We had to put together an extraordinarily refined puzzle. Its pieces were made of things unsaid. Of blind thoughts. Of absent memories. Of a programmed amnesia. What had we gone to the Congo for? Why were we no longer there? Such mysteries were finer than the most refined sugar.
—Jean-Louis Lippert, on the genocide in the Belgian CongoInside Turkey, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ranks as one of the greatest Turkish writers of the twentieth century. The seesaw of his domestic popularity notwithstanding—his years of institutional neglect as a melancholic observer of the Ottoman past in a Kemalist society devoted to the future (Parla)—Tanpınar's reputation has come, retrospectively, to dominate not just the previous century but also the self-image of modern Turkish literature. Similar to the “central” figures of other national literatures such as Rabindranath Tagore and Octavio Paz, Tanpınar was full of energies that spilled over into many fields and across many genres: political satire (Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü [The Time Regulation Institute]), the long essay (Beş Şehir [Five Cities]), the historical novel of ideas (Huzur [A Mind at Peace]), not to mention the definitive literary monograph of the Turkish nineteenth century (On Dokuzuncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi [History of Nineteenth-Century Turkish Literature]) and one of the most widely anthologized poems in modern Turkish poetry (“Ne içindeyim zamanın” [“Neither Am I inside Time”]). Up until ten years ago, having none of the international reach of Orhan Pamuk, Yaşar Kemal, and Nazim Hıkmet, he might even have been called (alongside Oğuz Atay) Turkey's secret national treasure. Half a dozen stellar English translations of his work, alongside the appearance of his texts in a wide spray of other languages (including German, Spanish, and Russian) are fortunately changing this state of secrecy.
In the following pages, I reread Tanpınar's oeuvre with Armenians in mind, and in view of a number of biographical facts about the author that have recently come to light. In particular I revisit two key texts of his—a history and a novel—to highlight Tanpınar's relative silence about a minority that suffered a great deal of violence during his lifetime. Finally, I also suggest two possible factors—a vocabulary of Sufi spirituality, and the influence of the fascist writers of the Action Française—in the nationalism that produced and facilitated these silences.
Tanpınar's quiet nationalism—and the complex, substantial oeuvre it supplied a background hum to—is unusual in that it both reflected the required patriotism of his time and also, on important points, departed from it. Like that of Ziya Gökalp, it could adopt a religious tone, and even blend in moments of Sufi spirituality (as Gökalp did) to render itself more sublime. As with Ömer Seyfettin and Yakup Kadri, it had a definite ethnic component, although it displayed none of the fierce anger of these two writers; similar to the nationalisms of the Anglophone Halide Edip and the Francophone Yahya Kemal, it was by no means foreign to European sensibilities—even if (as we shall see) the European traditions Tanpınar's national sentiment invoked were conservative and Romantic, not necessarily revolutionary and Enlightenment. Perhaps most importantly, Tanpınar possessed a nationalism that thrived on a constant sense of self-interrogation, and even self-parody. His work reflects this—stories of technology-mad uncles who half kill themselves modernizing their houses (a parody of Atatürk); novels (like A Mind at Peace) filled with long, sprawling conversations on the idea of nationhood, history, Europe, and the “Turk”; essays on Istanbul, whose deep historical reach seems to undermine the nationalist modernity it pays lip service to. Tanpınar's nationalism, in other words, was an agile, versatile, historically conscious entity—one that was in constant conversation with the Sufi/Ottoman archives he was devoted to.
Why write an article on Armenians in Tanpınar? There is, first of all, an obvious, ethical imperative to memorialize the violent disappearance and extermination of Armenians from Ottoman society during the period 1915–23, an event considered by a growing consensus of historians to have been a genocide. The number of Armenians killed during this campaign of violence is estimated to be somewhere between 700,000 and 1.5 million (Göçek 1). The Turkish government of the newly founded republic, it should be said, prosecuted some of the principal figures for war crimes in the years leading up to 1925 (Atatürk even admitted, in a famous 1926 interview with the Los Angeles Examiner, that there had been “massacres” of Armenians). A greater sensitivity around the word genocide (soykırım in Turkish) emerged after the Second World War, and the term genocide was eventually banned in Turkey, a ban that has continued right up to the present.
Why is Tanpınar so inviting as a place to begin an inquiry into the selective/collective amnesia of the Turkish present? Possibly because he knew so many Armenians himself—not just sculptors like Mari Gerekmezyan, whom he persuaded to study philosophy at Istanbul University, but also the colleagues and students he met in the two Armenian schools he taught at for four years, and about which he said virtually nothing, either in his diaries or in his letters.Footnote 1 A second, more ironic, reason might be the themes themselves that Tanpınar was so regularly drawn to: melancholy and loss. Tanpınar's work has come to be seen as an interrogation of the state-driven amnesia of all things Ottoman, a brave and subversive refusal to sweep everything before 1922 under the Kemalist carpet (Ertürk; Dolcerocca). A novel such as A Mind at Peace is dedicated to the forlorn recognition, in scene after scene, of a past jettisoned by the modernizing, Western-inspired reforms of the secularist regime that saw only backwardness and shame in the country's imperial legacy. This preoccupation with memory (comparisons with Benjamin abound)Footnote 2 makes Tanpınar's silence on Armenians all the more interesting—a case of one kind of amnesia trying to write about another.
Perhaps the most interesting reason to investigate the curious and shifting place of Armenians in the great writer's work is Tanpınar's own complex set of responses to the West—a Francophile committed to Paul Valery and André Gide, but also a religious ethnic nationalist with a deep, almost atavistic sense of Sunni Turkish Islam. The strange marriage between these two vocabularies—in particular, the way Tanpınar's admiration for a conservative, French, right-wing, at times even fascist spirituality (Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras) would shape his own nationalist aesthetic—may well throw some light, in the wider context of genocide itself, on the relationship between violence and mysticism, and the subtle way sublimity can be folded into the designs of the violent.
