Middle Eastern Literatures ISSN: 1475-262X (Print) 1475-2638 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/came20 “Free spirited clocks”: modernism, temporality and The Time Regulation Institute Özen Nergis Dolcerocca To cite this article: Özen Nergis Dolcerocca (2017) “Free spirited clocks”: modernism, temporality and The�Time�Regulation�Institute , Middle Eastern Literatures, 20:2, 177-197, DOI: 10.1080/1475262X.2017.1342446 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2017.1342446 Published online: 22 Aug 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 296 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 2 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=came20 MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES, 2017 VOL. 20, NO. 2, 177–197 https://doi.org/10.1080/1475262X.2017.1342446 “Free spirited clocks”: modernism, temporality and The Time Regulation Institute Özen Nergis Dolcerocca Department of English and Comparative Literature, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey ABSTRACT This article reads Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s 1954 novel The Time Regulation Institute (TRI) as an inherently modernist text. It provides a nuanced reading of the novel against conventional Tanpınar scholarship, which predominantly interprets it as a straightforward satire, and inserts it into an overdetermined philosophy of civilization attributed to the author. The article shows that Tanpınar’s poetics in TRI 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. TRI 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 article 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 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. 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.”1 This critical emphasis on the spiritual aspects of his work was restated in the 1973 debate between S. Hilav, a Marxist sociologist, and H. Yavuz, a “conservative” poet, in which the former offered a nuanced reading of the Turkish modernist, bringing out social and materialist aspects of his work, while the latter emphasized his “spiritual cultivation” CONTACT Özen Nergis Dolcerocca Istanbul, Turkey odolcerocca@ku.edu.tr © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Koç University, Rumeli Feneri Yolu, Sariyer, 34450 178 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA (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.2 Whether influenced by Yahya Kemal’s overshadowing prominence, Kaplan’s partial interpretation, or the emerging critique of the republican modernization since the 70s, Tanpınar’s critical readers often share the verdict that establishing continuity with the Ottoman Turkish cultural memory represents Tanpınar’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 of Ottoman Islamic and Western humanistic traditions, foregrounding the idea of synthesis between the two as his works’ most notable achievement. 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 radical break with tradition. However, these debates also circumscribed critical approaches to Tanpınar’s various 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 overshadowed his most powerful considerations on modernism. He is unduly considered a cultural theorist before a novelist or a poet: A Mind at Peace (Huzur), a notable work of philosophical fiction, a collection of his columns and essays (Yasadigim Gibi), letters (particularly to Y.N.Nayır) and diary entries have become the primary source for the writer’s cultural concepts.3 I suggest a different direction here 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 Erturk and Nurdan Gurbilek,4 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.5 In this article, my first aim is 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 themes and novelistic techniques in The Time Regulation Institute (TRI), Tanpınar’s last complete novel and a text reflecting on the conditions of social and cultural modernity.6 In its unheroic and comic-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 1950’s (along with its interrupted cultural revolution) and the emerging populist and counter revolutionary discourse in the political arena,7 the novel moves the question of cultural identity away from an ostensibly authentic Ottoman Islamic heritage and toward fragmented and coexisting cultural practices referring to divergent origins and traditions. At the same time, TRI engages with problems of time and memory, in line with the modernist tradition Tanpınar adamantly followed,8 experimenting with the plurality of temporal experience, each flowing in different speeds and belonging to different systems of reference. Shifting critical emphasis from traditionalism to his aesthetic explorations is turning “social” questions of identity, authenticity and cultural theory to MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES 179 representational issues in Tanpınar’s writing: novelistic imagery, narrative time, thematic features and stylistic preferences. By foregrounding its modernist elements, I argue that Tanpınar’s novel deemphasizes the idea of continuity with the Ottoman past, in favor of a more critical approach. 