The Time Regulation Institute

PENGUIN
CLASSICS

THE TIME REGULATION INSTITUTE

AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR
(
1901
–
62
) is considered one of the most significant Turkish novelists of the twentieth century. Also a poet, short-story writer, essayist, literary historian, and professor, he created a unique cultural universe in his work, combining a European literary voice with the Ottoman sensibilities of the Near East.

MAUREEN FREELY
was born in the United States, grew up in Istanbul, studied at Radcliffe, and now lives in England, where she teaches at the University of Warwick. The author of seven novels, she is the principal translator of the Nobel Prize–winning Turkish novelist, Orhan Pamuk.

ALEXANDER DAWE
is an American translator of French and Turkish. He lives in Istanbul.

PANKAJ MISHRA
is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose writing appears frequently in
The New York Review of Books
,
The Guardian
, and the
London Review of Books.

AHMET HAMDI TANPINAR

The Time Regulation Institute

Translated by

MAUREEN FREELY

and

ALEXANDER DAWE

Introduction by

PANKAJ MISHRA

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This translation first published in Penguin Books
2013

Copyright ©
2013
by Maureen Freely and Alexander Dawe

Introduction copyright ©
2013
by Pankaj Mishra

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Published in Turkish as
Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitusu
by Dergah Yayinlari

Published with the support of the Turkish Ministry of Culture / Translation and Publication Grant Program of Turkey

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION
DATA

Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi.

[Saatleri Ayarlama Enstit
ü
s
ü
. English]

The Time Regulation Institute / Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar ; translated by Alexander Dawe
and Maureen Freely ; introduction by Pankaj Mishra.

pages cm.
—
(Penguin classics)

ISBN
978
-
0
-
14
-
310673
-
9
(pbk.)

eBook ISBN
978
-
1
-
101
-
61367
-
2

PL
248
.T
234
S
19513
2014

894
'.
3533
—dc
23

2013033709

Introduction by
PANKAJ MISHRA

A Note on the Translation

Suggestions for Further Reading

Chronology of Turkish History

THE TIME REGULATION INSTITUTE

Part I: Great Expectations

Part II: Little Truths

Part III: Toward Dawn

Part IV: Every Season Has an End

Appendix

Notes

Orhan Pamuk has called Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (
1901
–
62
) the greatest Turkish novelist of the twentieth century. From the evidence of this novel—and
Huzur
(
A Mind at Peace
)—Tanpınar may have a strong claim to this distinction.

Born and educated in the old Ottoman Empire, Tanpınar was clearly a major artist and thinker—a strong influence, among other Turkish writers, on Pamuk himself. However, it is difficult for the anglophone reader to verify Pamuk's judgment. Translations from twentieth-century Turkish literature are scarce. The unique history and culture of modern Turkey is not immediately familiar to readers in English: how, for instance, in the
1920
s the Muslim-majority Ottoman Empire was radically and forcibly reorganized into a secular republic by Mustafa Kemal (better known as Atatürk), and everything in its culture, from the alphabet to headwear and religion, hastily abandoned in an attempt to emulate European-style modernity.

There is another, even steeper, hurdle to understanding Atatürk's drastic cultural revolution: this is the basic assumption, shared by many Western readers, that societies must modernize and become more secular and rational, relegating their premodern past to museums or, in the case of religion, to private life. This idea—that modernization makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness—has its origins in the astonishing political, economic, and military successes of Western Europe in the nineteenth century. It was subsequently adopted in tradition-minded societies by powerful men ranging from autocrats such
as Atatürk and Mao Tse-tung to the more democratic-minded, if paternalistic, Jawaharlal Nehru.

They felt oppressed and humiliated by the power of the industrialized West and urgently sought to match it. It did not matter that their countries lacked the human material—self-motivated and rationally self-interested individuals—apparently necessary for the pursuit of national wealth and power. A robust bureaucratic state and a suitably enlightened ruling elite could quickly forge citizens out of a scattered mass of peasants and merchants, and endow them with a sense of national identity.

But there was a tragic mismatch between the intentions of these hasty modernizers and the long historical experience of the societies they wanted to remake in the image of the modern West. No major Asian or African tradition had accommodated the notion that human beings could shape a meaningful narrative of evolution, or that the social order, too, contained the general laws discovered by modern science in the natural world, which, once identified, could be used to bring about ever-greater improvements—the potent and peculiarly European prejudice that gave conviction to such words as “progress' and “history” (as much ideological buzzwords of the nineteenth century as “democracy” and “globalization” are of the present moment). Time, in fact, was rarely conceptualized as a linear progression in Asian and African cultures. Nevertheless, scientific and technological innovations, as well as the great triumphs of Western imperialism, persuaded many Asians that they too could rationally manipulate their natural and social environment to their advantage.