Not that Tanpınar himself was ever violent. One might describe him as, in some ways, a reluctant nationalist—a figure whose devotion to the Ottoman past and satirizing of the Kemalist present rendered his own feelings toward the Turkish nation-state ambivalent and would forever complicate any simplistic descriptions of him as a nationalist writer. He was fourteen years old in the crucial year of 1915—and could not have played any physical part in the events of the day, even if it is unclear to what extent his own father (an Ottoman qadi, or judge) was involved in the large-scale deportation of Armenians. In July 1914, the young Ahmet and his family found themselves stationed for over a year with their father in Kirkuk (in present-day Iraq), a town then on the edge of the Ottoman Empire. During their time there, Kirkuk would be designated as a deportation center for Armenian civilians by the authorities to compensate for the already saturated concentration camps of Deir el Zor (Okay 27–28; Kevorkian 626). In an essay written years later, Tanpınar recalls the slice of his childhood spent there: the local character of the neighborhood, the shame he felt at his murder (cinayet) of the sparrows in a neighbouring barn, the Arabian Nights tales he would forever associate with Kirkuk, and—perhaps most important—the constant workload of his father, who “yavaş yavaş hızlanan seferberliğin doğurduğu bir yığın mesele yüzünden geç vakte kadar hükümet dairesinde kalırdı” (“stayed in his office till late dealing with the pile of documents from the gradually accelerating mobilizations taking place”; “Kerkük Hatıraları” 343).Footnote 3 Most likely Tanpınar's father was involved in general war preparations, but the moment shows how closely the fate of the Armenians was biographically bound to Tanpınar's own story.Footnote 4
The undulations in the history of Tanpınar's critical reception deserve some mention, as they illustrate the way different times bring different optics to produce different versions of what is “overlooked” in a major writer's work. After decades of neglect by a secular republican elite and a sense of ownership by a religious, conservative readership more in tune with the slightly outdated Persian-tinged Turkish Tanpınar used, in the 1980s the prominent critic Berna Moran reproposed Tanpınar's oeuvre as an object of serious critical value regardless of political affiliation (Parla 29). Moran had seen in a novel like A Mind at Peace no straightforward traditionalism, but rather a technically accomplished examination of the tension between personal happiness and social responsibility (157). Many critics have subsequently joined in this effort to retrieve Tanpınar from a conservative, nationalist reading—Suha Oğuzertem, for example, sees Tanpınar's protagonists as exemplifying moments of self-dissolving modernist alienation (228), and Nurdan Gürbilek paints Tanpınar as a Benjaminesque incurable melancholic, irreversibly out of step with hegemony's zeitgeist (Kör Ayna 132). Similarly, Nergis Ertürk, while by no means overlooking the conservative-nationalist overtones of Tanpınar and his milieu, sees a writer whose melancholy exposes the “contradictions of a rationalizing modernity” enacted by “an amnesiac hegemonic majority” (44). Non-Turkish critics such as Pankaj Mishra have perceived a novelist who “places himself on the side of the fragmentary and the gratuitous against the imperatives of history and progress” (xiv). Perhaps most importantly, Pamuk's oft-expressed admiration for Tanpınar has led him to chide those who labeled him “reactionary” (Istanbul 153), celebrating instead a “deep and complex writer” who “open[s] up an inspiring and critical new space between” Turkey and the West (Other Colours 210).
The culminating effect of this resurgence of critical interest has been to see Tanpınar as a minority voice—minority, that is, in terms of intellectual mood, not ethnicity or religion. A subversive figure, the mirror-inverse of his secular rational age, exhibiting a rebellious obstinacy by refusing the new aesthetics of the collective. Working against this over the past few years, however, in yet another countermovement, have been a growing number of dissonant voices—voices who feel that, in the renewed rush to recognise Tanpınar's undoubted literary genius, some sense of the writer's own more reactionary aspects may have been lost.
Orhan Okay, in his 2010 biography of Tanpınar, was one of the first recent voices to sound these reservations. In Tanpınar's last year as an undergraduate student at Darülfünun (later to be renamed Istanbul University), nationalist students—all of them close friends of Tanpınar—agitated successfully to have five university professors removed for their lack of patriotism, including one Armenian professor of English literature, Barsamiyan Efendi (Okay 132–33). Okay writes, “Bunların hepsi Ahmet Hamdi'nin yakın arkadaşlarıdır. Peki, Ahmet Hamdi bu olayların neresindedir? Içine girmiş midir? Sadece bir muşahit midir? Yoksa sahnenin dışındakiler arasında kalmıştır? Bu soruların cevabını bügün için veremiyoruz” (“All of these were close friends of Ahmet Hamdi. So, where was Ahmet Hamdi in these events? Did he get involved? Was he just a spectator? Or did he work behind the scenes? We cannot find an answer to these questions today”; 133). Okay's words—more a concern than an outright criticism—have been followed by others. Vivet Kanetti has criticized the female Romanian character of Emma in A Mind at Peace for her sexual promiscuity, calling it an example of the “modern Turkish male sexual fantasy,” a standard trope (as Murat Belge reminds us [32–33]) for most Turkish representations of non-Muslim females in literature. Even more recently, Gözde Yılmaz has written of the “Sunni-Turkishness” (“Türklük-Sünnilik”) pervading so much of Tanpınar's fiction and nonfiction, a subtextual ideological landscape that affirms his own “individual and collective amnesia.” The literary critic Orhan Koçak has gone the furthest, expressing in a number of articles his frustration with the “forgiving” critical reception Tanpınar has received over the years. Here we find him quoting from one of Tanpınar's novels, Sahnenin Dışındakiler (Those outside the Scene [1950])—a novel that examines the immediate aftermath of the First World War, including the occupation of Istanbul by French and English troops, through the eyes of Cemal, the male protagonist. One of the central themes of Those outside the Scene is the dilemma of nationalism as an individual choice—a decision Cemal has to make, as he feels compelled to fight the nationalist cause, but is at the same time in love with Sabiha. The boarding house where Cemal is staying is owned by the only Armenian character in the novel, a beautiful widow named Madam Elekciyan:
1915 yılında Madam Elekciyan’ın hayatında dört mühim hâdise olmuştu. Evvela bu evi satın almışlardı. Yazık ki bu sevincin üstünden iki ay geçmeden Kirkor Elekciyan ölmüş, fakat talih bu kaybı telâfi etmek ister gibi beş seneden beri izini kaybettiği Salih Kaptan’ı karşısına çıkarmıştı. İşte bu ikinci buluşma kat’î olmuştu. Talih bu sefer de bu saadeti kıskanmış olacak ki, hemen arkasından Madam Elekciyan’ın vücudunun güzelliğinde o kadar zararlı bir rol oynayan kaza olmuş, Salih Kaptan’ın bütün ihtimamlarına rağmen, kırılan sol bacağı öbüründen biraz kısa kalmıştı. (Sahnenin Dışındakiler 222)
In the year 1915 four important events happened in the life of Madam Elekciyan. First of all, they bought this house. A pity that Kirkor Elekciyan died barely two months after this happy event. However, as if wanting to compensate for this loss, fortune brought forth Salih Kaptan whom she had lost track of for the last five years. This second encounter was definite. Fortune must have been envious of this happiness since shortly after Madam Elekciyan had an accident which had a detrimental effect on the beauty of her body, and despite all the efforts of Captain Salih, the broken left leg remained shorter than the other one. (trans. by Adile Aslan)
For unfamiliar readers, the nearest equivalent to this would be a German writer describing a Jewish woman and mentioning that the most important event for her in the years 1938–45 had been falling in love with another (German) man. Koçak, in an angry commentary on Tanpınar, writes:
Niçin bu “mahallede” hep son derece gevşek bir okumanın nesnesi oluyor Ahmet Hamdi, bolca bağışlanmış, her zaman çoktan hoş görülmüş olarak? Bazı sahiden parlak, ışıltılı, keskin pasajlar, gözümüzü o bulanık, kirli töre'nin fokurdamalarına karşı köreltiyor mu?