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 time-keeping, 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,9 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 cannot be understood without the underlying aesthetics of Tanpınar’s work. Emphasizing parody, humor, irony, satire and narrative instability, TRI composes a literary mode that fits neither category of the socially conscious or the metaphysically grounded aesthetics outlined in the Hilav-Yavuz debate. The problem of occupying this unclear position, which the author himself resentfully notes in his diary,10 is at the root of the pervasive problem in Tanpınar interpretation. Tanpınar’s poetics in TRI reveal 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. TRI offers remarkable insights into modernism and theories of time, exploring how time is produced and ordered, and how that ordering simultaneously involves machines and myths, systems of belief and of power, as well as different ideologies and forms of enchantment. My second aim in this article is to put forward a nuanced reading of the novel against conventional Tanpınar scholarship, which predominantly interprets TRI as a straightforward satire and inserts it into an overdetermined philosophy of civilization attributed to the author. TRI is a Zeitkritik in the comic-ironic mode. It is a memoir by the narrator Hayri Irdal, a “simple-minded” man from a modest Istanbul community. Although its misleading title suggests that the Clock-Setting Institute constitutes the main story line, which in fact comes in the second half, the novel focuses on the different stages in Hayri’s life. In four segments, it follows the protagonist from his childhood during the fall of the Empire up to his career in the absurd Republican bureaucracy, introducing ostensibly incompatible worlds populated with a set of eccentric characters: the Ottoman Abdusselam Bey, the Sufi watchmaker Nuri Efendi, the fabulist Lutfullah, the psychoanalyst Dr. Ramiz and of course the modernizer Halit Ayarci (the Regulator). 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. 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.11 However, this mode of irony and satire, through which Tanpınar achieves his critique of modernization and mechanization, lends 180 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA itself to an effortless interpretation of the novel as critique of Republican “secular modernity.” In the same way as its author’s thought, TRI could not be fit neatly into an interpretive framework. The novel is considerably different from Tanpınar’s earlier work in 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 in terms of social commentary and straightforward satire by many critics.12 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 TRI as performing satire of the Republican modernization project.13 In his introduction to the novel’s recent English translation, which has presented the writing of Tanpınar to a large body of Anglophone readers, Mishra resorts 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, were forced to “modernize and become more secular and rational,” which was 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 TRI 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 Kemalist elite,” caricatured in the novel.14 Not only does he reduce the novel to its “satirical intentions,” the essayist here makes a historical mistake, equating thirty years of Kemalist reforms with the almost two-hundred years long history of modernization in Turkey. This comes in contradiction with the novel’s open critique of the failures of the Constitutional periods and of Sultan Abdülhamit II (1879-1909), who conducted Western-style modernization under a totalitarian regime, described in these pages as a “moribund” era, plagued with “gossip and endless paranoia.”15 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. Mishra, of course, is only following Tanpınar’s critical reception in Turkey that focuses on cultural dualities and the civilizational debate.16 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.17 The four aforementioned segments in his life story correspond to different periods in the 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 the Republican and post-Republic Turkey.18 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 MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES 181 citizens. However, I argue that the ostensible style of satirical allegory is undercut by the logic of Tanpınar’s text, as distinct from Hayri’s own narration. Tanpınar’s novel engages with the collective anxiety about cultural disintegration and fragmentation, but it does not presume to offer any solutions. The political and social commentary, and other satirical accounts of society largely go underdeveloped; some remain nothing more than a hint, as in Abdüsselâm’s problems with the Abdülhamit regime. What has been largely subsumed into satire in TRI criticism is the textual resistance to the cultural logic of dualisms between modern/pre-modern and Republican/Imperial. The genre of social satire is grounded on a central conflict between individual and society, and on an implied moral superiority shared with the implied reader over the satiric target. TRI, on the contrary, does not offer any alternative socio-cultural or political models, nor does it imply any successful integration of its protagonist into society. It proposes nothing in the form of social change and it views all regulating, managing and calibrating systems—be they religious, the “authentic” culture of the Ottoman past or the modern-secular order—as essentially the same. They are all oppressive to the subject’s inner temporal flow and to plural and incongruous temporalities. Hayri appears to be the vehicle of a satirical narrative, inviting the reader to share an implicit moral consensus (namely 