I first read Tanpınar in 2003 when I was doing my master’s. I was taking a course on Turkish Political Thought from Tanıl Bora, and I ended up preparing a paper on Tanpınar for that class. I cannot remember if that was my choice or by lot, but it was one of the pieces I most enjoyed writing ever. Almost 20 years later, when I reread my musings, post-post-Kemalism was all the rage in Turkish Studies. I realized Tanpınar had been the cultural hero of post-Kemalism and liberal Islamism, which seemed poised to carry the day when I wrote that paper. However, that was not meant to be. Liberal Islamism’s champions evolved into textbook populist-nationalist authoritarians, and post-Kemalism’s intellectual hegemony soon declined as Aytürk called for a post-post-Kemalism. So, did Tanpınar’s legacy collapse along with the movements that once claimed him? Curious, I started exploring newer scholarship on him and quickly saw that his oeuvre still has life in it and finally published my observations in Turkish Studies.
Indeed, it is not surprising for an author of Tanpınar’s complexity to be interpreted through new lenses by every generation. Even during his lifetime, it was not clear to his contemporaries whether he belonged to the left or the right. In contrast, his diaries suggest that he saw himself above such petty squabbles. In the 1970s, both Marxists and conservatives sought to claim him.
However, his work became emblematic with the rise of post-Kemalism in the 1980s. His novels offered an excellent starting point for criticizing the failures and excesses of Kemalist modernization. The comical superficiality of modernization in Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü and the longing to reconnect with the past in Beş Şehir and Huzur aligned well with the post-Kemalist critique of Kemalism as an elitist, distorted project of modernization that violently rejected the past and traumatized the nation’s cultural life. Later on, liberal Islamists found in Tanpınar the blueprints for a new cultural policy: a way to connect capitalist modernity with the Ottoman past and Islamic identity.
As the Tanpınarian East–West synthesis gave way to Kısakürek’s totalitarian utopia in İdeolocya Örgüsü in the 2010s as the main inspiration for right-wing cultural policy, one might expect Tanpınar’s figure to fade into relative irrelevance. Yet the 21st century had other plans for him. At the literary level, with Orhan Pamuk’s encouragement, Tanpınar’s work entered the world stage, gaining global visibility as his writings were translated into English and other languages. This coincided with the rise of “World Literature” as a scholarly project, part of a trend across the humanities that aims to challenge Eurocentric views by developing new perspectives that focus on global interactions in a world of inequalities. At first glance, Tanpınar may not appear to be a natural candidate for a global perspective. He often espouses an Orientalist conception of a rational, dynamic West versus a spiritual, static East, and can at times be read as either an uncritical admirer of the West or a nationalist obsessed with lost grandeur. Neither of these roles fits comfortably within the intellectual aims of World Literature, which seeks to build a cultural sphere where different traditions can encounter one another on equal footing while addressing the dynamics that produce global inequalities.
However, scholars dug deeper. Once we try to see beyond what Tanpınar says about Turkey’s struggles, we see a critic of modernity itself. Some scholars found his work useful in discussing contemporary problems such as masculinity, neoliberal urbanization and institutional decay. Others pointed out that, beneath his unapologetic use of the Orientalist East-West distinction, lies a critique of this dichotomy, as Tanpınar emphasizes that they are useless as frozen, reified concepts, evidenced by their comfortable coexistence in İstanbul. Most importantly, they discovered that his central intellectual problems, namely the problem of modernity’s temporal and spatial organization, are in line with the modernist discontent that shaped the European literary field in the first half of the 20th century. In short, for contemporary scholarship, Tanpınar is a modernist and a critic of essentialism, rather than a critic of Kemalism.
As such, his commentary on social issues extends well beyond Turkey’s immediate woes. In Tanpınar, we see a critique of the modern world rooted in Turkey’s own unique experience. This is, indeed, in line with the current generation’s concerns about Turkey’s political landscape. The previous generation’s willingness to lay Turkish democracy’s problems at the door of the Kemalist State and the military, as well as Turkey’s unique historical experience, has lost credibility after the 2010s. Turkey’s contemporary problems with democracy are better understood within the context of the Global crisis of democracy and the wave of populist nationalism that affects everywhere. For this reason, the current generation is unsatisfied with endlessly reinterpreting the past, cycling from post-Kemalism to post-post-Kemalism. To emerge from our self-incurred immaturity, as Kant would put it, we need to grow out of our complex relationship with our “father.” Instead, we need to expand our horizons by examining the universal crisis of modernity through the lens of geographical inequalities. Tanpınar is an ally.
Writings & Readings 