Why, in our neck of the woods, is Tanpınar always given such an extremely loose reading, abundantly forgiving, always positive? Do some indeed bright, sparkling, sharp passages blind our eyes to the gurgitations of this tainted ritual? (trans. by the author and Adile Aslan)
Domestic politics in Turkey today may well be playing a role in this recent resurgence of suspicion toward Tanpınar: the secular elites he was marginalized by are now themselves very much in the margins. Since 2002 a moderate Islamic party (in Turkish the “AKP” or Justice and Development Party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) has been in government, and the widely perceived renormalization of religious narratives and downplaying of secular ideals might be fueling a renewed cynicism toward a writer whose conservative, nationalist views are now back in power. Domestic politics aside, however, the deeper concern that unites all these frustrations is the fear of overlooking one thing for the sake of something else. Nothing could be more ironic, in the analysis of a writer whose central theme was the politics of forgetfulness, than replicating that forgetfulness in the very act of reading him.Footnote 5
Tanpınar's Armenians
[T]raumatic re-enactment conveys … both the truth of an event, and the truth of its incomprehensibility.
—Cathy CaruthKoçak's anger at Tanpınar is mostly an anger at omission: Tanpınar mentions the year 1915 in talking about his Armenian character, but he does not refer to what happened to Armenians that year. And throughout Tanpınar's novels, stories, and nonfiction, the primary question concerning the representation of Armenians in his work is one of paucity, not abundance. Tanpınar in truth wrote very little about Armenians—only two Armenian minor characters of any note appear in his fiction; although he was very much an Anatolian writer as well as an Istanbulite one, Armenians appear as small dots of Christian otherness against a Sunni, Turkish Muslim backdrop.
Both the near absence of Armenians in Tanpınar's work and his silence on the violence they suffered are unremarkable—even the few Turkish writers of Tanpınar's generation who did write favorably about Armenians allude only to, at best, the genocide of 1915. When we place Tanpınar against the background of twentieth-century Turkish literature in general, the paucity of his Armenians—it has to be said—reflects a general pattern. If Istanbul-based Armenian writers such as Zabel Yessayan and Krikor Zohrab generally wrote only about Armenians, early-twentieth-century Turkish writers generally wrote only about Turks, despite growing up in what was most definitely a multicultural society. An unwillingness to see Armenians and Armenian life as part of Turkey underlies this paucity of representations. Beyoğlu (a largely Christian neighborhood) was considered by many Turkish figures to be un-Turkish, the “unconquered part of Istanbul” (Belge 30). When its nineteenth-century buildings (many of them designed by French or Armenian architects) were bulldozed, the writer Attilla Ilhan considered it “no great loss,” since they were not “products of Turkish culture” (qtd. in Belge 30–31). Aside from Madam Elekciyan, the only two Armenian characters to appear in Tanpınar's work—a dancing girl and a slippery, untrustworthy watchmaker—easily fit the stereotypes of Armenians when they appeared at all in Turkish fiction: false, money-grabbing, and, in the case of female characters, almost always sexually promiscuous. One stereotype Tanpınar does not indulge in, however, is that of the violent, Turk-hating, treacherous Armenian. His near-contemporary Halide Edib, one of the most famous women writers in the Turkish canon and a passionate nationalist, filled the pages of both her fiction and nonfiction with tales of Armenians inflicting violence, sectarian bias, and general injustice upon their fellow Turks. In Tanpınar's texts, written barely a decade following those of Edib, this particular type is completely absent.
Left-wing writers such as Yaşar Kemal and Kemal Tahir gave sympathetic (albeit incidental and monodimensional) space to Armenians in their work. In Yaşar Kemal's famous novel Mehmet My Hawk, for example, the theft of Armenian property runs as a subtext to the narrative (Galip 97). In some ways, the writer whose silences on Armenians most resemble Tanpınar's is the writer most influenced by him: Orhan Pamuk. In all of his eleven novels to date, the only Armenian character to be found in any of them lies in his very first book, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları (Cevdet Bey and His Sons), in which the lover of the protagonist's brother is Armenian. Although Pamuk's political position on Armenians and their relationship to Turkey is the polar opposite of Tanpınar's—the Nobel laureate has been widely criticized in the nationalist press for his courageous, public denunciation of Turkish national amnesia—the virtual absence of Armenians in his fiction does mirror that of the nationalist writer he loves most.
As a historian, however, Tanpınar breaks this silence. In the scholarly moments Tanpınar mentions Armenians, he does so professionally and with academic accuracy: in his 1944 essay on Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, the Ottoman reformist, he is quite happy to mention the monographs Pasha wrote on “Armenians and Armenian religion” (Edebiyat Üzerine 199). In History of Nineteenth-Century Turkish Literature, he mentions the Armenian scholar Legofeti Hoca in discussing the Academy of Sciences (On Dokuzuncu Asır Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi 144) and even (briefly) touches on the Turkish-language newspapers in Istanbul published in Greek or Armenian script (221). Although the references are hardly abundant—and always marked by the word ecnebi (“foreigner”)—Tanpınar certainly does not hide the Armenian origins of Turkish-Ottoman theater, declaring theater to be “Müsülman-şark edebiyatlarının en az tanıdığı sanat nevidir” (“the least-known genre in Muslim-Oriental literature”; 278). The first theater production in Turkey was in a foreign language (ecnebi dilleriyle), says Tanpınar, and twenty-six years had to pass before the first Turkish-language piece was produced (280). He dedicates a small section to the Armenian director and theater company founder Güllü Agop (281–82), and even offers some slightly Orientalist observations on the weakness of Turkish theater—it comes, he says, from a civilization (medeniyet) that attaches no importance to man, that has no concept of “introspection” (he uses the French word, spelled the same way as the English one), and that lacks any life experience (hayat tecrübesi eksikliği) of women because they live separately from men (283).Footnote 6
In Five Cities, Tanpınar's nationalist sublime shines at its purest. An exquisitely written book, this series of five short essays on Erzurum, Bursa, Ankara, Konya, and Istanbul intricately interweaves a whole array of poetic reflections on time, architecture, language, and faith. In the opening pages Tanpınar invokes the memory of the Battle of Manzikert (the Turkish Hastings/Saratoga): “Bu geceler düşüncemi başka büyük geceye, 1071 senesi Ağustos'unun 26. gecesine götürüyor … bileğinin kuvvetiyle, dehasının zoruyla bize bu aziz vatanın kapılarını açan Alparslan'ı” (“My thoughts reverted to another great night, the night of 26th August 1071, when Alparslan … with his strong and powerful genius opened to us the gates of our beloved homeland”; Beş Şehir 25; Five Cities 13).Footnote 7 In pushing so many poems, anecdotes, images, and memories together, within the space of two hundred pages, the book undergoes a kind of chemical reaction, fusing into the single expression of one writer's commitment to an entire, glorious landscape. Mosques, battles, couplets, and prayers all seem to blend themselves into a single stream of language. Tanpınar, an avid reader of Orientalists such as H. A. R. Gibb and Joseph von Hammer (not to mention travelers such as André Gide and Pierre Loti), has been accused elsewhere of self-Orientalism (Yashin 164–66). Some of the more grandiose passages do seem to suggest a crucial element of self-alienation at work in the process of re-presentation—but this does not wholly account for the almost spiritual yearning that seems to drive the book.
