The Time Regulation Institute (2 page)

The novel's narrator, Hayri Irdal, is one of those superfluous semimodern men familiar to us from Russian literature: more acted upon than active, simmering with inarticulate resentments and regrets, a cross between Oblomov and the protagonist of
Notes from the Underground
. Confusion marks almost everything he does:

I was fording a deep-sea cavern lined by the remains of knowledge and by all the ideas I had ever failed to grasp. As they swirled around my feet I moved forward, and with every step I felt the coil of unfounded beliefs, ungrounded frustrations, and unending despair tightening around my chest and arms.

By the early
1960
s, Tanpınar had worked in a ministry and even been a member of parliament; his narrator has a keen appreciation of the absurdities of the self-perpetuating and
self-justifying bureaucratic state, which, rather than self-aware individuals, embodies progress and enlightenment in Turkey. The modern age, his benefactor, Halit Ayarcı, claims, has been

given many names, but first and foremost it is the age of bureaucracy. All the philosophers, from Spengler to Kieserling, are writing about bureaucracy. I would go as far as to say that it is an age in which bureaucracy has reached its zenith, an age of real freedom. Any man who understands is a valuable figure. I am in the process of establishing an absolute institution—a mechanism that defines its own function. What could be closer to perfection than that?

This mechanism that defines its own function turns out to be the Time Regulation Institute. Tanpınar's satirical intentions in this novel are clarified by the fact that in
1926
Atatürk had formally adopted Western time by passing the Gregorian Calendar Act. Most people in Turkey, as in nineteenth-century Asia, had not needed to know the time with the precision offered by watches. The muezzin's call to prayers or the sun's journey sufficed. But Atatürk decreed that clock towers be erected across the country. They were to be part of the new architecture and urban environment in which Turkish citizens could pretend to be modern, and anyone still adhering to Islamic time, or timekeeper's houses, was severely punished.

Atatürk was clearly influenced by Western notions of maximizing the efficiency of individual citizens. His clock towers not only cheaply propagandized the virtues of regularity, constancy, punctuality, and precision; the Western-style workday, which divided life into compartments—time carefully allocated for work, study, recreation, and the rest—promised greater economic productivity and endowed time itself with monetary value.

Irdal, however, has savored another kind of life, one in which idleness, or wasting time, is a source of happiness. As in
A Mind at Peace
, Tanpınar again evokes the modernism of the everyday—one opposed to the alienated linear time of top-down modernity. But the setting is pastoral rather than urban,
and the mood is nostalgic as Irdal contrasts the easy luxuries and fulfillments of his childhood with the individual liberations promised by the modern state.

The freedom I knew as a child was of a different kind. First, and I think most significantly, it was not something I was given. It was something I discovered on my own one day—a lump of gold concealed in my innermost depths, a bird trilling in a tree, sunlight playing on water.

Irdal dates his fall from this Eden to the time he is given a watch: “My life's rhythms were disrupted, it would seem, by the watch my uncle gave me on the occasion of my circumcision.” From then on, he is a citizen of modern Turkey, expected to do his bit as an individual producer and consumer to boost its collective power. Asked by Halit Ayarcı to wear a bureaucrat's drab uniform, Irdal can sense

a dramatic shift in my entire being. New horizons and perspectives suddenly unfurled before me. Like Halit Ayarcı, I began to perceive life as a single entity. I began to use terms like “modification,” “coordination,” “work structure,” “mind-set shift,” “metathought,” and “scientific mentality”; I took to associating such terms as “ineluctability” or “impossibility” with my lack of will. I even made imprudent comparisons between East and the West, and passed judgments whose gravity left me terrified. Like him, I began to look at people with eyes that wondered, “Now, what use could he be to us?” and to see life as dough that could be kneaded by my own two hands. In a word, it seemed as if his courage and powers of invention had been transferred to me, as if it were not a suit at all but a magic cloak.

But, as Tanpınar shows, sometimes relentlessly, Irdal drifts further away, as he grows older, from any ideal of serenity and contentment. Though “born into a family fallen on hard times” he has had quite a happy childhood. “So long,” Irdal writes, “as we are in harmony with those around us—assuming, of course, the right balance—poverty is never as terrifying or
intolerable as we might think.” In Istanbul, he knows the desperate loneliness and petty jealousies of people in relatively affluent but atomized societies. His professional career turns out to be a procession of empty and futile postures. His private life is marred by multiple broken friendships and unhappy marriages. He is hounded by a series of absurd people, among them a wealthy aunt who hilariously rises from the dead to torment him.

Tanpınar uses Irdal to take aim at many aspects of Kemalist Turkey: counterfeit tradition, for instance, as exemplified by Irdal's projected history of a seventeenth-century clock maker called Ahmet Zamanı Efendi, which tries to provide a respectable pedigree to the Kemalist state's tinkering with the old temporal order, and heals its ruptures with the past. As part of Atatürk's invention of tradition, the freshly minted Turkish Historical Association had indeed introduced a new history of Turkey, in which Turks became a primarily ethnic rather than religious community. Unlike Mümtaz in
A Mind at Peace
, who cannot get on with his account of an eighteenth-century Ottoman poet, Irdal manages to finish his book. There is, however, a problem: this account of a traditional herald of Turkish modernity, renamed Ahmet the Timely, is mostly bogus, depicting him, among other impostures, at the Ottoman siege of Vienna.

As Irdal writes, “Unfortunately a handful of armchair academics tried to spoil the fun, being so impertinent as to suggest that such a figure had never actually existed and dismissing the book as a complete fabrication.” But his boss, Ayarcı, assures him that

as important as creating a movement is maintaining its momentum. In extending our movement to the past, you have intensified its forward momentum. In addition you have shown that our forbears were both revolutionary and modern. . . . Is history material only for critical thought? Can we not stumble upon someone from the past whom we love and enjoy? Oh, you'll see how pleased everyone will be with our work!

