Ahu Karasulu, Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul Mumtaz Listens to Massive Attack. So What? An Essay on Ahmet Hamdy Tanpinar’s Huzur

This paper is an attempt to see another Huzur (Tranquility)¹ of/in Tanpynar, by deterritorializing and reterritorializing the 'novel of disquietude', putting a Massive Attack soundtrack in the place of, in addition to the original music of the novel.

Diving into the world of Tanpynar from our times, two quotations in introduction to a recent article² about the criticisms and reviews on Huzur, written in the fifty years after its publication would give the clues. In the first quotation, Tanpynar himself states that he will be happy if Huzur makes the effect he desires and brings us more close to discussing the problems.³ The second, is from one of the best commentaries written on Tanpynar; the author, who accepts that any sentence written on a text is also about a certain habit of reading, puts forward that "...what is invisible in Tanpynar is what we can not see in him."⁴

Although how he sees classifications, at least in the eye of one of his characters⁵ would force us to be more careful, by and large, "the problems" he has in mind are those of so-called Westernization, like many of his contemporaries. That is, in the first decades of a newly established Republic, destined to the West, 'to which degree shall we be Westernized?', 'to which degree shall we remain like 'us'?', were questions that the writers of the period were sensitive to, in definition of the East and the West⁶, and under the so-called 'threat' of 'rootlessness'.
Some writers, like Peyami Safa or Halide Edip, with their more clear definitions of the East and the West, have expressed their theses, from what the possible dangers are, to how a synthesis could be possible, in the form of a 'novel'; where, some others, like Halit Ziya Upaklygil, or Mehmet Rauf, have focused on mostly the psychological problems of the 'rootless' individual, and have kept away from presenting the social and economic conditions, other than defining a setting.⁷

Tanpynar falls in-between both categories: he focuses on the individual, in reference to the social and economic conditions, and elaborating upon where any 'we' could be, between the East and the West.⁸ It will not be wrong to say that Tanpynar wrote on in-betweenness: on being aware of both worlds but remaining between 'two limits'. Following Gürbilek, "Tanpynar wrote the novels of a divided world. Novels where, the past and the present, love and sexuality, depths and the surface; or in the symbols of the novel, between the Bosphorous and Beyodlu, Leyla and Marie can not meet, and any passage through the pairs is impossible."⁹ Still, he wrote "... the novels of a remembrance, where the subject did not and could not forget himself/herself; or we have read his works as such."¹⁰ In difference, he has tried to pass through these dualities, pulling the outside world and the surfaces into a dream, surrounding the world of objects with a dense language, being aware of the pain that in-betweenness and hesitation could give, aestheticising this pain.¹¹
Among his works of fiction, Huzur can be seen as a perfect example of such like dualities¹², in-betweenness and hesitations of an individual, and to be an individual, aware of his/her 'state', and facing the pain of it. Commonly, it is seen as a 'love story' between Mümtaz¹³, the protagonist, and Nuran. The novel has four parts, each carrying the names of the characters: Yhsan¹⁴, Nuran, Suad and Mümtaz, respectively. The first and the fourth parts last twentyfour hours¹⁵ in gloom in the August of 1939: Yhsan is ill, Mümtaz has separated from Nuran, and she has returned to his ex-husband and her child, Suad¹⁶ is dead but he chases Mümtaz in his thoughts, and Second World War is about to break. The second and third parts last a year (the summer of 1938 and the winter of 1938-39), on the rise and the fall of the love between Mümtaz and Nuran. Although it is almost impossible to give a three-sentence-definition of Huzur, with in-betweenness in mind, and after Pamuk¹⁷, the following piece from the novel may give an idea:

Not only here, but each and every corner of the world, under the light of every lamp, such like things have happened. Man was clumsy, for that reason he might really be unlucky. Even the best wishes gave birth to piles of senseless sadness. Sadnesses, little sadnesses... He sighed. "Suad will do something tonight. Me, thinking about this, is preparing a crisis on its own. Is not politics like this as well? Fear and the eagerness to defence, in return ... just like in music ... and in the end, a magnificent final, like a golden storm ...

He himself was surprised in the sudden switch from the state classical Ottoman music gave him, to the Western music.