“Our beloved homeland” (bu aziz vatanın) … reading Five Cities with Armenians in mind reveals a book with many ironies. An existential tone runs through the entire text: “Mazi daima mevcuttur” (“The past is always present”), begins Tanpınar; “Kendimiz olarak yaşayabilmek için, onunla her an hesaplaşmaya ve anlaşmaya mecburuz” (“To live the authentic life, we must take into account and come to terms with every moment”; Beş Şehir 10; Five Cities viii). On every page there is a constant, moral stress on the continuity of the past into the present, an ethically infused emphasis on how history-saturated even the most quotidian details of our own lives are.Footnote 8 It is an attitude that makes Tanpınar's own silence about Armenians an initally curious, then later ironic, and finally quite Freudian affair.
Tanpınar's overlooking of Sinan's Armenian heritage, especially given the central and sublime place the architect has in Tanpınar's own vision of the Ottoman past, is one such irony. Sinan is, for Tanpınar, a “deha” (“genius”), a “taşın ve konuşan hacimlerin şairi” (“poet of stone”), whose “yaratıcılığındaki genişliktir” (“breadth of creativity”) was so awe-inspiring it “bir ananeyi tek başına tüketen, kendinden sonra gelenlere pek az bir şey bırakan sanatkârlardandır” (“exhausted a complete tradition … and left very little for his successors to achieve”; Beş Şehir 136, 138, 136, 140; Five Cities 135, 138, 136, 139). Although Sinan's Armenian origins would have been common knowledge—particularly to one so well-read and interested in architecture as TanpınarFootnote 9—they are filtered out of the narrative, as Tanpınar not only twins Sinan with a Turkish poet, Bâkî (Beş Şehir 138; Five Cities 137), but also folds him into a sublime vision worthy of Barrès himself:
İnsan kaderinin büyük taraflarından biri de, bugün attığı adımın kendisini nereye götüreceğini bilmemesidir. … Bunun gibi, Malazgirt Ovasında döğüşen yiğitler, kılıçlarının havada çizdiği kavsin, bütün ufku dolduran nal şakırtılarının, Sinan'ın, Hayreddin'in. ltrî”nin, Dede'nin dünyalarına gebe olduğundan elbette habersizdiler. Kader, insan ruhu bir tarafını tamamlasın, yaratılışın büyük rüyalarından biri gerçekleşsin diye, onları bu ovaya kadar göndermişti. Yaratıcı ruhun emrinde idiler, onun istediğini yaptılar. (Beş Şehir 22)
One of destiny's strangest aspects is that we do not know where today's decision may lead us. … The young warriors fighting on the plains of Manzikert certainly never dreamt that the curves of their swords in the air and the horizon that resounded with their horses’ hoofbeats all bore within them the seeds of Sinan, Hayreddin, Itrî and Dede. Destiny had sent them to this plain to perfect a side of the human spirit, to realise one of creation's dreams. They were under orders from the creative soul; they obeyed her. (Five Cities 11)
In this remarkable passage, Sinan is incorporated—alongside a Turkish admiral, an Ottoman musician, and a Sufi poet—into a civilizational project whose glorious dawn begins a good three centuries before his birth. The classical Ottoman identity Tanpınar is in part evoking would be oblivious to ethnicity; moreover, the gesture of effacing incongruous details out of a nationalist-inspired history of ideas is hardly an unfamiliar one—a whole tradition exists of Ottoman court poets who removed the early history of Greek-Turkish collaboration in their poetic retelling (Fodor 13–21; Almond 104). Nevertheless, when we consider the aesthetic demands of the sublime in this passage—how the future of the Ottoman Empire already lay pregnant in the bloodshed of the very first battle—we realize that not only did Tanpınar delete the Armenianness of Sinan from this epiphany but also, more importantly, he had no choice but to delete it. Tanpınar's vision, its Bergsonian invocation of a Sunni-Turkish energy, an organic élan vital that permeated the culture from its inception at the Battle of Manzikert through all its subsequent manifestations . . . such a vision could not accommodate an Armenian as the architect of the Suleimaniye and Selimiye mosques, any more than he could recognize the large Armenian segment of the population that lived in a city like Erzurum. Tanpınar's deletion of Armenians from his history—in effect, the tranformation of the incongruous into the invisible—had as many aesthetic reasons as ideological ones.
Of course, we are still dealing with ironies here, nothing more. The fact that Tanpınar was unwilling to mention Sinan's Armenianness, or recognize the historical presence of Armenians in Anatolia to the same degree as another of his heroes, the historian Evliya Çelebi,Footnote 10 is ironic insofar as our subject is the difficult question of a writer's silences. That Tanpınar could teach at two Armenian schools for four years (Esayan Ermeni Ortaokulu and Pangaltı Mıhitaryan Lisesi—both in Istanbul [Korkmaz])Footnote 11 and never mention them once, not the pupils he knew, nor the colleagues he worked alongside, is a silence that stands alongside these other ironies.
Perhaps the most interesting silence of all in Five Cities, where Tanpınar appears to be on the brink of saying something more, but then at the last minute pulls back, occurs toward the end of the section on Konya. Tanpınar recalls his time in Konya, as a fifteen-year-old in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, in 1916. Walking past the city prison, he hears an Armenian song—he does not call it Armenian—from what was very probably an Armenian woman: “Konya hapishanesinin kadınlar kısmında yüzünü görmediğim fakat sesini çok iyi tanıdığım bir kadın vardı. Akşam saatlerinde onun türkü söylemesini âdeta beklerdim. Ve bilhassa isterdim ki ‘Gesi bağlarında bir top gülüm var’ türküsünü söylesin. Bu acayip türkü hiç fark edilmeden yutulan bir avuç zehire benzer” (“Among the women of the Konya prison, there was one whose face I'd never seen but whose voice I recognized. I used to wait for her voice in the evening hours. And I particularly longed for her song. ‘My armful of roses in the vineyards of Gesi.’ To hear this strange melody is like swallowing a handful of poison unaware”; Beş Şehir 90; Five Cities 83). Gesi, an Armenian-majority province in the city of Kayseri, is famous for this song, which is still popular in modern Turkey today. In the years following 1915, the song was said to be associated by many Armenians with the loss of loved ones during the catastrophe (Setian 129). Tanpınar's page on this moment is not by any means indifferent—he addresses directly the suffering and anguish of those years in Anatolia, but without specifically naming one group or another, so that the picture of generic pain and disorder he paints euphemistically avoids any specific details of massacre or ethnic cleansing. Furthermore, he mentions Barrès in the very next lines, insisting the song reminds him of Barrès's book on Spain and confessing his own awe at the enigma of creative composition. And yet the mention of poison is strange—why would listening to such a song be akin to swallowing poison? Doubtless Tanpınar would say it is the melancholic effect of the melody he is referring to. Tweaking this line differently, however, we can perhaps glimpse a deeper, more personal anxiety going on beneath the recollection of this Armenian song—the poison of what Caruth calls the truth of the incomprehensibility of the event (153).
