Peyami Safa’s Novels at the Intersection From Modern to Modernist Fiction

It is observed in the Western fiction that different novels were authored with a new fictional understanding and new narrative techniques at the beginning of the 20th century. Particularly such authors as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf ushered in a new era with their novels written with new fictional and narrative techniques. These novels with these new characteristics was once labeled as deviations from modern fiction or as “modernist novels”. The likes of modernist novels rendered at the turn of the 20th century were belatedly observed in the Turkish novel in the second and third quarter. In the Turkish literature, fictional trends did not occur in the same order as did in the west. Thus, some novels exhibit the stylistic and narrative techniques of both modern and modernist fiction. Tutunamayanlar of Oğuz Atay, which was published in 1972, is considered the first modernist Turkish novel by men of literature, yet some credit this to Attila İlhan’s Sokaktaki Adam, published in 1953. Until Oğuz Atay and Attila İlhan, the Turkish novel also introduced such authors as Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, Peyami Safa, and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, who wrote with the new fictional and narrative techniques observed in the Western novel. Some devices of the modernist fiction are employed in Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar’s Fahim Bey ve Biz (1941), Çamlıca’daki Eniştemiz (1944) and Nizamettin Beyin Alafrangalığı ve Şeyhliği (1952), Peyami Safa’s Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (1949), Yalnızız (1951) and Biz İnsanlar (1959), and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Huzur (1949) and Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (1961). The novels of these novelists transitioning from modern novel to modernist novel simultaneously incorporate a great many features of modernist novels. These authors are the pioneers and harbingers of modernist novels in the history of Turkish fiction thanks to their novel-related views and novels observing the norms of this new type of fiction. This paper analyzes the aforesaid novels of Peyami Safa in view of modernist fiction.

Keywords

Modern Turkish Literature, Peyami Safa, modernist fiction, Yalnızız, Biz İnsanlar, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu