew something of the old ways before they were violently suppressed” and his novel is a text that “aims at many aspects of Kemalist Turkey.” Mishra hence reduces the novel to an unambiguous social and critical statement, a critique of modernization that celebrates tradition, spirituality, and “the old ways.” He contrasts “spiritual resources” with the “great and irreversible material changes introduced by Turkey’s

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Kemalist elite,” caricatured in the novel.23 Not only does he reduce the novel to its “satirical intentions,” the essayist also makes a historical mistake here by equating thirty years of Republican reforms with more than 200 years’ long history of modernization in Ottoman Turkey. This overlooks the novel’s open critique of the failures of the Constitutional periods during the Tanzimat era and of Sultan Abdülhamit II (1879–1909), who conducted Western-style modernization under a totalitarian regime, described in the novel as a “moribund” era, plagued with “gossip and endless paranoia.”24 However, focusing merely on the critique of Republican practices eventually–and conveniently—imposes the sentiment of imperial nostalgia on the text, which in turn puts the novel in a clearer interpretive framework for the global book market. Mishra, of course, is only following Tanpınar’s critical reception in Turkey that primarily focuses on cultural dualities and the civilizational debate.25 Tanpınar sees the significance of grasping the nature of temporalities in rethinking the process of change. The established answer in Tanpınar scholarship, however, is that the textual treatment of temporal irregularities is a symptom of his desire for an ideal temporal unity, disrupted by “cultural dualism” (kültür ikiliği) between the Ottoman Empire and the National Republic.26 According to this view, which could be exemplified by literary critic B. Kahraman’s conventional interpretation of the author as “conservative modernist” (muhafazakar modern), the problem of civilizational duality becomes essentially an aesthetic question on establishing duration between the two pillars. Kahraman even goes so far as calling the author an aesthetic Muslim treating beauty and time as merely aesthetic concepts. Many of Tanpınar’s own critical prose support this reading, particularly his article “Medeniyet değiştirmesi ve iç insan” [Identity and Exchange of Civilizations], which has come to overshadow interpretations of his fiction.27 Indeed, the process of Turkey’s transition to modernity and its cultural consequences infuses most of Tanpınar’s critical works and fiction. In that article, the Turkish modernist approaches the revolutionary impulse of the early Republic critically and argues that modernity can only be achieved through the recognition of the late Ottoman past. Tanpınar considers the Republican cultural revolution of the 1920s and 1930s as a cultural rupture, the abrupt transformation of a traditional society so as to realize a universal civilizing project. The establishment of a modern secular order on social and cultural grounds, such as custom, tradition, religion, art, and language, results in a troubling epistemological duality

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where two incompatible worlds exist simultaneously, that is, traditional and modern, secular and Islamic, and Oriental and Occidental. For Tanpınar the key to the crisis created by the rupture is not to deny legitimacy to either one of those systems but to recognize their simultaneity and multiplicity, and to establish an inner continuity between them. In this respect, the question of time and temporality is a crucial one for Tanpınar; he endeavors to build a bridge between the late Ottoman past and the Turkey of tomorrow. He is critical of the developmentalist narrative that presumes an ultimate break with what comes before and recognizes the persistence of an Ottoman Islamic heritage in modern Turkey. Defining Tanpınar as a conservative modernist draws too neat a picture for such a complex and contested literary figure as Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. It also runs the risk of inducing allegorical and culturalist readings of his fiction, as in the critical reception of The Time Regulation Institute. The novel’s treatment of temporal disorders, for that matter, becomes merely a symbolic yearning for the persistence of the Ottoman legacy in the present. The Time Regulation Institute has been commonly read as an allegorical account of the transformation of Turkish society based on the protagonist ̇ Hayri Irdal’s life. The four aforementioned segments in his life story correspond to different periods of the Ottoman and Republican Turkish history: “Great Expectations” corresponds to the pre-Tanzimat era, “Little Truths” to the Tanzimat and the Young Turk period, and finally “Toward Dawn” and “Each Season has an End” allegorize respectively the  early  Republican and the  post-Republic Turkey.28 The text certainly has elements that support this reading, particularly in the segment on Hayri’s entanglement with the project of the Clock-Setting Institute and its founder, Halit Ayarcı. It is an ironic account of a new nation’s project of modernization that demonstrates its own absurdity through the automatization of its citizens. However, the ostensible style of satirical allegory is undercut by the subversive logic of Tanpınar’s text, as distinct from Hayri’s own narration: Tanpınar’s novel does engage with the collective anxiety about cultural disintegration and fragmentation in Turkey, but it does not presume to offer any solutions. The political and social commentary, and other satirical accounts of the society, largely remain underdeveloped in the novel, some being nothing more than a hint, as, for instance, in Abdüsselam’s troubles with the Abdülhamit regime. What has been largely interpreted as satire in The Institute is the textual resistance to the cultural logic of dualisms between modern/pre-modern and Republican/Imperial.

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Social satire as a genre relies on a central conflict between individual and society, and on an implied moral superiority shared with the implied reader over the satiric target. The Institute, in contrast, does not offer any alternative socio-cultural or political models, nor does it imply any successful integration of its protagonist into society. It proposes no solution in terms of social change, and views all regulating, managing, and calibrating systems—be they the religious, ‘authentic’ culture of the Ottoman past or the modern-secular order—as essentially the same. They all break off the subject’s inner temporal flow and marginalize plural and discordant temporalities. Hayri appears to be the vehicle of a satirical narrative, inviting the reader to share an implicit moral consensus (i.e., the devastating effects of hasty modernization). He has a satirical bird’s-eye view on society, which marks him as an outsider. The reader shares a laugh about the unreliable world of hearsay or about  bureaucratic absurditieswith this equally unreliable narrator. However, there is a double irony here that the reader is invited to decipher. The satirical persona of Hayri, sneering at his family’s absurd attempts at being ‘modern,’ for instance, becomes yet another self-­ negating persona. Most critical works on the novel have taken the narrator-­ protagonist’s satirical dualism (particularly between traditional and modern, manifest in the contrast of father figures Nuri Efendi and Halit Ayarcı) at face value and have failed to recognize it as yet another level of unreliable narration. Tanpınar exploits the dialogic potential of the genre: instead of transcending the opposites through ‘synthesis,’ in The Institute he lets them operate in an ironic, yet creative, conflict. If anything, the novel could be labeled a “modernist social satire,” as described by Lisa Colletta, in which humor emerges in the non-rational, the unstable, and the fragmented, and resists easy definition and political usefulness.29 One of the few readers to address this problem is Nergis Ertürk. In “The Time Regulation Institute: Dwelling in a Mechanized Language,” the critic argues that  the internally split narrator doubly negates and ironizes his own writing, thereby showcasing the impossibility of assuming the indivisible voice implied by solicitous criticism. By pointing out that Tanpınar in The Institute permits his novel to question the very possibility of cultural memory, she suggests that the novel demands a critical reading fully informed by the history and theory of the logic of modern representation, in the broadest sense of the term.30 The Time Regulation Institute is different from Tanpınar’s earlier work in tone and content. Along with other semi-autobiographical details about

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Tanpınar’s own life,31 Tanpınar caricatures the very interpretive frameworks to be applied to the novel, creating a tongue-in-cheek meta-­critique. The bizarre coffeehouse Hayri frequents with Dr Ramiz, for instance, has a culture of nicknaming and classifying its members. The community of the coffeehouse is divided into three classes—as in a mock Freudian trio: Nizamıâlemciler (the World Changers), Esafil-i Şark (the Eastern Plebeians), and Şiş Taifesi (The Irregulars). The first group, Nizamıâlemciler, proposes new ideas for discussion and only discusses serious matters: they are the “aristocrats who busied themselves with the regulation of the world,” Hayri reports. The “Eastern Plebian” class is “armed with only just enough culture to be active members of the coffeehouse commune… they indulge in an innocuous flair of the comical by drawing attention to the imperfections of others around them.” The third group, the Irregulars, consists of “men still in thrall to their primal urges.”32 The text thereby mockingly offers its own alternative interpretations: one could read the novel as a world-regulating and morally grounding gesture, an attempt at changing the world, in the vein of the “World Changers”; or one could read it as a deflating joke, poking fun at the imperfections of the narrator and his milieu. While some of Tanpınar’s earlier work clearly has such idealist tendencies offering alternative worldviews, The Time Regulation Institute belongs to the second class. The narrator of Five Cities, for instance, falls under the first class in his nostalgic desire to locate duration in the modern urban text; Hayri, on the other hand, is an Eastern Plebeian. Temporal dysfunctions embodied in aksak and chronostatic elements in the novel hold the key to a new reading of Tanpınar’s perennial themes of time, duration, and memory. Indeed, the logic of chronostasis is not simply a theoretical presence exclusive to Tanpınar’s last published novel; we can also see it in his other fiction and non-fiction writing, which exhibits remarkable insights into modernism and theories of time. Manifested as forms of resistance to calibrating forms of temporal order, temporal flaws and chronopathologies gain thematic, narrative, and theoretical significance in the novel’s exploration of plurality of times, temporal experiences, practices, and forms.

5.4   Mechanization and Zeitkritik As the novel is a quasi-autobiography, the protagonist’s birthdate is also not entirely certain. Although Hayri’s father records his birthdate in the back of an old book as 16 Receb-i Serif, 1310, of the Islamic calendar (22

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January 1893), Hayri replaces it with a different date: his circumcision ̇ ceremony when he receives a watch as a gift. “Hayri Irdal’s true date of birth was the very day he received this watch,” he reports.33 A circumcision gift,34 the watch completely transforms his life, “giving it a deeper meaning and purpose.” As opposed to the record of his father, Hayri designates a second date of birth, playfully transforming the chronotope of origin into multiple births: his circumcision, owning a watch of his own, and its immediate dismantling, all coincide with this “true” moment of birth. Hayri’s self-proclaimed genesis strangely dislocates the time of autobiography, doubling the narrator’s self, so much so that he refers to himself in the third person using his proper name. He reveals that his serenity was “sullied by [this] passion,” which interrupted the “harmony” in his life. “Up until that point, I had seen only the exteriors of faultfinding and scolding timepieces,”35 Hayri explains, “but my uncle’s gift sparked my desire to know timepieces more intimately, to plumb their depths. The first day I held it in my hand, my intellectual plane was elevated tenfold.”36 The pure temporal order of his earlier self is ruptured by the possession of this time-object, simultaneously described as a “faultfinder” and a “passion.” A conspicuous metaphor for maturity and for gaining social and sexual identity, the circumcision gift disturbs Hayri’s autonomous and uncontrolled perception of time. It alters his mind and marks a point of temporal disenchantment. Important as it is, however, Hayri immediately divests the watch of its power as a curious and, more importantly, a calibrating object. In an effort to get to know it more “intimately,” he dismantles the watch and eventually breaks it down, which marks an unfortunate start of his early career as a watchmaker. Turned into a mass of twisted and jagged metal, the watch stops indefinitely. Tanpınar seems to present a Bergsonian critique of mechanized and spatialized time, which measures, divides, and consumes time.37 Time, constructed as an abstract, general, quantifiable entity–embodied in technologies of temporal management in the novel—overwhelms the subject’s lived time as duration. The time of Hayri’s narrated life starts with a stopped clock, prevented from telling any time at all. The metaphoric act of dismantling the clock could be read as the protagonist’s reaction against mechanization, following the conventional dichotomy of the inner self and the outer machine. It partly stems from his astonishment at discovering that the timekeeping machine works almost by itself, seemingly to outwit him. We might also argue that Hayri takes it apart only to realize there is no hidden secret, absolute essence, or prime mover in it, mirroring

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his dismantling of himself as the autobiographical subject. In the novel, it is made clear that owning a clock is different from having clocks around. Hayri lists different clocks in the family home, such as Mübarek (the household’s clock), his father’s watch (which “measures all times”), and a secular clock, but none has a similar effect on him to the uncle’s gift. A watch of one’s own is a monitor, a reminder and controller of lived time. It ordains a quantitative consciousness of time, imposing the necessity to live on clock-time, to master one’s time.38 In this sense, the watch parallels autobiographical time with its chronological sense to lived time. It implies narrative structuring of identity, a coherent continuity in one’s past, present, and future. With the watch, Hayri is detached from other temporalities he used to be attuned to as a small child and has to adapt to a new temporal organization of a grown-up self, such as school, work, or prayer time. Hence, he destroys the first watch he owns. Other devices of temporal measurement have a similar chronostatic, time-stopping effect on Hayri. Instead of regulating his everyday life, they become sources of disorientation and stagnation: he eventually has to repeat two years at school, Hayri reports, because of that watch and another he finds on the way to the school. The anxiety-driven impulse to bring time to a standstill is an inherent temporal irregularity—aksaklik—that results in a series of errors and bad choices: Hayri drops out of school, fails his first wife and children, gets arrested, and ends up at a psychiatric clinic. Like his great-grandfather Ahmet the Some Timer, he repeatedly relapses back on his temporal illness. He deviates from daily rhythms of regulated lives: without “the experience of proper, organized development” (hakiki çalışmanın nizamı), he keeps jumping off “the train, in the middle of a desert, far from [his] destination.”39 Hayri’s apparently hyperbolic insistence on his aksaklık demonstrates the truly convoluted character time acquires in the text. If there is a central antagonism in the novel, it is not, as typically argued, between Hayri and Halit the Regulator, but between Hayri and time. In a key passage in the second segment, Hayri, held in a mental institution because of an innocent lie he tells one drunken evening, reflects on his chronopathology: Bazı insanların ömrü vakit kazanmakla geçer… Ben zamana…kendi zamanıma çelme atmakla yaşıyordum. The English translation by Freely of this brief but crucial  statement reads, “Some people spend their lives making good use of time, but in my life it has always stuck a foot out in front of me. I have tripped over time.”40 The literal translation reads: “Some people spend their lives gaining time [vakit]… but I, I

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lived tripping time [zamana], my time [kendi zamanima], over.” What is lost in translation here is Hayri’s agency and his rank in the race. The first part of the sentence, in contrast with what comes after, describes managed existence by way of regulated time: people try to catch up with time and master it despite its relentless and dashing march. It is a paradoxical way of life: they spend time in order to gain time. Hayri, on the other hand, trips time over (and not the other way around). One crucial aspect in this sentence is Tanpınar’s lexical choice: while time is vakit in the first part, it becomes zaman, iterated twice, in the second as Hayri’s own time. Although these words, both Arabic in origin, are mostly used interchangeably, they have contextual difference. Vakit is used as a time marker for regulated time, such as deadlines, timetables, or schedules, or shorter periods; zaman, on the other hand, designates a more general, universal phenomenon. Hayri is not invested in vakit as such: he does not gain time by planning, calculating, or anticipating; on the contrary, he trips the time of modernity over, slowing it down. Time (zaman), his time, is slumped, impeded, held up. His false self-deprecating tone here seems to have lost its double irony in translation: although he seemingly regrets not running after time, he is in fact ahead of time—an illusion of chronostasis, and of mastering time by stepping outside of its regulating demands. Automatism in Tanpınar occurs, as in Bergson, when time is turned into space, when the reality of change is overwhelmed by an extreme sense of temporariness which compels one to ‘gain’ and ‘master’ time. Jale Parla argues that, in Tanpınar’s work, machines are the antithesis of individual autonomy. His characters are mechanized to the extent that they suppress their individuality. Machines, she argues, are intrinsically related to the novel genre and that Tanpınar mechanizes his characters only as much as they stay connected to the outside world.41 We can compare this idea, that is, being mechanized to the extent of one’s connection to the outside world, to Bergson’s philosophy. The idea that Bergson defines his concept of duration in opposition to clock-time is a simplification. In fact, the nuances and reality of “clock-time” are essential in the Bergsonian philosophy of time. Bergson does not oppose mechanical time; in fact, he asserts its inevitability. He argues that our reason operates through mechanical, spatialized time (see Chap. 2): action requires calculated temporality; it is a vital and necessary illusion. Similarly, in The Institute, characters are mechanized to the extent that they function in the outside world. For instance, Hayri’s dysfunctional temporality in everyday life— manifest in his dropping out of school, failing his first wife and children,

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and his psychiatric treatment—is restored once he becomes a part of the Time Regulation Institute project. Although automatism haunts his life, continually foiling it, watches and clocks nevertheless retain their curious power for Hayri. He learns the art of clockmaking and spends most of the rest of his life dismantling and fixing timepieces. They represent their owners’ convictions, their alienation from modern existence, and their reactions to major historical transformations. Hence, epitomizing temporal totalization is not the only function and meaning clocks attain in the novel. The human and machine (or lived time and clock-time) dichotomy does not always play out in a regulating and disciplining dynamic that runs from machine to human, but also from human to machine. Machines are anthropomorphized, personified, displaying multiple eccentric times in the novel. [Saatler] sahiplerinin mizaçlarındaki ağırlığa, canı tazeliğe, evlilik hayatlarına ve siyasi akidelerine göre yürüyüşlerini ister istemez değiştirirler. Bilhassa bizim gibi üst üste inkılaplar yapmış, türlü zümreleri ve nesilleri geride bırakarak, dolu dizgin ilerlemiş bir cemiyette bu sonuncusuna, yani az çok siyasi şekline rastlamak gayet tabiidir. Bu siyasi akideler ise çok defa şu veya bu sebeple gizlenen şeylerdir. Hiç kimse ortada o kadar kanun müeyyidesi varken elbette durduğu yerde, ‘Benim düşüncem şudur’ diye bağırmaz. Yahut gizli bir yerde bagı̆ rır. Iş̇ te bu gizlenmelerin, inanç ayrılıklarının kendilerini bilhassa gösterdikleri yer saatlerimizdir. Sahibinin en mahrem dostu olan, bilegĭ nde nabzının atışına arkadaşlık eden, gög ̆sünün üstünde bütün heyecanlarını paylaşan, hulasa onun hararetiyle ısınan ve onu uzviyetinde benimseyen, yahut masasının üstünde, gün dediğimiz zamana bütününü onunla beraber bütün olup bittisiyle yaşayan saat, ister istemez sahibine temessül eder, onun gibi yaşamağa ve düşünmeğe alışır.42 [Watches and clocks] inevitably fall in step with an owner’s natural disposition, be it ponderous or ebullient, and in the same way they reflect his conjugal patterns and political persuasions. Certainly in a society like ours that has been swept along by one revolution after another in its relentless march toward progress, leaving behind diverse communities and entire ­generations, it is all too understandable that our political persuasions would find expression in this way. Political creeds remain secret for one reason or another. With so many sanctions hanging over us, no one is about to stand up in a public place and proclaim, ‘Now, this is what I think!’ or even to say such a thing aloud, for that matter. Thus it is our watches and clocks that hold our secrets, as well as the beliefs and habits that set us apart from others.

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Just as a watch can become a man’s dearest friend, ticking with the pulse in his wrist, sharing the passions in his chest, and growing heated with the same fervor, until they are as one, so too may a clock sit on a table throughout the span of time we call a day and assume the essence of its owner, thinking and living as he does.43

Questions regarding time, change, and rupture are displayed in symbolic and metaphorical characterization of clocks. Time machines gain multiple meanings: they are personified, turned into objects of desire; they double, submit to, and subdue the human. Watches here reflect the inner flow of time. They are stripped of their actual, objective, and spatial existence and become reflections of the autonomous and non-spatial temporality of their wearer. They also reflect their owners’ unconventional political persuasions, concealments, and idiosyncrasies, embodying multiple temporalities. Their rhythms change according to the prudence or rashness of their owner, to her private life and “political creeds,” which here refers to the authoritarian regime of Sultan Abdülhamit II (1876–1909). Assuming the essence of its owner, a watch “thinks and lives” as she does, until “they are as one.” In this view, time is not a neutral abstraction that exists independently of lived experience. Time here is a function of something other than itself: every event, process, revolution, or fate (talih) has its own particular time. Time is not one time, but an infinite number of times. In the image of anthropomorphized watches, Tanpınar recognizes this temporal diversity and their simultaneity in order to reimagine the process of change itself. The Clock-Setting Institute is a parody of bureaucratic absurdity and the alienating abstraction of modernity, which is pictured in the novel as a social engineering project that sets out to alleviate and resolve the conflicts between citizens’ times. As Hayri points out, hangi bakımdan olursa olsun arada bir ilerilik, gerilik farkı bulundug ̆u aşikardır ve bu fark mühim bir farktır (there is a difference of progression and a difference of regression, of which the importance is incontestable).44 What the Institute aims to do at a symbolic level is to replace these qualitative multiplicities with the singular quantitative measure of time, by literally, and with absurd solemnity, setting public and private clocks and watches. Unregulated clocks running late or ahead come to represent divergent, uneven, and disorganized perceptions of time in society. Halit the Regulator describes these non-synchronized times as “our dirty laundry” (kirimiz, pasımız) that needs to be kept away from foreign eyes. He announces that the Institute would wash it away by synchronizing modern citizens’ perception of time

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to make sure that no one falls back or springs forward.45 In this way, the novel highlights the asynchronies between different social and individual clocks before, during, and after overwhelming transformations, such as the onset of global modernity and its ‘relentless march toward progress.’ The lagging or accelerated clocks point to a deficit or surplus that threatens the nation’s coevality with world-historical time. Such standardization and unification of time charts a distinct chronology that imagines a singular past and a calculated future in a homogenous, synchronous, and unidirectional flow. Lived time is ultimately emptied of its connection with history and of interest in the future, except for the promise of development. Halit the Regulator even fashions a new past for the nation, reinventing it in line with the necessities of the present. In order to make up for the “difference of regression,” the Regulator makes up a historical figure, Ahmet Zamani (Ahmet the Timely), which stands in conspicuous contrast with the ‘real’ forefather Ahmet the Some Timer. This invented ancestor is a modern and Western clockmaker and philosopher who lived in Istanbul in the seventeenth century. While Hayri is reluctant to write the fictional biography based on his former mentor Nuri Efendi, he eventually becomes invested in substituting the past with an invented origin. Nergis Ertürk cautions against reading this episode as part of the novel’s satirical critique of the Republican effacement and fabrication of public memory. It is instead part of the novel’s engagement with the crisis of modern representation, raising questions of truth and lie, authenticity and inauthenticity.46 The modernist endpoint in Tanpınar’s work might be discoverable in this emphasis on doubt about the possibility of an authentic relation with the past, about recovering a secure origin, and about singular choronography, as the defining aspect of modernity in Turkey. Tanpınar in The Institute transforms the topos of origin into multiple origins (and births). Hayri challenges narrative chronologies of life-writing, while creating confused temporalities in which projection into the future precedes origin; the copy precedes the original.

