Katharina Forster (University of Warwick) Alev Tekinays Der weinende - - PDF document

Katharina Forster (University of Warwick) Alev Tekinay’s Der weinende Granatapfel as Neo-Romantic Bildungsroman – An Analysis of the Novel’s Chronotopic Structure A number of novels published in the past few years, such as Ilija Trojanow’s Der Weltensammler (2006), Feridun Zaimoglu’s Liebesbrand (2009) or Yadé Kara’s Selam Berlin (2003), feature motifs and narrative patterns evocative of the traditional bildungsroman. However, they tell transcultural coming-of-age stories, highlighting the quest for self-discovery in a world transformed by mass migration and colonialism. While time and the idea of development are of special importance in the bildungsroman, time and space are central variables in intercultural novels of formation: they represent change not only in temporal terms as personal and social developments within societies, but also spatially as travels and encounters between cultures. To describe the configurations of time and space in literature and their “intrinsic connectedness”1 Bakhtin introduced the concept of the chronotope. In literature, he argued, “[t]ime […] thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”2 I will use Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope in a brief discussion of Alev Tekinay’s fantastic novel Der weinende Granatapfel (1990), which has been called a neo-romantic novel of formation3, to describe how the text reimagines genre traditions.

1 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press,

2008) 84.

2 Ibid. 3 Alev Tekinay, Der weinende Granatapfel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990) [= Phantastische Bibliothek No.

249] 2.

Alev Tekinay was born in Izmir; she studied German in Munich, receiving a PhD in medieval literature4, and has since published scholarly articles on a number of topics, among those the image of the orient in Romantic literature.5 Her keen interest in the Romantic period also informs her short stories and novels; they often incorporate fairy-tale elements or fantastic themes, which—as Tekinay stated in an interview—present alternative solutions to contemporary problems and social conflicts.6 Her novel Der weinende Granatapfel is highly allusive.7 It draws on a number of pretexts from Eastern and Western literary traditions: the Turkish fairy tale of the weeping pomegranate8, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf and, most significantly, Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Tekinay takes up Romantic ideas and motifs – like Sehnsucht (longing), Heimweh (homesickness), Entfremdung (alienation) – but reinterprets them in the context of labour migration as sociocultural alienation and a longing for intercultural connections. The fantastic solution the novel puts forward – which is the idea of unity, reinterpreted as a reconciliation of East and West – is taken from both Romantic philosophy and Eastern Mysticism, a reflection of Tekinay’s efforts to construct a deeper connection between Eastern and Western cultures9.

4 cf. Alev Tekinay, Materialien zum vergleichenden Studium von Erzählmotiven in der deutschen Dichtung des

Mittelalters und den Literaturen des Orients (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1980).

5 cf. Alev Tekinay, “Der deutsche und türkische Liebesroman im Mittelalter,“ Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgen-

ländischen Gesellschaft 131 (1981); ----, “Der morgenländische Bestandteil im ‘wunderbaren morgenländischen Märchen‘ Wackenroders,“ Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 218 (1981); ----, “Zum Orientbild Bettina von Arnims und der jüngeren Romantik,“ Arcadia 16 (1981).

6 cf. Petra S. Fiero, “Eichendorff and Novalis Revisited, Phantastic Elements and Intertextuality in Alev Tekinay’s

Works,” German Studies Review 23.3. (2000) 417.

7 cf. ibid. 418, 420-1. Fiero mentions Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild, Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen,

Brentano’s poetry and Eastern philosophy, especially Sufism; cf. Erika Greber, „Öst-westliche Spiegelngen, Der Doppelgänger als kulturkritische Metapher,“ Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 66 (1992) 587. Erika Greber references E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der goldne Topf and Nâzim Hikmet’s works as the novel’s pretexts.

8 cf. Wolfram Eberhard and Pertev Naili Boratav, Typen türkischer Volksmärchen (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner

Verlag, 1953) 111-112; cf. „How Keloglan Married the Padisah’s Daughter,“ Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative, Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas <aton.ttu.edu/narratives/wmVol_41-1196_How_Keloglan_Married_The_Padisahs_Daughter.pdf>.

9 cf. Fiero 422. Fiero also states that Tekinay is keen to “stress the affinity between literary and philosophical

trends coming from the Occident and Orient.”

The novel tells the story of the young Orientalist Ferdinand Tauber, an awkward dreamer, who – feeling lost and alienated and strangely affected by a half-remembered dream – embarks on a journey to Turkey. In Istanbul he stumbles upon a poem by the Turkish folk poet and Sufi mystic Ferdi T., which mysteriously describes Ferdinand’s own life and causes him to remember his dream: it shows his separation from a beautiful woman in a garden of weeping pomegranates. Ferdinand is thrown into an identity crisis and, determined to find an answer to the mystery, he follows Ferdi T. all over Turkey, but always fails to catch up with him in time. On his journey, he learns that Ferdi T. is his doppelgänger and that he himself might be his literary invention that took on a life of its own. He also meets and falls in love with the woman he saw in his dream and eventually starts to write his own poems, becoming a poet

• f his own. A day before Ferdinand and Ferdi T. are finally set to meet at a poetry competition,

the Turkish poet dies of a mysterious illness. Ferdinand is inconsolable but upon listening to a radio broadcast of Ferdi T.’s final poem, he resolves his identity crisis in the sudden realization that there is neither a Western poet Ferdinand Tauber nor an Eastern poet Ferdi T. He rejects the notion of an individual identity for the abstract idea of a universal kinship of all humans. As becomes apparent, the novel merges fantastic with more realistic, i.e. verisimilar,