How strange... I have two worlds. Just like Nuran, I am between two universes and two loves. That means, I am not a completeness! Is it the same for all of us?¹⁸

Music almost has a separate entity in Tanpynar¹⁹. In Huzur²⁰, the characters make and listen to music, from Western classical music to sufi music, from classical Ottoman music to folk music. It becomes another face of in-betweenness. Mümtaz can see the 'we' of him destined to appreciate Debussy and Wagner, but live in a composition in Mahur, but as in the piece above, a 'state' of classical Ottoman music can end with Western classical. Sufi music, or Dede Efendi's Ferahfeza Mevlevi Ayini while performed by the characters of the novel, would suddenly turn to the happy melodies of folk music in its peak, when it is about to reach 'unity' or 'completeness'.
Still, not only the feelings but the outside world is seen through the music as well. In his happiest hours, Mümtaz sees the whole existence as a piece of music. Furthermore, for Mümtaz, music shapes his and Nuran's life, but it determines the life of the nation as well: unless the music changes, their only chance will be in love.²¹ Yet, his chance in love seems to be wasted.

Taking a deep breath, and re-diving into the world of Tanpynar, this time over Mümtaz, music, in-betweenness and wasted chances, Deleuze would give us the clue. For him, understanding an author is not developing an initial intuition nor is it arguing against his system. It is, producing the inherent metaphysics of the work (including whether it mixes with a possibility of life) and dreaming about it. Dreaming not with a trained, historico-universitarian mind, but strolling through the work's labyrinths, swimming through its currents, knowing it might not be the very direction that thought aims at.²² It would be the attempt to see Mümtaz, his in-betweenness, and his wasted chance, dreaming through music, from another time.

"Music has a taste for destruction, every kind of destruction, extinction, breakage, dislocation"²³, at least that is what Deleuze and Guattari remind. Refrain "is the content proper to music"²⁴ and the content of music all at the same time. It prevents music, where music "takes up the refrain, lays hold of it as a content in a form of expression, because it forms a block within it in order to take it somewhere else"²⁵.

In other words, "music is precisely the adventure of the refrain: the music lapses back into a refrain...; the way it lays hold of the refrain, makes it more and more sober, reduced to a few notes, then takes it down a creative line that is so much richer, no origin or end of which is in sight"²⁶.

The rhythm is born where music is pervaded by every minority and yet comprises another power, over the integrated refrains. Rhythm is critical: it operates over heterogeneous blocks, it changes direction; still, "there is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness"²⁷ for the matters of emergence of expression.²⁸

I would dream through Massive Attack²⁹ from my time, with their electronic, repetitive-rhythm based music. The rhythm there is not born over integrated refrains; it has on its own an immense expressiveness collapsing music into the refrain. The music of Massive Attack³⁰ is the rhythm, which is the refrain in its integrity: a few notes construct the essence of music; the lyrics, the voice, and the melody (?) only reinforce that essence. The destructive power of music should be sought in the rhythm there.

The music of Massive Attack, over the refrain, fulfills its role in territorializing, deterritorializing and reterritorializing again via the rhythm³¹ which is the refrain. Let Mümtaz be wrapped up by them then ...

Remember the first and fourth parts, the gloomy twentfour hours of Mümtaz in the August of 1939: Yhsan is ill, it is all over with Nuran and the war is about to break. Enter 'Weather Storm' for the first part. The refrain is territorial; it indeed marks a territory: he moves through the streets of Istanbul, ghost like, thinking about his distant past, Yhsan, Macide, Nuran... The world of things, the world of men; man is a microcosmos: all collapse into the territory of an inner tension. His life is slipping through his hands.

Inner tension would soon turn into suffocation in the fourth part as the ghost of Suat occupies Mümtaz's brain. It is 'Karmacoma' that defines Suat: the threatening refrain and the other-worldly voice of Tricky. It is a territorialized function refrain that marks an assemblage and yet pass into new ones by deterritorialization-reterritorialization, which would be in the core of Mümtaz's being wrapped up by the music. The assemblage it marks is Suat's threatening, cynical entity present in Mümtaz's life: 'suffering and cruel' as Mümtaz sees him³², he is always critical of, even looking down on Mümtaz. Drinking, sick, abusive on women, hating his family, he says he chose life as an individual, pushing himself to extreme adventures to feel it; he says he killed God to be free: it is all but a 'reverted theology' as Yhsan calls it³³. Comatose when alive, 'Karmacoma' would deterritorialize the darkness of Suat and reterritorialize it twice: once to the suffocation of Mümtaz in the fourth part, and to the love affair between Mümtaz and Nuran.