5.5  The Clock-Setting Institute: The Absurdity of Presentism In as much as Tanpınar employs the figure of the anti-hero to explore questions of time and temporality, it is through Halit the Regulator that the author sustains the comic absurdity that serves as a critique of modernity’s temporal ideologies. Halit is an arrogant entrepreneur, one who

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entertains relations with the bureaucracy of the new national state. Inspired by Hayri’s obsession with clocks, he ‘invents’ the Clock-Setting Institute as part of a series of modernizing state institutions. He sermonizes Hayri on the importance of work ethics and genuine business life, coming up with a preposterous philosophy of time: “Work is a matter of mastering one’s time, knowing how to use it. We are paving the way for such a philosophy. We’ll give our people a consciousness of time.”47 In addition to their comic-ironic function in the text, Halit’s drills display the absurdity and the dehumanizing instrumental rationality of the modern time regime, which treats time as a commodity that needs to be managed with optimal efficiency. The Institute, with its emphasis on work ethic, is therefore part of the missionary globalization of (Gregorian) capitalist time, and of modernization, both of which replace diverse temporal experience and knowledge. The “consciousness of time” that citizens lack is that of the linear, monumental history set in a diligent and punctual rhythm. The efficiently organized existence generates a host of anxieties, and it informs the personal and cultural malfunctions manifested by different characters in the novel.48 Halit’s regime of speed, efficiency, and abstraction marginalizes those inflicted with chronostasis whose “inability to adapt to professional life” and “failure to adjust to the modern age [muasır zaman]” result from the lack of such “time consciousness.” Hayri’s former employers and group of friends, including the commune at the coffeehouse, The Society for Psychoanalysis, the Spiritualist Society, and the entourage of Seyit Lütfullah, all share a similar chronopathology, “living indolent lives,” locked out of the temporal order of work and efficiency. Willpower (irade), effort (gayret), and power (kudret)—such expressions of determination make up Halit the Regulator’s vocabulary, a true entrepreneur who believes that an efficiently managed experience would overcome all irregularities and weaknesses. “A few minor adjustments to your life,” “a little entrepreneurialism,” and “a modest change in perspective,” the Regulator advises Hayri, would solve all his problems. Hayri exclaims: “I must confess that I never thought of it that way. I assumed the only solution was a natural disaster or an epidemic that would wipe out the entire household. I was just biding my time.”49 Biding one’s time, imagining the future as catastrophe, is a symptom of anxiety arising from living in the perpetual present, or présentisme as formulated by François Hartog, for whom the present in modern times is different from that of the past epochs. It is an omnipresent present, a time

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of flux composed of constant demand for novelty and acceleration, while at the same time perpetuating enclosure in a day-to-day life with a stagnant present.50 Hartog, historicizing the notion of presentism, cites Paul Valéry, who at a 1935 conference, discussing the First World War as a major temporal rift, drew attention to the modern experience of rupture in the sense of continuity, which gives everyone the impression that they belong to two different eras. On the one side there is the past, which is neither abolished nor forgotten, but a past from which we can draw nothing to help us orient ourselves in the present, or to imagine the future.51 On the other side is the perpetual present, which seems “incomprehensible and nearly unchanging.” It results in a disoriented temporal flow, and therefore places the subject in between “two abysses,” where neither the past nor the future provides any ground for the present.52 Presentism fills this gap. The present pretends to be its own horizon and tries to shape both the future and the past according to its own image, as a temporal replica of itself. This idea of belonging to two eras is a perennial theme in Tanpınar’s work, which has so far been commonly interpreted in political and cultural terms as the conflict between the Ottoman past and the Republican present. In addition to this conspicuous discourse, however, Tanpınar’s novel points to a larger crisis of time, in the form of presentism, that is inherently modern. Halit the Regulator is the embodiment of the tyranny of the perpetual present; he is “the kind of man who saw both his future and his past through the prism of the present” (mazi ve istikbalini halin arasından gören zat).53 For him, history is at the disposal of the day we live in: “There is no such thing as lies or truth in these matters. The question is to adapt oneself to one’s century, to be a part of it. Our age needs Ahmet the Timely Efendi. And it is only at the end of the seventeenth century that this need can be filled,” he asserts.54 “Reflecting a present sentiment onto the past,” the Regulator subdues any past heritage or future impediment to present necessities. “In extending our movement to the past,” he tells Hayri, whose fictional biography of the Timely Efendi has been a success, “you have intensified its forward momentum. In addition you have shown that our forbearers were both revolutionary and modern.”55 This leak of the “present sentiments” into the past, extending with accelerated speed back to the seventeenth century and to the future, leaves no temporal ground to stand on: turning everything and everyone into an act in the service of the present, an imitation without origin. The Clock-Setting Institute carries the tyranny of the instant to the point of absurdity. If anything, the Institute is a full-fledged parody of the

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contemporary presentism Hartog describes. It is a product of a temporal ideology that unifies a series of fragmented chronologies inhabited by different classes, groups, and individuals. Halit the Regulator’s publications, Social Monism and Time and The Second and Society, are only small comical examples of his obsession with the present as uniform and omnipresent. The “efficient” mode of organization Halit builds for achieving social monism has all the characteristics of a typical bureaucratic structure. The lavishly big and complex administrative body includes the following components: “the Absolute Staff” is to be supported by a technical team structured to “reflect the workings of a clock;” it regulates itself in much “the same way clocks regulated our everyday lives: the Minute Hand, Pin, and Spring Departments would complete the first division, while the second division would include Social Coordination and Labor Statistics.”56 In addition to the main body, there are “regulation stations,” which are small roadside posts where ladies and gentlemen can stop in to adjust their timepieces: “There fashionable young ladies, handsome men, strapping young lads, and citizens both young and old could have their watches regulated for a modest fee, after which they would be issued with a receipt.” They are placed along the busy boulevards of the city’s most fashionable and affluent neighborhoods, and over time they penetrate “deeper into the backstreets and other, more modest, parts of the city.”57 The clerks “speak about the Institute and timepieces in a uniform way, relaying exactly the same information every time, and with the air of a serious professional.” Hayri goes even further than his ‘benefactor’ and, with a civil servant’s sense of accomplishment, proposes the automatization of clerks, who are now to behave “just like alarm clocks, speaking when fixed to do so, and then remaining silent when they’re not on duty.”58 These automatized typists and clerks perform the staged dysfunctionality of the bureaucratic institution devoted to the mechanization of its new national subjects. The absurd practices of the Institute produce a comedy of mechanical reproduction, theorized by none other than Henri Bergson, in his essay on “Laughter.”59 Humor, in his view, is essentially linked to duration and to the dichotomy between machine and human consciousness. The French philosopher argues that “really living life should never repeat itself,” and when it does, we suspect that behind the façade of the living something mechanical is at work. This mechanical perception of the living is funny because when human beings act like machines, it communicates absurdity and incongruity. This deflection of life toward the mechanical, Bergson writes, is the real cause of laughter.60 The two hundred and seventy

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control bureaus with their automated representatives and seventy typists, “exerting a startling degree of rhythmic control under the direction of our chief secretary as she waved her baton at the head of our grand typing salon,” incite precisely such a humor of mechanical reproduction and automatization. The novel’s humor is based on this non-durational essence of laughter, connecting the thematic treatment of time with the inner workings of the novel form as well. The Institute as a bureaucratic apparatus creates a mystification around itself, an extreme sense of coordination, and an almost neurotic obsession with order, efficiency, and even appearance. It reflects a reified world where relations between individuals become a thing, an object, a blind machine. Halit the Regulator combines this bureaucratic system with capitalist work logic. Hayri reports that his benefactor “sizes people up as if he might buy them” (durmadan insana bakıyor, sanki satın alacak gibi), but his gaze never offends because “to him people were no more than objects occupying space” (bakışları insanı taciz etmiyordu, sadece eşya seviyesine indiriyordu).61 The irony in this veneer of bureaucratic order, and its impersonal and mechanical relations, is that it conceals its fundamental dysfunctionality. Despite Halit the Regulator’s lectures on productivity and punctuality, no actual work gets done at the Institute: “There wasn’t even that much to be found in my new employment. It was an undertaking born of a few words. It had the logic of a fairy tale.”62 The two clerks, Hayri and Nermin, spend the first month waiting for Halit, and even after the whole apparatus is set and fully functioning, no one seems to get busy at the office. The female workers at the Institute occupy a Penelopean temporality, filling in the empty time by knitting hundreds of sweaters. The bureaucratic machinery entails an extreme sense of mastery over time: it can take the form of endless delays or of preposterous punctuality. “The few steps to the next room [turn] into a journey lasting a full half an hour,” Hayri reports on the mayor’s visit to the newly founded Institute.63 The bureaucratic space-time is empty, and it is subject to bureaucratic overdetermination: it expands or shrinks, a few steps might take a full hour, as in the Kafkaesque nightmarish temporality; or it might take an isolated second to launch a state institution of the size of the Clock-Setting Institute. Hayri experiences difficulties in adapting to this mechanized temporal order. Although he becomes one of the bureaucrats himself, his satirical persona retains critical consciousness and distance until the end. This critical approach is most manifest in the problem of authenticity and the

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question of aesthetic values. Hayri’s infliction with chronostasis and resistance to change echo Walter Benjamin’s ambivalence toward tradition in the age of mechanical reproduction. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin asserts, “the authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.”64 While Benjamin primarily discusses art here, he adds that the process of mechanical reproduction bears significance that “points beyond the realm of art.” Mechanical reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. This results in the loss of what he calls the work’s “aura,” which is the authority resulting from the work’s unique engagement with history and tradition. Reproduction substitutes “a plurality of copies for unique existence,” reactivating the reproduced object in each individual’s particular situation and leading to a “tremendous shattering of tradition.” In his increasingly mechanized world at the Institute, Hayri’s anxiety arises from the awareness that he and others around him are reduced to the roles they play, reproducible and interchangeable, and requiring not individual uniqueness, or ability, but merely the will (irade) to perform the expected behavior. “For when it’s a matter of the new,” Halit the Regulator declares, “there is no need for any other talent.”65 Everyone is therefore subject to a similar kind of “withering” that Benjamin suggests for the work of art. Although the “liquidation of traditional value and cultural heritage” is revolutionary in the experience of the artwork, it is nonetheless profoundly traumatic for a modern subject, who is unmoored from stable, historical, and cultural conceptions of value and is now alone responsible for creating meaning within his life. The liquidation of historical and cultural conceptions of value in The Institute revolves around the theme of music. Despite Hayri’s mock self-­ deprecation about his lack of sophistication and bookishness, he nonetheless exhibits keen appreciation for music. His protests against his sister-in-law’s atrocious singing skills meet with Halit the Regulator’s lecture on the current state of art “in this day and age”: “You say she’s ugly, so from a contemporary perspective she’s sympathetic. You say her voice is wretched, which means it is emotive and conductive to certain styles. You say she has no talent—well then, without a doubt she is an original.”66 The theme of music in Tanpınar’s oeuvre has been subject to many studies mostly in the context of his interest in Ottoman music heritage. Unlike his

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unfinished novel Mahur Beste which is thematically focused on music, a theme that reverberates throughout his work, music in The Institute has more to do with what Benjamin calls the “loss of the aura.” The singing career of Hayri’s sister-in-law exemplifies the liquidation of uniqueness replaced by a plurality of bad copies. The authority of the work of art no longer stems from its unique engagement with history and tradition: “Today who would ever think of trying to distinguish the Isfahan from the Acemasiran,”67 Halit exclaims; “Unique and new. Pay attention here! I mean new, new in capital letters.” Hence, the perpetual reproduction of the “new in capital letters” substitutes a plurality of copies for unique existence.68 The passages that involve Halit the Regulator and the Clock-Setting Institute are as close as the novel gets to conventional satire, albeit without the optimism of correcting the vice of the reification and mechanization of social time. Only in later parts of the third segment on the apparatus and the practices of the Institute does the text signal an understated moral motive. Therefore, unlike Hayri’s comic-ironic autobiographical narrative in which the comic mode arises from the individual’s negotiations with society undergoing damaging transformations, the humor of the Halit/ Institute segment remains as essentially corrective. It is nevertheless important to note that even this conventional satirical mode undergoes irony, for it is not the society that needs to be corrected, but the characters involved in the Institute, with their spirit of bureaucracy, efficiency, competition, and social fatalism, whereby everyone submits to the inevitable. The rest of society, in fact, laughs at the workings of the Institute. It becomes a notorious success thanks to Hayri’s system of cash fines. People, “unable to believe such a thing was possible, or simply assuming it to be some kind of joke,” rush to the clock-setting stations, so much so that the railroad stations are overrun with people “smiling, often splitting their sides in laughter.”69 The satire thus provides its own reader sharing the external perspective of the satirist, thereby adding another layer to the list of implied readers (i.e., the reader of the satirical persona, the reader of the picaresque autobiography, and the reader of the extradiagetic text by the author). The humor of mechanical reproduction and automatization finds its audience in the narrative itself, raising the question of who the implied reader of The Time Regulation Institute is.

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5.6  The Temporal Void If “nobody can begrudge his past forever” (herhangi bir insan bir insan bile mazisiyle dargın yaşayamaz), as Halit the Regulator insists, people inflicted with aksaklik/  (temporal irregularities), such as Hayri’s father haunted by his heritage of debt, are merely oddities, outsiders, people “living in some kind of limbo.”70 Oblivion, void, limbo, and non-existence are all recurrent tropes in the novel, representing disoriented experience of time in modern life. These images recall the deep rifts following the First World War Paul Valéry describes. I am going to discuss two examples here: the pocket watch that belongs to Hayri’s father, and Abdüsselam Bey’s household. The father’s pocket watch is a multi-purpose, multi-functional mechanism with various eccentric features such as a compass, a hand that shows the direction of Mecca, and a calendar of universal time. It is “a strange contraption,” Hayri describes, that displays “all times be it oriental or occidental, existent and non-existent.”71 However, the watch does not function properly: “Half of the watch remained out of order, like a house whose middle floor was lived in but whose ground and upper floors were vacant and silent.”72 This extraordinary and somewhat uncanny watch does not “measure” time but times—plural and interpenetrating temporalities. It runs against standardized time and linear chronologies, wherein the past and the future are “non-existent” times. It is instead attuned to the unique rhythms of multiple times, beyond cultural dualisms or differences. The second case is that of the old Istanbulite Abdüsselam Bey, of Tunisian descent, who  is the patriarch of an extended Ottoman family and who used to accommodate relatives from all corners of the empire. Abdüsselam’s used to be a Babelian household, as Hayri puts it, due to the displacement of his relatives from the former imperial lands of the Balkans, Caucasia, and North Africa. Now almost empty, the house is like “a text whose meaning is undecipherable because its essential sentences were erased from its midst”73 (ara yerdeki esas cümleleri silinmiş, bu yüzden manası bir türlü çıkmayan bir metin gibi buluyor). The father’s watch and Abdusellam’s life symbolize a dream that was devised once but is now a failure, an irreparable discordance. It represents the always already lost ideal of a heterogeneous unity, which is now replaced by the experience of time as fragmentation and disorientation, as empty time standing between two unintelligible worlds, like a half-empty house or a half-intelligible text. The emphasis here is on the ideal being always already unattainable, but nonetheless presenting itself as a conceivable ideal, which is hollowed out by an omnipotent and omnipresent present.

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5.7  The Time of Psychoanalysis: “A taboo encircled by a web of complexes” There is a third occurrence of the void metaphor in the novel that has less to do with loss of ideals than with a yet another form of time regulation, which is epitomized by Hayri’s psychoanalyst Dr Ramiz. While Tanpınar himself is an adamant reader of Freud, psychoanalysis is also subject to the comic-ironic treatment in the novel. After all, is psychoanalysis not founded on the Regulator’s aphorism that “nobody can begrudge his past forever,” and that the past traumas and wounds need to be re-­appropriated for a fully functioning personality? Dr Ramiz, in order to illustrate the configuration of the human mind for Hayri, uses the metaphor of a grand villa, in which only the cellar and the attic are complete while the first floor is either empty or unfinished.74 A reenactment of the Freudian trio in the novel, the metaphor of the incomplete building points to a different sort of asynchronicity in the novel, postulating psychoanalysis as yet another discourse of temporal regulation. Psychoanalysis is predicated on the reconstruction of personal history through the act of remembering. The past here is aggressive; as in the example of Mübarek the clock, it returns and haunts the present. Furthermore, it has an incontestable hermeneutic value: for Dr Ramiz, Hayri reports, there is nothing but psychoanalysis: “sooner or later everything came back to it. With this humble key, he proposed to explain all life’s mysteries.” Dr Ramiz returns to his homeland from Vienna with this “miraculous lever” (mucizeli manivela) to “cure the entire nation,” if not to move the earth, only to be denied a secured position and funding to practice psychoanalysis  in Istanbul.75 Having been assigned Hayri as his patient, Dr Ramiz sets out to cure him of his “father complex.” The dialogues between a reluctant patient and an overenthusiastic analyst are one of the most witty and entertaining sections of the novel: with Freudian slips, dream interpretations, grotesque symptoms, and free associations, Dr Ramiz slowly reconstructs Hayri’s life story in his own fashion.76 Psychoanalysis not only presumes a temporal order that traces everything back to infancy, but it also fosters the universality and timelessness of one’s psychic life. When confronted with Hayri’s protests that his parents are from an older generation with its own quirks and superstitions, Dr Ramiz strongly disagrees: “There’s no such things as old or new in our field. The most primitive person is no different from ourselves. Conscious and unconscious lives are the same everywhere. Psychoanalysis….,” at which moment Hayri reveals his inner thoughts: “And that was how the

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word I would hear so often for the rest of my life popped out of his mouth and plopped down before me like a soft-boiled egg.”77 This new term stands for yet another temporal order, with an unwarranted assumption to universality, objectivity, and the psychic unity of mankind, to which Hayri needs to adapt in order to get out of the mental institution. The Oedipal complex diagnosis is another grand narrative, a hermeneutic idol whose temporal coordinates are determined by not only universal, unconscious, and abstract rules, but also by one’s own past. Dr Ramiz, with a mechanical approach to Hayri’s psyche as a universal text to be interpreted and to be manipulated, obliges Hayri to find an unresolved trauma in his past. Alas, neither the doctor’s diagnosis nor the patient’s desperate search for a buried trauma delivers the hermeneutic promise of psychoanalysis. In this way, the novel also offers another one of its own tongue-in-cheek interpretations, without providing a narrative of traumatic origin whose unresolved tension the reader would symbolically decode. Discontented with his patient’s symptoms and dreams, Dr Ramiz reproaches Hayri for not having dreams that are more in line with his Oedipus complex, and assigns him a list of dreams he is supposed to have each week.78 Thus, Dr Ramiz disorients the time of psychoanalysis: the analyst’s diagnosis precedes the patient’s symptom. In fact, psychoanalysis itself presumes a form of disoriented temporality. Assuming the past and the present are locked in a struggle over the traumatic past event, the eventual aim of therapy is to stop the haunting of the past event by affording it expression in the present. The therapeutic result is to reconstruct the past and reach a cathartic experience. The narrative temporality of psychoanalysis hinges on this  reordering one’s time and one’s past. However, everything depends on the conviction of the patient, as Freud points out somewhat nonchalantly: The path that starts from the analyst’s construction ought to end in the patient’s recollection; but it does not always lead so far. Quite often we do not succeed in bringing the patient to recollect what has been repressed. Instead of that, if the analysis is carried out correctly, we produce in him an assured conviction of the truth of the construction which achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory.79

Therefore, the Freudian nachträglichkeit—the retroactive comprehension of a traumatic event that had remained unperceived, or the deferred effect of a childhood trauma—does not necessarily require the memory of such

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an event but just its reconstruction. The construction of the event precedes its memory, providing yet another model of chronopathology. Dr Ramiz himself is inflicted with a kind of chronostasis. Although, or rather, because he is the comic-ironic embodiment of psychoanalytic narrative, he lacks immediacy and any form of comprehension without mediation, usually of a Western kind. He is able to make sense of an eccentric character scuh as Seyit Lütfullah, who, Hayri claims, does not even speak proper Turkish, let alone German, only through Marx and Engels. He appreciates the “value of Nuri Efendi’s words” and of his patient Hayri, only after Halit the Regulator declares his admiration for them. So much so that Hayri later becomes the most cited author after Freud and Jung in ̇ Ramiz’s works  titled Time and Psychoanalysis and The Irdal Method of Time Characterology. The young man is inflicted with psychoanalysis: he sees meanings, metaphors, metonyms, and subtle illusions in the most absurd and arbitrary circumstances. Everything is a metaphor for something else; everything is mediated through an interpretive apparatus. “He would pronounce on a single minor point,” Hayri observes of his analyst, “and within seconds be on the verge of an avalanche.”80 Dr Ramiz does not follow a pace, a progressive tempo of inductive reasoning; he passes over multiple steps and speeds right into a conclusion. This temporal irregularity is also present in his appearance: “On first looking at him … you were nevertheless left feeling of aksaklık that was hard to discern,” Hayri observes; “then, as you came to know him, you began to see how badly put together it all was, with his overgrown forehead, his overly symmetrical bone structure, and, last but not least, his chin, which ended abruptly, like a fugitive struggling to break free of its unnatural contours.”81 Ramiz also has vocal distortions: “he would start off in a bizarre and articulated accent that trailed off into a kind of muttering, until finally it vanished into nothingness. For some reason it conjured up spirals made of uneven curves, and so, too, did his face.”82 It is important to note that another character, Seyit Lütfullah the fabulist, is also inflicted with similar physical defects and tics—he has “a continuous series of short, awkward, involuntary spasms,” his left arm swings back and forth, his necks twitches violently, and one foot forever drags behind him.83 Dr Ramiz is an implicit double to the fabulist Seyit Lütfullah, who also sustains a mediated temporality, as if in a Platonic cave, where two temporal frames, the time of the ideal and the time of appearance, overlay onto each other. The distortions in their temporalities are also present in their physical manifestations—a crippling walk, slurred speech, or a facial

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tic—all of which interrupt the flow of time, much like a skipping video in which some frames jump back and forth.

5.8  How to Fill the Void: The Building on the Freedom Hill How, then, does the novel fill the gap opened up by the ‘omnipresent present’ emptied of past and future? Does it offer any emancipatory image or any hope? There is a final occurrence of the void metaphor in the concluding segment, “Every Season has an End.” When Hayri sets out to design the Institute building with his son, Ahmet (the author’s first name), he insists it will not be a typical building: a building that has renounced its very essence as a building, and in so doing denies a building’s fundamental principles, should be quite capable of planting the concept of clock [saat] within man.84

So much so that a person rushing in would be sufficiently struck by “the unnaturalness of the design”85 (işin gayri tabiiliği) to want to turn around and examine it. The essence of the clock-building here is its lack of essence. The clock-time strips things of autonomy and inner temporal flow; therefore, to take on the essence of a clock would not make something orderly, efficient, or functioning, but rather gayri tabii—unnatural, abnormal, and aberrant. Confronted with a number of problems in giving the building this clock design, Hayri gets particularly stuck with designing the central hall, a seventy-two-square-meter emptiness right in the middle of the building. This brings us back to the incomplete house metaphor: How does Hayri fill the gap, the emptiness at the center of it all? Is he capable of filling it with his self-narration, or is it still an empty space in abeyance? The building itself is a metaphor for duration: it does not represent an orderly punctuality or regulated space. On the contrary, it represents temporal irregularity itself, with a pointless void in the middle opened up by presentism between the emptied past and future. In order to break up the massive space in the middle, Hayri first thinks of “dividing the space with a balustrade like the one from the cemetery of the Kahvecibasi Mosque.” However, the idea of this symbolically charged balustrade does not prove useful in filling up the emptiness. This once obsolete object has a long history in Hayri’s life; it is now in use in his new Clock Villa, as the narrator looks through it while writing his memoirs. In the narrative present, Hayri

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glances up at the star-and-tulip motif on the railings and looks deep into his despairing and poverty-stricken past, back to his childhood with its fantasies and hope: Seyit Lütfullah için şunun bunun muvakkithaneye bıraktıgı̆ şeyleri o yıkık medreseye götürdüg ̆üm zamanlarda bu parmaklığın önünde durur, onu uzun uzadıya seyreder, bir gün kendisi defineyi bulursa veya Aristidi Efendi hakikaten civayı altın yaparsa hisseme düşen kısımdan—vâkiâ kimse böyle bir şey söylememişti ama, elbette benim de hisseme bir şeyler düşecekti—bütün duvarı ve mezarlığı tamir ettirmeyi düşünürdüm. Whenever, in those days, I went to see Seyit Lutfullah, to give him various items people had abandoned at Nuri Efendi’s workshop, and would pass through that ruined medrese, I would stop before this same balustrade and daydream about the share I would receive of the treasure Lutfullah was sure to unearth one day, or the mercury that Aristidi Efendi would one day transmute into gold—though no one had ever actually promised me a share, I was convinced that someday, somewhere, something would come to me— and I would dream, too, of repairing the cemetery and its toppled walls and maybe even the mosque itself. (53; 52–53).86

The railing, therefore, is both a memory-object and a curtain, a clear barrier set between the present and the past.87 It is a screen through which Hayri looks back on an irretrievable past. It nevertheless fails to break up the emptiness in the Institute’s new building on “the Freedom Hill.” Hayri eventually decides to fill it with columns and stairs, which only carry the problem to the second floor and are left unfinished to “reflect the Clock-Setting Institute’s very essence.”