Tanpınar's attitude toward the events of 1915 are not always clear. He does not deny that some kind of violence happened, but he seems to characterize it as an act of ethnic cleansing taking place against a background of general violence, the removal of one ethnic group by another so that a project of national independence can take place. Sometimes Tanpınar comes close to articulating this: when he writes, “Yazık ki bir imparatorluğun hayatı … her şeyden evvel soğukkanlı hesap ister” (“How sad that the life of an Empire … specifically demands cold-blooded decisions”; Beş Şehir 103; Five Cities 98), he is referring to the banishing of a vizier, but he could easily have been writing about the extinction of a minority group. Near the beginning of Five Cities, Tanpınar makes what is probably his only explicit reference to the Armenian genocide—an event Tanpınar, following many others, calls the “Ermeni meselesi” (“Armenian affair”; 39; 30).Footnote 12 Describing the American investigators who were subsequently sent out throughout eastern Turkey to see if a genocide had actually taken place, Tanpınar repeats a mayor's joke to argue that there had never been a sizable population of Armenians in Erzurum in the first place:
Mütareke yıllarında Ermeni meselesi dolayısıyla Erzurum'a gelmiş olan Amerikan heyetine o zamanın Belediye Reisi Zâkir Beyin verdiği cevabı kim hatırlamaz? … “Ben kısa bir misalle Erzurum'da ekseriyet kimlerde idi, Generale anlatayım.” diyerek heyeti oturdukları evin penceresine götürmüş, “- Bakın, demiş, … O büyük taşlık Müslüman mezarlığı, o küçüğü de Ermeni mezarlığıdır: bunlar kendi ölülerini yemediler ya!” (Beş Şehir 40)
Who doesn't remember Zakir Bey, mayor at this time, and his reply to the American commission which had come to Erzurum after the armistice years to inquire about the Armenian affair? … “Let me tell the General in a very few words who were the majority in Erzurum!” And he took the member of the commission to the window of the house where they were living, and said “See … the bigger section is the Moslem cemetery, the smaller one is the Armenian cemetery: for sure they haven't devoured their own dead!” (Five Cities 31)
Ten pages earlier, Tanpınar had already established Erzurum as a city infused in his imagination with the folktales of Kerem and Yunus, his grandmother's reminiscences of Yemen and Mecca, and he even mentions the number of the mosques (fifty-four) and madrassas, or colleges (thirty-eight), found there. The Christian presence in Erzurum, a fifth of whose population was Armenian in 1914, and whose churches in the region number nearly five hundred,Footnote 13 is elided. Faced with the historical dimension of the Armenian presence in the backdrop of his “five cities,” satire and silence were Tanpınar's only real response to the problems this created for his vision of the past. His reiteration of the mayor's denial illustrates Tanpınar's profound reluctance to give up any fragment of the romantic tapestry he weaves for the city in the previous ten pages: “Sanki şiir, din, gurbet duygusu … bu dağları, dereleri onun için ilâhî varlıklar yahut veliler hâline getirmişlerdi” (“Poetry, religion, the yearning for one's country … elevated mountains and streams to the rank of sacred and saintly beings”; 27; 18). Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, we really see the effect of Barrès and Maurras, whose mystical belief in the spiritual unifying force of the nation, the need for submission to a sublime order, and the energy latent in any reconnection with a people's past may well have had some effect on Tanpınar, who cites the two authors repeatedly throughout his work.Footnote 14
Tanpınar's commitment to the fascist writers of the Action Française, and the way in which he blended his own Sufi ideas into a nationalist sublime, make it difficult to describe his cognitive dissonance as just another case of bad faith. Tanpınar had Armenian friends and neighbors, taught at two Armenian girls’ schools for four years, knew some Armenian writers and history—and, yes, virtually none of this was was ever mentioned in his work, or in his letters, or in his extensive diaries. But something was needed to facilitate this denial—and it may well be that a sense of the mystical sublime was a useful mediator. The point is worth elaborating. Although one might think it was in the conservative nationalist atmosphere of the Dergâh writers that Tanpınar first encountered the thinkers, novelists, and poets of the Action Française,Footnote 15 Tanpınar had actually been introduced to them as an undergraduate through the lectures of his mentor, Yahya Kemal. In his book on Kemal, he describes the old poet as discovering in Barrès the “tarihin vecdi içindeydi” (“ecstasy of history”), minus the desire for vengeance and minus what Tanpınar perceived as the “rejyonalist bir fikir” (“regionalism”) of Barrès (Tanpınar, Yahya Kemal 46, 47). Tanpınar does not appear to have been too troubled by Barrès's own ideological commitment to the civilizational identity of a Christian or Catholic West (Barrès saw both Muslims and Prussians as “barbarians” and could describe Spanish children on the streets of Córdoba as “little Saracens” [Undying Spirit 48]).Footnote 16 When we read through a book like Colette Baudoche, it is interesting to see the organic, animating way Barrès talks about cities: “Metz does not aim to please the senses; … it is a city for the soul, the old French soul” (9). “Metz is the place where we feel our loss of strength” (11). It is a personification of the city that reminds the reader of Tanpınar's Turkish cities: “Erzurum hatırlıyordu: gömüldüğü toz ve çamur yığınının içinde … kısacası, bütün hayatını hatırlıyordu” (“Erzurum remembered its lives past now buried in a heap of dust and mud. … [I]n short, Erzurum remembered the entirety of its life”; Beş Şehir 33; Five Cities 23). The ability to solidify the substance of communities, extinguish the individual, and then shape and form these communities into sentences, stretching their time lines like personalities out over decades and even centuries, seems to have played a part in both writers’ urban animisms.
