‘But surely, reverend father,’ said
Candide, ‘there is a great deal of evil in the world.’
‘And
what if there is?’ said the dervish. ‘When His Highness sends a ship to Egypt,
do you suppose he worries whether the ship’s mice are comfortable or not?’
‘What
ought to be done, then?’ said Pangloss.
‘Keep
your mouth shut!’ said the dervish.
—Voltaire, Candide: Or Optimism, 1758, translated by Theo Cuffe.
—Voltaire, Candide: Or Optimism, 1758, translated by Theo Cuffe.
Readers approaching Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s
1962 The Time Regulation Institute for
the first time should be prepared. Hailed as the greatest Turkish novel of the
twentieth century, its mode is entirely different from Tanpinar’s earlier A Mind at Peace, a brooding roman fleuve set in Istanbul on the eve
of World War II. It’s different again from the love-laden work of 2006
Nobel-winner Orhan Pamuk, whose novels My
Name is Red (2000), Snow (2002),
and The Museum of Innocence (2008) so
recently catapulted Turkish fiction to the world stage. Nor, despite the
animosity it exhibits towards modernization and the bureaucratic state, does Tanpinar’s
last work especially read like speculative fiction à la Orwell or Atwood. Instead, The
Time Regulation Institute, like the novels it best resembles, is a perfect freak,
belonging to a bizarre coterie of comic magna
opera—the eccentric pinnacles of extraordinary careers—almost all of which
are closely married to the conventions of Menippean satire. So be prepared: this
is Tanpinar’s Finnegans Wake, not his
Dubliners; it’s his Idiot, not his Crime and Punishment; it’s his Tristram
Shandy, and not any kind of Sentimental
Journey to anywhere. It is, for those who know the history, 400 pages of
fooling before the Lear of Atatürk’s Republic.
 |
| Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar's The Time Regulation Institute, trans. from the Turkish by Maureen Freely & Alexander Dawe |
In
his review for The New York Times,
Martin Riker identifies the ways in which The
Time Regulation Institute is recognizably Menippean, a form which since Bakhtin
and later Frye has been an essential part of novelistic theory. It flourished
in the Enlightenment with Swift, parts of Fielding, and Voltaire. Menippean
satire depends on two things: first, a lovable ingenu, blessedly out-of-step with the absurdities that surround
him (yet as a protagonist often malleable and weak-willed, blind to the
personal defects that make his position unique, and allured by the prospect of
belonging). And second, it depends on a rapidly rotating host of stock characters,
drawn largely from Greek comedy—the senile old man, the braggart, the miser,
the would-be philosopher, and so on—many of whom appear briefly, vanish, and
reappear seemingly at random. Over the course of his travels the ingenu puts forth common-sense
objections to what he perceives (correctly) as absurd behaviour, yet is so
desirous of acceptance that he’s prepared to swallow justifications more absurd
than the original behaviours themselves; and as he goes forth in search of
truth, trying gamely to render all these distinct-yet-equally-preposterous positions
consistent, it’s philosophy itself that puts its chin in the noose. At the end
of the reader’s dizzying journey, she or he is made to see (even if the ingenu himself is not) that all systems
of belief are equally self-serving—and, more importantly, that their proponents
are little more than reality-saboteurs, prepared to ignore, sideline, or
silence all the anomalies for which their systems fail to account.
In short, and as
Frye argues, the Menippean satirist sees stupidity, vanity, cruelty, hypocrisy,
selfishness, and most other human vices as symptoms of a larger intellectual
disease. For Tanpinar, that disease was his country’s obsession with modernization.
Beginning in the 1920s, when Tanpinar was a young man, the newly birthed Turkish
Republic under Mustafa Kemal (better known as Atatürk) was subjected to a national
development plan comparable to those of Russia, Japan, Iran under Reza Pahlavi,
or China under Mao Tse-tung. In it the Muslim calendar, along with Arabic
measures and numerals, were traded for the Gregorian calendar, European measures,
and Roman numerals. In 1929 Atatürk also initiated a “Language Revolution,” in which
the Latin alphabet was adopted, verb tenses simplified, and many Persian and
Arabic words eliminated from use. The people were given three months to adjust.
