Imagining the Turkish House: Collective Visions of Home

4. How Literature Is Spiritual Space, and How the Heart Is Superior to the Mind

four how literature is spiritual space, and how the heart is superior to the mind works addressed in this chapter 1935: Fatih-Harbiye, Peyami Safa 1935: “Ev Sevgisi” (Affection for the House), Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın 1936: Cumbadan Rumbaya (From the Cumba to the Rumba), Peyami Safa 1936: Sinekli Bakkal, Halide Edib 1938: “Arka Sokaktan Görüş” (A View from the Back Streets), Halide Edib Kiralık Konak was one of the last novels of the Ottoman Empire. It was written in 1922, at the end of the struggle for liberation, in the last year of the last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI.¹ In 1923 the Turkish Republic would be formally established, and before the end of the decade the new Turkey would institutionalize and canonize profound cultural changes as it worked to forge a modern nation. The author of Kiralık Konak, Yakup Kadri, was a nationalist, a supporter of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and a believer in the need for reform along Western lines. Yet neither he nor the rest of the Turkish population foresaw the extreme secularization measures or the break with the past that would be inaugurated by the Kemalist government in the mid-1920s. In 1921, Yakup Kadri attended a religious service to commemorate those who had fallen in the war of independence in Anatolia. This memorial led  | imagining the turkish house him to a realization that the national struggle should not be for secular nationalism but for the deeper ideals of the people: Yesterday for the first time the common people, whom we had always despised as ignorant and idle, taught the intellectuals of this country some divine truths. One of these is that the heart is superior to the mind. Another is that apart from sincerity and devotion and simple faith, there is no way of salvation. The third is that there must be no separation between the nation and the religious community.² By the 1930s, however, Kemalist secularization had institutionalized the material-spiritual polarization that had been used rhetorically to separate those who worked for Westernism from those who protected the status quo. With the ruptures caused by the new republic, this spiritual-material dichotomy took on both a new urgency and deeper poignancy, for the immediate spiritual world of the people had once more come up for reevaluation, and perhaps annihilation. For this reason, the novels of the 1930s that take place in a domestic setting are worth reviewing separately. These novels continue to use the trope of East versus West, but in ways that take us deeper into cultural identity and into the components of spirituality, as well as its boundaries. Kiralık Konak established the Turkish house as a site of moral questioning , but also as a carrier of one’s spiritual heritage from a past that had all but disappeared from the public realm. In fact, Kiralık Konak disrupted the memory that was simultaneously being constructed for it by Kemalist authors, who were conscripting the Turkish house for its “modernist” architectural components rather than for the affective, emotional qualities associated with a life that had been lived inside it, as we saw in Chapter 2. In Kiralık Konak, the Turkish house was allied with a concept of interiority that was a key element of the spirituality of this remembered affective past. What I would like to suggest now is that this memory of a valued interiority not only became more developed but eventually became part of a larger matrix. In the 1930s, within the context of the new republic’s institutionalization of rupture, this memory, or this understanding, was used to disrupt a Kemalist, Orientalist-Western authority that was redefining Turkish identity from the outside. In the novel, an affectively understood house would be used strategically to reclaim authority by (re)presenting the Turkish self from its “authentic , Eastern” viewpoint—that is, from the inside. The house was the appropriate space to present this inside because it formed a matrix with interiority, spirituality, and historical consciousness. The Turkish house, and even its literature and spiritual space, and the heart and the mind |  old Turkish exterior, were both represented and imagined as the deep Turkish interior. In the 1930s, then, the Turkish house is enlarged as an image of tradition and the past, and of the values that are perceived as threatened by the present . As the site of the...