This word for “ecstasy,” vecd, is also worth dwelling on for a moment. An Ottoman Turkish word, it has its origins in the Arabic wajd (وجد), which has a variety of meanings, among them “finding,” “body,” “being,” and even “listening.” Tanpınar certainly knew the Sufi connotations of the term because he uses the word vecd twice in his novel A Mind at Peace, the second time in the middle of a detailed description of a Sufi dervish ceremony that the protagonist witnesses in a lodge in Istanbul:
Üçüncü selam Mümtaz'ı büsbütün başka ufuklara taşıdı. … Mevlevi ayini vecde yaklaştıkça mahzun ve yüklü aristokrat edasını bırakıyor, … Mümtaz nağmenin kıvrak raksında adeta halkımızın neşesini, Anadolu'ya bu kadar uzun ıstıraplarla tahammül kudretini veren o büyük kaynağı buluyordu. (Huzur 282)
The third selam transported Mümtaz to completely different horizons. … As the Mevlevî ceremony approached an [ecstatic] trance, it abandoned melancholy and solemn aristocratic expression. … Mümtaz discovered that great wellspring that gave villagers their joy and Anatolia the fortitude to withstand such suffering. (Mind 312)
Not only does Tanpınar report the ecstasy Mümtaz witnesses and experiences, he also historically grounds it as an abiding source (kaynak) of energy the Turkish people of Anatolia were able to draw on—Tanpınar's nationalism at its subtlest. A deeper point, however, lies in the Sufi source of this word. Readers of Ibn ‘Arabi and Mevlana (including Tanpınar) will know that all ecstasy involves annihilation—that all wajd, if you like, requires some degree of fana’. Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–1240) defines “ecstasy” (wajd) as “the states that come upon the heart unexpectedly and annihilate it from witnessing itself and those present” (qtd. in Chittick 212). Ecstasy takes place when the cosmos listens (sama’) to God, whose speech brings forth being (wujud). Ecstasy and being—different words in English, the same word ultimately in Arabic—have this relationship in the Sufi universe, a privileged connection to the divine that can only take place to the exclusion of all else: “The cosmos can have no existence without Speech on God's part and listening on the part of the cosmos. … There is nothing but speech and listening. There can be nothing else” (Chittick 213). The annihilation required here is not merely spiritual, not merely of the self, but of all things that do not pertain to the speaking and listening of ecstatic being.
Did mysticism facilitate Tanpınar's willingness to overlook the violence he was almost certainly aware of? Tanpınar was not simply a writer forever prone to an open sense of the mystical, the transcendental, the incommunicable in life—he was also someone who, like Barrès and Maurras, grounded these mystical inclinations in the ideological horizon of a civilizational entity: Sufi poetry, Seljuk history, Ottoman aesthetics, Turkish language. Tanpınar's One was no epekeina tes ousia, no transcendental Other, but very much a culturally located, physically grounded sublime. Perhaps the pleasure—the ecstasy, the jouissance—Tanpınar felt in the repeated connection he made to this horizon (what Slavoj Žižek calls “the ecstatic throwing-oneself into the lethal bliss of the divine Thing” 158) made Armenians into something necessarily abject, a political obstacle, a demographic inconvience, a semantic stain. The pleasure with which Tanpınar disappeared ex-statically into his One may well have overpowered the definite veins of humanism we find in his work. A reading of his most famous novel might give us some idea of this struggle.
The Crucified Suad: An Armenian Reading of A Mind at Peace
There's a corpse between us. Don't expect my return! The dream is over.
—Nuran in A Mind at PeaceTanpınar wrote most of his novel A Mind at Peace in 1947, in the aftermath of the Second World War and a good three decades after the Armenian genocide. It has become a cliché, among Tanpınar scholars, to declare at the outset that A Mind at Peace (whose original title, Huzur, means “peace”) is really about huzursuzluk (“restlessness”). To suggest here, tenatively, an Armenian reading of A Mind at Peace—and of the restlessness in A Mind at Peace—is not to claim the novel is “really” about the violence inflicted on Armenians by Turks. Rather, it raises some basic questions: What happens when we read Tanpınar's masterpiece specifically with Armenians, and Talat Pasha, and the Committee for Union and Progress, and the earlier Hamidiye massacres (1893–94) and Adana massacres (1909) in mind? What kind of novel is produced by constantly—perhaps, even, artificially—keeping this frame of reference present? Is the result a skewing of Tanpınar's intended themes—national identity, the meaning of history, Ottoman aesthetics, the balance between public and private self, the lived experience of the city—into a spray of random, speculative directions? Or might such an approach—what we might term, following Žižek, looking awry at the ideological object—actually reveal, from a different angle, a dark thread running through the heart of the text? A vein of something so unspeakable, it barely approaches articulation except through a whole array of allusions, repetitions, and metonymic displacements?
Perhaps the first thing to note is how, in a novel that examines the oblivion the Kemalist state consigned the Ottoman world to, the Armenian operates in a spectral fashion, as it too was a significant part of that now abandoned world. In one of the book's most famous passages, where Mümtaz, the protagonist, idly wanders around an antique shop, what do we see among the various bric-a-brac but a once-famous book on fish by an Armenian zoologist:
Mümtaz bu dükkana bakarken hiç farkında olmadan Mallarme'nin mısraını hatırladı: “Meçhul bir felaketten buraya düşmüş.” Buraya, bu tozlu dükkana, bu duvarına elle yapılmış triko çorapların asıldığı yere. … Bu kitapların yanıbaşında açık işportalarda, … kapakları resimli romanlar, mektep kitapları, ciltlerinin yeşili atmış frenkçe salnameler, eczacı formülleri vardı. Kahve falı ile Momsen'in Roma hayali, Payot edisyonunun artıklarıyle Karakin Efendi'nin balıkçılık kitabı, baytarlık, modern kimya, ilmi remil, sanki insan kafasının bütün düzensizliği bu çarşıda birdenbire teşhir edilmesi icap ediyormuş gibi birbirine karışıyordu. (Huzur 29)
As Mümtaz looked at this shop, Mallarmé's line came to mind: “It's ended up here through some nameless catastrophe.” Here in this dusty shop from whose walls hung handmade tricot stockings. … Beside these books, in open hawker's cases, were … pulp novels with illustrated covers, textbooks, French yearbooks with faded green bindings, and pharmaceutical formulas. As if the detritus of the mind of mankind had been hastily exposed in this market, books mixed and intermingled, texts on reading fortunes in coffee grounds alongside classicist Mommsen's vision of Rome, remnants of Payot editions, Karakin Deveciyan Efendi's treatise on fish and ichthyology, as well as subjects like veterinary medicine, modern chemistry, and the techniques of geomancy. (Mind 52–53)
The nameless (Meçhul—literally, “unknown”) catastrophe remains unnamed. One of only two references to Armenians in a four-hundred-page novel discussing death, revolution, politics, and Dostoyevskian guilt, the number stands out in contrast to the references to Greeks in the text (eight). Greeks—or Rumlar / Rum polites / Ottoman Greeks—constituted that other great Christian minority in the Ottoman Empire, a minority group made somewhat more articulable by not having the stigma of a possible genocide attached to them. For Tanpınar, of course, the catastrophe (felaket) in the passage has been the destruction of the Ottoman world. That the destruction of the Armenian world went hand in hand with this event, linked if not monocausally so, is a fact A Mind at Peace makes no actual reference to. The “nameless catastrophe” would have to remain unnameable. Nevertheless, regardless of what one finds in the debris and bric-a-brac of the novel (Mümtaz comes across an old portrait of a Greek patriarch on the street five pages later), the tension between a decadent nostalgia for the Ottoman past (with all its accommodations) and the nationalistic commitment to a monocultural sublime makes the Armenian a curious site of struggle for Tanpınar's shifting aesthetics. That it remains a largely unarticulated site only highlights how far Tanpınar did not process, or was reluctant to process, his own thoughts and feelings about Armenians. A kind of collapsed, tortured humanism shuffles through A Mind at Peace, diagnosed by many as a traumatized male identity, a modernist crisis, or a self-conscious belatedness. What happens when, instead of these factors, we suggest the mass ethnic cleansing of the Armenians as one of the causes of the text's “restlessness”?
