Novel Anxieties: An Ottoman Counter-discourse on Time and Space

In a poem titled "Ondokuzuncu Asır" ("The Nineteenth Century"), the Ottoman translator and ambassador Sadullah Pasha (1838–91) defined the nineteenth century as the time when "reality became metaphor, metaphor became reality / chances are old knowledge was destroyed from its foundations" (Mecaz oldu hakikat, hakikat oldu mecaz / Yıkıldı belki esasından eski malumat).¹ Starting with the mid-nineteenth century, novel technologies and urban structures created new modes of experiencing time and space. Like many of his Ottoman contemporaries, Sadullah Pasha believed these changes did not come without crisis: rapid transformations threatened what people knew; they turned the world upside down. Following the Gülhane Hatt-ı Şerifi (Gülhane Edict) (1839) and Islahat Fermanı (Reform Edict) (1856), both of which initiated the Tanzimat era (Reform era), the Ottoman state launched an empirewide modernization project to strengthen the central position of Istanbul as the capital.² This project included urban renewal plans that sought to reorganize Istanbul according to the latest urban designs imported from Europe. With new technologies and accelerated travel, new conceptions of time and space entered people's lives. Just as these technologies of ered alternative forms of mobility through time and space, they also created new disorienting ef ects on urban residents. In this article, I trace the ways Ottoman novelists grappled with the disorienting ef ects of the rapid modernization process on Istanbul's residents. I argue that Ottoman novelists developed a counter-discourse against modernization projects in Istanbul. Novelists criticized these temporal and spatial schemes using tropes of technology, which they thought did not represent progress but rather a disillusionment with a new order.

Leading scholars of Ottoman literature have drawn attention to the crisis of the cultural and linguistic duality between the general public and the bureaucratic class as a result of the so-called Westernization movement in the Ottoman Empire.³ However, critics have not addressed the overarching ef ects of the changing urban habits and transforming time-space conceptions on everyday life.⁴ I sug est that rather than focusing on a duality based on the politics of reform, a close reading of quotidian experiences in literature shows that nineteenth-century Ottoman authors used mediums of modern technology, such as the steamboat and print media, as symbolic spaces to thematize individual anxieties on a range of topics, which included a criticism of productivity, changing gender roles for men and women, and the new order of time and space. Keeping in mind that drastic changes in technology introduced distinctive modes of experiencing time and space in the nineteenth century, I seek to contribute to the earlier scholarship by arguing that criticism by Ottoman intellectuals was not a mere reaction to Westernization, nor was it specific to the Ottoman context.⁵ Rather, their anxiety can be better understood within the context of the reaction to shifting time-space schemes and the proliferation of new technologies across the globe.

The counter-discourse by Ottoman novelists is especially relevant from a postcolonial perspective as it emerged at a time when the Ottoman Empire was integrated into the world economic system as a periphery and initiated an empire-wide modernization project against European colonial expansion aft er losing large territories such as Egypt and Algeria to European powers.⁶ Since new scholarship has treated the Ottoman Empire itself as a colonizing empire, the counter-discourse theory formulated by postcolonialist scholarship best explains Ottoman individual and intellectual responses to the state-imposed rapid modernization movement.⁷ As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, while a discussion of European thought is indispensable in rethinking non-European contexts, non-European histories cannot be written with a simple application of European theory.⁸ Rather than a direct application of European discourse on non-European intellectual products, a dialectical reading is necessary to understand, in Helen Tiffin's words, the "counter-discursive practices" and "subversive maneuvers" in postcolonial literatures against the universalizing ef ects of European theory.⁹

This article illustrates how Ottoman novelists employed a counter-discourse against shifting understandings of time and space in Istanbul in the works of three authors: Ahmet Midhat, Fatma...