Kafka warned us against the treachery of language, its many flavors of betrayal. In a 1914 letter, he cautioned his sister Ottla not to accept anything he wrote or said at face value: “I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
But some writers embrace these fault lines, and their finest works often reflect on the deficiencies of their own medium. Neither aspiring to perfect coherence nor succumbing to the deepest darkness of incomprehensibility, WAITING FOR THE FEAR (NYRB Classics, 208 pp., paperback, $16.95) is an astonishing, deeply wry example, a collection of eight short stories by one of the most influential and inventive Turkish writers of the 20th century, Oguz Atay.
These linguistically playful, slightly surreal stories, written in the 1970s, center on the down-and-out misfits and oddballs who struggle to connect with the rest of society. Whether through an advice columnist ridiculed for his fastidiousness or a seemingly scatterbrained woman who discovers the decomposing body of her ex-husband, Atay (1934-77) alerts us to what he called the “fear of living,” a hypervigilant anxiety about the outside world.
Language and its shortcomings are key preoccupations. In the lengthy title story, a nervous young man’s life unravels when he receives an ominous letter from a cult in words he can neither identify nor understand. A professor of ancient languages helps decipher the note: “You are henceforth absolutely forbidden to leave your house,” it reads. The young man readily obliges and his life soon becomes a series of abortive chores, hobbies and bouts of self-destructive claustrophobia. He halfheartedly picks up Latin and English grammar books, reads up on religion, enrolls in a correspondence course and drinks until he blacks out.
Interspersed with these Oblomovian scenes of killing time are rebukes of Turkish society in the 1970s. “My country and its people infuriated me: No one read anymore,” the narrator seethes. “No one even knew how to properly feel.”
As Turkey joined the American-led postwar world order through the Marshall Plan and NATO membership, English increasingly became the lingua franca. Several of the characters in Atay’s stories struggle with their lack of passable English and also harbor hostility toward foreigners. But their criticism is also directed inward, pointing to their disjointed interior states. “I kept myself to myself,” Atay’s underground man concedes, scolding himself for being like a “cheap novel,” banal and insincere.
Atay was born in Inebolu, a small port town on the Black Sea coast. Prone to pneumonia, he often stayed home with his doting mother, a schoolteacher. She taught him the Arabic- and Persian-laced vocabulary of Ottoman Turkish, which was purged through language reforms in favor of a more purist lexicon with Turkic origins. His novels embrace both of these competing linguistic registers. While well-versed in classical Divan poets such as Fuzuli and Baki, Atay also admired Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Kafka and read widely, including works by Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Dickens and Henry James, as well as the American anthropologist Oscar Lewis.
Atay’s writing career did not really take off until his mid-30s, after the dissolution of his first marriage. Pressured to secure a stable income, he had begrudgingly studied civil engineering at Istanbul Technical University, taught college classes and set up a soon-to-be-bankrupt construction firm. Financial and critical success eluded him during his lifetime. In the autobiographical short story “Letter to My Father,” Atay blames his strong-willed father for his insecurities: “If you’d raised me better, I don’t know, for instance by sending me abroad or something … I might have been better able to express myself, or to determine my relationship to things, or to place myself within the universe.”
That inability to express oneself colors “Man in a White Overcoat,” the lyrical, Gogolian first story in “Waiting for the Fear.” Atay shows us how easy, how dangerous, it is to be read by others and governed by their wills. The protagonist, an enigmatically silent man in a woman’s coat, is alternately cast as an epileptic, beggar, lunatic, pervert and tourist. A wily store owner stages him as a live mannequin. Each time he manages to escape from his manipulators, he is recaptured by a new, gawking crowd or domineering personality. He has no words of his own to protest.
Even as Atay’s work satirizes some aspects of Turkey’s manic drive to westernize (his last novel, “Eylembilim,” teases its talky protagonist, a Beethoven-loving math professor), he was not a conservative reactionary. He lionized the ideal of Turkish intellectuals who were both confident in their own background and open to the world. “We are not a backward country,” he once remarked, “we only resemble an impoverished nobleman.” Turkey’s economic deprivation, not its cultural insecurities, was what held it back.
Today, Atay is revered largely for his 1972 novel “Tutunamayanlar,” a 700-page experimental masterpiece about a young engineer named Turgut and his quest to understand what drove his contemplative petit bourgeois friend Selim to suicide. The novel’s title is an intentionally agglutinative mouthful, a neologism tough to replicate in English. A literal translation would be “those who cannot hold on,” but before he died of a brain tumor at 43, Atay agreed to “The Disconnected” for an eventual English edition.
Steering away from social realism, “Tutunamayanlar” stretched the aesthetic sensibilities of the Turkish novel with its eccentric riot of form, Joycean use of stream of consciousness and intermittent lack of punctuation. Reminiscent of Nabokov’s “Pale Fire,” it contains a 600-line mock-epic poem, as well as its exposition.
As Turgut increasingly feels detached from his former orderly life, he seems to echo Atay’s own ambitions: “I want to write a new foreword for myself. I want to create a new language. A language that will describe me to myself.” The objective Atay has for his characters and readers is self-knowledge, however illusory, as the nation and its culture transform around them.
The most self-referential and tender story in “Waiting for the Fear” is “Railway Storytellers — A Dream.” In it, three short-story writers, one of whom is the oblivious narrator, live in ramshackle huts next to a secluded provincial railway station. When the trains come in, they peddle their fiction, typed on loose sheets of paper, to “boorish and ignorant” passengers. Their competition is not one another, we are told, but the hustling sandwich sellers, the alert fruit vendors, the savvy fizzy-drink salesmen.
When all is said and done, literature is merely one more product, Atay suggests. The transitory reader is its fickle consumer, whose hunger and thirst will usually win out. In fact, the entirety of the narrator’s world is precarious: The railway regulations change, the profitable express train is rerouted, his companions die or disappear. And yet with unfazed optimism, he holds on for a reader to find him, putting all his faith in language. We are beholden to it, he seems to say. We cannot do without it.
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