What makes the silence concerning Armenians in A Mind at Peace even stranger is the extent to which some of its major characters are steeped in, or have names close to, events and characters responsible for the Armenian genocide. The infamous Committee for Union and Progress (İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti [CUP]) was an organization widely held to be responsible for the event itself and organized the death squads (Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa) that would plan and carry out many of the massacres. Talat Pasha was considered to be one of the architects of the violence, and personally responsible for the fervent energy behind the extermination (he was assassinated by an Armenian in Berlin in 1921). Nuran—one of the four main characters of Tanpınar's epic novel, with whom Mümtaz is deeply in love—has a mother, Nazife, and an uncle, Tevfik, both of whom have links to the CUP:
[S]onra sonra Mümtaz Nuran'ın annesinin hemen hemen bütün İttihat ve Terakki erkanını uzaktan takip etmiş olduğunu ve şaşırtıcı hafızasiyle hiç kimsenin bilmediği şeyleri hatırladığını anladı …
Nuran'ın dayısı annesinden çok ayrı bir yaratılıştı. Genç bir kaymakam iken Hareket Ordusu ile İstanbul'a girmiş, İttihat ve Terakki zamanında bir fırsatını bularak ticarete atılmış, … Mütareke senelerinin Beyoğlu'nda o kadar velveleli bir ad yapan, kumarı, içkiyi ve kadını seven bu adamın baba evindeki bu son on iki senelik hayatı cidden garipti. (Huzur 157–58)
[M]uch later Mümtaz realized that she'd traced the careers of almost every high official in the Committee of Union and Progress. …
As a young lieutenant colonel, [Nuran's uncle] had marched into Istanbul along with the Army of Action to put down the 1909 Islamic counterrevolution against the Union and Progress government. During the Union and Progress era, he was able to capitalize on some opportunity or other that had arisen and entered into business; … the last dozen years of Tevfik's life under his father's roof were truly bizarre in light of the notorious name he'd made for himself as a gambler, a carouse, and a philanderer during the armistice years after 1918 in the bustling Beyoğlu district. (Mind 175–76)
Two points. First of all, Tanpınar leaves unexplained exactly how Tevfik, an officer under the CUP, made his money in the years leading up to and after 1915 (Beyoğlu was one of the most Greek or Armenian districts in Istanbul). Since A Mind at Peace is a literary text, and not a historical record, it is probably unfair to pick out an arbitrary reference to the Ottoman countercoup of 1909 and expect the novelist to supply a supplementary remark on the Adana massacres of 1909, where fifteen to thirty thousand Armenians lost their lives. What the passage does show, however, is how close the events of 1915 lie to the surface of Tanpınar's novel—even to something as innocuous as the love affair between Nuran and Mümtaz. This eerie, peripheral presence of Armenians in A Mind at Peace finds its strangest expression in the name choice of Nuran's great-grandfather—Talat (“Talat Bey'in karısı Nurhayat Hanım Mısırlı bir binbaşı ile sevişerek kaçınca Mevlevi muhibbi olan Talat Bey bu eseri yazmıştı” [“When Talat's wife, Nurhayat, eloped with an Egyptian major, Talat, a devotee of the Mevlevi's order, had written the lyrics”; 37; 62]). The name occurs eight times in the novel. It is the name of a fictitious character, not meant to refer to the actual Talat Pasha—but it is a loaded name, a powerful name, particularly in a novel written while the memory of the atrocities would still have been very much alive.Footnote 17 Tanpınar also connects the novel to Talat Pasha and the CUP through Nuran—the object of Mümtaz's powerful romantic feelings, and the cause of some of the most mystical, ecstatic passages in the whole book (“This woman … had a quality that was thoroughly radiant and enchanting … and the small and mysterious contractions emanating from the depths of his being repeatedly sang forgotten songs of life” [127–28]). This juxtaposition of politicial violence and romantic vision lends the ultimate breakup of their relationship an air of interrupted fantasy. Whatever Tanpınar's choice of Talat as a name might mean, it illustrates how history lurks in A Mind at Peace—how, beneath the story of enchantment and disillusionment, romantic aspirations and sudden, crushing despair, the historical time line of 1915 persists on the edge of memory.
Any attempt to hermeneutically ground an Armenian reading of A Mind at Peace—to maintain that the driving force of the novel, its central motor, is the unnameable catastrophe of 1915—has to include two final aspects of the novel: the Christianizing of Suad's suicide, and the mention of Hitler. Suad is one of the novel's pivotal characters. His conversations with Mümtaz, Nuran, and the others—often wild, rambling exchanges, full of Dostoyevskian and Nietzschean conceits—convey the picture of a soul wholly alienated from its environment and dominate the second half of the book. Ultimately viewed with concern as a madman, an aberration by those around him, Suad appears to dissolve within the morbid speculations of his own self-consuming modernity (“Benim için Allah ölmüştür. Ben hürriyetimi tadıyorum. Ben Allah'ı kendimde öldürdüm” [“Allah is dead. I'm savouring my freedom. I've killed Allah within myself”; 312; 337]) and disappears in a blaze of nihilistic despair at the end of the novel, hanging himself one night in his house to the sound of Beethoven. It is Nuran and Mümtaz who discover the body, and the sight has a traumatic effect on Nuran, effectively severing any chance of a relationship with Mümtaz after the incident (she tells him, “Aramızda bir ölü var” [“There's a corpse between us”; 351; 376]).
Suad's suicide has been widely seen by a number of critics as a translated suicide—a borrowing from Dostoyevsky's texts, reproduced in 1940s Turkish (Naci 181; Yavuz 66–68). Such a gesture neatly sets off the death and destruction in the novel from the narrative of Turkish nationalism, “foreignizing” it into the westernized, self-hating figure of Suad himself. Two aspects, relevant to my approach, deserve to be highlighted. First of all, the lengths Tanpınar goes to make Suad a Christ figure and surround him with a series of Christological references: three days after his death, Mümtaz compares him to a crucifix (salib [Huzur 242; Mind 392]); he subsequently encounters Suad's resurrected spirit, the shining effulgence of his stigmata (Huzur 273; Mind 441), and explicitly compares Suad to Christ, referring to his “Isa gibi çarmıha” (“crucifixion like Jesus”; Huzur 274; Mind 442). Whether Tanpınar wishes to underline the self-sacrifical symbolism implicit in Suad's death, or rather make an ironic comment on the Christian provenance of Suad's fatal modernity, remains debatable. But the Christianizing of Suad's death, and the destructive effect it has on Nuran and Mümtaz's harmony, does leave open the possibility of a historical subtext to Suad's suicide. This is not to propose some kind of crude symbolism (i.e., “Suad is the Armenian genocide”) but rather to suggest that his suicide, and the strangely Christian framework within which Tanpınar writes it, might be the consequence of the author's own unresolved feelings—not simply toward Armenians but also toward modernity itself and its role in the events of 1915. This subtext seems to be strengthened barely four pages later, when we encounter, having just learned of Suad's hanging, the only Armenian in the entire novel:
Surun tanımadığı bir kapısından içeriye girdi. Küçük, betondan bir
polis kulübesinin yanına çömelmiş bir Ermeni kadını ona elini uzattı:
- Yardım et ki kalkayım oğul! …
- Şurada bir kilise var da … mübarek yerdir. Fakir ama. … Dileğin
varsa bir adak adayıver … kabul olur. Ben oraya gidiyorum! …
- Niçin hayatın üzerinde duranlar insanı anlamıyorlar?