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 this unreliable world of hearsays or bureaucracy with 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, is 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 Ayarci) at its 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 TRI 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 reveals in the non-rational, the unstable, and the fragmented, and it resists easy definition and political usefulness.19 One of the few readers to address this problem is Nergis Erturk. In “The Time Regulation Institute: Dwelling in a Mechanized Language,” the critic makes a similar point: 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 of TRI permits his novel to question the very possibility of cultural memory, she suggests, 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.20 The aksak rhythm of an anti-hero 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 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 182 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA erratic narrative of his life story: from his “Clock Villa,” or possibly from an asylum (as the novel has two endings),21 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 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.22 This historical account of the Institute, penned to honor its founder, as well as to assert Hayri’s role, 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. The now fifty-year-old Hayri relates 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 this was a common practice at the time to build a legacy for one’s family name.23 However, due to a “series of unfortunate events” (a recurrent thread in Hayri’s story-telling), it remained “intrinsically incomplete” (kendiliğinden geri kalmıştı). The phrase literally means “the mosque stayed behind time, of its own accord.”24 The word kendiliğinden here is revealing. It paradoxically assigns the mosque a form of agency that is outside of causality: it is automatically, spontaneously and by itself 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 result 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 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 it 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. 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 MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES 183 imagination could ever concoct; and over an individual’s lifetime these flaws congeal to define his character” (Her insanın hayatında hiçbir muhayillenin icat edemeyeceği kadar aksaklık vardır, ve bu aksaklıklar o insanla beraber yetişmiş, büyümüş, şahsi, nevi kendine mahsus şeylerdir).25 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 mahus) temporal flaw originating in inherited traits and a host of diverse influences over which one is often not in control. The term aksaklık,26 translated here as disorder and imperfection, is important in 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 co-exist, aksaklık runs against the traditional understanding of time as sequential. It is a case of chronopathology where limpings and syncopations—in the form of voluntary and involuntary recollections of Hayri; intrusive memories of his father; untimely revelations of Seyit Lûtfullah; sudden day-dreaming of his wife Pakize; the resurrected aunt from the grave; belated reactions of Dr. Ramiz; and confused genealogies of Abdüsselâm Bey—create uneven sequences in the novel. Mübarek the clock is a reminder of such temporal dysfunctions that run through Hayri’s family: an unkept promise from the past that returns as a tangible and disruptive symptom. It “still embodies the spirit of [Hayri’s] childhood.”27 Embodied in the clock, the debt from (and to) the past haunts the living. It continually makes itself known in the present through uncontrollable, repetitive and apparently meaningless events/strokes. With a rhythm all its own, it was like a packhorse that had strayed from its caravan. Following whose calendar? In which year? What was it waiting for when it stopped running for days before suddenly heralding some mysterious event with a resounding clang that filled the space around it? We hadn’t the slightest idea. The free-spirited clock never submitted to adjustments or repairs. It followed a time all its own, far removed from human affairs. On occasion it would release an unexpected sequence of deep chimes, after which its pendulum would swing silently for months on end.28 This episode belongs to the first segment of the novel called “Great Expectations,” which, in line with its pronounced reference to Dickensian Bildungsroman, introduces problems of origins, self-determination and familial roots. Like Dickens’s Pip, who walking through the graveyard of his dead parents and brothers compares his survival with their loss, Hayri at the beginning of the novel dwells with the ghosts of the past in the half mosque, half stable villa. The place of origin is an obstacle to be transcended in both narratives; Hayri refuses the debt of the family mosque and rejects the father’s legacy. However, unlike a Bildungsroman, Tanpınar’s novel does not follow a linear development of the protagonist. Hayri does not “come of age”; there is no promise of his life to be fulfilled, nor any process of self recognition. Mubarek therefore is a metaphor not only for an inherited defect of deferral, but also for the narrative structure of the novel. In cyclical, repetitive and incidental patterns, TRI unfolds as a sequence of coincidentally connected fragments, aimless drifts and unexpected outbursts of the past. Thus, temporal dysfunctions embodied in aksak, chronopathological 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 aksaklık is not simply a theoretical presence exclusive to Tanpınar’s 184 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA 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 resistance to calibrating forms of temporal order, characters’ chronopathologies and their “free spirited clocks” gain thematic, narrative and theoretical presence in the novel. Mechanization and Zeitkritik As the novel is a quasi-autobiography, the protagonist’s birth date is also relative. 