'Heat Miser' marks the suffocation of Mümtaz in the fourth part. That would mark a territory and a reterritorialization. Mümtaz seems to cease his outsider's view, 'taking the responsibility of his ideas'³⁴, sending ordinary people to war, so, to their death. Such a split: Suat would only laugh at it and call him to where he is. Yhsan gets better, the war breaks, Mümtaz, refuting to follow suicidal Suat, collapses. Reterritorialization? Though unclear in the novel, blood means purification.

Another reterritorialization Suat brings is to the Mümtaz-Nuran story. Suat is amongst the people Mümtaz met in Büyükada on the day he came to know Nuran; on the height of their love, Suat's love letter to Nuran marks a downturn in their relationship and his suicide is the end of the love affair.

It is a love-at-first-sight, Mümtaz meeting Nuran: for Mümtaz the beauty of a woman is defined by being from Istanbul, raised up in the Bosphorous. A third characteristic sets in: to be exactly Nuran-like.³⁵ With too many friends and tastes in common, newly met Nuran would soon be the Goddess, the ideal around which the world turns. The aesthete of the third part might be reflected by 'Angel'. Summer, the beauties of the city, music and arts are in the rising refrain of the song. It is heartbeat, excitement and an ecstatic mood. Their intimate involvement might be marked by 'Inertia Creeps', a territorialized function refrain assuming a special function: eroticising the body of the woman in her entire Easternness ...

Love is soon to reach its peak: "bodies are the easiest to give" Mümtaz says, "the point is in giving our lives. Belonging to one love from head to toe, entering into a mirror as two and getting out as one soul!"³⁶ Nuran's response is silence, as she is spilt in between her daughter and Mümtaz, the responsibilities of the daily life and the sacred love. Suat's irrational, unexpected, written-for-nothing love letter would be received, they would start meeting in the city-centre; Nuran would be swallowed by her inner tensions more and more, with lesser time for Mümtaz. He waits, painfully... It is beautifully described in 'Mezzanine'. The refrain has all the tension, the suffering to be territorialized in a possible break for the couple.

The end of the relationship would come when they find Suat hung to death in the house they meet. Soon she would return to her ex-husband, giving up happiness for some tranquility. The rest would be domestic hell for Mümtaz. The world falls onto him as it is in 'Unfinished Sympathy'.

He would suffocate, he would collapse, the ultimate reterritorialization of 'Heat Miser' is 'Safe from Harm'. The refrain dictates a banging head on the wall over and over and over... Suat is present with the voice of Tricky: "I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me to see me looking back at you". Mümtaz is broken into pieces, the strength in the female voice constructs his line of flight: "if you hurt what's mine/I'll sure as hell retaliate". Suat of him can be deleted from the scene. Mümtaz collapses to the stairs, looking at his hands cut when he broke Yhsan's medicine bottles. Blood may mean purification. Any Nuran, as close to the tranquility in disquietude is just about to enter the scene.

Mümtaz may listen to Massive Attack. So what? Huzur of/tranquility in Tanpynar is taken as in-betweenness, hesitations, dualities and the pain of it aestheticised. His music is seen as such, that is, both in expression and in possession of in-betweenness, hesitations and dualities, up to a point where the music changes or there is no other chance than love, and love is lost. Diving into this world, from my time, the music I had in mind, Massive Attack, wraps Mümtaz up, deterritorializing and reterritorializing the disquietude, in which there is a room for tranquility. For this time, that was what I saw in Tanpynar.

Notes

¹ The novel is first published as a newspaper serial in Cumhuriyet, and as a book, its first revised edition appeared in 1949. In this paper, a its 5th edition is used. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar, Huzur (Tranquility) (Istabul: Dergah Yayynlary, 1992). The translations from the original text are mine.

² Handan Ynci, "Elli Yylyn Huzur Okumalary" (Fifty Years' Readings of Huzur), Kitap-lyk, no. 40 (March-April 2000), pp.133-143.

³ Ynci, p.133, quoted from: "Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar ile Son Romany Yçin Bir Konupma (A Conversation with Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar on his Latest Novel)" (Necdet Evliyagil), Cumhuriyet, 24 January 1950.

⁴ Nurdan Gürbilek, "Tanpynar'da Görünmeyen" (The Invisible in Tanpynar), Defter, no. 5 (June-September 1988), p.104.