5.9  Repetition and Difference: “We all ride the Carousel” Tanpınar’s search for an aesthetic integrity in years of cultural, national, and political transformation is met with conscious disillusionment. He comes to accept a more modest sense of cultural and aesthetic possibilities of the work of art. In the anti-heroic protagonist clinging to outmoded aesthetic ideals, Tanpınar stages this failure with humorous irony. Hayri, unmoored from stable, historical, and cultural conceptions of value, is now responsible for creating meaning in his life. The epigraph borrowed ̇ from the nineteenth-century poet Izzet Molla (omitted in the Freely translation) foreshadows Hayri’s ongoing negotiation between radically

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different epistemologies throughout the novel: “Please God, for the sake of His Excellency Mecnun (the Insane)/make go away/The traces of the torments of reason which remain yet in my head” (Bihakki Hazreti Mecnun izale eyleye Hak/Serimde derdi hiredden biraz eser kaldi). Hayri’s “torments of reason,” manifest in his desperate protests against Dr Ramiz and Halit the Regulator, arise as much from his outmoded ideas as from his fear of change—his chronostasis. Despite his initial declarations as to how much his life changes after meeting Halit the Regulator, the temporal progression of change is not linear but cyclical, except for his social ascent, which follows the picaresque narrative line. Hayri progresses from one form of servitude to another, caught in what seems to be a closed circle of trials and errors, adopting a new master/benefactor along the way: Nuri Efendi, Abdüsselam Bey, Seyit Lütfullah, Dr Ramiz, briefly Nevzat Bey, and finally Halit the Regulator. It is only three weeks following the death of his final master that Hayri starts writing his memoirs, free at last of any filial servitude. The multiple father plots repeat one after the other, and they seem to go nowhere: the surreal treasure hunt of Seyit Lütfullah, the alchemic experiments of Aristidi Efendi, the coffeehouse that offers “something along the lines of a sedative, something akin to opium,” the Society for Psychoanalysis, the Spiritualist Society, and eventually the Clock-Setting Institute, all constitute “the marshland we know as the absurd.” “And though I couldn’t see it,” Hayri observes, “I was up to my neck in it.”88 Boundaries between the old order of Sufist teachings, ancient fables and old wives’ tales, and the teleological narrative of modernity are blurred in and through Hayri’s lived time, which is “a mechanism” the narrator describes as “combined and harnessed to the caravan of time, an amended alloy, a composite work of art.”89 The main composition or “alloy” in the novel is that of Nuri Efendi, the muvakkit (clockmaker), and Halit the Regulator. This is the most explicit doubling and mirroring motif in Hayri’s narration: “Nuri Efendi and Halit Ayarcı—my life circled these two great poles. …These two men, so distinct in virtue and mentality, were likewise distinct in their understandings of time, but in me their opposites merged in such a way as to never again diverge.”90 Considering how unreliable Hayri the narrator is, we need to ask whether these two men are really different. If their understandings of time are indeed that distinct, how is the newly founded Institute’s philosophy based on Nuri Efendi’s teachings? The dramatized binary between these two figures is not supported by textual evidence. Halit is not the contrastive double but the mirror figure of Nuri: a

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repetition with difference, with a unifying idea and a shared identity behind it. It is no coincidence that the Clock-Setting Institute is modeled on the muvakkithane of mosque complexes, observatories to determine the time of prayers according to the position of the sun, which also served as public clocks.91 The novel, therefore, invites a reading of the ClockSetting Institute as a fictional revamping of Islamic timekeeping practices in the disenchanted modern society, bringing the temporality of eschatology and of modernity into a peculiar—and failed—synthesis, “an amended alloy.” Although it is true that Nuri Efendi is one of the rare characters that remain outside of the novel’s ironic mode, he nonetheless fails to gain a realistic portrait in the text and maintains an obscure tale-like presence, “an old man in a fairy tale” with “an unearthly look.”92 His teachings reported by Hayri detail Sufi mysticism and an eschatological understanding of time: “Man must never forsake his clocks, for consider his ruination ̇ if forsaken by God” (Insan saatin arkasını bırakmamalıdır. Nasıl ki Allah insanı bırakırsa herşey mahvolur); “Metals are not forged on their own. The same follows for man. Righteousness and goodness come to us through the grace of God. Such values are manifest in a watch or clock” ̇ (Maden, kendiliğinen ayar kabul etmez. Insan da böyledir. Salah, iyilik, Hakkın bize lütufla bakışı sayesinde olur. Saat de böyledir).93 Although the self is essentially transient, the deeds in the present determine one’s afterlife, which marks the time that lies beyond the end of time. Regulated time therefore plays an important role in the daily spiritual experience of the devout subject: it is part of the fulfillment of a divine plan for creation, and for the immortality of the human soul. Nuri Efendi repairs old and broken watches and gives them to people in need: “‘Here, have this,’ he’d say. ‘At least now you’ll be the master of your time. The rest our God of Grace will oversee!’”94 Nuri Efendi calls these watches the muaddel (amended)—a slightly ironic reference to the recycling of weapons in that era. The infinite deferral of meaning to the afterlife also prescribes an inexhaustible concern with discipline and work in the present. The clocks, therefore, are “weapons” for mastering one’s time and fulfilling one’s duty to the divine. The work ethic of such Sufi eschatology is easily appropriated by the discourse of modernization; the promise of the afterlife is replaced with the promise of development. In their unrelenting commitment to an obscure timeless ideal, eschatology and developmentalism easily overlap in the novel:

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̇ Düşün Hayri Irdal, düşün aziz dostum bu ne sözdür? Bu demektir ki, iyi ayarlanmış bir saat, bir saniyeyi bile ziyan etmez! […] Herkes günde saat başına bir saniye kaybetse, saatte on sekiz milyon saniye kaybederiz. […] Hesap et artık senede kaç insanın ömrü birden kaybolur. Halbuki bu on sekiz milyȯ nun yarısının saati yoktur; ve mevcut saatlerin çoğu da işlemez. Içlerinde yarım saat, bir saat gecikenler vardır. Çıldırtıcı bir kayıp… Çalışmamızdan, hayatımızdan, asıl ekonomimiz olan zamandan kayıp. Şimdi anladın mı Nuri Efendinin büyüklüğünü, dehasını? ̇ Think about the implications of these words, my dear friend Hayri Irdal. This means that a properly regulated clock never loses a single second! […] If every person loses one second per hour, we lose a total of eighteen million seconds in that hour. […] Now perform the calculations and see how many lifetimes suddenly slip away every year. And half of these eighteen million people don’t even own watches; and if they do, they don’t work. Among them you’ll find some that are half an hour, even a whole hour, behind standard time. It’s a maddening loss of time… a loss in terms of our work, our lives, and our everyday economy. Can you now see the immensity of Nuri Efendi’s mind, his genius? Thanks to his inspiration, we shall make up the loss.95

Halit the Regulator takes up mystic temporality and appropriates it for the capitalist work ethic. Following this line of thought, Halit the Regulator revises and rewrites Nuri’s aphorisms. Consider the aforementioned adage, “Metals are not forged on their own,” which Halit the Regulator transforms into a hollow and meaningless slogan on clock-setting: “Metals are never regulated on their own.” Halit thus empties the past teaching of its metaphysical telos, that is, forging a metal is like forging a human being who can attain goodness only through discipline and work. Here the metaphor is replaced by metonymy; the adage becomes a simple tag for setting the time on a clock. Modernity literalizes language as it mechanizes time.96 The time of theology, of fabula, of psychoanalysis, of Ottoman collectivity, and of modernity are all subject to the double irony of Hayri’s storytelling. Hayri neither denounces nor fully adopts any of them. “Here we all ride the carousel together,” Hayri exclaims at the carnivalesque party at the end of the third segment. He is stuck in a cyclical movement, repeating the same errors and patterns of behavior, even after he claims that he is “saved” from it. Through the figure of the Sufi mystic Nuri Efendi, Tanpınar appears to pen a moral critique by juxtaposing the instability and decay of the modern world with the stability and traditional values of a previous era, when in fact he inevitably subverts any nostalgic notion that

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previous eras were better, or, even if they were, that lost values of the past can be recaptured: “How strange that for years as I listened to these and all the other sayings born of my late master,” Hayri laments, “I suffered under the illusion that I was squandering my youth. In reality, it was these very words that would lead me to enjoy the success and well-being that only heartfelt public service can provide.”97 Neither the old nor the new temporal order seems to be privileged; temporal systems differ merely in kind, and not in nature.

5.10  Time and Authenticity: Duration on Trial Conflicting temporal epistemologies force Hayri into conflicting roles and expectations: he has to repeatedly stage himself anew, and being an amateur actor, he easily adopts to new circumstances. Tanpınar masterfully crafts a double parody through Hayri’s character: a playful parody of narrative conventions and life-writing and a parody of the modern celebration of change and novelty. Hayri presents his memoir as a story of upward mobility, complying with the genealogy of the ‘world as possession and progress.’ Yet, instead of chronicling the coming-of-age of an authentic subject, this pseudo-Bildungsroman is undercut by cyclical and repetitive temporal frames with a focus on social adaptation, mimicry, and self-­ fashioning. Hayri frequently reminds us that he has “always had spectator’s frame of mind.”98 This tone of self-deprecation is yet another form of irony—as he is an active agent as much as an onlooker in his story. In fact, Hayri subverts the teleology of selfhood by performing his individuality as a pseudo-autobiographical observer. This emphasis on role-playing, acting, and masks is inherently related to the novel’s central question: Is there an alternative temporality to that of modernity? What is the telos of the protagonist, if not finding a balance, a terkip (synthesis) between the old and the new temporal orders? Consider Franco Moretti’s comments on the temporality of the Bildungsroman. Following Georg Lukác’s theory of the novel, Moretti argues that the ultimate step to a protagonist’s formation lies in the perfect compromise between individual aspirations, and the constraints and expectations imposed by society.99 The telos of a bourgeois protagonist turns on such compromise. Although there is something to be said about Hayri’s concessions to Halit the Regulator’s project, he is nonetheless a ‘half-outsider’ who has “learned to observe human affairs with detachment.” He does not compromise, but rather pretends to do so. His transformation is only a mockery; it stages the failure of its own narrative telos.

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All the characters in the novel are mere ‘pretenders’ like Hayri, with the exception of Nuri Efendi and Hayri’s son Ahmet—even as the former is described as an “old man in a fairy tale” and the latter remains marginal to the narrative until the very end. Halit the Regulator is predominantly concerned with pretending and performance, albeit without any idealistic sense of self-improvement. His claim that he hates theater only proves his commitment to acting, so much so that he prefers to keep the boundary between fact and fiction blurred. In this sense, the Regulator shows striking parallels to another antithesis, Seyit Lütfullah, who is like “a ghostly shadow in the void, a mask on loan, a living lie: Imagine the lead actor in a fantastical play who—still wearing his costume and cloaked in his assumed personality—springs off the stage to continue his performance in the crowded city streets.”100 Hayri’s characterization of the fabulist would work perfectly for Halit the Regulator as well; Halit is an actor who does not know that he is one. An actor, performing as such, draws a line between imitation and the imitated basis, because acting and role-playing assumes a reality or an authentic experience to begin with. With Halit, as with the fabulist, such basis for reality is completely absent. Hayri’s adaptation to different temporal orders is also informed by this performative essence. Hayri roams at the borders between different social spheres but never actually commits to one: he dresses like others, adopting their personalities, literally and metaphorically, without fully becoming them. When he puts on Halit the Regulator’s suit in the first days of his employment at the Institute, he senses a “dramatic shift in [his] entire being,” and begins to use words like “modification,” “coordination,” “work structure,” “mind-set shift,” “metathought,” and “scientific mentality.”101 “All my life I’ve had to learn new words,” Hayri protests; “at almost every stage, I was obliged to renew my lexicon with revisions based on real-life experience—with my own blood and toil” (Hayatım kelime öğrenmekle geçti. Hemen her safhasında sözlüg ̆ümü yeniden yapmıştım, hem de kendi hayatımda, etimle kemiğimle yaşayarak).102 This emphasis on theatricality, role-play, and adaptation reveals that there is no genuine ground to make a compromise with any form of temporal regulation, no utter surrender to standard time, and no true concession to a genealogy of the world as possession and progress. Hayri’s theatricality and inherent inauthenticity is manifest in the novel as a formal and narrative element, as well as a thematic and theoretical component. The novel is not a grand récit of Proustian “time regained”103 but—as in Hayri’s characterization of the coffeehouse—“a piece of shadow-­puppet

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humor [Karagöz şakası],” or “the replica of an ortaoyunu.”104 The past is recaptured in the form of shadows, puppets, parodies, and metonymic reductions that culminate in the grand masquerade (the aunt’s party) at the end of the novel. Hayri, for this reason, is both a pretender and debunker, embodying a form of individuality that focuses on social adaptation, mimicry, self-fashioning, and self-narration. Modernity, understood as the experience of profound and pervasive crisis—a crisis of time, of the self, of language, a crisis of perception and experience—finds expression in The Institute through dark humor. Looking to the past or to Ottoman culture as a source of authenticity and inspiration against the modern world proves as futile as feeling at home in the perpetual present and the eternal novelty of modernity. The novel does not prioritize any one temporal, ideological, or philosophical framework, or any claim to authentic experience. It reacts not only to the crisis of inauthenticity endemic to the modern Republican present, as Ertürk puts it, but also to the authenticity crisis endemic to modernity.105 Hayri’s story of survival in conflicting temporal residues and regimes also explores the narrative and cultural potential of durational flow. Hayri epitomizes Bergsonian intuitive thinking that would grasp the indivisibility of temporal experience, where consciousness forms both the past and the present into an organic whole. For Hayri, establishing such a durational flow is as much an ontological question as a matter of experience and perception; he “renews his lexicon” with “blood and toil.” He needs to bridge the past with the present in order to respond to the call of his age and be “a man of his era.” Surviving radical change and transformation, which is more than the mere shift of values or of epistemological systems of the kind that Benjamin outlines in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” is an ontological necessity in Tanpınar’s novel. Facing the absurdity of the Institute’s functionalist treatment of time and his inability to adapt to it, Hayri declares, “No, this was not a question of lies or truth; it was rather one of to be or not to be.”106 The idea of duration becomes an ontological question more than an epistemological one: the subject caught within the rupture undergoes an ontological crisis, unless she does not take the leap to break with the past. This is the central paradox of the protagonist and of the novel as well: the vital necessity and simultaneously the impossibility of an uninterrupted relation with the past. It is important to note that this challenge to duration cannot be reduced to cultural specificity, which is a mode of literary criticism prevalent in analyzing literature from the non-West. It is true that the

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epistemological ruptures in question in Tanpınar’s text suggest an East/ West and modern/belated divide—but as some critics have shown, these divides are inherent to modernity itself, rather than being cultural divergences to alternative modernities.107 The history of wars and revolutions only figures marginally in the novel. Hayri mentions both Tanzimat and the First World War incidentally. The focus is on the anxiety of the individual suspended in the dilemma of cultural rupture. As opposed to what Bergson believes, the division of psychical life into definite states is not relative to the various interpretations the subject gives to his past;108 for Hayri, a radical change takes place outside of the subject which unsettles the subject’s perception of time: “For whatever reason, it is my past, and not my current position in life, that holds the key to my problems; I can neither escape from it nor entirely accept its mandate.”109 Tanpınar does not put the idea of ‘duration’ into question per se but rather pushes the Bergsonian notion further and asks: What happens if a radical epistemological rupture takes place outside the subject that restrains the past from coexisting with the present? What happens if “the continuous melody of our inner life” can no longer be heard but needs to be established? And what if the subject stuck in the middle is not a ‘privileged soul’ like the protagonist of The Mind at Peace, but an ordinary man? As we have seen in Chap. 2, there is a common prejudice running from Bachelard to Badiou that Bergson does not engage with discontinuity. The idea of duration is commonly and inaccurately interpreted as a homogenous flow without ruptures. This is a question that Bergson answers in Creative Evolution, in which, to put it simply, ruptures are part of evolution, and they create une forme nouvelle, incommensurable avec ses antécédents [a new form, incommensurable with its antecedents].110 The central question in The Institute follows this line of thought: When historical forces divide one’s time into definite periods, in what way does the subject experience the flow in a new form, one that is incommensurable with the past? “I became a new man,” Hayri declares, from the moment he meets Halit Ayarcı. This proclaimed transformation is undercut by erratic traces of the past in the form of doubles and masks. Although past forms are incommensurable with the “new man” of the modern temporal order, they persist in heterogeneous multiplicities, to put it in Bergsonian terminology. The link between temporal experience and (in)authenticity is further clarified when Hayri explains why he gets into

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details about his distant past, instead of focusing only on the Institute and the new man that he is. The doubling of Hayri in this scene is not only an effect of his experience of the inner flow, but it also demonstrates the way his sense of self is divided temporally. Rather than experiencing the inner flow as an “indivisible unity,” he is “seized by shadows of the past” [mazi gölgeleri yüzünden yolum deg ̆işti] and “the truth and absurdities that lie beneath”: ̇ Içimde, kendi mazim olsa bile o günlere karşı katılaşmış bir taraf var. Ne yazık ki, bu mazi dönüşünü yapmadan kendimi anlatamam. Ben yıllarca bu adamların arasında, onların rüyaları için yaşadım. Zaman zaman onların kılıklarına girdim, mizaçlarını benimsedim. Hiç farkında olmadan bazen Nuri Efendi, bazen Lütfullah veya Abdüsselam Bey oldum. Onlar benim örneklerim, farkında olmadan yüzümde bulduğum maskelerimdi. Zaman zaman insanların arasına onlardan birisini benimseyerek çıktım. Hala bile bazen aynaya baktıgı̆ m zaman, kendi çehremde onlardan birini tanır gibi oluyorum. Şu anda Nuri efendinin kendini yenmiş tebessümünü yüzümde dolaşıyor sanıyorum, biraz sonra Lütfullah’ın yalanı benimsemiş bakışlarını kendimde bularak yaptığım işten ürküyorum. Bir başka defasında babamın ümitsiz kıskançlıgı̆ ve sabırsızlıg ̆ıyla perişan oluyorum. Hatta bu, kıyafetlerimde bile görülüyor. En meşhur terzilerde yaptırdığım elbiselerim sırtıma geçer geçmez bana Abdüsselam Beyin kılığını veriyorlar. Daha dün gözlüklerimi değiştirmem icap edince, artık o cinsin modası geçmiş olduğunu bile bile Aristidi Efendininkine benzer bir altın gözlük aramadım mı? Belki de şahsiyet dediğimiz şey bu, yani hafızanın ambarındaki maskelerin zenginligĭ ve tesadüfü, onların birbirleriyle yaptığı terkiplerin bizi benimsemesidir. Belki daha derin, daha kuvvetli bir şey, bu mirasları ikide bir aksatan o içten müdahalelerdir. Her halde bende olan budur. Bunu herkes için söyleyemem. Elbette benim gibi yaşamayanlar, kendilerini başka türlü, daha kuvvetle, daha saf şekilde bulanlar vardır. (52) However I might regret it, I cannot explain myself without looking back. I lived among these men for years and with them chased after their dreams. There were times when I even dressed like them, adopting aspects of their personalities. Without my quite knowing, I would on occasion even become Nuri Efendi or Abdüsselam Bey or, yes, even Seyit Lütfullah. They were my models, the masks I hardly knew to be masks. I would don one personality or another before heading out to mingle with the crowds. And still today when I look in the mirror I can see these men reflected in my face. First I see Nuri Efendi’s indulgent smile, and then Lütfullah’s deceitful gaze, and I shudder at the thought of the horrible things I might have done. Or I am devastated to detect the desperate jealousy and impatience of my father. I

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can see these men’s traits in my attire too. The moment I put on a suit sewn for me by one of those celebrated tailors, I can be no other than Abdüsselam. And just the other day I noticed I needed new spectacles: off I went to look for a new pair with gold rims exactly like the ones Aristidi Efendi used to wear, though I knew the style was well out of fashion. Perhaps this is what we mean by ‘personality’: the rich array of masks we store in the warehouses of our minds and the eccentricities of those who manifest themselves in our person. But there may be a deeper and more powerful force that intervenes on occasion to obstruct these inherited traits. This is something I’ve always had in me. I cannot say that the same goes for everyone. Naturally there are those who live differently, those who consider themselves stronger and closer to reality, and unique.111

The temporal nature of the self lies at the root of its inherent inauthenticity; it is crowded with several figures from the past with their own peculiar and divergent temporalities. The past does not exist in an indivisible flow, but in a disoriented, obstructed, and agonizing swirl. It does persist in different forms, as Hayri unwittingly wears these faces—one at a time, or all at once. This persistence is nonetheless held up, interrupted, aksak. The past does not transfer to the present fluently, unlike involuntary memory that streams a past sensation into consciousness. Its heritage is ‘obstructed.’ It fails to offer any essence or a “powerful and more unique” [kuvvetle, daha saf şekilde] path to the temporal self. Therefore, the inner flow is not formed through an authentic self but an ‘alloy’ of various masks and models. “I was never quite able to escape the hold of these friends on me,” Hayri declares, “they endured in me in a haphazard way” [hayatımın ileri safhaları, bana bu insanların tesirinden kurtulmak imkanını pek vermedi… onlar bende karmakarışık devam ettiler].112 Duration is the “haphazard” continuity of such masks, a heterogeneous multiplicity outside of any form of chronometry. The past does not always persist as perceptible masks and personalities, but it also resurfaces as illegible residues. Sanki bir deniz altı kovug ̆unda yürüyormuşum gibi bir türlü kavrayamadıgı̆ m fikirler, bilgi kırıntıları ayaklarıma dolaşıyor, her kımıldandıkça köksüz asabiyetler, süreksiz ümitler, yersiz inançlar çürümüş yosunlar gibi kollarıma ve vücuduma sarılıyor, beni daha derinlere doğru çekiyor, gözlerimi her açtıkça ucunu bucagı̆ nı göremedigĭ m heyulâ dâvalar yarı karanlıkta üzerime saldırıyorlardı.