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 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.29 A circumcision gift,30 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 moment 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 at 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 tells 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,”31 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.”32 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.33 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 astonishment at discovering that the time-keeping 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 a prime mover in it, mirroring 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 Blessed One), his father’s watch, which “measures all times,” and a secular clock, but none has a similar effect on him as the MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES 185 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.34 In this sense, the watch parallels autobiographical time that gives a 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 and obliged to adapt to a new temporal organization of a grown-up self, such as school, work or pray time. Hence, he destroys the first watch he owns. Other devices of temporal measurement have a similar chronostatic, timestopping effect on Hayri as well. 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 from school, fails his first wife and kids, 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.”35 Hayri’s apparently hyperbolic insistence on his aksaklik demonstrates the truly convoluted character time takes on 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.” Freely’s English translation of this brief but critical 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.”36 The literal translation reads: “Some people spend their lives gaining time (vakit) […] but I, I lived tripping time (zamana), my time (kendi zamanima), over.” What is lost in translation here is Hayri’s agency and his order in the race rank. 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, slows 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. Tanpınar’s prevalent use of clocks, both literally and metaphorically, is also at the center of his social critique. They represent their owners’ convictions, alienation from 186 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA modern existence, and reactions to major historical transformations, such as top-down modernization, the authoritarian regime at the end of the Ottoman rule, the Kemalist revolution, a sense of national belatedness and so on. 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 the other way around. Machines are anthropomorphized, personified, displaying multiple eccentric times in the novel. [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. 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.37 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 (18761909). Assuming the essence off 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: the absurdity of presentism 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, “there is a difference of progression and a difference of regression, of which the importance is incontestable” and what the Institute aims to do at the symbolic level, MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES 187 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 this 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 to make sure that no one falls back or springs forward.38 In this way are highlighted 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 towards 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. In as much as Tanpınar employs the figure of an anti-hero to explore questions of time and temporality, it is through Halit the Regulator that he sustains the comic absurdity that serves as a critique of modernity’s temporal ideologies. Halit is an arrogant entrepreneur, one who 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.”39 In addition to their comic-ironic function in the text, Halit’s drills display the absurdity and 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 different characters manifest in the novel.40 Halit’s regime of speed, efficiency and abstraction marginalize 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 Lûtfullah, 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. Through the figure of the Institute, Tanpınar caricatures modernity’s singular chronography of the global and universal time, particularly in delineating society’s relation to the past. Halit the Regulator 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 188 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA 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 Erturk 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.41 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 TRI 