Abstract
The Endless Pain of the Teared Time: Spatialization of Nostalgia in the Novels of Abdulhak Şinasi Hisar
Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar's three novels (Fahim Bey ve Biz, Çamlıca’daki Eniştemiz, Ali Nizami Beyin Alafrangalı¬ğı ve Şeyhliği) are formed as a 'family narrative'. These novels can be called ‘memorabilia-novel’ due to their purpose of narrating experiences, and "bildungs-novel" because they deal with the changes of the central characters together in a row in the title of the novels over time. As these naming confirm, the novels deal with the change in the person over time. The link between change an nostalgia emerges from narrators’ comments. The narrator recounts the past with yearn. The past is conceptualized as 'past paradise' and 'Bosphorus civilization' in the expressions of Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar. This conceptualization is basically a search for meaning produced by the transience-eternity tension. The rupture in the 'now', which points to mortality, turns towards the 'past' as a desire for eternity. In other words, in this quest, Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar eases the pain of the 'now' by commemorating a permanent being (past paradise). In this article, the possibilities and problems of nostalgia will be investigated from the view of Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar and his novels. It will be tried to show in what way and how the nostalgia, which is revealed in the descriptions and narrator interpretations in the novels, affects the shaping of the fictional instruments (narrator, character, plot, tense, etc.).
Keywords
Nostalgia, Abdülhak Şinasi Hisar, novel, space