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I was fording a deep-sea cavern lined by the remains of knowledge and by all the ideas I had ever failed to grasp. As they swirled around my feet I moved forward, and with every step I felt the coil of unfounded beliefs, ungrounded frustrations, and unending despair tightening around my chest and arms; whereupon, like rotten seaweed, they pulled me deeper into the depths of the sea; and every time I opened my eyes, gruesome leviathans larger than the eye could see would lunge toward me through the murky void.113

The “residual structures of feeling” are active elements in the present, but they stand in opposition or as alternatives to the dominant culture and formation, which will not accommodate its needs. The fragmented past unexpectedly surfaces in the text as “remains of knowledge” and as images “he [Hayri] fails to grasp.” These traces are only partially legible; the past is more a haunting presence than a stabilizing of the historical moment. It survives only as ungrounded (köksüz) and discontinuous (süreksiz) hopes and beliefs, consuming the subject in a swirl like “gruesome leviathans.” These residual traces of the past clearly resurface when Hayri, living in Abdüsselam Bey’s new house, comes across what the Ottoman patriarch calls “the children’s room,” despite the fact that no child has ever been born or lived there. It is a sort of a storage room, or in Hayri’s words “an emotional depot for Abdüsselam,” with “a mountain of meaningless castaway objects” moved out of the big old konak such as cradles, mattresses (all victims to Abdüsselam Bey’s conjugal nights), wardrobes, mirrors, old toys, and chests. This whole collection of odds and ends gives the room a strange atmosphere, an uncanny feel (garip bir hava): Eventually we all came to believe that the spirit of the old villa resided in that room. It was a room of remembrance and loss, piled high with farewells, with the dead stacked one on top of the other, where each of us could see the death of our own childhood and youth” [Yavaş yavaş herkes evin kaybolmuş hayatının orada toplandığına inanmıştı. Orası birikmiş ayrılıkların, üst üste yığılmış ölümlerin, hatıra ve unutulmaların odasıydı. Yaşayanlar bile orada kendi çocuklarının, ilk gençliklerinin ölümünü seyrediyorlardı].114

This scene particularly invites reading it through the concepts of the uncanny and the grotesque, because here, in this “realm beyond time,” Abdüsselam “drains all these objects of their indifference.”115 Abdüsselam’s deep personal investment in the room resonates with Benjamin’s

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characterization of the collector’s connection to his objects. As Benjamin suggests, “all that is remembered, thought, known, becomes the base, frame, pedestal and seal of its possession (…) not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.”116 These discards and residues of the past trigger nostalgia for certain aspects of the past lost to modernity. They invoke a different and deeper dimension of collective temporality, the death of their childhood and youth. There is a claim to immediacy inherent in them that interrupts what has been constructed as the present. Their ephemeral quality is charged with meaning, albeit uncanny and unintelligible. These objects have the psychic force of memories of shared experiences, not of an isolated individual, but of the collective—the large family of the past Ottoman household. It is nonetheless a strange room that no one ever enters except for Abdüsselam Bey whose particular chronopathology comprises reversing genealogies: he gives Hayri’s daughter his own mother’s name, “in a moment of confusion,” and calls the child “Mother” and teaches her to address him as her son. The mixed up genealogies and the regressive impulse materialize in this uncanny “timeless” room with a buildup of discarded and outmoded everyday objects. I would like to conclude my analysis with the most important clock in the novel: the great-grandfather’s Mübarek. This clock is a memory-­ object, but even more importantly, as “a free-spirited clock” that refuses to submit any adjustments or repairs, it is a symbol of chronostasis. Clock-­ time, by spatializing the temporal flow, allows for the coordination of divergent temporalities on a global scale. Like Heidegger’s idea of “the world-as-picture,” the spatial representation of time affected by the clock is rooted in an interest.117 The clock is a piece of technology used as a means of disposing over, of mastering, time. Mübarek is an antithesis of the inevitable and unstoppable progress that timepieces have come to represent. It follows “a time all its own, far removed from human affairs,” occasionally ticking and chiming. “My mother looked kindly on the clock’s elderly disposition,” Hayri narrates; “To her mind it was either a prophet or a being blessed with mystical powers.” His father, on the other hand, maintains “a more humanist outlook on life and call[s] the clock the Calamity.”118 A saint or calamity, this idiosyncratic clock epitomizes multitemporality and the diversity of experiencing time as against a single politically charged chronometry of modernity. My concern in this chapter has been to demonstrate that The Institute is an experiment in the plurality of times, flowing at different speeds and

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belonging to different systems of reference. It is also a novel of being, or rather becoming, a nation with nonsynchronous and heterogeneous temporalities. The Clock-Setting Institute is a satirical trope that epitomizes the teleological narrative of modernity in which divergent historical experiences are only categorized as belatedness. Eventually, what comes to the fore is not only an inquiry into how time is produced and ordered in different systems of temporal ideologies, but also the exploration of individual and collective temporal experiences or durations. The Time Regulation Institute conveys the cacophonous multiplicity of temporalities in which other temporal regimes become visible, before, after, beyond, and beside the subjective flow and its vocation of memory. It is an aesthetic vocation for the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous—the coexistence, confrontation, and union of different temporalities.

Notes ̇ 1. The novel was serialized in 1954  in the newspaper Yeni Istanbul, and published in book form in 1961, shortly before the author’s death. Tanpınar himself edited it for the book publication. 2. I use the term ‘Clock-Setting Institute’ for the fictional Institute in the novel, as it is a more accurate translation. 3. Compare Benedict Anderson’s notion of simultaneity: part of what makes such communities national is a shared experience of simultaneity modeled on the spatio-temporal organization of newspapers and novels, for “these forms provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation” by furnishing their reader-consumers with a “complex gloss on the word ‘meanwhile’” Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25. 4. Chronostasis is a form of temporal illusion where the initial perception made by the brain after the introduction of a new event or task-demand can seem to be stretched in time. The term is commonly used in understanding psychological and neural mechanisms of subjective time, which resonates with Bergson’s studies in Matter and Memory. I use the term here to refer to a temporal dilation and suspension, as part of the larger chronopathologies, that is, time-related disorders, individually and collectively understood. 5. Tanpınar dictates a postscript to his assistant in the process of editing the serialized novel into a book, although this letter does not appear in most editions of the novel. It is a letter from Halit the Regulator to Dr Ramiz, explaining that the novel is in fact a mad text by Hayri who is an institutionalized patient suffering from paranoia.

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̇ 6. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (Istanbul: Dergah, 2010), 21; Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, Alexander Dawe and Maureen Freely, trans. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2014), 18. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are from Maureen Freely’s 2014 edition. 7. The surname Ayarcı means ‘setter’ or ‘regulator.’ Referred to as Halit the Regulator from here on. 8. Building a mosque used to be a form of public service, similar to building a school or a hospital today. It was regarded as a wealthy person’s civic duty and social service to one’s community. Mosques were social centers in neighborhoods, with a small library, a muvakkithane, a soup kitchen, a fountain, a school, and other facilities depending on size. 9. Omitted in the 2014 translation in English. 10. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 25; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 22. 11. The Turkish term aksak is primarily used in Ottoman musical theory, means “limping,” “stumbling,” or “slumping,” that is, irregular. It designates a rhythmic system in which pieces or sequences are based on the uninterrupted reiteration of a matrix, which results from the juxtaposition of rhythmic cells based on the alternation of binary and ternary quantities, as in 2+3, 2+2+3, 2+3+3, and so on. Put simply, it creates a limping rhythm, where the tempo of two stretches into three lingers longer than a regular rhythm, a case of chronostasis. See Reinhard, Stokes, and Reinhard, “Turkey” for its use in Ottoman music. 12. Mehmet Kaplan, “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Güzel Eserin Üç Temeli,” in Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar, Abdullah Uçman ̇ ̇ and Handan Inci, eds. (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002), 175; Mehmet Kaplan, “Kitap Hakkında Birkaç Söz,” in Yahya Kemal, by Ahmet Hamdi ̇ Tanpınar (Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1982), 6. Also see Kaplan’s review of Tanpınar’s poems compiled one year before his death, Mehmet Kaplan, “Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda,” in Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar ̇ Üzerine Yazılar (Istanbul: Kitabevi, n.d.), 62–68. ̇ 13. See Nazım Irem, “Turkish Conservative Modernism: Birth of a Nationalist Quest for Cultural Renewal,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34, no. 1 (2002): 87–112; Hasan Bülent Kahraman, “Yitirilmemiş Zamanın Ardında: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Muhafazakar Modernliğin Düzlemi,” in Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar, ̇ ̇ Abdullah Uçman and Handan Inci, eds. (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002), 600–633; Metin Çınar, “Dergah Dergisi,” in Modern Türkiye’de Siyasî ̇ ̇ Düşünce: Muhafazakarlık (Istanbul: Iletiş im, 2001), 85–91; Beşir Ayvazoğlu, “Yahya Kemal,” in Modern Türkiye’de Siyasî Düşünce: ̇ ̇ Muhafazakarlık (Istanbul: Iletiş im, 2001), 416–438. Also see Pamuk,

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“Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Türk Modernizmi”; Göknar, “Ottoman Past and Turkish Future: Ambivalence in A. H. Tanpınar’s Those Outside the Scene”; Berkiz Berksoy, “Bir Entelektüel Olarak Tanpınar,” DOĞU BATI, no. 37 (2006): 111–131. 14. Hasan Bülent Kahraman, for instance, in his informative article on Tanpınar, has focused on the individual versus society debate of the time (fert cemiyet tartışması), drawing mostly from the author’s diaries, personal letters, and prose. Kahraman, “Yitirilmemiş Zamanın Ardında.” 15. See Nergis Ertürk, “Modernity and its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 123, no. 1 (2008): 41; Nergis Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey,(Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Gürbilek, “Tanpınar’da Ophelia, Su ve Rüyalar” and its translation in this issue, “Dried Spring, Blind Mirror, Lost East: Ophelia, Water, and Dreams”; Nurdan Gürbilek, “Tanpınar’da Hasret, Benjamin’de Dehşet,” in Benden Önce Bir Başkası: Denemeler ̇ (Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 2011). 16. For a compelling psychoanalytic reading of the novel, see Süha Oğuzertem, “Hasta Saatler, Bozuk Sıhhatler: Enstitü Sorununa Babasız Bir Yaklaşım,” in Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar, ̇ ̇ Abdullah Uçman and Handan Inci, eds. (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002), 460–77; Süha Oğuzertem, “Unset Saats, Upset Sihhats: A Fatherless Approach to The Clock-Setting Institute,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 19, no. 2 (1995): 3–18. For other nuanced readings of the novel, see Feldman, “Time, Memory and Autobiography in The Clock-Setting Institute of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar”; Parla, “Makine Bedenler, Esir Ruhlar: Türk Romanında Araba Sevdası”; Parla, Don Kişot’tan Bugüne Roman, 301–305; and Bayramoğlu, Huzursuz Huzur ve Tekinsiz Saatler. 17. The single-party regime of the Republican period ends in 1946 and, with the election of the populist Democratic Party to the government in 1950, the cultural policies of the state change dramatically. 18. Tanpınar was a diligent reader of French symbolists as well as British modernist fiction. In addition to his fiction and poetry, we can see the presence of Euro-modernism in his lectures. See Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, ̇ Edebiyat Dersleri, Gözde Sağnak and Ali F.  Karamanlıoğlu, (Istanbul: YKY, 2002). 19. The author writes, “it is strange that they read my works superficially and both sides decide on it accordingly. According to the right, I tend to the left due to my engaged works, Mind at Peace and Five Cities. According to the left, because I talk about call to prayers, Turkish music, or our own history, I am on the right, although not a racist.” Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar,

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̇ Enginün, ( Istanbul: ̇ Günlüklerin Işığında Tanpınar’la Başbaşa, ed. Inci Dergâh Yayınları, 2007). 20. Berna Moran reads the novel as a complex satire and an allegory. Moran, “Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü,” 1978. For a reading of the novel as a satire, see Gürsel Aytaç, “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın Çağ ve Toplum Hicvi: Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü,” in Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar ̇ ̇ Üzerine Yazılar, Abdullah Uçman and Handan Inci, eds. (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002). 21. See Kaplan, Yücel, Tecer, and Aytaç’s interpretations of the novel in ̇ Abdullah Uçman and Handan Inci, eds., Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: ̇ Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002). Aliş in Sema Uğurcan, ed., Doğumunun 100. Yılında Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ̇ (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2003). Also see note 16 above. 22. Although Mishra is not an expert in Turkish literature, his introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel has an indisputable impact on Tanpınar’s reception abroad. Moreover, by reinstating the locally prevalent East/West interpretations, the introduction serves as a good example of the ‘classic’ reading of Tanpınar’s work for the purposes of this chapter. 23. Mishra, “Introduction.” 24. The first half of the novel takes place during the Second Constitutional Era (1908–1920). Hayri mocks the cheering crowd for celebrating the many declarations of “freedom” as it never stays for long. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 21–22; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 18–19. 25. See note 2 above. For the conventional reception of the author in Turkey, ̇ also see Turan Alptekin’s, Inci Enginün’s, and Orhan Okay’s works on Tanpınar. Also see Hece’s 2001 special issue on Tanpınar, Hüseyin Su, ed., “Tanpınar Özel Sayısı,” Hece, no. 61 (2001). 26. See Kahraman, “Yitirilmemiş Zamanın Ardında”; Göknar, “Ottoman Past and Turkish Future: Ambivalence in Tanpınar’s Those Outside the Scene”; Oğuz Demiralp, Kutup noktası: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın yapıtı ̇ üzerine eleştirel deneme (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1993). 27. Tanpınar, “Medeniyet değiştirmesi ve iç insan” in Yaşadığım Gibi. 28. See Kaplan, “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar”; Berna Moran, “Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü,” in Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar, ̇ ̇ Abdullah Uçman and Handan Inci, eds. (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002), 274–290. 29. Colletta, Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel, 3. The satiric mode is arguably present in the novel and it has been explored in a number of ways by Turkish critics. However, I drop the term ‘satire’

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here, as I read the mimicry of modernization and over-rationalization in the novel not as corrective, but rather as subversive and derisive. 30. Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, 125. 31. In addition to his own well-known master–apprentice relationship with poet Yahya Kemal, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar shares many traits with his ̇ fictional anti-hero Hayri Irdal. Particularly the coffeehouse segment in the novel has curious biographical details. Tanpınar used to frequent a coffeehouse, a gathering place of writers and intellectuals, quite like the one in the novel, called Nisuaz, where everyone was given a nickname. Reportedly the author’s nickname was Kırtıpil, a funny-sounding word ̇ that means trivial and petty. Hayri Irdal was also given the nickname öksüz (orphan). Not only paired by their names Hamdi and Halit, Tanpınar himself also suffered from financial problems all his life, and he was also reportedly a gambler, like his fictional double. He was also a bureaucrat brieflyand served in the parliament for one term, according to his diaries, due to his financial troubles. 32. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 128; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 136. 33. Ibid., 23; Ibid., 20. 34. Male circumcision is a coming-of-age ritual, typically performed before puberty around the age of ten in Ottoman and modern Turkish culture. It marks the formation of social and sexual identity. A watch is a common gift for a circumcised child, who is now expected to manage his time like an adult. The religious connotation here is about being able to follow the time for prayers like an adult. 35. O zamana kadar azar, tekdir belası saatlere yalnız dışlarından bakmakla yaşamıştım. The translation of this sentence is mine. The Freely translation omits the personification of timepieces in the text. Compare “Up to that point, I had seen only the exteriors of timepieces, fearing I would be scolded if I looked inside.” Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 29; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 27. 36. Ibid., 29; Ibid., 27. ̇ 37. On Bergson’s influence on Tanpınar’s work, see Nazım Irem, “Bergson and Politics: Ottoman-Turkish Encounters with Innovation,” The European Legacy 16, no. 7 (December 1, 2011): 873–882; Özen Nergis Dolcerocca, “Time Regulation Institutes: Time in Modern Literary and Cultural Imagination (1889–1960)” (Unpublished Dissertation, New York, NY, New York University, 2016). 38. See Samoyault, La Montre Cassée for a literary and symbolic analysis of the ‘watch’ trope in film and literature.

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39. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 52, 57; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 51, 57. 40. Ibid., 190; Ibid., 200. 41. Parla, “Makine Bedenler, Esir Ruhlar: Türk Romanında Araba Sevdası.” 152. 42. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 15. 43. Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 12. 44. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 12. The English translation here is by Ender  Gürol, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute: A Novel, trans. Ender Gürol (Madison, Wis.: Turko-Tatar Press, 2001), 36. 45. Ibid., 235; Ibid., 250. 46. Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. 47. Ibid., 243; Ibid., 255. 48. See Cobley’s Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency Ideology and Fiction for analysis of logic of efficiency in modernist novels such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), and E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). 49. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 216; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 229. 50. Hartog, Régimes d’historicité, 12. 51. Ibid., 15. 52. Ibid., 28. 53. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 207; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 219. 54. Ibid., 294; Ibid., 313. 55. Ibid., 295; Ibid., 314. 56. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 234; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 249. 57. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 247; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 263. 58. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 249; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 265. 59. This genre was memorably employed in Charlie Chaplin’s cinema. It also has been taken up by literary works. See Justus Nieland, Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), and Michael North, Machine-Age Comedy, Modernist Literature & Culture (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 60. Henri Bergson, Le rire, 14th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France— PUF, 2012).

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61. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 184–86; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 196–196. 62. Ibid., 225; Ibid., 239. 63. Ibid., 230; Ibid., 245. 64. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–252. 65. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 218; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 232. 66. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 221; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 234. 67. Kinds of makam in traditional Ottoman music. In the Sufi teaching, each makam represents and conveys a particular psychological and spiritual state. See Reinhard, Stokes, and Reinhard, “Turkey.” 68. See Chap. 2 for the discussion on music as a metaphor for duration in Bergson. 69. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 19; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 16. 70. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 131; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 139. 71. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 28; translation mine. 72. Tanpınar, 29; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 26. 73. Ertürk reads this metaphor as a cut text: “The Time Regulation Institute must be said to preserve such “cut” text in its incomprehensibility, without filling in its missing parts in the end (or along the way),” Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey (118).  Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 40; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 38. 74. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 137; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 146. 75. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 99; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 104. 76. Whether Dr Ramiz is right in his Oedipal diagnosis is up for debate. According to Oğuzertem, there is more to Hayri’s father complex than what his analyst recognizes. See Oğuzertem, “Hasta Saatler, Bozuk Sıhhatler: Enstitü Sorununa Babasız Bir Yaklaşım.” 77. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 104; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 109. 78. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 114; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 121. 79. Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. XXIII, 1953, 265.

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80. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 49; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 48. 81. My translation. The aksak reference is omitted in the Freely translation. 82. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 98; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 103. 83. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 41; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 40. 84. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 346; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 370. 85. My translation. The adjective gayritabii literally means non-natural. The Freely translation prefers “original,” possibly interpreting its meaning as ‘extraordinary,’ rather than as ‘anomaly,’ which is the correct form here as the building is supposed to lose its ‘essence.’ 86. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 53; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 52–53. 87. Railings are a recurrent image in Tanpınar’s writing, particularly in the city. It used to be a common practice to surround tombs, graveyards, fountains, and mosques with iron railings in Ottoman urban culture. In Yaşadıg ̆ım Gibi, he notes that in the eighteenth century “railings becomes an art on its accord in Istanbul, transforming and taking over the urban landscape… they gradually became an art of talking without any meaning within a century, just like the old way of writing, but in a different way” [parmaklık, bu devirden sonra müstakil bir sanat gibi inkişaf edecek şehri, dış manzarasında yer yer, yavaş yavaş zaptedecektir… Muhakkak olan bir taraf varsa, yavaş yavaş parmaklığın tıpkı yazı gibi, fakat yazıdan başka bir yolda, bir asır içinde söylemeden konuşan bir sanat haline girmesidir] (146). 88. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 138; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 147. 89. Ibid., 34; Ibid., 32. 90. Ibid., 34; Ibid., 32. 91. In the days of the Ottoman Empire, nothing more clearly exhibited the resolve of the state and social elites to introduce Western-style modernization than the public clock towers, and the muvakkithane that Sultan Abdülhamit II ordered to be built in large cities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. For time reforms in the Late Ottoman Empire, see the recent study by Avner Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 92. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 31; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 28. 93. Ibid., 31–32; Ibid., 29. 94. Ibid., 32; Ibid., 30.

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95. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 35; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 33–34. 96. For a compelling analysis of the novel’s language in terms of mechanization and language politics in Turkey see “Time Regulation Institute: Dwelling in a Mechanized Language” in Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, 111–134. 97. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 33; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 31. 98. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 65; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 66. 99. Moretti, The Way of the World, 79. 100. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 40; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 39. 101. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 16–17; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 13. 102. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 174; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 184. 103. Marcel Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé, Texte intégral, A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust; 7 (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). 104. Karagöz and Hacivat is the title of a traditional Turkish shadow play that is based on theatrical slapstick humor. Ortaoyunu is an improvisational theater common in squares or coffeehouses in the Ottoman Empire. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 128. 105. Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, 123. 106. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 298; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 318. 107. See Eric Hayot, “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time.” 108. Henri Bergson Matter and Memory. p.159. 109. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 53; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 52. 110. Henri Bergson, L’évolution Créatrice, ed. Frédéric Worms, 12° edizione (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France—PUF, 2013). 111. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 52; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 51. 112. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 52. Emphasis and translation are mine. 113. Tanpınar, 139; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 147. 114. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 85; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 88.

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115. See Bayramoğlu, Huzursuz Huzur ve Tekinsiz Saatler; Hakan Sazyek, ̇ kisi Bağlamında Tanpınar’ın Saatleri Ayarlama “Grotesk-Yabancılaşma Iliş Enstitüsü,” Electronic Turkish Studies 8, no. 4 (2013). 116. Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” Illuminations, 60. 117. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2013). 118. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 27–28; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 2014, 25.