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. The “invention” of Ahmet the Timely, and the Clock-Setting Institute, exemplifies what François Hartog, in Regimes of Historicity, calls présentisme, defining the contemporary experience of living in a perpetual present. According to Hartog, the present in modern times is different from that of the past epochs. It is an omnipresent present, a time of flux composed of constant demand for novelty and acceleration, while at the same time perpetuating enclosure on a day-to-day life with a stagnant present.42 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.43 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.44 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 the Republican present. In addition to this conspicuous discourse, however, Tanpınar’s novel points to a larger “crisis of time” that is inherently modern. Halit the Regulator is the embodiment of this 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].45 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.46 “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, MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES 189 “you have intensified its forward momentum. In addition you have shown that our forbearers were both revolutionary and modern.”47 This leak of the “present sentiments” into the past, extending back to the seventeenth century, and to the future, with accelerated speed, 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 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. However, 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.”48 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 preposterous punctuality. “The few steps to the next room [turns] into a journey lasting a full half an hour,” Hayri reports on the mayor’s visit to the newly founded Institute.49 The bureaucratic space-time is empty, and it is subject to bureaucratic determination: it expands or shrinks, a few steps might take a full hour, as in the Kafkesque nightmarish temporality; or it might take an isolated second to launch a state institution of the size of the ClockSetting Institute. Repetition and metonymic reduction: “we all ride the carousel” The critique of alienating absurdities and mechanization of the modern world in the episode “Toward Dawn” also leads Tanpınar to explore questions on aesthetics and the status of the work of art. Embodied in Hayri’s old-fashioned thinking and his holding on to obsolete ideas of beauty, work, truth and reality, is the desire to resolve fragmentation and mechanization through the integrity of aesthetic form. In his increasingly mechanized world, Hayri is faced with the disturbing awareness that he, and others around him, are reduced to the roles they play. They are reproducible and interchangeable, and they need neither individual uniqueness, nor ability, but merely the will [irade] to perform their work. “For when it’s a matter of the new,” Halit the Regulator declares, “there is no need for any other talent.”50 The liquidation of historical and cultural conceptions of aesthetic and work value revolves around the discussions on music in the novel. Despite Hayri’s mock self-deprecation about his lack of sophistication and bookishness, he nonetheless exhibits keen appreciation for music. His protests against his sisterin-law’s atrocious singing skills meet with Halit the Regulator’s lecture on the current state of art “in this day and age”: 190 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA 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. The theme of music in Tanpınar’s oeuvre has been examined quite a few times, mostly in the context of his interest in the Ottoman heritage.51 It has more to do with what Walter Benjamin calls the “loss of the aura” than the aesthetic promise of a unified national identity. According to Benjamin, mechanical reproduction “detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition” that results in a diminishment of what he calls the work’s “aura,” the authority resulting from the work’s unique engagement with history and tradition.52 The singing career of Hayri’s sister-in-law typifies such 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 Acemaşiran,”53 Halit exclaims, “Unique and new. Pay attention here! I mean new, new in capital letters! For when it’s a matter of the new, there’s no need for any other talent.”54 The perpetual reproduction of the “new in capital letters” substitutes unique aesthetic experience with plurality of bad copies.55 The possibility of authentic aesthetic experience is now reduced to the sister-in-law’s “tone deaf” singing. Tanpınar’s search for an aesthetic integrity in years of cultural, national and political transformation meets with conscious disillusionment. He comes to accept a more modest sense of the cultural and aesthetic possibilities of the work of art. In the antiheroic 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 alone responsible for creating meaning in his life. The epigraph borrowed from a nineteenth-century poet Izzet Molla (omitted in the Freely translation) foreshadows Hayri’s ongoing negotiation between radically 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 was transformed after his encounter with 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, Abdüsselâm Bey, Seyit Lûtfullah, Dr Ramiz, briefly Nevzat Bey and finally Halit the Regulator. It is only three weeks following the death of his final master that Hayri commences the writing of his memoirs, free at last of any filial servitude. The