The result of
this program has been described as a bifurcated consciousness in the Turkish
people, a subject which both Tanpinar and Pamuk explore, and which Pankaj
Mishra describes handsomely in his introduction to The Time Regulation Institute. On one hand there was a general
anxiety, felt by many non-Western nations just prior to and after WWI, about
being hüzün (“doomed to arrive late,
and spiritually destitute, to history”); on the other was trepidation that the
traditions, language, art, and ethos of the Ottoman empire were becoming
increasingly inaccessible to the public. The modernization program of Atatürk
privileged the former concern, forcibly subordinating tradition to progress,
and ignoring to a great degree how the people themselves thought, what they
believed, whether or not they were psychologically prepared for these shifts, or
the impact of the propaganda required to make such shifts tenable. (At one
point in The Time Regulation Institute,
our narrator Hayri Irdal is called Turkey’s “undiscovered Voltaire” in the
newspaper, an assertion he finds both preposterous and distressing. “‘Do you
think it’s easy for a civilization carrying so much history on its back to
catch up in just fifty years?’” is the response of his mentor, Halit Ayarci: “‘A
little exaggeration along the way is only natural.’”) Modernization was contagious,
and its unapologetic spread—without the kind of cosmopolitan synthesis of past
and present that Tanpinar himself believed necessary—is what manifests itself,
in The Time Regulation Institute, as
a type of bureaucratic brain-fever.
Insomuch as The Time Regulation Institute has a main
plot conflict, it revolves around the process by which Hayri comes to accept
the notion that history and truth—when paired with public ignorance thereof—can
be manipulated at will. This is the crux of Tanipinar’s satire. Throughout his
life our narrator is condemned as an idealist, a pessimist, a defeatist, a
cynic, and old-fashioned: “‘You’re intelligent enough,’” his master Halit tells
him when the Institute is in its infancy, “‘[but] you just don’t believe it.
You lack faith.’” Shaking his head over Hayri’s condition—our protagonist
yearns perpetually for absolute truth—Halit eventually seizes Hayri by the
shoulder and shouts: “You’re going to change, Hayri Bey, change … above all
else, the Time Regulation Institute needs you to believe.”
And he does. He
changes. He believes. An upper-level administrator in a vast government
make-work project devoted to the regulation of clocks, Hayri spends six months
writing a fictitious biography-cum-institute-manifesto
called The Life and Works of Ahmet the
Timely. He’s well aware that this 17th-century watchmaker-philosophe, from whom the Institute
supposedly drew its slogans and mandates, never existed. Indeed Hayri is
troubled when Halit first demands the biography of him. Yet after publication,
Hayri finds himself responding bitterly to accusations of fraud: “I’d come to
see the world through Halit Ayarci’s eyes, so much so that I found any
objection to my work intolerable. It was now, after all, a question of an
author’s pride. And I had grown very fond of Ahmet the Timely. To doubt his
existence at this late date would be far too troubling.”
The change is
effected by combining convenience, self-interest, and Hayri’s longstanding Schopenhauerian
attraction to those whose charisma and willpower are greater than his own,
persons whom Halit is always urging him to imitate: “‘Look my dear friend,’” as
he says of a Dutch scholar making a fool of himself on the dance floor at an
Institute party: “‘study that man’s willpower! What effort, such a life
force—it’s the very joy of living! What is knowledge in the face of such
power?’”
This triumphing
of will is a mock-lesson repeated over and over again. Hayri’s stepdaughter
becomes a phenom pop singer, though she possesses neither training nor talent. The
fictitious Ahmet the Timely is studied worldwide. Objections to the Institute’s
mandate (not to mention its budget) are smoothed away by Halit’s masterful
gladhanding. Even Hayri, awkward and unattractive, becomes a lovable public
figure when his wife gives a false interview to the media. (When Hayri protests
the interview is “‘nothing but lies from top to bottom,’” Halit immediately
retorts: “‘That’s what you think. Everyone will love this!’” And they do.) The
character of Dr. Ramiz, Hayri’s Freud-besotted analyst, is there to reinforce
the notion that truth is merely a function of wish-fulfillment. Nor can truth
hope to gain footing in the world of the Institute, whose entire mandate is
devoted to focusing the public on a kind of eternal now, on a temporality that
lacks context or connection to anything that goes before or after. As an
organization the Institute’s success relies entirely on Halit’s strange power
to distort “both his future and his past through the prism of the present.” By
focussing on the present to the exclusion of all else, Halit teaches Hayri to
govern by willpower—i.e., by convenient assertion, under the assumption that no
assertion will be questioned given adequate fervor and conviction on the part
of the speaker, and the ignorance of the public. In short, Halit prepares way
for a propagandistic state.