References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised Edition. London; New York: Verso, 2006. Aytaç, Gürsel. “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın Çağ ve Toplum Hicvi: Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü.” In Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar, edited by ̇ ̇ Abdullah Uçman and Handan Inci. Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002. Ayvazoğlu, Beşir. “Yahya Kemal.” In Modern Türkiye’de Siyasî Düşünce: ̇ ̇ Muhafazakarlık, 416–38. Istanbul: Iletiş im, 2001. Bayramoğlu, Zeynep. Huzursuz Huzur ve Tekinsiz Saatler: Ahmet Hamdi ̇ Tanpınar Üzerine Tezler. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2007. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Bergson, Henri. Le rire. 14th ed. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France— PUF, 2012. ———. L’évolution Créatrice. Edited by Frédéric Worms. 12° edizione. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France—PUF, 2013. Berksoy, Berkiz. “Bir Entelektüel Olarak Tanpınar.” DOĞU BATI, no. 37 (2006): 111–31. Çınar, Metin. “Dergah Dergisi.” In Modern Türkiye’de Siyasî Düşünce: ̇ ̇ Muhafazakarlık, 85–91. Istanbul: Iletiş im, 2001. Cobley, Evelyn. Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency Ideology and Fiction. Toronto [Ont.]: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Demiralp, Oğuz. Kutup noktası: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın yapıtı üzerine eleştirel ̇ deneme. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 1993. Dolcerocca, Özen Nergis. “Time Regulation Institutes: Time in Modern Literary and Cultural Imagination (1889–1960).” Unpublished Dissertation, New York University, 2016. Ertürk, Nergis. Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. Oxford, UK; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

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———. “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 123, no. 1 (2008): 41. Feldman, Walter. “Time, Memory and Autobiography in The Clock-Setting Institute of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.” Edebiyat: Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures, no. 8.1 (1998): 37–61. Freud, Sigmund. “Constructions in Analysis.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, XXIII:257–69. London: Vintage, 1953. Göknar, Erdağ M. “Ottoman Past and Turkish Future: Ambivalence in A. H. Tanpınar’s Those Outside the Scene.” South Atlantic Quarterly 102, no. 2/3 (2003): 647–61. Gürbilek, Nurdan. “Tanpınar’da Hasret, Benjamin’de Dehşet.” In Benden Önce ̇ Bir Başkası: Denemeler. Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 2011. ———. “Tanpınar’da Ophelia, Su ve Rüyalar.” In Kurumuş Pınar, Kör Ayna, ̇ Kayıp Şark, 99–138. Istanbul: Metis, 2012. Hartog, François. Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps. Paris: Seuil, 2003. Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture.” In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New  York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2013. ̇ Irem, Nazım. “Bergson and Politics: Ottoman-Turkish Encounters with Innovation.” The European Legacy 16, no. 7 (December 1, 2011): 873–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2011.626187. ———. “Turkish Conservative Modernism: Birth of a Nationalist Quest for Cultural Renewal.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 34, no. 1 (2002): 87–112. Justus Nieland. Feeling Modern: The Eccentricities of Public Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Kahraman, Hasan Bülent. “Yitirilmemiş Zamanın Ardında: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Muhafazakar Modernliğin Düzlemi.” In Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: ̇ Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar, edited by Abdullah Uçman and Handan Inci, ̇ 600–633. Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002. Kaplan, Mehmet. “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Güzel Eserin Üç Temeli.” In Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar, edited by Abdullah Uçman ̇ ̇ and Handan Inci, 174–76. Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002. ———. “Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda.” In Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar ̇ Üzerine Yazılar, 62–68. Cağaloğlu, Istanbul: Kitabevi, n.d. ———. “Kitap Hakkında Birkaç Söz.” In Yahya Kemal, by Ahmet Hamdi ̇ Tanpınar, 5–9. Istanbul: Dergah Yayınları, 1982. Lisa Colletta. Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

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Michael North. Machine-Age Comedy. Modernist Literature & Culture. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Mishra, Pankaj. “Introduction.” In The Time Regulation Institute, vii–xx. New York, New York: Penguin Classics, 2014. Moran, Berna. “Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü.” Birikim 37 (March 1978): 44–55. ———. “Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü.” In Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar ̇ Üzerine Yazılar, edited by Abdullah Uçman and Handan Inci, 274–90. ̇ Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. London; New York: Verso, 2000. Oğuzertem, Süha. “Hasta Saatler, Bozuk Sıhhatler: Enstitü Sorununa Babasız Bir Yaklaşım.” In Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar Üzerine Yazılar, edited by ̇ ̇ Abdullah Uçman and Handan Inci, 460–77. Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002. ———. “Unset Saats, Upset Sihhats: A Fatherless Approach to The Clock-Setting Institute.” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 19, no. 2 (1995): 3–18. Pamuk, Orhan. “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Türk Modernizmi.” Defter 23, no. Bahar (1995): 31–45. ̇ ̇ Parla, Jale. Don Kişot’tan Bugüne Roman. Istanbul: Iletiş im, 2001. ———. “Makine Bedenler, Esir Ruhlar: Türk Romanında Araba Sevdası.” Toplum ve Bilim 96, no. Spring 2003 (n.d.): 146–65. Proust, Marcel. Le Temps Retrouvé. Texte intégral. A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust; 7. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. Reinhard, Kurt, Martin Stokes, and Ursula Reinhard. “Turkey.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 29 Aug. 2023. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/ omo-9781561592630-e-0000044912. Samoyault, Tiphaine. La Montre Cassée. Lagrasse: Verdier, 2004. ̇ kisi Bağlamında Tanpınar’ın Saatleri Sazyek, Hakan. “Grotesk-Yabancılaşma Iliş Ayarlama Enstitüsü.” Electronic Turkish Studies 8, no. 4 (2013). Su, Hüseyin, ed. “Tanpınar Özel Sayısı.” Hece, no. 61 (2001). Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi. Edebiyat Dersleri. Edited by Gözde Sağnak and Ali ̇ F. Karamanlıoğlu. Istanbul: YKY, 2002. ̇ ———. Günlüklerin Işıgı̆ nda Tanpınar’la Başbaşa. Edited by Inci Enginün. ̇ Istanbul: Dergâh Yayınları, 2007. ̇ ———. Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü. Istanbul: Dergah, 2010. ———. The Time Regulation Institute. Translated by Alexander Dawe and Maureen Freely. New York: Penguin Classics, 2014. ———. The Time Regulation Institute: A Novel. Translated by Ender Gürol. Madison, Wis.: Turko-Tatar Press, 2001. ̇ ———. Yaşadığım Gibi. Istanbul: Dergâh, 2006. ̇ Uçman, Abdullah, and Handan Inci, eds. Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda: Tanpınar ̇ Üzerine Yazılar. Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2002.

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̇ Uğurcan, Sema, ed. Doğumunun 100. Yılında Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2003. Wishnitzer, Avner. Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Hayot, Eric, “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time”, in Mark Wollaeger, and Matt Eatough (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms, Oxford Handbooks (2012; online edn, Oxford Academic, 18 Sept. 2012), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195338904. 013.0006.

CHAPTER 6

The Clockwork Language: Temporal and Linguistic Modernity in Robert Walser’s The Assistant

Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly. (The Third Man, 1949) (Harry Lime [Orson Welles], The Third Man, 1949)

6.1   Introduction Harry Lime’s justification for his actions may be a cynical critique directed at post-Second World War Europe, but it certainly touches upon the well-­ established contrast between chaos and order, inscribed in the histories of different national cultures. The image of the Swiss cuckoo clock is a comic embodiment of a regulating and standardizing force, measured against the chaos and instability in Italy that facilitated creativity. Welles’ satirical contrast between the chaotic yet creative and the orderly yet ordinary is not far from Robert Walser’s view of the bourgeois workspace and the standardization of experience in modernity. The Swiss author in his 1908 novel The Assistant (Der Gehülfe) tells the story of a monotonous and dull

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 Ö. N. Dolcerocca, Comparative Modernism and Poetics of Time, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35201-0_6

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life under the shadow of a clock. The protagonist, Joseph Marti, is expected to function like a cuckoo clock: a rational, lifeless but dynamic automaton, a mechanism for producing formulaic correspondences. The novel thereby traces modern life and its concomitant depersonalizing and dehumanizing effects, including linguistic modernization that results in a clockwork language emptied of its ambiguity and chaos. In that sense, Walser proves Welles right: it is impossible to sustain difference, aesthetic or otherwise, in a clerkly language. In the previous chapter we have seen how chronopathology is a counter-­ image to the social, temporal, and narratological models of progress, manifest in the characters’ temporal disorders, such as developmental lags, obsessive repetitions, or tic-like compulsions. While such temporal irregularities result from an overflowing and chaotic multiplicity of temporalities in Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute, time in Robert Walser’s The Assistant seems far duller, solitary, and subdued under the oppressive and omnipresent singularity of the capitalist time regime. Chronicling Joseph Marti’s service as a clerk at engineer-cum-inventor Herr Tobler’s household, the novel traces a banal workaday world of correspondences, paperwork, and sales figures. While the master–servant dialectic between Tobler and Joseph has striking parallels to Hayri’s subservience to Halit the Regulator, Joseph’s story lacks the proliferation of disparate forms of time and multiple benefactors/employers. My aim in this chapter is to trace Walser’s narrative, thematic, and theoretical treatment of time and temporality in The Assistant in a historically contextualized comparative perspective. After foregrounding the novelist’s experiments with narrative chronology, I show how the singular and empty time of the protagonist’s clerkly work correlates with the homogenizing force of capitalist modernity. The novel particularly resonates with the critique of the commodification of labor, in which human labor and action are absorbed into the time regime of speed, efficiency, and instrumental rationality. Crisis of time in the novel is reflected in the time of the clerk as non-permanent, repetitive, and belated, which doubles in crisis of language. Caught up in the temporality of repetition and absolute predictability of an ‘amanuensis,’ Joseph is locked up in mechanical, iterative, and unoriginal utterances.1 This rationalized and instrumentalized language marginalizes past forms as inassimilable differences. Relating this linguistic alienation to the bourgeois information age and to German language

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reforms, I argue that The Assistant is a unique text which joins modernist explorations of temporality, authorly writing, and authenticity with questions of mechanized time and the language of capitalist modernity.

6.2   The Assistant During his lifetime Walser’s name was known only to few, and it was only six years after his death that The Assistant was published in a paperback edition, with the promotional phrase on the cover Kafka liebte dieses Buch (Kafka loved this book).2 Whether Kafka had in fact read the novel is unclear (although he did read and admire Walser), but the unconventional work of the Swiss author was certainly in need of the Czech prodigy’s symbolic capital for its promotion by the Berlin publishing industry.3 In a 1908 critical review of the novel, W. G. Sebald reports, a critic contrasts the insubstantiality of Walser’s novel with the more solid earthiness of the autochthonous Swiss writers and Heimat poets of the time.4 In contrast to these Heimatlich-Regional writers,5 however, Walser not only criticizes contemporary nationalist discourse on military order and mobilization in The Assistant, but he also keeps linguistic Helvetisms to a minimum by writing in High German, a significant choice to which we will return later. The lack of national character in Walser’s writing, along with its alleged insubstantiality has placed the writer in the peripheries of the cultural field, and of the literary establishment within the German-speaking intellectual milieu. Writing in the early twentieth century, Walser engaged in modernist experimentation in a wide range of genres that include novels, short stories, plays, and his signature “Microgramme,” or microscripts. Walser’s biographical details have supported this peripheral perception of the writer during his lifetime, with his solitary and transient lifestyle, his family history of mental illness, and his own institutionalization from 1929 until his death in 1956. Walser’s work has enjoyed recent critical interest since the early 2000s, thanks to new translations of his works and the opening of the Robert Walser Zentrum in Bern. The Assistant is from many aspects a Zeitroman, tracing daily life in Switzerland in the early twentieth century in parallel to the life story of its author. While autobiographical details can be found in all of Walser’s works, The Assistant is particularly pronounced in this aspect and registers Walser’s experience as a young worker in Zurich. His biographer Robert Mächler characterizes the author of the Zurich period as der werdende

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Dichter (the expectant poet). In these approximately eight years stricken with poverty and uncertainty, Walser lives at seventeen different addresses and works many odd jobs mostly for short periods,6 including posts in an accident insurance company; a credit union; a machine factory; a household; a bank; and an inventor’s office. The dullness and disillusionment Walser experiences in these newly emerging office jobs find expression in his novel, The Assistant, which is almost entirely based on his experience in the short-term office work during his “expectant” period—right before the young Swiss clerk becomes a published author in Berlin in 1906. In the spring of 1903, Walser, just like his fictional double Joseph Marti who happens to carry the maiden name of Walser’s mother, is briefly employed in an elastics factory, followed by a short tour of duty in the military in the Füsilier-Rekrutenschule in Bern. He is then employed as a secretary to an inventor, Karl Duber-Grässle, in Wädenswil from July 1903 to early 1904, a period that roughly corresponds to Joseph’s employment time at the Tobler House in the fictional town of Bärenswil. The mystery surrounding the origins of the manuscript and its book history, according to Karl Wagner, is still unresolved. Walser, immediately after publishing his first novel Geschwister Tanner (1907), writes a novel called The Assistant, an entirely different work from the 1908 novel. Reportedly a story about gambling in Asia, the monograph is rejected by his publisher Bruno Cassirer, and today the manuscript is considered lost. The origins of the second novel published as The Assistant are also unknown. Walser claims to have written it in a mere six-week period, as an entry for a literary competition, which is also rejected. Berlin publisher Bruno Cassirer, however, agrees to publish the second Assistant, which is today considered to be the author’s most successful work.7 With the ghost of the ‘lost’ manuscript of the original Der Gehülfe lingering over the published one, the history of the novel, like its protagonist’s copywriting, is merely a subsequential copy shadowed by the sign of the original.

6.3  The Narrative Time One can hardly speak of an engaging plot line in The Assistant. The novel covers a period of six months and is mostly confined to a small fictional town called Bärenswil—modeled on the Swiss Wädenswill, a half industrial and agricultural town on Lake Zurich. It records a young office employee’s involvement in engineer Tobler’s invention projects. It is based on a master–servant structure between the deranged, incompetent, and

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arrogant entrepreneur and his clerk. The assistant, Joseph Marti, assigned to the post by “the marvelous Copyists Bureau for the Unemployed,” works for six months in the luxury of the Abendstern (Evening Star) Villa in the countryside, without any compensation other than the discreet charms of the bourgeois household, with good meals, exquisite tobacco smoking, and leisurely swims in the lake. Joseph comes from a poor neighborhood in the city (possibly Zurich) and finds himself in a position of uncomfortable intimacy with the Toblers, whose finances are hurting despite their luxurious lifestyle. Engineer Tobler, who used to be a lowranking engineer in a factory, now hopes to make a fortune as the inventor of various ‘miscalculated’ inventions such as the “Advertising Clock” and the “Marksman’s Vending Machine.” Tobler’s financial problems worsen each day, while the family celebrates the national holiday with a lavish party and continue the costly work on the garden grotto. The novel follows Joseph’s employment from spring until winter, when the assistant quits his job and leaves the Tobler house, now ruined by debts. On the first day of the new year, the assistant walks away from the Evening Star Villa with his predecessor Wirsich. Apart from the Toblers’ parties, and Joseph’s visits to the city and his two-day-long detention, The Assistant is an uneventful novel about a young clerk who is not special, unusual, or interesting in any way. On the diegetic level, the protagonist’s day typically involves going downstairs, having breakfast, writing letters, running errands for the Toblers, and heading back home, with occasional leisure-time activities. Repetitive routines and the uneventful quotidian life that permeate the narrative time is possibly the reason why his contemporaries accused Walser of “insubstantiality.” Walser balances the lack of event-centered plot with narrative digressions, mostly in the form of Joseph’s memories, depictions of the inner workings of his mind, and lengthy descriptions by the narrator. Such proliferation of narrative deviations, freed from the constraints of any teleological framework, characterizes all of Walser’s work. Critic Samuel Frederick interprets Walser’s passion for walking, in his stories and in real life, as a means of storytelling: a narration that does not progress along a direct route, but meanders about, taking detours, digressing from the path, or retracing steps.8 The unbalance between story time and discourse time, in which the latter dominates the former, upsets the progressive rhythm of linear storytelling.

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The novel’s narrative characteristic is also reflected in the use of temporal markers. The very first sentence, for instance, pairs the general marker Eines Morgens (one morning) with the specific and punctual um acht Uhr (at eight o’clock). The punctual and mechanical temporal divisions, such as specific references to date and time throughout the novel, are coupled with non-specific time markers. The first two weeks are diligently noted with temporal markers in the novel, with specific days, from Monday to Sunday. Almost all days are accounted for by the narrator. These two weeks also cover the first half of the narrative time in the novel. After the third week, the time markers get less specific, such as “early in the week” and “the next Sunday,”, with evenly spaced generalized references to the passage of fictional time. Toward the end of the novel, the only time references that remain are to Christmas and the New Year’s Eve. Thus, from the promise of a punctually organized time of narration, and of Joseph’s story as the newly employed assistant, the novel gradually moves into an unspecified and indeterminate time of being in limbo, as the Tobler house collapses deeper into debt and ruin. The Assistant experiments with narrative chronology, not necessarily in favor of anachronisms or fragmentations, but by foregrounding digressions in long durations, told in long single paragraphs without interruptions. This is particularly evident in the narration of dreams, memories, and observations. Joseph’s memories regress step by step into his past, starting with his most recent experience as tenant at Frau Weiss’, then moving on to his military service, a memory triggered by his encounter with a former comrade, followed by his memories of working at the elastics factory, with a brief detour to the military time, and finally, back—as in back in narrative time but forward in Joseph’s time—to the beginning of the novel. This cyclical narration tracking Joseph’s story back and forth is told in one long uninterrupted segment with no paragraph divisions. This section captures, in Bergson’s terms, the “immediate data” of the protagonist’s consciousness, which becomes a signature modernist technique more than a decade after The Assistant was written. At the end of this protracted section, the narrator returns to the time of military service, oddly told in the present tense: “Now comes a railway journey through the vernally enchanted countryside, and then there is nothing left to know” (Jetzt kommt eine Eisenbahnfahrt durch ein frühlingverzaubertes Land, und dann weiß man nichts mehr, denn von da an ist man nur noch eine Nummer). The narration then suddenly jumps back to the past tense, “for eight weeks things continued in this way; an eternity it wasn’t, but

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sometimes it felt like one,” and concludes with “for what does any of this matter now that he is living in the home of Herr Tobler” (Acht Wochen lang dauert das so, es ist keine Ewigkeit, aber bisweilen scheint es ihm ­eine./ Doch was soll das alles, da er doch jetzt in Herrn Toblers Hause lebt).9 This segment creates an elliptical digression, with tense changes from past to present. It seems aimless and without any intention to join it back into the unity of the storyline. The eight weeks in military service, introduced with the time marker jetzt, which then refers to the present time of the story at the Tobler home, not only confuses the “now” of the narrative time, but it is also used as a digression, acknowledged as such by the narrator: “for what does any of this matter.” Instead of linear causal action sequences, Walser uses ellipses, long durations, repetitions, and gradation. The novel is populated with commentaries, asides, and thoughts, along with sudden shifts of focus to nature and the appreciation of its details to the point of their fetishization. Walter Benjamin, in his 1929 essay on Robert Walser, calls this overgrowth of detours “language running wild,” or a wild proliferation of language (Sprachverwilderung), accurately using organic imagery of nature and growth, which is a major inspiration in Walser’s writing.10 “This chaste (keusche) and artful clumsiness (Ungeschick) in all spheres of language,” Benjamin writes, trips Walser up in “Bacchus-­ like garlands of language” (bacchisch mit Sprachgirlanden). Walser’s writing is marked by linguistic excess that results in “clumsy” improvisations, seemingly casual progression of fictional time, and a rambling quality of style, with no chapter divisions or obvious breaks in the narrative continuity. This “garrulousness” (Geschwätzigkeit), as Benjamin calls it, leads one of the leading literary critics of the time to pronounce The Assistant a novel “with no content” (ohne Inhalt) and with “much boring manner” (viel langweilige Manier).11 Ironically, what the critic perceives as negative aspects of the novel—langweilig as boring but also as slow, langsam—are in fact the novel’s narrative strengths and its formal backbone, in which decelerations and deferments stand in contrast with the protagonist’s mechanistic time of repetition and acceleration.

6.4  The Time of the Clerk: Vorübergänglichkeit The nonlinear perpetuation of narrative movement, in the form of temporal deviations and delays in the narrative rhythm, is mirrored at the thematic and theoretical level. The Assistant portrays the inner workings of modern progress, which appear in the guise of the orderly industrial town

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of Bärenswil, of its productive industrialists and capitalists, and of technological efficiency. The novel opens with the young assistant standing at the door of the Evening Star Villa, only to be told by his irritated employer that he is two days early. From the very beginning, Joseph is out of sync with this new milieu; he is temporally off. He is yet another anti-hero, like Hayri in The Time Regulation Institute, who confesses that he has “trouble comprehending new and unfamiliar things.”12 The young assistant is inflicted with chronostasis: he prefers to slow down and appreciate the old and the overlooked, as does the narration on the diegetic level with constant digressions. He stops the clock against the encroachments of the new. The long walks in the woods and in the city, the detailed and lively depiction of swimming in the lake, the long detours of dreams and memories, all stand in contrast with his office work at the Evening Star Villa. There, Joseph’s life and sensibilities are circumscribed by servitude and docility. The hostile effects of the work-life are particularly manifest in his failure to achieve intimacy, in feelings of isolation from others and in the sense of alienation due to working under exploitative and limiting conditions. Joseph greets the new with suspicion; he resists being assimilated by the modern impulse for calibration and determination, albeit instinctively. Joseph’s time stagnates; it does not flow in the same rhythm as others. When he meets his “emancipated” friend Klara, a character based on Klara Agappai in Walser’s earlier novel Geschwister Tanner, she is surprised to see how little Joseph has changed: “how wonderfully you’ve managed to remain just the same as ever” (wie vortrefflich du es verstanden hast, der Alte zu bleiben). She calls Joseph the “eternal fugitive” (Flüchtling) and adds hurtfully, “life has neglected you a little, you see” (Dich vernachlässigt ein bißchen das Leben, hörst du). It seems that Joseph is a character whose time has stopped; it is devoid of a linear flow, of a gradual progression into a telos. While “life thrusts [others] in new directions” (das Leben wirft [andere Männer] in neue Richtungen), it passes Joseph over.13 He is an eternal fugitive, in the sense that being in time is an alienating rather than a productive and progressive condition for Joseph. Joseph is homeless in time: he experiences it as a source of constant change, uncertainty, contingency, and loss. Besides, this temporal displacement and inability to move forward reflect more than an existential anxiety. The condition of being Flüchtling also has to do with the demands of emerging work practices under industrial-capitalist production, with its process of bureaucratization in public and private offices. Peter Utz calls

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attention to Walser’s allusions to the city of Berlin in The Assistant in this regard, the capital of the German Reich which Siegfried Kracauer would later describe as the capital of the clerks. According to Utz, Walser is one of the first to depict the alienation of this upcoming social group, the nomads between the working class and the bourgeois establishment.14 The Assistant is a story on these emerging middle-class white-collar clerks, a subject Walser treats repeatedly in his early work with an underlying autobiographical drive. In Fritz Kocher’s Aufsätzen (A Schoolboy’s Diary), published four years before The Assistant, the second chapter titled “Der Commis” (assistant, errand boy) contains the schoolboy’s entry on office clerks.15 Aside from strong allegorical connotations of the copyist for literary production, an archetype that dates back to Nikolai Gogol’s Overcoat, the figure of the clerk is also the metaphor par excellence for the modern condition, which is, put in Charles Baudelaire’s terms, “ephemeral, fugitive, contingent upon occasion.”16 About Joseph’s employment in the elastics factory, the following description clearly illustrates the temporality of the office clerk: Er war dort, wie man sagt, aushilfsweise engagiert gewesen, nur so vorübergehend. Er schien mit seiner ganzen Persönlichkeit nur ein Zipfel, ein flüchtiges Anhängsel zu sein, ein nur einstweilen geschlungener Knoten. Beim Antritt der Stellung war ihm bereits lebhaft der Austritt aus derselben vor Augen getreten. … Sein Trost und sein Gedanke war die »Vorübergänglichkeit« der Stellung. Joseph had been engaged [in the elastic factory], as they say, provisionally, on a non-permanent basis. He and his entire person appeared to constitute merely a sort of frill, an ephemeral appendage, a knot tied for the nonce. When he took up this position, he already vividly saw before him the moment when he would leave again. … His main consolation, a thought constantly on his mind, was the ‘non-permanence’ of his position.17

Joseph’s precarity in his temporary employment is part of the nomadic existence generated by the capitalist mode of production. The office clerk is a nomad and a refugee displaced from one post to another; he is an “ephemeral appendage” of the larger capitalist industrial organization. Joseph is a true “temporary gentleman,”18 who suffers from the alienating and dehumanizing effects of this non-permanent existence. Vorübergänglichkeit is a term Walser coins from vorübergehen (to go by). At the linguistic level, the sense of non-permanence is expressed by this neologism and the pun on the correct word Vergänglichkeit (transience).