plots repeat one another and they seem to go nowhere: the surreal treasure hunt of Seyit Lûtfullah, 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.”56 Boundaries between the old order of Sufist MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES 191 teachings, ancient stories and old wives’ tales, and the teleological narrative of modernity are blurred in and through Hayri’s lived time, which is “a mechanism” “combined and harnessed to the caravan of time, an amended alloy, a composite work of art.”57 The main composition or “alloy” in the novel is that of Nuri Efendi, the “muvakkit” (clock-maker) 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.58 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 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 muvakkithanes of mosque complexes, observatories to determine the time of prayers according to the position of the sun, which also served as public clocks.59 The novel, therefore, invites a reading of the Clock-Setting Institute as a fictional revamping of Islamic time-keeping 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.”60 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” (İnsan 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. İnsan da böyledir. Salah, iyilik, Hakkın bize lütufla bakışı sayesinde olur. Saat de böyledir).61 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!62’” Nuri Efendi called 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 fulfill one’s duty to the divine. The work ethic of such Sufist eschatology is easily appropriated by the discourse of modernization, the promise of the afterlife is replaced with the promise of development. 192 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA In their unrelenting commitment to an obscure timeless ideal, eschatology and developmentalism easily overlap in the novel: 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.63 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 off its metaphysical telos, i.e. 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.64 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 carnavalesque 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 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.”65 Neither the old nor the new temporal order seems to be privileged; temporal systems differ merely in kind, and not in nature. If modernism is characterized by the experience of profound and pervasive crisis—a crisis of time, of the self, of language, a crisis of perception and experience, Tanpınar in TRI responds to this crisis with dark humor. The novel is not a grand récit of Proustian “time regained”66 but—as in Hayri’s characterization of the coffeehouse—“a piece of shadow-puppet humor (Karagöz şakası)”, or “the replica of an ortaoyunu.”67 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. Seeing the past or Ottoman culture as a source of authenticity and inspiration in the modernized world proves as futile as feeling home in a perpetual present and the novelty of modernity. MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES 193 The novel refuses to endorse any one temporal, ideological, or philosophical regime, and instead populates the narrative with multiple inauthentic actors. The Clock-Setting Institute is a parody of teleological narratives of modernity in which divergent historical experiences exist only as deviations, failures or late emulations. 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 an exploration of individual and collective temporal experiences, practices and forms. 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. Kaplan, “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar,” 175; Kaplan, “Kitap Hakkında Birkaç Söz,” 6. Also see Kaplan’s review of Tanpınar’s poems compiled one year before his death Kaplan, “Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda.” 2. See İrem, “Turkish Conservative Modernism”; Kahraman, “Yitirilmemiş Zamanın Ardında”; Çınar, “Dergah Dergisi”; Ayvazoğlu, “Yahya Kemal.” Also see Pamuk, “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar ve Türk Modernizmi”; Göknar, “Ottoman Past and Turkish Future”; Berksoy, “Bir Entelektüel Olarak Tanpınar.” 3. 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.” 4. See Ertürk, “Modernity and Its Fallen Languages”; Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. Gürbilek, “Tanpınar’da Ophelia, Su ve Rüyalar” and its translation in this issue, “Dried Spring, Blind Mirror, Lost East”; Gürbilek, “Tanpınar’da Hasret, Benjamin’de Dehşet.” 5. For a compelling psychoanalytic reading of the novel, see Oğuzertem, “Hasta Saatler, Bozuk Sıhhatler”; Oğuzertem, [“Unset Saats, Upset Sihhats.”] 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”; Parla, Don Kişot’tan Bugüne Roman, 301–5; and Bayramoğlu, Huzursuz Huzur ve Tekinsiz Saatler. 6. The novel was serialized in 1954 in the newspaper Yeni Istanbul, and published in book form in 1961, shortly before the author’s death. It was initially composed as a serialized novel. Tanpınar edited it later for its publication as a book. 7. 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 changed dramatically. 8. Tanpınar was an 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 Tanpınar, Edebiyat Dersleri. 9. I will use the term “the Clock-Setting Institute” for the fictional Institute in the novel, as it is a more accurate translation than “the Time Regulation Institute”. 10. 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. Tanpınar, Günlüklerin Işığında Tanpınar’la Başbaşa. 