This
perniciously synchronic approach to time is paralleled throughout the novel by
a psychoanalytic model of consciousness, propounded by Dr. Ramiz, which Hayri
compares to a three-storey house with no stairs (a structure built in a moment
of absentmindedness by a famous architect of Hayri’s acquaintance, and later
used by Hayri as a model for the Institute’s new building—a monstrosity praised
by the media for its “new architectural language,” the inversions of which match
a “new era of Turkish syntax”). The
lesson? Past, present, and future cannot be joined any more than consciousness
can be to the subconscious, Turkish syntax to its Arabic or Persian roots, or
the higher floors of the Institute to those below them. Everything is forced
into an isolated present: “I was living in a world without connection,” Hayri
observes. “At the time I found the experience quite pleasant, but when I
consider it in retrospect, I see the traces of a nightmare.”
The vision
Tanpinar gives us of modernized Turkey is that of a nation untethered from its
past and instead guided by extreme and absurd relativism. Philosophy can’t make
sense of these changes, as logical analysis—much like syntax—unfolds in the
kind of time that Atatürk’s history-effacing regime negates. The only way that
Hayri can find peace of mind is to do the work that presents itself to him, no
matter how ludicrous his situation becomes. His decision to believe in the
Institute is as sudden as that of Voltaire’s Candide, who, after years of
enduring countless indignities in pursuit of the best of all possible worlds,
renounces optimism in order to go and work in the garden. The journey of Hayri
Irdal towards acceptance of his role is every bit as ludicrous as Candide’s
syphilis-riddled, buttock-severing quest for his beloved Cunegonde. And in the
end? Despite his outward zeal, despite his many assertions of the good done by
the Institute for the people of Istanbul, the skepticism of Hayri’s memoir is
palpable. The composition of it may be the only garden available in which work
is still possible. “My first responsibility in writing these memoirs is to
discredit all who have slandered or scorned the institute or its late founder,”
Hayri declares early on; “my second, of no less importance, is to assert a
small but very important truth.” Realistically, he does neither. Despite his
general longwindedness it appears all Hayri has done is learn—to quote
Voltaire’s dervish—how to keep his mouth shut.
Readers of Candide, which as a Menippean critique
of progress mirrors The Time Regulation
Institute in many ways, tend to forget that Voltaire locates his final garden
in Istanbul. The farmer and the mystic who finally provide prospective to
Candide are Ottomans. In some ways the tragedy of The Time Regulation Institute lies in its reversal of the Candide story: Istanbul is no longer a
place whose pragmatism offers respite to the West’s self-serving mania for
improvement, but instead is dependent on the West for a modicum of common
sense. (It’s the Dutch scholar, dancing foolishly above, who along with a host
of visiting Americans eventually debunks the Institute.)
Yet for all of
its philosophical heavy-hitting and evident intellectual panache, the The Time Regulation Institute is also gut-jigglingly
funny, lurking under the bridge between modernization and antiquity like some
kind of ticklish troll. And though Hayri may not say so himself, Tanpinar’s
lampoonings, exaggerations, and deflations manage to assert through indirection
those “small but very important” truths that his narrator attempts to
articulate: that “sincerity is not the work of one man alone,” that no nation
can live suspended on the “threshold of infinite potential,” and that history
can never be effaced. “It is my past,”
Hayri reflects, “and not my current position in life, that holds the key to my
problems; I can neither escape from it nor entirely accept its mandate.” Nor
should he. But somewhere between the two lies the condition of modernity,
against which we continue to struggle—and with which, as Tanpinar does, we can
sometimes play.
Tara Murphy is from Windsor, where she lives with a well-treated shih tzu, a maltreated banjo, and a bunch of plants. The plants know a lot about Milton.
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