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Instead of using the latter, Walser coins Vorübergänglichkeit, emphasizing the act of passing by or being a thing of the past (vorübergehen/sein) in order to express the sense of non-permanence. While the bureaucratic machine is permanent, the individual bureaucrat is not. Joseph is reduced to an infinitely interchangeable and depersonalized fragment, a condition which Max Weber describes as a “single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to [the individual bureaucrat] an essentially fixed route of march.”19 In the development of modern capitalism, Weber argues, a new kind of person must exist, with special qualities and capacities for work, with a natural inclination for the new kind of rationalized labor that capitalism as a system harbors. While Weber sees these qualities as initially derived from religious resources, the office worker finds himself compelled to perform these special qualities and capacities for work. Even among the technical school pupils, Joseph used to be “hanging by a thread,” he reports, “just a button that no one took the trouble to sew back on again… his existence was nothing more than a hand-me-down jacket, a suit that didn’t quite fit” (der nur lose hing, den man gar nicht mehr festzunähen sich abmühte, da man zum voraus wußte, daß der Rock doch nicht lange getragen werde).20 The sartorial metaphor foregrounds the sense of alienation in mechanized existence. Being a clerk is a costume, a performance; Joseph is a clerk-puppet with essentially fixed qualities and performances. While the administrative machine demands speed and efficiency, Joseph is plagued with the temporal disorder of developmental lag or immaturity. Of his former position at the elastics factory, Joseph admits that even the apprentice was “above” him. He had to seek the advice of this apprentice, “who wasn’t even fully grown yet” (unausgewachsenen). The adult-child Joseph is paradoxically unable to follow the not-yet-grown’s pace and productivity. Joseph is unable to grow up; he lags behind linear chronologies; his time is at a standstill. He reports that he performs his work absentmindedly (kopflos) and that he appears to have “lost track of many absolutely essential bits of knowledge” (ihm mancherlei durchaus notwendige Kenntnisse abhanden gekommen waren). He adds: “certain things that other people were able to assimilate at astonishing speed took so strangely long to sink into his skull” (Gewisse, für andere Menschen erstaunlich leicht zu erfassende Dinge prägten sich ihm so merkwürdig schwer ein).21 Joseph is either too late or too early, always just about to be rendered obsolete by the rhythm of modern society. He fails to adjust to the demands of the modern age and to the professional life. Performing his work

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kopflos—which may mean both ‘headless[ly]’ and ‘in panic’—he is outside the temporal order of work and efficiency. Some “absolutely essential” knowledge required for business-like competence remains a mystery to Joseph, while others learn it at an astonishing speed. Trying to live up to the overwhelming speed in mechanization of experience, Joseph keeps copying, typing, calculating, and planning, albeit anxiously and absent-mindedly. With respect to the demands of modern life, Joseph has “fallen behind in life,” he observes (zurückgeblieben im Leben).22 The term Zurückgeblieben means both falling behind, or belatedness, and mental (or physical) retardation. Joseph repeatedly speaks of feeling small and inferior; the word dumm occurs frequently to convey the condition of being inescapably late, lagging behind the time of the others around him, not to mention the anxiety of inauthenticity and alienation in the Marxian sense. Estranged and contrived, the tardy clerk considers himself an “impostor,” with “mental indolence” and an “empty head,” who merely puts on an act. For survival, Joseph becomes devoted to efficiency, performing his duties with unwavering dedication to the point of ridicule. Yet, in reality, he is no more interested in the perfect execution of his tasks than his employer is in what he sells. He mostly copies down letters and ads for the inventor’s affairs, typing out the language of business, technology, and marketing he does not understand. He merely repeats and reproduces the absence of meaning, the authorial voice of capitalist modernity.

6.5  The Advertising Clock As a copying clerk, Joseph is a precarious presence in the Tobler enterprise, while the employer Herr Tobler ostensibly possesses the authorial voice of businessmen, inventors, entrepreneurs, or any practice that is part of the culture of speed and novelty. The engineer Tobler has a lot in common with Halit the Regulator in Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute analyzed in the previous chapter. He is a caricature of the great independent inventor of the early twentieth century, who idolizes and markets technological innovations. A low-level employee in a large machine factory only three years before, Tobler is now “a freelance, independent inventor and businessman,” who happens to conceive and manufacture what he tries to sell.23 The central irony of the novel lies not in the essential belatedness of the protagonist servant, but in that of his master, the self-proclaimed modernizer. It turns out that the great inventor himself is

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an imposter, a pretense. His business expectations are based on self-­ deception and his practices on outright fraud. He does not have Geschäftstüchtigkeit, the efficiency, the aptitude for business, as his wife condescendingly tells Joseph. Tobler falls victim to his own invention and its demands for punctuality. Caught in the temporality of capital and debt, with unpaid bills, pressing expenses, and unfulfilled financial obligations, Tobler wants to see “the time stop in its tracks.”24 Among Tobler’s inventions, the most outstanding and most promoted device is the “Advertising Clock” (Die Reklame-Uhr). A profound symbol of technological modernization and punctuation of experience, the engineer’s wunderkind is a constant presence in the novel, inviting the assistant, and the readers, to resolve the mystery of this “profitable enterprise.” It is a decorative clock with a set of eagle wings adorned with names of firms which would potentially be used to advertise their addresses and services. Tobler intends to franchise this clock to railway station managers, restaurants, hotel owners, and other businesses: Solch eine wirklich äußerst hübsch aussehende Uhr, kalkulierte Joseph, wird beispielsweise in einen oder in mehrere Straßenbahnwagen gehängt, und zwar an eine möglichst in aller Menschen Augen stechende Stelle, damit die fahrenden und reisenden Mitmenschen ihre Taschenuhren danach richten können und jederzeit wissen, wie spät oder wie früh es am Tage ist. Diese Uhr ist wahrhaftig nicht schlecht, meinte er allen Ernstes, um so weniger, als sie den Vorzug hat, mit dem Reklamewesen verbunden zu sein. A genuinely quite fetching clock like this, Joseph calculated, would be hung up, for example, in one streetcar or several, in particularly conspicuous locations, so that all those riding and travelling would be able to set their pocket watches by it and always know how early or late in the day it was. The clock is really not bad, he thought in all seriousness, especially as it has the advantage of being associated with the institution of advertising.25

Tobler’s invention not only organizes the social time as a public clock, but it also links this empty clock-time to capitalist consumption. “The second Tobler brainchild,” the Marksman’s Vending Machine (Schützenautomaten), which dispenses a pack of live ammunition in uniform packages of thirty, has, reports Joseph, the very same “additional virtue of being connected to the sphere of advertising.”26 These “old ideas”—a public clock and a vending machine—are “cleverly translated to a quite different realm,” by Herr Tobler.27 The efficiency of mechanization in the Advertising Clock is coupled with the logic of consumption. Its advertising “virtue” upstages

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the uncertain benefits of the so-called invention of a colorful public clock. The emphasis on commodification and marketing associates the idea of time as social regulation (as in the standardized clock-time) with capitalist consumer culture. It is important to note that Robert Walser wrote The Assistant only two years after the foundation of the International Mono-­ Society (Internationale Monogesellschaft) in Switzerland (1905), which used to be a prominent institution of advertising in Europe. Its aim was to raise the artistic level of contemporary advertising by the creation of a “Mono-system” that contained pictures and advertisement texts that provided “information that is new and worthwhile to both adults and children.”28 Thomas Hapke shows that such information-mediating activities and organizations, particularly in German-speaking countries, gained momentum in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Such importance placed on communication and advertisement in the early bourgeois information age, particularly in the German-Swiss case, testifies to Walser’s emphasis on the language of business and advertisement as the dominant (and the most alienating) form of communication. Later in the office, Joseph is confronted by the Advertising Clock for the first time. The assistant describes it as “an invisible-visible apparition,” and “like a small or large child…like a headstrong child that requires constant self-sacrificing care and does not even thank one for watching over. And is this enterprise flourishing, is the child growing?” (Sie ist wie ein kleines oder großes Kind, solch eine Uhr…wie ein eigensinniges Kind, das der beständigen, aufopfernden Pflege bedarf, und das nicht einmal dankt dafür. Gedeiht denn eigentlich dieses Unternehmen, wächst dieses Kind?)29 The clock is filled with contradictions, an invisible and visible ghost, which is a phrase Johann Wolfgang von Goethe uses a century ago in Faust to describe divine power. The homogenous and empty time of modernity is the invisible absolute. It is a divine presence that exercises disciplinary force to instigate relentless change, and it is a constant reminder of one’s inherent inadequacy and belatedness, like an angry god. Yet, it is visible in its calibration that mechanizes individuals’ everyday experience. The clock is also a self-centered and spoiled child that dictates round-the-clock work time and demands eternal growth, production, and accumulation. It promulgates the myth of capitalism as omnipresent and timeless. The Advertising Clock represents the strange timelessness of mechanistic and profit-oriented thinking. The mechanistic worldview, epitomized in Tobler’s invention, immobilizes the subject’s experience as occurring in the temporal flow. The novel, however, goes beyond such simplistic

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opposition between mechanical time and durée, by foregrounding the historical specificity of capitalist time. It is part of the modern Weltanschauung, the global outlook of the epoch, that would “successfully imprint itself on people’s opinions and judgments once and for all.”30 Abstract time is the breaking up of time into equal, neutral, and interchangeable units of absolute equal length, indifferent to content. It is the idea of time as an independent variable, as opposed to concrete time as a dependent variable (i.e., time as defined through concrete and existing, often natural, events). According to historian Moishe Postone, the rise of capitalism entails the supersession of earlier forms of concrete time by abstract time and the internalization of abstract time as a universal metric and dynamic abstraction.31 The time of capitalism—parodied in the figure of the Advertising Clock in The Assistant—abstracted from any content and demarcations, transforms the concrete time, a function of events and actions, into the abstract time of organization and work. Joseph experiences abstract time as a radical split and division. After having a pleasant Sunday in the city, Joseph returns to the Tobler Villa, only to be confronted by Tobler’s reprimanding device: “in the guise of a bird beating its wings above your apparently rather poetically minded head, the Advertising Clock is hurtling back and forth. Sunday, that softest of days, is over now, and the hard, rugged workday has just grabbed hold of you” (die Reklame-Uhr schießt dir als ein flügelschlagender Vogel über den etwas poetisch, wie es scheint, veranlagten Kopf. Der weichliche Sonntag ist vorüber, und der harte, robuste Werktag hat dich soeben wieder angepackt.)32 At the subjective level, abstract time is experienced as estrangement. The imposing presence of the clock with its eagle wings summons the emptied temporality of work time. The blurring division between work and leisure time, partly due to the indefinite nature of Joseph’s duties at the Tobler house, gradually leads to the clerk’s identification with mechanical and impersonal labor. The clerk asks himself whether the Advertising Clock has “truly taken hold of all the fibers of [his] being”; “am I consumed by it?” he ponders. The clock haunts Herr Tobler in a similar way. Having fallen victim to the dictates of profit-­ seeking and measured existence, Tobler is approached by “the iron necessity,” “an invisible-visible figure up close beside him,” coldly commanding him to try harder. Karl Marx defines this condition of temporal estrangement in curiously similar terms with Henri Bergson: “The subordination of man to the machine situation arises in which men are effaced by their labor; in which the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate as a

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measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is the speed of two locomotives…Time is everything, man is nothing…Time sheds its qualitative, variable, flowing nature; it freezes into an exactly delimited, quantifiable continuum filled with quantifiable things…in short, it becomes space.”33 As time loses its qualitative nature and durational flow, it becomes a reified and mechanical quantitative measure for human labor, absorbed into the clock’s regime of speed, efficiency, and instrumental rationality.

6.6  Clockwork Language The abstract and impersonal temporality of clock-time is directly related to the question of linguistic modernity. Robert Walser’s vision of mechanized and rationalized human experience extends beyond the thematic treatment of automatization in the novel: the Advertising Clock is not only a profound symbol of standardized time engrossed by efficiency and novelty, but it is also a reminder of the clockwork language—the increasingly mechanical and repetitive speech—of technology and capitalism. By using the clerk trope, The Assistant registers the anxiety about the alienating ramifications of the mechanization of the word.34 Copying countless business letters, patent documents, advertisements, and contracts, the protagonist finds himself trapped in the repetitive and hollow language of communication and exchange. Like the abstract time of pure and exact repetitions of temporal units, Joseph’s writing comprises mechanical, iterative, and unoriginal utterances. The single-minded activity of copying and the implicit condemnation to sameness determine Joseph’s relation to the machine of modernity and mechanized writing. In that sense, his old friend Klara is right: Joseph remains “just the same as ever”; he is an eternal fugitive who is condemned to the homelessness and displacement of copy- work.35 Confined in the inventor’s office, the copyist only produces insignificant and impotent writing. The temporality of the copyist is a subsequential and repetitive one: he imitates a gesture that is always anterior to the original. Joseph is a pencil pusher, a ‘dead-letter’ specialist, or as the narrator puts it, a subordinate (Untergebene) and an amanuensis (Schreiber), confined to the order of scripture. He is a writer by proxy, a secondary and subservient figure that copies others’ writing ‘to the letter’ and passively reproduces a copy of a copy. This recalls the distinction Roland Barthes draws between the authorly écrivain, a worker with language, and the clerkly écrivant, who instrumentalizes language to convey a message.36 Amid the tumult of

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endlessly repetitive voices in the copy-work (Reinschrift), Joseph has difficulty finding an authentic voice. His ventures into writing as an écrivain—an authorly writer of his memoirs, diary, personal letters—remain only weak attempts, repeatedly suspended by clerk’s duties. The assistant not only fails the authentic and authorly language as an écrivain, but he also fails as a clerkly écrivant. When Joseph is initiated into “the secrets of Tobler’s commercial enterprises,” he observes, “something odd was happening to him—he understood only half of what was said. What was wrong with him, he thought, and reproached himself: ‘Am I a swindler, just full of empty talk?’” (Es ging ihm dabei eigentümlich, er verstand nur die Hälfte. Was denn nur mit ihm sei, dachte er und machte sich Vorwürfe: Bin ich ein Betrüger, ein Schwätzer?).37 The clerk is unable to recognize himself in the dehumanized language of instrumentalization and rationalization, and he is entirely estranged by Tobler’s speech. Upon hearing the unintelligible description of the business operation, Joseph doubts his own linguistic capacity. He lacks control over the language of the engineer; he is a babbler “full of empty talk,” a talk that lacks the mechanized word of the “capitalists.”38 As opposed to Joseph’s “solemn pen” in writing business correspondence, he reports that all capitalists write in “a slender and delicate script” with “precision and at the same time somewhat offhandedly”; their words are “concise and courteous,” and “polite and succinct.”39 The casual precision and clarity in the language of the capital locks out any obscurity and generates a language that functions in the logic of general equivalence, like money. Joseph attempts to write in this new language with peculiar terms and linguistic patterns, acquiring a lexicon of glib phrases to use in his correspondences, such as “telephonic communication,” “I shall take the liberty,” and “most sincerely.”40 These fluent and voluble words communicate impersonality as well as hollowness. Their mechanized and unambiguous form, used in short and precise business letters, does not convey anything other than the meaning intended. In the text of the capitalist écrivant, language is reduced to a practical tool, an instrument in which the act of writing turns into a “leveling of the muzzle of [Joseph’s] epistolary musket” (richtete der Angestellte an seinem Schreibtisch die Mündung des Korrespondenzgeschützes).41 French poet Stéphane Mallarmé locates the modern crisis in language in the splitting between l’universel reportage and la literature essentielle, whereby the former characterizes the language of exchange and communication, and the latter describes the poetic and “romanesque” language. Mallarmé

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compares this elementary use of discourse in universal reporting to a coin, a mere means of communicative exchange: “in order to exchange human thought, to take or to put into someone else’s hand in silence a coin” (pour échanger la pensée humaine, de prendre ou de mettre dans la main d’autrui en silence une pièce de monnaie).42 This anti-rhetorical and anti-­ literary voice of “reporting” complements the ordinary, iterative, and inflexible word of the capitalist. If we go back to the theme of the office clerk and bureaucracy, Joseph’s anxiety about his insufficiency in this “clerkly” language, and his alleged “empty talk” or prattle, ironically reveals the lack of this coin-like quality. The empty talk does not belong to the failed clerk but to the capitalist who limits language to instrumental communication. It is a clockwork language—standardized, abstract, and universal—emptied of its ambiguities and subversions. How, then, does time endure in the clockwork language of reportage? Joseph’s attempts at ‘authorly’ writing outside of his copy-work are mostly imitative compositions that reproduce originals: the affectionate letter to Frau Weiss, the diary entry, and the descriptive passages recalling chivalric romance are all derivatives of conventional narrative models. While this ties in with the figure of the copyist as a writer by proxy, there are a few other examples of Joseph’s authorly language that resists mechanized and reproduced forms of writing. One such incident is the short piece he composes after a visit from his employment supervisor with a “paternal look,” titled “Bad Habit” (Schlechte Gewohnheit): Eben ist ein Mann von mir weggegangen, der mir um der Erinnerungen willen, die mit seiner alten, armen Gestalt verbunden sind, lieb und bedeutend ist. Ich glaubte etwas vergessen, verloren, oder nur liegen gelassen zu haben, als ich in sein Gesicht schaute. Ein Verlust prägte sich sogleich meinem Herzen ein und ein altes Bild meinen Augen. Ich bin vielleicht ein etwas überspannter, aber ich bin auch ein genauer Mensch. Ich empfinde die kleinsten Verluste, ich bin in gewissen Dingen peinlich gewissenhaft, und nur ab und zu muß ich mir wohl oder übel gebieten: Vergiß das! Ein einziges Wort kann mich in die ungeheuerste und stürmischste Verlegenheit setzen, ich bin dann von dem Gedanken an dieses scheinbar Winzige und Nichtige erfüllt, durch und durch, während die Gegenwart, wie sie treibt und lebt, für mich unerklärlich geworden ist. Diese Momente sind eine schlechte Gewohnheit.43 Just this moment a man has left me who, on account of the memories I associate with his old, poor figure, is dear and meaningful to me. I felt I had forgotten, lost, or simply misplaced something when I looked into his face. A loss immediately impressed itself upon my heart, and an old vision upon

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my eyes. I am possibly a somewhat high-strung person, but I am also a precise one. I feel even the most trifling losses, in certain matters I am meticulously conscientious, and only occasionally am I obliged, for better or worse, to command myself: Forget this! A single word can thrust me into the most monstrous and tempestuous confusion, and then I find myself utterly possessed by thoughts of this apparently miniscule and insignificant thing, while the present in all its glory has become incomprehensible to me. These moments constitute a bad habit.44

The problem of language here emerges as a problem of time. The bad habit Joseph suffers from is temporal in its essence: “a single word” temporally disorients him, throws him into a “monstrous” confusion in the present, rendering it incomprehensible. A past self with an old set of attachments emerges in the form of nostalgic loss, as something forgotten, lost, or simply misplaced. Operating under a doubled and split signifier, a “single word” triggers a radical temporal split between the past and the present, leaving Joseph with an overwhelming sense of fragmentation. Dry, rational, and present-oriented language, “in all its glory,” on the other hand, becomes indecipherable. Joseph has a similar experience of estrangement in the long dramatic and surrealistic dream sequence, in which he and everyone victimized by Tobler—his former assistant Wirsich, the mother Wirsich, Frau Tobler, and the dog—are trapped in a room inside what looks like Tobler’s “glass ball,” in real life. Tobler hurls his “metallic, masculine voice” at them, “the perfect voice for a boss.” This voice seems to be “framing the living room or embracing it.” It growls but “the words themselves were indistinguishable.”45 The mechanized language of the employer embodied in the growling metallic voice is beyond comprehension for the assistant. External and depersonalized, it remains unintelligible to those trapped in Tobler’s globe. Robert Walser lays out a topography of domination in The Assistant, experimenting with the question of how to work with or within the language of authority. Tobler’s glass ball (Die Glaskugel) in this sense is an important metaphor for understanding the scientific and capitalist objectification and reification of the world. The “pride of Villa Tobler,” the glass ball has “all the images of the world reflected in it.” Its clarity, its abstraction, and its mirror-like reflection of the world represent the nightmarish language of general equivalences, and thereby raise the question of if and how mimesis is possible outside of such language. Moreover, the masculine voice that surrounds the globe in Joseph’s dream is implicitly

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connected to the tropes of fatherland, military and economic power, and patriarchal authority in the novel.46 The details of Tobler’s and the town’s pompous celebration of the Swiss national holiday expose the novel’s critique of patriotism, directly associated with Tobler’s pride in his inventions and his business. Joseph is not merely a clerk in the service of the Tobler house, the narrator declares, but when it is required, he is also “a clerk in the service of the great and holy fatherland.”47 Joseph is split between two unintelligible discourses: the indecipherable metallic voice of the bourgeois patriarch and the unsettling “single words” that invoke a voice that is forgotten, lost, or misplaced. This schism is manifest in Joseph’s experience of temporal duality between the world of the Evening Star Villa and the pastoral harmony that surrounds it. In one of his “flights to nature,” which include excursions into the woods, boat rides, and long swims in the lake, Joseph encounters this “lost language” in the silence of the forest. As opposed to the singular oppressive metallic jingle of Tobler’s voice, a peaceful pastoral silence lends voice to the dead past: O es war so schön hier. Im Wald ist die Stille eine doppelte. Ein weiter Ring von Bäumen und Gesträuchen bildet die erste Stille, und die zweite, noch schönere, ist der eigene erwählte Platz. So wie der Bach murmelte, glaubte man sich schon in lange, kühle Träumereien verstrickt, und so wie man ins Grün hinaufschaute, befand man sich mitten in silbernen und goldenen und guten Weltanschauungen. Die selber erdachten, einem fernen und nahen Bekanntenkreis entnommenen Personen flüsterten leise, sie sagten etwas, oder sie machten bloß Mienen, während die Augen eine tief innerliche Sprache für sich redeten. Die Gefühle traten nackt und mutig auf, und das Feinstempfundene traf ein verborgenes, sehnsuchtsvolles Verständnis an. Die Lippen und Gedanken, ohne der Zeiträume und Lebensstraßen zu bedürfen, küßten sich, wenn sie sich erkannt hatten; auf den Lippen sah man die Freude hochaufbrennen, und aus den Gedanken heraus sang eine zu Bach, Busch und Waldstille passende, freundliche Wehmut.48 Oh, how beautiful it was here. In the forest, every silence was redoubled. A broad ring of trees and bushes formed the first silence, and the second, an even more beautiful one, was formed by a person choosing a spot for his own. The way the brook was murmuring, you thought yourself already entangled in long cool daydreams, and when you gazed up into the green foliage, you found yourself in the midst of silver and golden and good worldviews. The figures you invented yourself, drawn from a distant and close circle of acquaintances, were quietly whispering, they were saying

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something or perhaps only making faces while their eyes were speaking a profound, intimate language of their own. Feelings were stepping forward naked and courageous, and even the most delicately perceived sensation was met with a secret understanding suffused with longing. Lips and thoughts, requiring neither epochs nor roads on which to pass through life, kissed as soon as they recognized one another; you could see the joy burning upon these lips, and a friendly melancholy was singing from the thoughts that accorded well with brook, bushes, and woodland silence.49

The question of time and memory is once again associated with crisis in language. The novel’s ironic mode is temporarily suspended, and the voice of the narrator becomes indistinguishable from the voice of the protagonist. As Joseph proceeds deeper into the rings of silence, “good world-­ views” (guten Weltanschauungen) open up in front of him. Figures “invented” from past acquaintances speak a “profound and intimate” language in “quiet whispers.” They invoke a primordial and authentic mode of representation in which there is a “secret understanding suffused with longing.” Lips and thoughts kiss, establishing an immediacy in language, saving it from its fallen state. It is the aural utterance of the lips that offers such representational purity as opposed to the written word. The lost and misplaced word that earlier thrusts Joseph into “the most monstrous and tempestuous confusion” is now met with a secret understanding that is only accessible in the form of loss. It also invokes a ghostly yet friendly presence of the past, bringing to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s comments: “we greatly transform ourselves, those friends of ours who have not been transformed become ghosts of our past: their voice comes across to us like the voice of a shade.”50 The voice of the other is spectral, belonging to a past that cannot be remembered in present linguistic forms. This significant passage can also be read as a fictional precursor to Walter Benjamin’s essay on the lost enchantment of language, published nine years after Walser’s The Assistant. Benjamin, who admires Mallarmé’s poésie pure as the illumination of language’s magical side, interprets modernity as the decline of “aura” and questions the reduction of language into bourgeois instrumental communication.51 In “the Fall of language-mind,” Benjamin argues, “man abandoned immediacy in the communication of the concrete—that is, name—and fell into the abyss of the mediatedness of all communication, of the word as means, of the empty word, into the abyss of prattle [Abgrund des Geschwätzes].”52 Walser’s protagonist mourns the loss of this authentic voice that is now only a trace, an invented figure

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whispering in his ears. The clerk’s linguistic estrangement in the clockwork language of rationalization and mechanization echoes Benjamin’s attack on the crisis of representation and communication in capitalist modernity. It evokes the mystical language Benjamin refers to, which identifies the word with the essence of the thing—where lips unite with thoughts. The striking similarities between the two authors’ treatment of mechanization of the word go even further. Benjamin uses the same term as Walser in defining the “empty talk” (Geschwätz) of communicative instrumentalism.53 The enslavement of language in “empty talk” (Verknechtung der Sprache im Geschwätz), in Benjamin’s terms, points to linguistic insubstantiality and the reduction of language into “mere signs.” The idea of the mystical language in Benjamin is a part of his critique of the bourgeois view of language for reducing it to a handy tool. In The Assistant, on the other hand, the longing for enchanted language is connected rather to the question of the survival of the past in clockwork language. The language of modernity for Walser no longer has the power to express anything of urgency or importance. It has turned into a precious instrument of delightful uselessness, in which the smell of coffee and jam blends into the glib phrases of business letters and promotional advertising such as Glänzendes Unternehmen (Glorious enterprise) and Höchster Gewinn bei absoluter Risikolosigkeit (Maximal profit at absolutely no risk).54 This of course cannot be fully understood without taking into account the writer’s relation to the modern German language and its transformation from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The Swiss context is particularly complex: Walser, as a Swiss-German writer, has to decide between writing in High German and adopting the local mode of expression in Swiss-German dialect. Robert Walser’s entire work, apart from an early play, is written in Hochdeutsch with occasional linguistic Helvetisms.55 The split between the local touch of Swiss dialect and High German as the author’s medium of expression (a schism echoed in Joseph’s experience of language as estrangement) is further complicated with the German language reforms and the policy of standardization of orthography and pronunciation.56 The Highland German dialect from the North was standardized to be used in written and oral communication. This “pure” dialect, now regulated and homogenized, comes to represent a stance of learned importance and social refinement. Mechanization of writing and standardization of pronunciation, along with purification of the language from foreign words (particularly French),57 not only caused a split from

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the heterogeneous linguistic forms of the past, but it also underlined the arbitrariness and instrumentalization of language. It is precisely at this moment, with the empty language of standardized communication and the empty time abstracted from any content, that Joseph encounters the linguistic and temporal amnesia of modernity. During a boat trip on the lake, a section that recalls both the surreal dream sequence and the whispering figures in the woods, Joseph is suddenly overwhelmed by the abiding presence of the past, the linguistic grip of memory, and a keen sense of nostalgia: Steige, hebe dich, Tiefe! Ja, sie steigt aus der Wasserfläche singend empor und macht einen neuen, großen See aus dem Raum zwischen Himmel und See. Sie hat keine Gestalt, und dafür, was sie darstellt, gibt es kein Auge. Auch singt sie, aber in Tönen, die kein Ohr zu hören vermag. Sie streckt ihre feuchten, langen Hände aus, aber es gibt keine Hand, die ihr die Hand zu reichen vermöchte. Zu beiden Seiten des nächtlichen Schiffes sträubt sie sich hoch empor, aber kein irgendwie vorhandenes Wissen weiß das. Kein Auge sieht in das Auge der Tiefe.58 Rise up and ascend, O depths! Yes, there they are—rising from the surface of the water, creating a new enormous lake out of the space between sky and lake. The depths have no shape, and there is no eye that can see what they are depicting. They are singing as well, but in notes no ear can catch. They reach out their long moist hands, but there is no hand able to grasp them. They rear up on either side of the nocturnal boat, but no knowledge in any way present knows this. No eye is looking into the eye of the depths.59

The irony of the overdramatized epic invocation while the clerk takes his employer’s family on a boat trip and summons up the “depths” is further complicated by the emergence of a new narrative voice. The narrator conjures up a specter of a forgotten past, in which exist the indecipherable visual and aural marks that “no eye can see” and “no ear can catch,” and finds only traces of meaning. This “voice of a shade,” to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase, emerges as an inassimilable difference that can find no expression in the language of the present, because “no knowledge” that exists (vorhanden) in the present knows it. It is not a memory; it is a spectral trace of a not remembered but forgotten past. In contrast to Tobler’s omnipresent metallic voice echoed through the world trapped in the “glass ball,” the spectral presences and voices Joseph encounters in his flights to nature materialize and dematerialize in and out of existence. The past is revealed as inassimilable difference “in a flash,” to put it in Benjamin’s terms. In

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this sense, the passage is more about the Benjaminian awakening, analyzed in Chap. 3, than remembering; it suggests meta-temporality, a sudden temporal awareness that is otherwise lost to consciousness. Language here is a medium in which ‘flashes of recognition’ occur when a past that has been suppressed is recognized yet not fully visualized. The spectral presences are fragments of a past in “freely associated” and “long-forgotten images,” remarkably similar to those of Benjamin’s dialectical images and Tanpınar’s homelessness in language. Robert Walser shares with the modernists in this project many of the concerns with temporal ideology. He explores the mechanization and rationalization of temporal experience in relation to the logistics of capitalist production, and to the monotonous reproduction and circulation of clerkly language in the service of the present. In this sense The Assistant is a foundational text in the history of modernism for its treatment of the crisis in time as the crisis in language, all in remarkably unique ways that only la literature essentielle can give voice to.

Notes 1. Susan Bernofsky translates the German verb Schreiber as amanuensis. Although the word is not as commonly used in its German translation, it depicts the condition of the novel’s protagonist quite accurately. Derived from Latin (servus) a manu, which literally means “(slave) at hand(writing),” amanuensis foregrounds the theme of servitude in the novel. Robert Walser, The Assistant, trans. Susan Bernofsky (New York: New Directions Publishing, 2007). 2. Lucas Marco Gisi, ed., Robert Walser-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung (Stuttgard: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2018), 107. 3. See Franz Kafka’s letter in Robert Walser, Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses (University Press of New England, 1985); Katharina Kerr, Über Robert Walser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978). 4. Winfried Georg Sebald, “La Promeneur Solitaire,” in A Place in the Country: On Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser and Others (London; New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2013), 140. 5. See Pascal Casanova’s discussion of Robert Walser in the context of Helvetism, Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Harvard University Press, 2007), 176–177. 6. These biographical details can be found in Mächler’s biography. Robert Mächler, Das Leben Robert Walsers. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).

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7. For details on the origins and the textual history of the novel, see Karl Wagner, “Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation,” in Der Gehülfe: Roman, Originalausg., 1. Aufl., Suhrkamp BasisBibliothek; 102 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010), 281–298. 8. See Samuel Frederick, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Northwestern University Press, 2012), 52. 9. Walser, The Assistant, 26; Robert Walser, Der Gehülfe, Romane und Erzählungen (Zurich: Suhrkamp, 1984), 24. 10. Walter Benjamin, “Robert Walser,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 324–328; Walter Benjamin, “Robert Walser,” in Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses, trans. Mark Harman (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), 144–147. 11. Hofmiller (1908) in: Wagner, “Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation.” 12. Walser, The Assistant, 18. 13. Walser, 139; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 137. 14. Peter Utz, Tanz auf den Rändern: Robert Walsers “Jetztzeitstil” (Suhrkamp, 1998). 15. Robert Walser, Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben/1. Fritz Kochers Aufsätze (Zürich, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003); Robert Walser, A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories, Ben Lerner and Damion Searls, trans. (NYRB Classics, 2013). For an analysis of “Der Commis” chapter, see “Verkleidung im Büro: ‘Der Commis/Eine Art Illustration’” in Müller, Mit Fritz Kocher in der Schule der Moderne, 83–104. 16. Charles Baudelaire, “Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G Le Dantec and Claude Pichois (Paris: Gallimard], 1961). 1163f. 17. Walser, Der Gehüfe, 20; Walser, The Assistant, 22. 18. The title of an inter-war British play by H.F. Maltby, which critiques postwar settlements. See Jonathan Wild, The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 19. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Routledge, 2013), 228. 20. Walser, The Assistant, 23; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 21. 21. Walser, The Assistant, 22; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 20. 22. Walser, The Assistant, 16; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 14. 23. Walser, The Assistant, 71. 24. Walser, 160. 25. Walser, Der Gehüfe, 14; Walser, The Assistant, 17. 26. Carl Dublers, the inventor Robert Walser worked for and based his fictional character Herr Tobler on, patented this invention as “Schützenautomaten,” Wagner, “Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation,” 308.

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27. Walser, The Assistant, 73; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 71. 28. W. Boyd Rayward, ed., European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 313. For more information on the German information movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, see Thomas Hapke, “Roots of Mediating Information: Aspects of the German Information Movement,” in European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past, ed. W. Boyd Rayward (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 307–323. 29. Walser, The Assistant, 31; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 29. 30. Walser, The Assistant, 141. 31. It is important to bring attention to Moishe’s argument that the mechanical clock does not, in and of itself, necessarily give rise to abstract time, and that the origin of abstract time is related to the organization of social time in early capitalism. Hence, it is not the invention of the clock itself, but its association with the abstract time of capitalist modernity which turns it into a figure of calibration. See “Abstract Time” in Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination a Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 32. Walser, The Assistant, 140; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 138. 33. From Capital, vol. I, quoted in Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89. 34. The amanuetic subject has a literary genealogy that dates back to Nicolai Gogol’s Overcoat (1843) and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Golden Pot (1819). For analysis of the clerk figure in British and French literature respectively, see Jonathan Wild, The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939 and Cyril Piroux, Le roman de l’employé de bureau, ou, L’art de faire un livre sur -presque- rien. 35. Compare Gogol’s observation on Akaky Akakyevich “ he was always to be seen in precisely the same place, sitting in exactly the same position, doing exactly the same work—just routine copying, pure and simple,” Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat,” in The Diary of a Madman, the Government Inspector, and Selected Stories, ed. Robert A. Maguire, trans. Ronald Wilks (Cambridge; London: Penguin Classics, 2006), 140–73. 140. W.G. Sebald goes further in comparison of the two authors and argues that if Walser had any literary relative or predecessor, then it was Gogol: “Both of them gradually lost the ability to keep their eye on the center of the plot, losing themselves instead in the almost compulsive contemplation of strangely unreal creations appearing on the periphery of their vision…their ideal state is that of pure amnesia,” Sebald, “La Promeneur Solitaire.” 134–136. 36. Roland Barthes, “Écrivains et écrivants,” in Essais critiques (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 147–154. 37. Walser, The Assistant, 12; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 10.

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38. The term Kapitalisten in the novel, is not used in the non-specific sense of “one who has money,” but in terms of the passive investor who uses his money and finally cashes in his capital including the profits. In comparison, Tobler, the “engineer” (Ingenieur) and “technical inventor” (technische Erfinder) represents the investment seeker “creative entrepreneur.” See Wagner, “Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation.” 309. 39. Walser, The Assistant, 76. 40. Walser, 88. 41. Walser, 227; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 224. 42. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de Vers,” in Œuvres Complètes, ed. Henri Mondor (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 368; translation mine. 43. Walser, Der Gehüfe, 184. 44. Walser, The Assistant, 186–187. 45. Walser, 57. 46. For an analysis of gender in Robert Walser’s short prose and Mikrogramme, see Heffernan, Provocation from the Periphery, Chapters 4 and 5. 47. Walser, The Assistant, 66. 48. Walser, Der Gehüfe, 97–98. 49. Walser, The Assistant, 99–100. 50. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 274. 51. Beatrice Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 54–72. 52. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings, trans. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1996), 62–74; Walter Benjamin, “Uber Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” in Gesammelte Schriften 2,2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 140–157. 154. 53. Walter Benjamin borrows the term from Soren Kierkegaard’s critique of modernity. See Peter David Fenves, “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard (Stanford University Press, 1993). The term is also used by Heidegger and Adorno in a similar way. For a recent study on a more favorable use of the term in modern literature, see Wim Peeters, Recht auf Geschwätz: Geltung und Darstellung von Rede in der Moderne (Paderborn: Fink, Wilhelm, 2012). 54. Walser, The Assistant, 87; Walser, Der Gehüfe, 86. 55. Karl Wagner argues that on the linguistic level alone, The Assistant as the “Swiss novel” in fact went through a German proofreading and was circulated in Berlin; and its author did not seek to ingratiate himself to the

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contemporary trendy cult of “Heimatlich-Regional” literature (i.e., Heimat literature with the local flavor). Wagner, “Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation,” 292. 56. See Waterman, A History of the German Language, 171–175; Cardinal, The Figure of Paradox in the Work of Robert Walser, 29–30. For a compelling reading of the Turkish Language Reforms in light of A.H.Tanpınar and Walter Benjamin’s theory of language, see Nergis Ertürk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 123, no. 1 (2008): 41. 57. Waterman reports that in 1874, a post-master-general, Heinrich von Stephan, issued a series of directives deleting more than seven hundred French terms used in the postal and telephone services in Germany (177). Robert Walser, who grew up in the bilingual city of Biel, kept the technological and business terms in French, despite their German counterparts, such as Kommis, Bureau, and Billetts. 58. Walser, Der Gehüfe, 51. 59. Walser, The Assistant, 53–54.

References Barthes, Roland. “Écrivains et écrivants.” In Essais critiques, 147–54. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964. Baudelaire, Charles. “Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne.” In Œuvres complètes, edited by Y.-G Le Dantec and Claude Pichois. Paris: Gallimard, 1961. Benjamin, Walter. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” In Selected Writings, edited by Marcus Paul Bullock and Michael William Jennings, translated by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 62–74. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1996. ———. “Robert Walser.” In Gesammelte Schriften, 2:324–28. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977a. ———. “Robert Walser.” In Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses, translated by Mark Harman, 144–47. Hanover, NH: Published for Dartmouth College by University Press of New England, 1985. ———. “Uber Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen.” In Gesammelte Schriften 2,2, 140–57. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977b. Cardinal, Agnes. The Figure of Paradox in the Work of Robert Walser. Stuttgart: H.-D. Heinz, 1982. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Cyril Piroux. Le roman de l’employé de bureau, ou, L’art de faire un livre sur -presquerien. Ecritures (Dijon, France). Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2015.

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Ertürk, Nergis. “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages: Tanpınar’s Hasret, Benjamin’s Melancholy.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. 123, no. 1 (2008): 41. Fenves, Peter David. “Chatter”: Language and History in Kierkegaard. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1993. Frederick, Samuel. Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012. Gisi, Lucas Marco, ed. Robert Walser-Handbuch: Leben—Werk—Wirkung. Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2018. Gogol, Nikolai. “The Overcoat.” In The Diary of a Madman, the Government Inspector, and Selected Stories, edited by Robert A. Maguire, translated by Ronald Wilks, 140–73. Cambridge; London: Penguin Classics, 2006. Hanssen, Beatrice. “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work.” In The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, edited by David S. Ferris, 54–72. Cambridge; London: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Hapke, Thomas. “Roots of Mediating Information: Aspects of the German Information Movement.” In European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past, edited by W. Boyd Rayward, 307–23. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Heffernan, Valerie. Provocation from the Periphery: Robert Walser Re-Examined. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007. Jonathan Wild. The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880–1939. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Kerr, Katharina. Über Robert Walser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971. Mächler, Robert. Das Leben Robert Walsers. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Crise de Vers.” In Œuvres Complètes, edited by Henri Mondor. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Müller, Andreas. Mit Fritz Kocher in der Schule der Moderne. Tübingen: Francke A. Verlag, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Nietzsche: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Peeters, Wim. Recht auf Geschwätz: Geltung und Darstellung von Rede in der Moderne. Paderborn: Fink, Wilhelm, 2012. Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination a Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Rayward, W. Boyd, ed. European Modernism and the Information Society: Informing the Present, Understanding the Past. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Reed, Carol (dir.) The Third Man. 1949.

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Sebald, Winfried Georg. “La Promeneur Solitaire.” In A Place in the Country: On Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser and Others, 119–54. London; New York: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. Utz, Peter. Tanz auf den Rändern: Robert Walsers “Jetztzeitstil.” Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998. Wagner, Karl. “Rezeptionsgeschichte und Interpretation.” In Der Gehülfe: Roman, 281–98. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010. Walser, Robert. A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories. Translated by Ben Lerner and Damion Searls. New York: NYRB Classics, 2013. ———. Der Gehülfe, Romane und Erzählungen. Zürich: Suhrkamp, 1984. ———. Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, and Critical Responses. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985. ———. Sämtliche Werke in Einzelausgaben 1. Fritz Kochers Aufsätze. Zürich; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. ———. The Assistant. Translated by Susan Bernofsky. New York: New Directions Publishing, 2007. Waterman, John T. A History of the German Language, with Special Reference to the Cultural and Social Forces That Shaped the Standard Literary Language. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966. Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge, 2013.



Afterword

Modernism is commonly characterized by the experience of profound and pervasive crisis—a crisis of time, of language, of perception and experience, and so on. These crises are seen as symptoms of a wider sense of the discontinuity of tradition, and senses of transition, rupture, acceleration, and alienation. Modernisms’ radical reconceptualization of temporality has long been attributed to the dominant figures in the Modernist canon, particularly periodized in the 1920s. Limited to “the original and sedimented attachment to metropolitan avant-gardism,” as Jed Esty puts it, modernism and its experiments in time seem to have a unified aesthetic.1 In this sense, Georg Lukács is right in his critique of the twentieth-­century novel’s preoccupation with time as subjective idealism, which separates time, abstractly conceived, from historical change: “experienced time, subjective time, now became identical with real time: the rift between this and that of the objective world was complete.”2 Lukács traces this shift to Bergson’s philosophy, which, according to the critic, widened the gap between subjective and historical time further. However, these accounts of modernist temporality—as pure interiority and privacy, as well as abstracted and distracted subjective time freed from historical time—need to be complicated. This book has demonstrated that, once we move away from the “sedimented attachment” to the canon, which Lukács accurately critiques, such

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interpretations of duration do not necessarily constitute the only model for the literary and critical representation of temporality. In Walter Benjamin’s and A.H. Tanpınar’s urban histories, we have seen that durée denotes not just a subjective but also a collective experience of the persistence of the past. The relationship between material culture and temporality is key to their understanding of current life, and, particularly for Benjamin, to their utopian alternatives. Haunting, the untimely apparition of ghosts of what has been past, now forgotten, insists on coexisting with the new in the present of everyday life. History does not necessarily recede into an impersonal distance, as Lukács suggests, but it continues to punctuate the subject’s experience, which is not abstracted or distracted from the historical. Part III, on literary works, has demonstrated that experiments in the representation of temporality are not limited to abstract and subjective time. The Time Regulation Institute is an experiment in the plurality of times and it is also a narrative of being, or rather becoming, about a nation with nonsynchronous and heterogeneous temporalities. The Assistant explores the mechanization and rationalization of temporal experience in relation to the logistics of capitalist production, and to the monotonous reproduction and circulation of clerkly language in the service of the present. In this book, we have seen that these novels test and redefine the link between time, modernism, and the novel, in ways that do not comply with the canonical antagonism between realism and modernism. I argue that this undercurrent of modernism, which explores the anti-­modern temporal imagination, is often associated with conservatism and traditionalism, helps establish a new analysis of experience and perception, and alternative lines of thought among its contemporaries. It does not make a claim to go back to the past, or to the empty time of presentism, but presents a multiplicity of temporalities in which other temporal regimes become visible before, after, beyond, and beside the subjective flow and its vocation of memory. It is an aesthetic vocation for the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous—the coexistence, confrontation, and union of different temporalities. I acknowledge that (re)introducing the agency of authors who may have been overlooked, based on their national origins, their ambivalent reception, or their unremarkable success, in the literary-academic field, can potentially be perceived as an attempt to revise the canon in a way that does not fundamentally change the way we look at modernism. However, in this book I have tried to demonstrate that modernism cannot be defined

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as “a field of general similarity” in which a non-canonical writer could only be inserted along “the axis of resemblance.”3 This includes all writers in this study who in fact fail to fit into such a logic of resemblance.4 Henri Bergson, after having been hailed as a major philosopher until the 1920s, was harshly criticized later, and his influence on modernist literature was almost entirely dismissed. Only recently has he received critical acclaim thanks to Gilles Deleuze’s revival of Bergsonism. A.H. Tanpınar was and still is grouped with traditionalist writers of the right. The appreciation of his work in light of modernization tends to stop at a general idea of synthesis between the Republican present and the imperial past, and, ergo, Western and Eastern civilizations. Tanpınar himself was aware of such dry characterizations of his work: “It is strange that they give my works only a cursory reading, and both camps interpret them in their own way. According to the right, I tilt to the left due to my committed works, namely Mind at Peace and Five Cities. According to the left, because I talk about call to prayers, Turkish music, and our own history, I am on the right, although not a racist.”5 Robert Walser has stayed on the periphery of literary culture until very recently, and his work in his own time was deemed insubstantial and not publishable. Walter Benjamin found himself in a similar conundrum regarding his earlier and later orientations, that is, theological metaphysics and Marxist materialism, and was forced to endorse one and condemn the other, to which he protests: “I will not admit to a quintessential difference between these two [religious and political] observances.”6 This controversy overshadows his reception to this day. Therefore, eventually, none of these writers can be placed along the axis of resemblance, so as to be systematically incorporated into the modernist world literary canon. This book has followed a strain of thought regarding politics and poetics of time running through all of these authors and it has offered a reading of their work against the grain. Finally, I would like to underscore this study’s contribution to critical literature on Tanpınar. Nearly sixty years have passed since his Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (The Time Regulation Institute) was published in Istanbul. Its second English translation, having come out from Penguin in 2014, has ushered in refreshed critical interest in Tanpınar’s life and work. Following Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s acknowledgement of Tanpınar as a major literary influence, and the recent inscription of Turkish literature into the world literary market, the Turkish modernist has gradually received international recognition. After the English translation of his two seminal novels, Mind at Peace and The Time Regulation Institute, another

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major work, Five Cities, has recently appeared in English. While these recent translations provide an accessible introduction for English-speaking readers to a formative figure in modern Turkish literature, little critical treatment of his work exists in English.7 This book analyzes Tanpınar’s oeuvre and its place in world literature, inviting further questions as to how to interpret this canonical novel within the intended readership of world literature; how to place its translation and dissemination in our contemporary discourse; and how to think about its insertion into global literary networks, into global scholarship and even global pedagogy. What happens when Tanpınar’s text moves into new contexts, taken up by audiences beyond the imagination of the author, from radically different social and discursive spaces? What remain yet to be explored are these and other new questions opened up by the global circulation of the text. One important question regarding the scope of this book is the scholarly and pedagogical practice concerning world literature, which has virtually dominated the field of comparative literature over recent decades. The primary concern of world literature is to build a canon of key works of literature from diverse historical, aesthetic, and cultural perspectives, evidently an attempt at a critical narrative of literary history that challenges established orientations. This concern, however, is driven by a predisposition to universal origins and exemplary forms. The proclivity of world literature scholars for establishing what Aamir Mufti has called “the European universal library” excludes many diverse literary practices and traditions.8 In Modernism and Poetics of Time, I have aimed to challenge such proclivity for carving out universal origins and general principles, which presumes the translatability of narrative models across particular cultural and linguistic experiences.

