An Individual Pathology or A Collective Psychopathology? The Socio-historical References to the State-Induced Trauma through the Modernization Project in the Early Decades of the Turkish Republic in Yusuf Atılgan’s Anayurt Oteli
Adile Aslan
Sabanci University, Istanbul
This paper intends to undertake an analysis of the relation between the more obvious individual level and the almost invisible socio-historical level in one of the most widely praised novels written in Turkish, Anayurt Oteli, which, though published in 1973, has unfortunately not yet been translated into English. As I seek to demonstrate, an analysis of this multifaceted relationship will show how the author, Yusuf Atılgan, consciously makes use of Freud’s discoveries and psychoanalytic theories to make an ingenious criticism of the socio-historical events in the first half of the twentieth century in Turkey. Atılgan, who can undoubtedly be assumed to have read Freud’s writings and the ensuing psychoanalytic criticism, places his protagonist, Zebercet, whose name is an implicit reference to the feminine qualities of the male protagonist in an overtly patriarchal culture, in an unresolved Oedipal triangle, which puts the events of the story in motion by begetting his inability to identify with the father and his continuous search for a woman for the substitution of the mother and the retrieval of the primary ties to the mother. Running a small hotel called Anayurt Oteli [The Motherland Hotel] in a provincial town in Anatolia, Zebercet leads a deeply prosaic, self-enclosed existence pervaded by obsessive habits, until one day one look of a woman who comes to stay in this womb/motherland-substitute hotel for a night by “a delayed train from Ankara,” the capital city of the new Turkish Republic, shatters this secluded existence, leading ultimately to the expectations resulting in the complete dissolution of the integrity of the protagonist. The socio-historical references are buried deeply within the text to such an extent that only a very keen reader can gather all the scattered details of reminiscences of the protagonist into a coherent picture at the very end of the novel, when a seemingly individual story of an obsessive-compulsive, anti-social, introvert character turns into a collective history of the social and cultural experiences in the early decades of the Turkish Republic. The latent meaning of the novel is revealed through both the content and the form via innumerable textual references. Thus, while reading the basic themes and motifs of this short but intense novel through a psychoanalytic approach, citing the works of Jale Parla, Orhan Koçak, Nurdan Gürbilek, Berna Moran, A.H.Tanpınar, Murat Belge and Ebru Salman as well as various psychoanalysts, this paper aims to show that the author of Anayurt Oteli consciously uses psychoanalytic topoi such as the Oedipal triangle, prolonged infancy, incest, mirroring needs, split character, and narcissistic blows, to create a subtle criticism of the traumatic changes brought about by the modernization project in the early Republican period,