As evident in Iran under Reza Pahlavi, as well as in Mao Tse-tung's China, these single-minded authoritarian figures, who saw themselves as bending history to their will, ended up inflicting immense violence and suffering on their societies. The outcome was always ambiguous (as is now clear in Turkey's own turn to a moderate Islamism after decades of a secular dictatorship and the recent embrace by Chinese Communists of a worldview they previously scorned: Confucianism). For as Dostoyevsky warned, “No nation on earth, no society with a certain measure of stability, has been developed to order, on the lines of a program imported from abroad.”

Dostoyevsky was speaking from the experience of nineteenth-century Russia, the first society to be coerced by its insecure rulers into imitating the West: the result was uprooted and “superfluous” men, such as those he and his compatriots wrote about, bloody revolution, and a legacy of authoritarian rule that persists to this day. Japan had then followed Russia—and preceded Turkey—in trying to do in a few decades what it took the West centuries to accomplish. Japanese writers in the last century—from Natsume Sōseki to Haruki Murakami—have attested to the profound psychic distortions and widespread intellectual confusion caused by the Japanese attempt at Westernization that peaked with the rise of Japanese militarism and, after the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
1945
, turned Japan into an American client state. Novelists as varied as Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Yukio Mishima sought a return to an earlier “wholeness.” Tanizaki tried to recreate an indigenous aesthetic by pointing to the importance of “shadows”—a whole world of subtle distinctions banished from Japanese life by the modern invention of the lightbulb. Mishima invoked, more dramatically, Japan's lost culture of the samurai. Both were fueled by rage and regret that, as Tanizaki wrote in
In Praise of Shadows
, “we have met a superior civilization and have had to surrender to it, and we have had to leave a road we have followed for thousands of years.”

In recent times, Orhan Pamuk's fiction has, as he writes in his novel
The White Castle
, eloquently attested to the alienation wrought by “the transformation of people and beliefs without their knowledge” and the pathos of “witnessing the superiority of others and then trying to mimic them.” But what Tanpınar identified as a peculiar “fatality of Turkish history” was not particular to his or Turkey's experience. Both China's Lu Hsün and India's Rabindranath Tagore confronted what Tanpınar described as “the awful thing we call belatedness”; that is, the experience of arriving late in the modern world, as naive pupils, to find one's future foreclosed and already defined by other people's past and present. There is much literary, historical, and sociological evidence attesting to the spiritual and psychological
as well as political damage of top-down modernization. Still, most commentators in the West continue to insist that non-Western societies, especially Islamic ones, ought to quickly become modern: in other words, be more like the West. These reflexive and unexamined prejudices emerge, understandably, from the exceptional experience of Western Europe and America. But at least some of them have to be overcome before we can understand the nature and extent of Tanpınar's achievement—his sense of foreboding and loss, and his evocation, in particular, of the melancholy, or
hüzün
, of those doomed to arrive late, and spiritually destitute, in history. It requires sympathy with the trauma of writers who witnessed the devastation of their familiar landmarks, for whom the new world conjured into being by their great leaders remained agonizingly meaningless, denuded of the consolations of tradition and heaving with the tawdry illusions of modernity. It requires understanding that though Tanpınar knew his European literature—his Baudelaire, Gide, and Valéry—the anguish, as Pamuk writes, “that sustains all of his work arises from the disappearance of traditional artistry and lifestyles.”

The anguish—and the resentment of being in permanent tutelage to Europe—was all the more keen for Tanpınar, who had grown up in the Ottoman Empire and knew something of the old ways before they were violently suppressed by Atatürk. He grew up, for instance, with the Ottoman music and poetry that Atatürk's cultural engineering made inaccessible to later generations. His teacher was Yahya Kemal Beyatlı, a much-loved Turkish writer, who authored nostalgic epics relying on traditional Persian
aruz
rhythm instead of the newly invented Turkish one. Tanpınar seems to have recognized that Atatürk's new republic could not be a tabula rasa, no matter how hard the state tried to eradicate the fez, Muslim calendar, and Arabic numerals and measures, and replace them with the European clock, calendar, numerals, and weights and measures.

But Tanpınar did not respond to this feckless program of Westernization with a conservative or backward-looking project like Dostoyevsky's pan-Slavism. Tanpınar hoped for a synthesis of past and present that went beyond secularist slogans
and state programs for modernization. In opposition to a parochial nationalism, Tanpınar invoked the cosmopolitanism of Istanbul—something that has become a tourist-brochure cliché in our own time but wasn't so obvious in the
1930
s, when the city was disdained by secular Kemalists for its centrality to the superseded Ottoman Empire. The old city brought the traditional together with the modern, the foreign with domestic, and the “beautiful with ugly”—an intermingling originally forged by “the institutions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire.” And it was important to emphasize this because, Tanpınar wrote, echoing many writers in Japan and other parts of Asia, it was of no use to keep thinking of the East and West as separate; they had to be seen as “an invitation to create a vast and comprehensive synthesis [
terkip
], a life meant for us and particular to us.”

Tanpınar's brooding and intricate novel
A Mind at Peace
(
1939
) attempts such a synthesis—one reason why it became popular in the
1980
s as Turkey began to emerge from decades of soulless Kemalism. Its most cherished character is Istanbul itself—the city's poor neighborhoods, dramatic sunsets, and long Ramadan evenings—celebrated with no less lyrical intensity than Baudelaire had showered on his Paris. It is against the backdrop of the city in the
1930
s that Mümtaz, a young writer, pursues a nearly mystical romance with a musically gifted woman named Nuran, while staving off the intellectual and romantic challenge of Suad, a Nietzschean dandy. His cousin, the cultivated Ihsan, introduces the conventionally Westernized Mümtaz to the works of Ottoman poets and composers. As though fulfilling Proust's maxim that what we love in others is the particular world we think they represent, Nuran embodies, in the rapturous eyes of Mümtaz, the superseded Ottoman-Turkish culture.

The symbolism is rendered in a dense, opaque prose and unchronological sequences that speak of a very deliberate attempt to appropriate the techniques of modernism—the artistic movement that set itself against the great rational ideologies and epistemologies of the nineteenth century. The Kemalists had tried to enlist Turkish writers into the national task of creating new role models and educating a loyal and intelligent citizenry. But Tanpınar, with his poetics of the
indolent flaneur, rejects the social-realist tradition that was dominant in Turkey (and indeed in all new national societies in the twentieth century). He seems to have taken to heart Baudelaire's dictum that the modern artist is “the painter of both the passing moment and everything in that moment that smacks of eternity.” He lingers defiantly on classic Istanbul scenes: ferries with melancholy foghorns and broken marble fountains.

This literary archeology seeks to excavate different histories and memories buried within the old city. But Tanpınar's self-chosen project of synthesis in
A Mind at Peace
doesn't survive his scrupulous attention to the tormented inner lives of his characters. Failure dogs the romantic and professional life of Mümtaz, a writer entrusted with the task of developing a suitable intellectual history (biographies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Turkish figures) for modern Turkey. Most characters seem paralyzed by their inability to transcend their divided selves. Mümtaz's mentor, Ihsan, talks—channeling Tanpınar—about the “necessity of constructing a new life unique to us and compatible to our conditions without closing ourselves to the West and by preserving our ties with the past.”

But everywhere there are signs of the Turkish “intellectual indigestion.” Once discarded, Tanpınar implies, tradition cannot always be retrieved and used to re-enchant the world—a warning to those who today rummage through Istanbul's cosmopolitan past for clues to their identity.

As Mümtaz looked at this shop, involuntarily, he recalled Mallarme's line: “It's ended up here through some nameless catastrophe.” Here, in this dusty shop, in this place on whose walls handmade tricot stockings hung . . . In neighboring shops with wooden shutters, simple benches, and old prayer rugs rested the same luxurious and, when seen from afar, occult insights of tradition, in an order eternally alien to the various accepted ideas of classification, on shelves, over bookrests or chairs, and on the floor, piled one atop another as if preparing to be interred, or rather, as if being observed from where they lay buried. The Orient, however, couldn't be authentic anywhere, even in its grave.
Next to these books, in laid-out hawker cases, were lapfuls of testimonials to our inner transformation, our desire to adapt, and our search for ourselves in a new context and climate: pulp novels with illustrated covers, school textbooks, French yearbooks with faded green bindings, and pharmaceutical formulas. As if all the detritus of the mind of mankind had to be hastily exposed in this market . . .

The suicide of Suad, the Nietzschean radical, who hangs himself while listening to Beethoven, further hints at the impossibility of synthesis. The Orient is doomed to inauthenticity, to be forever seeking fragments it can shore against its ruins.

The Time Regulation Institute
, published in
1962
, confirms this despairing vision. The continuity between past and present dreamed of by Tanpınar seems no longer possible. The onward-and-upward narrative of progress, dictated by the state and embraced by a gullible people, has contaminated everything. The spiritual resources of modernism seem meager compared to the great and irreversible material changes—industrialization, mechanization, demographic shifts, middle-class consumerism, and rapid communications—introduced by Turkey's Kemalist elite.