Notes 1. Joshua Esty and Colleen Lye, “Peripheral Realisms Now,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 3 (2012): 269–88. 2. Georg Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism,” in Realism in Our Time; Literature and the Class Struggle, John and Necke Mander, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 35.

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3. For a discussion of Asian modernism in this context, see Eric Hayot, “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time,” in The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4. Except for Walter Benjamin, who is already part of the cannon as his work has enjoyed a revival of interest in the past twenty years, possibly due to what Scholem calls an “enormous suitability for canonization.” From Peter Osborne, Walter Benjamin: Appropriations (Taylor & Francis, 2005), 322. 5. Tanpınar, Günlüklerin Işıgı̆ nda Tanpınar’la Başbaşa, 332. 6. John Joseph McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Cornell University Press, 1993), 12. 7. For recent work on the author in English see “Beyond World Literature: Reading Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar Today,” Special issue ed. Dolcerocca, Middle Eastern Literatures 20, no. 2 (May 4, 2017): 127–132. Ayse Ozge Kocak Hemmat, The Turkish Novel and the Quest for Rationality (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill | Rodopi, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1163/ 9789004366046; Shaj Mathew, “The Multiple Simultaneous Temporalities of Global Modernity: Pamuk, Tanpınar, Proust,” Modern Language Quarterly 82, no. 4 (December 1, 2021): 473–498, https://doi. org/10.1215/00267929-­9365970. 8. Aamir R.  Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2016).

Index1

A Abdülhamid II (Sultan), 101, 134, 135, 142, 174n91 Adorno, Theodor W., 59n43, 75, 79, 88n33, 206n53 Advertising, 22, 192, 201 Ahmad, Aijaz, 13, 26n25 Alienation, 17, 98, 100, 114, 131, 141, 182, 188–191, 211 Amnesia, 202, 205n35 Anderson, Benedict, 167n3 Apter, Emily, 11, 14, 25n20 Aragon, Louis, 72 Aura, 25n22, 73–75, 83, 148, 149, 200 Authenticity, 21, 55, 113, 132, 143, 147, 161, 162, 183 Autobiography, 8, 126, 137, 149 Automatization, 149

B Badiou, Alain, 51, 162 Barthes, Roland, 195, 205n36 Baudelaire, Charles, 19, 66, 72, 78–80, 101, 189, 204n16 Belated, 8, 95, 129, 130, 162, 182 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 3, 5, 7, 15, 16, 19–21, 54, 57, 59n43, 65–80, 82–86, 86n1, 86n2, 86n4, 86n5, 87n6, 87n7, 87n8, 87n9, 87n10, 87n11, 87n12, 87n13, 87n14, 87n15, 87n16, 87n17, 88n20, 88n21, 88n22, 88n25, 88n27, 88n29, 88n30, 88n31, 88n32, 88n33, 88n34, 89n37, 89n38, 89n41, 89n42, 89n43, 89n44, 89n45, 89n46, 89n48, 89n49, 91–98, 100–103, 107, 109, 112, 114, 115n1, 115n4, 116n11, 116n13, 116n14, 117n23,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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117n29, 117n30, 118n39, 119n60, 120n68, 132, 148, 149, 161, 165, 169n15, 173n64, 176n116, 187, 200–203, 204n10, 206n51, 206n52, 206n53, 207n56, 212, 213, 215n4, 215n6 awakening, 65–67, 69, 71, 76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86, 86n2, 96, 97, 112, 203 Blitzhaft, 3, 69, 77–83 dialectical images, 2, 66, 72, 76, 80–82, 112, 203 dream image, 74, 83, 85 Erfahrung, 2 Erlebnis, 83 Geschichtsphilosophie, 70, 82 Gewesenen, 74 Jetzt, 3, 69, 77, 81, 82, 186; Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit, 3, 69, 77, 82 Jeztzeit, 69, 75–78; now-time, 65, 69, 76–78 Passagenwerk, 3, 19 phantasmagoria, 70, 72, 92 wish images, 84, 85, 96 The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 148, 161 Zeittraum, 83 Bergson, Henri, 1, 3, 5, 15, 16, 18, 35–57, 57n2, 58n3, 58n9, 58n15, 58n16, 58n17, 58n20, 59n21, 59n22, 59n23, 59n24, 59n25, 59n26, 59n27, 59n31, 59n33, 59n34, 59n35, 59n36, 59n37, 59n38, 59n39, 59n40, 59n41, 60n45, 67, 69, 76, 78–83, 86, 88n33, 89n36, 89n39, 89n40, 113, 114, 132, 140, 146, 162, 167n4, 171n37, 172n60, 173n68, 175n108, 175n110, 186, 194, 211, 213 Durée et simultanéité, 39, 59n21

Elan vital, 2, 3, 18, 38, 47, 56 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 3, 41, 52 intuition, 45–47, 56, 88n33 Laughter, 39, 146 le domaine commun, 46–47, 52 Matter and Memory (Matière et Mémoire), 39, 48, 49, 89n39, 89n40, 167n4, 175n108 tâtonnement, 53, 57, 67, 114 (see also Temporal blindness) Time and Free Will, 39, 41, 43, 45, 48, 52 The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 59n41 Berlin, 76, 183, 184, 189, 206n55 Bern, 183, 184 Beyatlı, Yahya Kemal, 93, 116n10, 130, 168n12, 168n13, 171n31 Bildungsroman, 8, 126, 159 Biology, 52, 56 Bloch, Ernst, 67, 69, 86n3, 114, 120n68 Blondel, Maurice, 35 Bourgeois, 79, 159, 181, 182, 185, 189, 193, 199–201 Boutroux, Emile, 35, 43 Bureaucracy, 99, 100, 126, 144, 149, 197 C Calendar, 11, 102, 103, 105, 137, 150 Cantor, Georg, 35 Capital, 4, 19, 20, 56, 72, 73, 93, 94, 99, 101, 104, 116n6, 149, 183, 189, 192, 196, 206n38 capitalism, 17, 67, 94, 115, 126, 190, 193–195, 205n31 capitalist, 17, 19, 23, 69, 71, 72, 99, 144, 147, 158, 182, 188, 189, 191, 192, 194, 196, 198, 201, 203, 205n31, 212

 INDEX 

capitalist modernity, 19, 69, 72, 99, 182, 191, 201, 205n31 Certeau, Michel de, 104, 105, 118n44, 119n48 Chronometry, 2, 3, 7, 8, 21, 127, 164, 166 Chronopathology, 8, 130, 139, 144, 153, 166, 182 Chronostasis, 8, 137, 140, 144, 148, 153, 156, 166, 168n11, 188 Chronotype, 13 Clerk, 21, 146, 147, 182, 184, 185, 189–191, 194–197, 199, 201, 202, 205n34 Collège de France, 35, 39, 40 Commodity fetishism, 70 Comparative Literature, 10, 11 Comte, Auguste, 58n16 Consciousness, 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, 12–14, 16–18, 20, 39, 42–47, 50–53, 66, 68, 70, 74, 75, 78, 79, 83, 85, 86, 95, 97, 139, 144, 146, 147, 161, 164, 186, 203 Consumer culture, 84, 193 Copy, 143, 184, 195, 197 Couturat, Louis, 35 Crisis, 2, 4, 5, 17, 22, 39, 43, 77, 84, 93, 95, 113, 114, 116n8, 135, 143, 145, 161, 182, 196, 200, 201, 203, 211 buhran, 95 D Daüssıla, 2, 96, 99–101, 107, 110, 112, 113 Debt, 98, 116n14, 129, 150, 186, 192 Decay, 2, 4, 20, 71, 73, 75, 83, 96, 107, 109, 113, 114, 119n54, 119n56, 158

219

Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 24n10, 38, 44, 57, 58n16, 58n18, 58n19, 60n46, 213 Dergah, 55, 93, 168n6, 168n12, 168n13 Descartes, René, 36, 37 Dialectics, 48, 66, 67, 69, 71, 74, 75, 81, 82 Duration, 2, 3, 18, 21, 36–53, 57, 69, 78, 98, 105, 107–109, 113, 114, 131, 134, 137, 138, 140, 146, 148, 154, 161, 162, 173n68, 212 See also Bergson, Henri E Einstein, Albert, 24n9, 40, 41, 58n9 Eliot, T.S., 39 Enlightenment, 55, 57, 78 Epistemology, 42 Ertürk, Nergis, 16, 26n32, 106, 112, 115n4, 116n14, 117n30, 119n51, 131, 136, 143, 161, 169n15, 171n30, 172n46, 173n73, 175n96, 175n105, 207n56 Eschatology, 157 Ethics, 42 Eurochronology, 8–14 Euromodernism, 14 Evolution, 24n9, 37, 39, 52, 53, 56, 162 Exile, 111, 114 Exposition Universelle, 35 F Fabula, 158 Fairy tale, 73 Fantasy, 85 Fashion, 68, 72, 83, 84, 97, 100, 102, 164

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INDEX

First World War, 4, 37, 77, 128, 145, 150, 162 Foucault, Michel, 58n16 Fourier, Charles, 72, 84 Freud, Sigmund, 120n66, 151–153, 173n79 Nachträglichkeit, 152 Oedipal complex, 152 G Gikandi, Simon, 15, 26n28 Globalization, 4, 126, 144 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 193 Gogol, Nikolai, 189, 205n34, 205n35 Overcoat, 189, 205n34, 205n35 Guerlac, Susan, 37, 39, 42, 48, 58n3, 58n5, 58n14, 59n29 H Habermas, Jürgen, 76, 88n28 Hartog, François, 6, 24n9, 144, 146, 172n50 See also Presentism Haussmann, Baron, 72, 73, 91, 100 Heidegger, Martin, 57, 69, 87n7, 166, 176n117, 206n53 Helvetism, 203n5 High German, 183, 201 Homelessness, 4, 20, 100, 101, 111, 113, 114, 195, 203 I Industrial Revolution, 4, 72 International Congress of Philosophy, 1, 35, 54, 55, 57n1, 59n42 Iqbal, Mohammed, 1, 39, 47, 56 Irony, 7, 21, 126, 127, 132, 136, 140, 147, 149, 155, 158, 159, 191, 202

Islam, 93, 98, 112, 117n35, 126, 130, 132, 133, 135, 137, 157 J Joyce, James, 2, 7, 8, 125 K Kafka, Franz, 13, 22, 183, 203n3 Koselleck, Reinhart, 4, 23n1 L Labor, 7, 85, 107, 182, 190, 194 Lachelier, Jules, 43, 58n16 Latour, Bruno, 5, 24n6 London, 25n18, 25n20, 26n28, 27n41, 58n11, 72, 105, 117n18, 117n34, 119n47, 174n91, 203n4, 205n35 Longue durée, 77 M Mallarmé, Stéphane, 196 Mann, Thomas, 5, 13, 197 Marx, Karl, 5, 23n2, 24n5, 84, 153, 194, 205n31 Marxism, 76 Mathematics, 38, 40–43 Mechanization, 149 Melancholy, 96, 109, 111, 112, 115n4, 120n66, 200 hüzün, 96, 109, 110, 120n66 Memory, 3, 4, 6–8, 17, 19–21, 37, 38, 46–50, 53, 57, 59n31, 74, 78–82, 87n8, 89n36, 95, 104–106, 112, 115, 116n8, 126, 127, 131, 132, 136, 137, 143, 152, 155, 166, 167, 186, 200, 202, 212

 INDEX 

collective memory, 104, 111, 113, 114 involuntary memory, 80, 125, 164 mémoire involontaire, 6, 7, 80, 86 mémoire volontaire, 80 pure memory, 49–51, 54 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 58n16, 59n31 Messianic, 21, 76, 79 See also Benjamin, Walter Metaphor, 53, 67, 88n19, 103, 138, 151, 153, 154, 158, 173n68, 173n73, 189, 190, 198 Metaphysics, 42 Metonymy, 158 Modernism, 1–4, 7–10, 12–16, 18, 20–23, 23n2, 25n23, 27n35, 39, 72, 93, 115n4, 125, 127, 131, 132, 137, 169n18, 203, 211, 212, 215n3 comparative modernism, 16, 20, 26n29 Modernity, 2–6, 8, 9, 12–19, 23, 25n16, 38, 39, 42, 55–57, 66–73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 83, 86, 93, 95, 98, 103, 108, 109, 116n8, 117n29, 118n36, 118n39, 126, 131, 134, 140, 142, 143, 156–159, 161, 162, 166, 167, 181, 183, 193, 195, 200–202, 206n53 Modernization, 4, 16, 21, 22, 27n35, 100, 102, 118n35, 118n36, 125, 129, 131–133, 135, 136, 144, 157, 171n29, 174n91, 182, 192, 213 Multiplicity non-numerical multiplicity, 43, 44 numerical multiplicity, 44 Music, 44, 148, 168n11, 169n19, 173n67, 173n68, 213 melody, 44, 47, 53, 162

221

Musil, Robert, 5 Muvakkithane, 102, 157, 168n8, 174n91 Mysticism, 58n16, 76, 97, 126, 157 Myth, 67, 86n2, 92, 103, 104, 114, 193 N Nation, 10, 22, 56, 91, 114, 120n65, 125, 126, 133, 135, 143, 151, 167, 167n3, 212 national identity, 56 Nicholls, Peter, 15, 25n12, 26n31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 87n7, 200, 202, 206n50 Nobel Prize, 38 Non-European, 3, 13, 14, 20 Nostalgia, 4, 6, 7, 70, 73, 75, 82, 93, 96, 101, 107, 109–111, 120n66, 130, 134, 166, 202 hasret, 96, 101, 117n30, 120n66 O Obsolescence, 4, 17, 20, 72, 114 Ottoman Empire, 93, 95, 117n21, 117n27, 117n34, 134, 174n91, 175n104 P Pamuk, Orhan, 98, 109, 116n14, 117n16, 168n13, 213 Paris, 1, 13, 19, 20, 24n4, 24n7, 24n9, 24n10, 25n19, 27n38, 35, 36, 40, 54, 56, 58n15, 58n17, 59n21, 66, 68, 70–73, 75, 76, 84, 86, 87n7, 87n18, 89n39, 91, 93, 94, 96, 99–101, 116n6, 117n19, 172n60, 175n103, 175n110, 204n16, 205n36, 206n42

222 

INDEX

Parody, 4 Periodisation, 9–12, 14, 25n23 Physics, 38, 40, 42, 52 Picaresque, 128, 149, 156 Poincaré, Henri, 24n9, 35, 58n16 Positivism, 38, 42, 43, 55, 56, 76 Presentism, 17, 145, 146, 154, 212 Progress, 7–9, 17, 20, 23, 44, 55, 68, 69, 72, 73, 77, 78, 83, 91, 92, 94, 96, 114, 141, 143, 159, 160, 166, 182, 185, 187 Proust, Marcel, 2, 8, 13, 19, 24n11, 25n14, 26n25, 39, 66, 68, 69, 72, 74, 79, 80, 83, 86, 89n36, 89n37, 112, 175n103 Psychoanalysis, 6, 7, 151–153, 158 See also Freud, Sigmund Psychology, 13 R Rationality, 58n16, 112, 144, 182, 195 Reification, 70, 149, 198 Relativity, 42 Renaissance, 11 Republic of Turkey, 95, 130 Residue, 96, 111, 112 artık, 96, 109, 111, 112, 158, 163 Ruin, 74, 87n6, 87n9, 107, 114, 115n5, 116n11, 186 Russell, Bertrand, 35, 37, 41, 49, 58n11 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 58n16 Satire, 4, 7, 21, 132, 133, 135, 136, 149, 170n20, 170n29 Schwarz, Roberto, 15, 26n28 Science, 13, 18, 35, 37–42, 44, 54, 76, 79

Second Empire, 73, 93 Second World War, 13, 37, 54, 55, 119n56, 181 Spiritualism, 36, 55 Spitzer, Leo, 74 Stein, Gertrude, 39 Stream of consciousness, 5, 7 Surrealism, 93 Synchronization, 17, 129 Synthesis, 21, 41, 76, 98, 100, 113, 131, 132, 136, 157, 159, 213 T Taksim Square, 92 Tanpınar, Ahmet Hamdi, 1, 3, 5, 7, 14–16, 19–21, 45, 56, 59n32, 76, 91–114, 115n2, 115n3, 115n4, 116n7, 116n8, 116n9, 116n10, 116n12, 116n14, 116n15, 117n16, 117n17, 117n22, 117n25, 117n30, 117n31, 117n32, 118n36, 118n37, 118n38, 118n40, 118n41, 118n43, 118n45, 119n49, 119n50, 119n53, 119n54, 119n55, 119n57, 119n58, 119n59, 119n61, 119n62, 119n64, 120n65, 120n66, 125–127, 130–138, 140, 142, 143, 145, 148, 151, 155, 158, 159, 161, 162, 167n1, 167n5, 168n6, 168n10, 168n12, 168n13, 169n14, 169n15, 169n16, 169n18, 169n19, 170n20, 170n21, 170n22, 170n24, 170n25, 170n26, 170n27, 170n28, 171n31, 171n32, 171n35, 171n37, 172n39, 172n42, 172n43, 172n44, 172n49, 172n53, 172n56, 172n57, 172n58,

 INDEX 

173n61, 173n65, 173n66, 173n69, 173n70, 173n71, 173n72, 173n74, 173n75, 173n77, 173n78, 174n80, 174n82, 174n83, 174n84, 174n86, 174n87, 174n88, 174n92, 175n95, 175n97, 175n98, 175n100, 175n101, 175n102, 175n104, 175n106, 175n109, 175n111, 175n112, 175n113, 175n114, 176n115, 176n118, 182, 191, 203, 207n56, 212, 213, 215n5 aksak, 130, 137, 139, 153, 164, 168n11, 174n81 Five Cities (Beş Şehir), 20, 91, 93, 97–99, 115n3, 126, 133, 137, 169n19, 213, 214 mahalle, 99, 119n54 Mind at Peace (Huzur), 93, 131, 133, 169n16, 176n115, 213 The Time Regulation Institute (Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü), 4, 5, 8, 21, 22, 102, 125–130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 142–149, 155–157, 167, 167n2, 168n6, 168n10, 169n16, 170n24, 171n32, 171n35, 172n39, 172n43, 172n44, 172n49, 172n53, 172n56, 172n57, 172n58, 173n61, 173n65, 173n66, 173n69, 173n70, 173n72, 173n73, 173n74, 173n75, 173n77, 173n78, 174n80, 174n82, 174n83, 174n84, 174n86, 174n88, 174n92, 175n95, 175n97, 175n98, 175n100, 175n101, 175n102, 175n106, 175n109, 175n111, 175n113, 175n114, 176n118, 182, 188, 191, 212, 213

223

Tanzimat, 27n35, 99, 100, 108, 117n35, 134, 135, 162 Technology, 4, 23n2, 37–39, 42, 166, 191, 195 Temporal blindness, 67–69, 114 Theology, 76, 158 Translation, 1, 14, 20, 52, 54, 57, 57n1, 58n12, 59n22, 86, 93, 118n37, 119n52, 133, 139, 155, 167n2, 168n9, 169n15, 171n35, 172n44, 173n71, 174n81, 174n85, 175n112, 203n1, 206n42, 213 Tunç, Mustafa Şekip, 1, 54–56 Turkish literature, 6, 16, 93, 115n2, 214 U Urban transformation, 70, 92, 99, 114, 115n2 Utopia, 73, 83, 84 V Valéry, Paul, 145, 150 W Walser, Robert, 1, 5, 7, 13, 15, 22, 127, 181–185, 187–189, 193, 195, 198, 200, 201, 203, 203n1, 203n2, 203n3, 203n4, 203n5, 204n8, 204n9, 204n10, 204n12, 204n13, 204n15, 204n17, 204n20, 204n21, 204n22, 204n23, 204n24, 204n25, 204n26, 205n27, 205n29, 205n30, 205n32, 205n35, 205n37, 206n39, 206n40, 206n41, 206n43, 206n44, 206n45, 206n46, 206n47,

224 

INDEX

206n48, 206n49, 206n54, 207n56, 207n57, 207n58, 207n59, 213 The Assistant, 4, 5, 8, 22, 181–187, 189, 193–195, 198, 200, 201, 203, 203n1, 204n9, 204n12, 204n17, 204n20, 204n21, 204n22, 204n23, 204n25, 205n27, 205n29, 205n30, 205n32, 205n37, 206n39, 206n44, 206n47, 206n49, 206n54, 206n55, 207n59, 212; Advertising Clock, 185, 191–195 business, 191–193, 195, 196, 199, 201, 207n57

Fritz Kocher’s Aufsätzen, 189 Geschwister Tanner, 184, 188 microscripts, 183 Vorübergänglichkeit, 4, 8, 187–191 Weber, Max, 58n6, 190, 204n19 Weimar Republic, 76 Welles, Orson, 181 Woolf, Virginia, 2, 7, 8, 24n11, 25n15 World literature, 10, 11, 14, 16, 20, 133, 214 Z Zeitroman, 5, 20, 183 Zurich, 22, 184