Broken Masculinities: Solitude, Alienation, and Frustration in Turkish Literature after 1970 by Çimen Günay-Erkol (review)

Every once in a while there emerges a fine example of literary criticism that offers a fresh outlook on familiar works and breaks new ground rather than plowing well-tilled soil. This is exactly what Çimen Günay-Erkol does in Broken Masculinities by focusing on the representations of masculinity in the novels written under Turkey’s harsh cultural and political climate in the 1970s. She establishes very early in her book that the novels in question, commonly named “March 12 novels” in reference to the military coup that took place in 1971, are critical in understanding “what happened to men in Turkey’s 1968 history, and how their masculinities in crisis are reflected in literature” (p. 9). What is remarkable in Günay-Erkol’s analysis, which covers a great variety of novels extending from well-known and widely read works such as Erdal Öz’s Yaralısın (You are Wounded, 1973) to somewhat unorthodox examples of the genre like Tarık Buğra’s Gençliğim Eyvah (Alas! My Youth, 1979), is that she carefully stays away from reductionist theories and simplistic explanations as well as the urge to read these texts as purely political novels written in order to keep record of the traumatic events of this difficult period in Turkey’s history. Engaging with the works of some mainstream literary critics (unsurprisingly all males, as Günay-Erkol reminds us), she challenges the widely accepted view that these novels should either be read as urban extensions of the so-called “village novels” or ideological texts written in the Soviet tradition of social realism. Instead, she emphasizes that they are valuable examples of literature as they feature “stories of ordinary people and ordinary lives, stories that shed light on the disillusionment of the citizens of Turkey, during a period of rapid change that pushed the country toward an earnest self-interrogation” (p. 20).

While warning the reader that she will not endorse a singular concept of masculinity, Günay-Erkol states that her perspective relies on showing how the authors of these novels seamlessly move between essentialist and non-essentialist or singular and plural experiences of masculinity. Although she covers a large number of novels (written by both left-wing and right-wing men and women) and a wide range of subjects (extending from Westernization and authoritarianism to class issues and family dynamics), her focus remains the same: to reveal how these novels deconstruct mainstream history by testimonials of personal traumas and how they negotiate masculinity as a performance rather than an essential quality following from biological sex or an inherent identity.

Günay-Erkol admits that Judith Butler’s views on the fluidity of gender constructions and the “performative nature of gender”⁴ constitute the central issue of her book. Especially in her analysis of the first three novels of the genre, namely Çetin Altan’s Büyük Gözaltı (Extreme Surveillance, 1972), Öz’s Yaralısın, Melih Cevdet Anday’s İsa’nın Güncesi (The Diary of Jesus, 1974), she draws our attention to the portrayal of the protagonists in a constant swing between fear of being emasculated and the desire to become a real man which “communicates the instability of traumatized masculinity” (pp. 50–51). In addition to subscribing to the Butlerian view that the performance of becoming a man always takes place under the gaze of other men,⁵ Günay-Erkol shows how this gaze (imaginary or real) becomes the dynamo of all these novels, and especially of Extreme Surveillance, where “the fear of effeminacy” turns every single act into a performance of manhood (p. 46). In addition to thoroughly discussing how this gaze is part of the “hegemonic masculinity,” she also successfully demonstrates how these men, whose bodies are “colonized” and/or “feminized” by their torturers, are possessed by episodes of...