⁵ In Aydaki Kadyn (Woman on the Moon), he writes "... Once classified, the interest is reduced by one half. Just like the tuberculous in a sanatorium." (Istanbul: Adam Yayynlary, 1987), p.30.

⁶ For Tanpynar's point of view regarding the East and the West, see: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar, "Park ile Garp Arasynda Görülen Esasly Farklar" (Basic Differences between the East and the West), in: Yapadydym Gibi (As I have Lived through It) (Istanbul: Dergah Yayynlary, 2^nd ed., 1996), pp.24-27.

⁷ Berna Moran, Türk Romanyna Eleptirel Bir Bakyp: Ahmet Mithat'tan A.H. Tanpynar'a (A Critical Look to the Modern Turkish Novel: From Ahmed Mithat to Ahmed Hamdi Tanpynar)(Ystanbul: Yletipim Yayynlary, 6^th edition, 1997).

⁸ Moran, p.249.

⁹ Gürbilek, p.104.

¹⁰ Gürbilek, p.104.

¹¹ Gürbilek, p.104; Orhan Pamuk, "Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar ve Türk Modernizmi" (Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar and Turkish Modernism), Defter, no.23, pp. 31-45.

¹² Moran states that the most significant duality in the novel is that between the happiness of the individual and social responsibility. Moran, pp. 203-223.

¹³ Although the novel is written in third person singular, commonly, the novel is taken to e autobiographical, and Mümtaz is seen as Tanpynar himself. Analysing Tanpynar's state of mind writing Huzur, Demiralp has put forward that Mümtaz is the poem state of Tanpynar. Oduz Demiralp, Kutup Noktasy: Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar'yn Yapyty Üzerine Eleptirel Deneme (The Point of Pole: A Critical Essay on Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar's Work) (Ystanbul: Yapy Kredi Yayynlary, 1993), pp.111-130.

¹⁴ Yhsan, who is said to be Yahya Kemal Beyatly, poet, and Tanpynar's professor, is a relative of Mümtaz that have brought him up. Compared to Mümtaz, he is the rational intellectual, focused on the future to be created rather than the past to be adored, and production and utility, compared to aesthetics as a manner of living.

¹⁵ The war breaks, and Mümtaz collapses as the twentyfour hours and the novel end.

¹⁶ Suad is the only 'negative' character of the novel. He suffers from tuberculosis. He is portrayed as an anarchist, and a nihilist. He does not see any good in arts. He holds a strong hatred for women. He confesses a fake love to Nuran and hangs himself in their apartment. His suicide would mark the end of the love affair between Mümtaz and Nuran.

¹⁷ He takes it as the 'thematic abstract' of the novel. Pamuk, p.36.

¹⁸ Tanpynar, p.343.

¹⁹ For a 'list' and/or evaluation of almost every comment Tanpynar has made on music, see: Tahir Abacy, Yahya Kemal ve Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar'da Müzik (Music in Yahya Kemal and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpynar) (Istanbul: Pan Yayyncylyk, 2000).

²⁰ Moran would go as far to say that the novel itself is 'composed' as a symphony. Moran, p.202.

²¹ Mehmet Kaplan, "Bir Pairin Romany: Huzur" (Huzur: The Novel of a Poet), Türk Dili ve Edebiyaty Dergisi, no.13 (1965), pp.30-42.

²² F. Gros, "Le Foucault de Deleuze: Une Fiction Métaphysique", Philosophie, no.47 (1995), pp.54.

²³ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus (translation and foreword by: Brian Massumi)(London: Athlone Press, 2^nd ed., 1992), p.299.

²⁴ Deleuze and Guattari, p.299.

²⁵ Deleuze and Guattari, p.300.

²⁶ Deleuze and Guattari, p.302.

²⁷ Deleuze and Guattari, p.315.

²⁸ Deleuze and Guattari, p.300, 313, 315.

²⁹ The answer to a 'why Massive Attack?' is almost entirely subjective. I think trip-hop gives the insight of a similar in-betweenness, and Massive Attack seems to be more hesitant, compared to other trip-hop groups. Mümtaz, in our times would add it to his collection.

³⁰ With their three studio albums in mind: Blue Lines (1991), Protection (1994) and Mezzanine (1998).

³¹ Even the presence of female voices does not soothe it down.

³² Tanpynar, p.360.

³³ Tanpynar, p.357.

³⁴ Tanpynar, p.415.

³⁵ Tanpynar, p.90.

³⁶ Tanpynar, p.237.