Early, Yet Already Late: Literary Musings on Historical Questions

Early modern is a fraught term, if only for the reason that it lends the so called “modern” unwarranted legitimacy. The phrase also blurs the mechanisms of periodization in the historical and literary studies of the Ottoman Empire, or rather Anatolia.

In the field, transition into the modern period is defined not by the transformation of classical or premodern forms, but rather by the appearance of “new” forms, e.g., free verse and novel. It would not be unreasonable then to assume that the “early modern” would be characterized by a foreshadowing of these new forms; new forms that in their full flowering signaled the beginning of the “modern.” This, however, is not the case. If “early modern” Ottoman Turkish literature can be characterized by a single core form, that form is the gazel, which, defying conventional attempts at periodization, maintained a central position within Ottoman literature well into the “modern” period.

Some scholars seem still to subscribe to conventions emanating from modernization theory that would have us believe that Ottoman Turkish and non-Turkish (Armenian, Greek, Kurdish, and other) modernities are all derivative, late-comers to a presumed modern world. Following in the footsteps of that world, tracking the steep curve of modernization, these infant modernities forever lagged behind their single parent, the West. Furthermore, many books with the phrase “Modern Turkey” in their titles present the republican transition as a break that gave birth to modern institutions along with a “modern” literature that pushed the boundary between early modern and modern even closer to the present. Yet, accounts of the events that inaugurated a particularly Turkish modernity might also focus on other breaks depending on the speaker’s interests: Is it to the departure of the Tanzimat era that we should look? Or is it to 1908? Or perhaps an even earlier moment, for example, the Nizam-ı Cedid? The tensions and uncertainties around Turks and modernity persist: When did Turks become modern? Have they ever been? And which Turks? As such, under the light of never ceasing discussions around the concept of modernization, early modern becomes a bastard parent of a bastard child, who can never be identified and renders herself inscrutable and indescribable. Consequently, “early modern” may imply a teleology, signifying a frozen period that is eternally pregnant with the modern, a birth often announced, yet hard to define.

Literary historians of Anatolia and the Ottoman Empire seem to replace the designation, “classical,” which was the norm in Turkish literary historiography, with “early modern,” thus agreeing with Western historiographies in identifying the fifteenth-century fall/conquest of Constantinople as the event that gave rise to the early modern. But what of the appearance of Ottoman literature at the beginning of that century? If, in the case of the rise of Western Turkish, the literary early modern is defined by the beginnings of the institution of literature, to consider the period immediately prior to the conquest of Constantinople to be the Middle Ages is disconcerting. The rise of vernacular languages in Anatolia might be a better beginning point, effectively drawing Ottoman scholars out of an insular historiography anchored to a dynasty. Then early modern beats on, a boat against the current of constructed time, carrying the “modern” back ceaselessly into the past, into “earlier” periods. As the origins of the modern go back in time, early modern ceases to be a useful rubric, but instead becomes a situational designation determined by external factors and condemned to privilege an evasive modern.

It may be that the usage of the term early modern in Ottoman historiography informs the parochial institutionalization by scholarship in both Turkish and other languages. This insularity matches the fortunes of the rubric “classical” in the great canon of Western historiography, born of Greek antiquity, flourishing through the Roman Empire, succumbing to darkness in the “Middle Ages,” and rising Phoenix-like from the ashes with the Renaissance. Similar is the surprisingly resilient discourse that pulses beneath the term early modern. For Anatolian or Ottoman literary networks, there may not be a Greek antiquity, Roman Empire...