Hayat ve insan ayrı şeylerdi. …
Ne ferdi saadetinden vazgeçebilecek, ne de etrafındaki hayatın korkunç icabını, bu on yaşında evliya türbesini bekliyen biçare kızı ve ihtiyar Ermeni karısını unutacaktı. (Huzur 237–38)
He entered the city through a gate in the ramparts that he didn't recognize. An Armenian woman crouching beside a small concrete police kiosk stretched out a hand.
“My son, help me so I might stand up. . . .”
“There's a church nearby. It's a sacred place. It's worn down, though. . . . If you have the desire to make an offering, go ahead and do so. . . . It'll be granted. I'm heading there myself!” …
Why don't those advocating for society understand people?
Man and life were separate entities.
… He'd neither be able to forgo his individual contentment nor forget about the terrible needs of the society that surrounded him, including the hapless ten-year-old girl attending to a saint's tomb and the aged Armenian woman. (Mind 381)
The Armenian woman appears out of nowhere in the novel, truly a ghost from the past. In one sense, this Christian beggar—along with the Muslim orphan—simply reinforces the conventional theme of the novel, the theme Moran touched upon earlier in this essay: the balance between the altruism of social responsibility and the egoism of personal contentment. The scene is hardly saturated with guilt—Mümtaz even appears cynical toward the Armenian and her infirmity, even if this cynicism seems to be highlighted, not shared, by the author. And yet the appearance of an Armenian beggar, and an abandoned church, so soon after Suad's death, and in conjunction with the rereading of Suad's letter, tinges his suicide, ever so faintly, with an Armenian hue. I cannot say any more: there is no explicit statement, no naming of the unnameable, nothing that would move even slightly in the direction of the German word Verarbeitung (“processing”). The most that can be extrapolated, from the brief appearance of the Armenian widow and her ruined church, so soon after the suicide of the novel's nihilist, is a faint sense of unarticulated shame. Two pages later and she is gone.
Lost Armenian books, characters called Talat, links between the novel and the CUP, Suad as a Christ figure, the appearance of Armenian widows and ruined churches . . . perhaps one final thing that renders visible some of the novel's Armenian palimpsest is the presence of Hitler himself. Not just the historical proximity—Hitler's famous pronouncement concerning the Jews and the Armenians, or the extent to which the Nazis allegedly learned from the Ottomans (Ihrig)—but the actual presence of Hitler in the book. Published in 1949, A Mind at Peace is set in 1939, and the sense of a looming war dominates the conversations of the second half of the book. Hitler is a frequent reference in these conversations: the political animal Sabih has opinions on everything from Hitler to Gandhi (Huzur 99; Mind 167), and the hostile Orhan sees Hitler as Europe's punishment for the savagery it has inflicted on other countries and races (Huzur 248; Mind 399). Hitler is seen as insane by most characters in the novel, including Mümtaz, and it is significant that the final page of A Mind at Peace ends explicitly with Hitler (Huzur 278–79; Mind 445), as the radio delivers the news of Hitler's “attack” (presumably on Poland) while Mümtaz sits on a step, his head in his hands. Conventional readings of the novel tend to see Hitler as what Tanpınar imagines to be the opposite of civilization. Critics such as Moran have generally considered A Mind at Peace (in the sense of “peace”) to be the “masal dünyasın” (“fairy-tale world”) of Mümtaz, one that is ripped apart at the end by the apocalyptic barbarism of the Nazis (Moran 171).
All of this is true. It is also true, however, that Tanpınar the journalist linked the murder of Armenians to the murder of Jews, invoking the name of Hitler, on at least one occasion, a good ten years after A Mind at Peace. In the penultimate year of his life, at a party in Paris, Tanpınar met the Armenian American writer William Saroyan. Little is recorded in his diary, although we do know that Tanpınar asked him where he was from—and when Saroyan replied “Bitlis,” Tanpınar told him he had spent his childhood near there (Günlüklerin Işığında 189).Footnote 18 The experience may well have intitated some kind of chain reaction, for three months later, in the pages of Cumhuriyet, Tanpınar wrote the only article concerning the massacre of Armenians ever to come from his pen. Not that the article deals directly with the so-called Armenian question. “İctimai Çürüm ve İnsan Adaleti” (“Social Crime and Human Justice”) is a response, more than anything else, to the state execution of the Turkish president Adnan Menderes by the military in 1960. After assessing the terrible damage Tanpınar felt Menderes's government had inflicted on the nation, Tanpınar comments on the futility of punishment for such figures—among whom he counts Abdulhamid II and Adolf Hitler (302). The massacre of Armenians, or indeed any kind of violence upon them, remains unmentioned—and yet the pairing of the two figures is startling, and suggests Tanpınar almost certainly has 1915 somewhere in mind in invoking the leader of the Third Reich and the Ottoman sultan. Until we see Tanpınar's diaries transcribed and published in their entirety, this linking of Hitler and Abdulhamid II may well be the nearest example we have to a moment of recognition in his oeuvre.
The ecstasy of history . . . tarihin vecdi: Is there a relationship between the mystical and the violent? How did it emerge in Tanpınar's work? When faced with the political necessity of acts he would rather not think about, did Tanpınar find in the ineffable sublime a kind of refuge, a mystical cover under which the real—messy, dirty, ugly—work of nationalism took place? Or is the equation between realpolitik and the mystical sublime too cynical, too pragmatic—are we seeing a complicity where, perhaps, a more unstable dynamic exists? The Turkish word for “ecstasy,” vecd, and its Arabic source, wajd, carries with it a deeply religious etymology—the idea of disappearing within God, of ecstatically erasing oneself within the divine. The idea of disappearing within the ecstasy of history would seem to offer a by-now-familiar circumvention of individual responsibility. Tanpınar's ecstasy of history was sincere: an ecstasy of language, of art, of music. The exhilaration Tanpınar's literary genius felt in the observation of a dome, the recollection of a couplet, or the reimagining of a battle enabled a rush of aesthetic adrenaline that trumped any moral discomfort he might have felt for the physical consequences of such visions: rape, deportation, mass murder. And yet what makes Tanpınar interesting is how this discomfort never quite disappeared: it stalked the extraordinary labyrinth of his work like a small shadow, suggesting a darker subtext here, an ominous echo there, but without ever developing into anything more substantial.