194 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA 11. 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. 12. See Kaplan et al.’s interpretations of the novel in Uçman and İnci, Bir Gül Bu Karanlıklarda. Aliş in Uğurcan, Doğumunun 100. Yılında Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar. Also see note 17 below. 13. 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 article. 14. Mishra, “Introduction.” 15. The first half of the novel takes place during the Second Constitutional Era (1908-1920). Hayri mocks the cheering crowd each time “freedom” declared and but does not stay for long. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 21–22; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 18–19. 16. See note 2 above. For the conventional reception of the author in Turkey, also see Turan Alptekin, İnci Enginün and Orhan Okay’s works on Tanpınar. Also see Hece journal’s 2001 special issue on Tanpınar, Su, “Tanpınar Özel Sayısı.” 17. 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 Aytaç, “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar.” 18. See Kaplan, “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar”; Moran, “Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü,” 2002. 19. Colletta, Dark Humor and Social Satire in the Modern British Novel, 3. The satiric mode in the novel 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’ here, as I read the mimicry of modernization and over-rationalization in the novel not as corrective, but rather as subversive and derisive. 20. Erturk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey, 125. 21. 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. 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 of paranoia. 22. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 21; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 18. 23. Building a mosque was 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, etc. depending on their size. 24. Omitted in the 2014 translation in English. 25. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 25; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 22. 26. The Turkish term aksak is primarily used in Ottoman musical theory, means “limping”, “stumbling”, or “slumping”, i.e., 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, etc. 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. 27. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 28; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 25. 28. Ibid., 27; Ibid., 25. 29. Ibid., 23; Ibid., 20. 30. Male circumcision is a coming of age ritual, typically performed before puberty around the age of 10 in Ottoman and modern Turkish culture. It marks the formation of social and sexual identity. 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 marking the times of the five daily prayers. MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURES 195 31. “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. 32. Ibid., 29; Ibid., 27. 33. On Bergson’s influence on Tanpınar’s work, see İrem, “Bergson and Politics: OttomanTurkish Encounters with Innovation”; Dolcerocca, “Time Regulation Institutes: Time in Modern Literary and Cultural Imagination (1889-1960).” 34. See Samoyault, La Montre Cassée for a literary and symbolic analysis of the ’watch’ trope in film and literature. 35. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 52, 57; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 51, 57. 36. Ibid., 190; Ibid., 200. 37. Ibid., 15; Ibid., 12. 38. Ibid., 235; Ibid., 250. 39. Ibid., 243; Ibid., 255. 40. 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). 41. Ertürk, Grammatology and Literary Modernity in Turkey. 42. Hartog, Régimes d’historicité, 12. 43. Ibid., 15. 44. Ibid., 28. 45. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 207; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 219. 46. Ibid., 294; Ibid., 313. 47. Ibid., 295; Ibid., 314. 48. Ibid., 225; Ibid., 239. 49. Ibid., 230; Ibid., 245. 50. Ibid., 218; Ibid., 232. 51. See Abacı, Yahya Kemal ve Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’da Müzik; Tosun, “Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar: Müzik, Zaman ve Rüya Estetiği.” 52. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 53. Kinds of makams 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.” 54. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 221; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 234. 55. Music is also a metaphor for duration, an uninterrupted flow with creative evolution and change, as Bergson writes, “an uninterrupted humming of life life’s depths” that can be discerned in the experience of listening to music, Bergson, The Creative Mind. 56. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 138; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 147. 57. Ibid., 34; Ibid., 32. 58. Ibid., 34; Ibid., 32. 59. 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 muvakkithanes 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 Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca. 60. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 31; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 28. 61. Ibid., 31-32; Ibid., 29. 62. Ibid., 32; Ibid., 30. 63. Ibid., 35; Ibid., 33-34. 196 Ö. N. DOLCEROCCA 64. 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. 65. Tanpınar, Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü, 33; Tanpınar, The Time Regulation Institute, 31. 66. Proust, Le Temps Retrouvé. 67. 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