• elements. Each is tied to a different chronotope. The fantastic chronotope is characterized by

simultaneity and the dissolution of spatial boundaries and is linked to the utopian solution put forward by the novel – the idea of unity and reconciliation. Ferdinand’s process of becoming a poet mirrors the cyclical, non-chronological progression that characterizes Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen.10 He does not develop through his experiences with the world outside of

• himself. His development is depicted as an awaking of hidden talents, a remembering of

forgotten knowledge. On his travels, Ferdinand is always struck by the feeling that what he sees

10 cf. Fiero 418. Fiero acknowledges Novalis’ influence on the depiction of Ferdinand’s journey, but does not

develop the idea fully; for a general discussion of Novalis‘ novel as bildungsroman cf. Jürgen Jacobs and Markus Krause, Der deutsche Bildungsroman, Gattungsgeschichte vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (München: Beck, 1989) 102-116.

and experiences is not new to him but something he has always known. As in Novalis’ novel, individual episodes of Ferdinand’s journey – like his dream or the poem of Ferdi T. – encapsulate and repeat the entirety of the story, subverting the plot’s linear progression and removing Ferdinand’s development from the ordinary, prosaic world and the influence of time. Similarly, motifs which are connected to the idea of unity and anticipate the novel’s ending, are repeated in variations throughout the story. The romantic symbol of the blue flower reappears in a Turkish talisman11 and in the tiles of a Muslim mausoleum12. The dance of the whirling dervishes is repeated in the whirling of leaves13 and the dancing students in a youth hostel in

• Istanbul14. This mixing and merging of Eastern and Western motifs again hints at hidden

connections between East and West, which Tekinay is eager to highlight. The doppelgänger theme also belongs to the fantastic chronotope. In a twist on the Orientalism discourse, the Turkish poet Ferdi T. is Ferdinand’s inventor and his mirror image – his equal not an exotic, inferior other.15 While Ferdinand and Ferdi T. never actually meet, Ferdinand experiences brief visions, in which the laws of time and space are suspended and he seems to merge with Ferdi T, realizing for a moment a mystical union of East and West. It is the mysterious, elusive poet who embodies the idea of intercultural reconciliation: He is both a Muslim mystic and a poet in the romantic tradition, whose voice is described as a unifying, healing power that ties together “Mensch und Natur, Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, […] Ost und West”16. The realistic elements of Ferdinand’s journey are characterized by a rivalling chronotope, in which configurations of time and space are more verisimilar and space is imbued

11 Tekinay, Granatapfel 109. 12 Ibid 95. 13 Ibid 73. 14 Ibid 66. 15 cf. Michelle Mattson, “The Function of the Cultural Stereotype in a Minor Literature: Alev Tekinay’s Short

Stories,” Monatshefte 89.1 (1997) 80. Mattson discusses Tekinay’s use of cultural stereotypes and relates it to Orientalism discourse. In regard to the novel Der weinende Granatapfel, she asserts that the “active/passive binary” inherent in Orientalist practices is disrupted when Ferdinand “finds out [that] he is the object/subject

• f another’s writing”. She does not acknowledge that Ferdinand might be Ferdi T.’s invention.

16 Tekinay, Granatapfel 146.

with time and history. This chronotope is tied to the experience of separation and

• disillusionment. On his journey, Ferdinand again and again meets people who are homesick,

who have been displaced or feel alienated – a young migrant worker in Germany, a farmer who has left his home to find work in the city, children from former Gastarbeiter who have problems reintegrating into Turkish society. In Ankara, Ferdinand meets and falls in love with Nilgün, the women he saw in his dream. But just as Ankara, westernized and polluted, disappoints his romantic ideas of the orient, his love for Nilgün ends in separation. She rejects him because, for her, cultural differences are insurmountable. The rivalling chronotopes do converge—twice—in places which have been changed by time, but whose past and present is marked by intercultural encounters: Istanbul and a ruined monastery near Erzurum, which has both Christian and Islamic roots. These are the westernmost and easternmost points of Ferdinand’s travels, reflecting Tekinay’s varied literary

• influences. It is in Erzurum that Ferdinand listens to the radio broadcast of Ferdi T.’s poem and

resolves his identity crisis. He never meets the poet, yet the idea of unity suggested in their meeting becomes real in Ferdinand’s romantic belief in the universal connectedness of all humans. While the fantastic elements taken from the Romantic pretexts are first confined to a separate chronotope, the novel eventually merges the fantastic with the real, updating literary traditions within the context of contemporary sociocultural and political issues.

Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. Eberhard, Wolfram and Pertev Naili Boratav. Typen türkischer Volksmärchen. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1953. Fiero, Petra S. “Eichendorff and Novalis Revisited. Phantastic Elements and Intertextuality in Alev Tekinay’s Works.” German Studies Review 23.3 (2000): 415-25. Greber, Erika. „Öst-westliche Spiegelngen. Der Doppelgänger als kulturkritische Metapher.“ Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 66 (1992): 539-94. „How Keloglan Married the Padisah’s Daughter.“ Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral

• Narrative. Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University,

Lubbock, Texas <aton.ttu.edu/narratives/wmVol_41- 1196_How_Keloglan_Married_The_Padisahs_Daughter.pdf>. Jacobs, Jürgen and Markus Krause. Der deutsche Bildungsroman, Gattungsgeschichte vom

• 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. München: Beck, 1989.

Mattson, Michelle. “The Function of the Cultural Stereotype in a Minor Literature. Alev Tekinay’s Short Stories.” Monatshefte 89.1 (1997): 68-83 Tekinay, Alev. Der weinende Granatapfel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990. [= Phantastische Bibliothek No. 249]