The Ottoman past that Tanpınar once wished to retrieve for his project of synthesis appears in
The Time Regulation Institute
as a plaything of frauds and charlatans. Unlike Nuran in
A Mind at Peace
, who knows her musical tradition and can sing, Irdal's sister-in-law can only screech grotesquely and mutilate old songs. “Our life is a tale without a plot or a hero,” Osip Mandelstam wrote about another spiritually marooned people, “made up out of desolation and glass, out of the feverish babble of constant digressions.” Tanpınar's novel, too, has the anarchic, bleak, and almost uncontrollable energy of the “modernism of underdevelopment,” which, as Marshall Berman pointed out,

is forced to build on fantasies and dreams of modernity, to nourish itself on an intimacy and a struggle with mirages and ghosts. In order to be true to the life from which it springs, it is forced to be shrill, uncouth and inchoate. It turns in on itself and tortures itself for its inability to singlehandedly make history—or else throws itself into extravagant attempts to take on itself the whole burden of history.

That peculiar torment is very palpable in
The Time Regulation Institute
. And so is its attempted resolution. Like Tagore and Tanizaki before him, Tanpınar upheld the felt experience—the small joys and sorrows—of ordinary life against the dehumanizing abstractions and empty promises of modern ideologies. No longer seeking, as he did in
A Mind at Peace
, an immutable cultural identity in Istanbul's past, he places himself on the side of the fragmentary and the gratuitous against the imperatives of history and progress.

Tanpınar returns often to the question of human freedom—a theme that clearly preoccupied him a great deal and gave metaphysical ballast to his critique of secular modernity:

The privilege I most treasured as a child was that of freedom. . . . Today we use the word only in its political sense, and how unfortunate for us. For I fear that those who see freedom solely as a political concept will never fully grasp its meaning. The political
pursuit of freedom can lead to its eradication on a grand scale—or rather it opens the door to countless curtailments.

The political pursuit of freedom can lead to its eradication on a grand scale.
The Time Regulation Institute
is to be savored, among other things, for the brilliance of such insights. Tanpınar presciently feared that to embrace the Western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalized knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated.

Irdal's career as the Kemalist state's functionary achieves its apotheosis when he becomes an architectural designer for the Time Regulation Institute and is praised for his “unusual staircases and the two unnecessary bridges connecting them to the main building.” But the makeover cannot but remain tragically incomplete. For Irdal, ushered late into the modern world, feels that

naturally all this didn't develop as smoothly as it would have for Halit Ayarcı. Every so often my soft, complacent, compassionate nature—made softer over time by poverty and despair—would step in to interrupt and alter my course. In effect I became a man whose thoughts, decisions, and speech patterns were all in a jumble.

How eloquently this describes the fate of many human beings, or “things,” forced into alien ways and lifestyles—the hundreds of millions of white-shirted workers with shakily grasped European languages and irretrievably impaired mother tongues. These are the people encountered in passing, if at all, in the works of Western travel writers, marked off from their suave Westernized compatriots by their broken English, seemingly childish naïveté, and residence in a netherworld of perception and awareness.

Max Weber, the tragic prophet of modernity, saw the bureaucratic and technological state as an “iron cage” in which we live as “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”
Even worse, Weber feared, “this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”
The Time Regulation Institute
explodes that presumption by showing us, in our postmodern cages, glimpses of another kind of civilization. It also mourns, more eloquently and sensitively than any novel I know, the obscure sufferings of people in less “developed” societies—those who, uprooted from their old ways of being, must languish eternally in the waiting room of history.

PANKAJ MISHRA

As a young man, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar witnessed the transformation, almost overnight, of the ornate, opaque language we now know as Ottoman into an idiom thought to be more fitting for a modern, westernizing republic. First came the Alphabet Revolution, in
1928
. Atatürk gave his new nation just three months to say good-bye to Arabic script and to master the new Latin(ate) orthography. In
1932
he launched the Language Revolution, with the aim of ridding modern Turkish of all words of Arabic or Persian origin. The Turkish Language Society, to which he entrusted this great task, did not, in the end, manage to do away with all such words, nor did it succeed in winning support for the thousands of neologisms it invented to replace them. But it did succeed in reducing the vocabulary by
60
percent. The distance between Ottoman and modern Turkish has grown with every decade, so much so that Atatürk's own orations, which still inform what Turkish schoolchildren learn about their history, have been translated twice.

Writers were intimately involved in this story from the beginning. Some allied themselves with the state; many others ended up in prison. But support for “pure Turkish” remained strong on both sides of the political divide. Tanpınar was the great exception. He revelled in Ottoman's rich blend of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. He believed that the way forward was not to sever all links with tradition but to find graceful and harmonious ways to blend Eastern and Western influences. He refused to change his language to suit the bureaucrats. For this he was heavily criticized, dismissed in literary circles as old-fashioned and irrelevant.
The Time Regulation Institute
,
first published
in book form in the year of his death, was his last (and most lasting) revenge.

Its hero, Hayri Irdal, speaks a language that, however much it strains to keep pace with modern times, keeps collapsing into its old ways. As much as he tries to embrace new words and ideas, his old ones come back to claim him. This losing battle is evident in Hayri's every reminiscence. Guilelessly he climbs from clause to clause, as we count the seconds before the edifice starts to teeter.

That's how it is, at least, for those of us who have had the privilege of reading
The Time Regulation Institute
in the original. For those of us familiar with Turkey's traditions of oral storytelling, there is also the pleasure of watching Hayri walk way out on a limb, and then the limb of the limb, as we begin to ask ourselves if he and his author have perhaps lost the thread, the plot, the point, or even their minds. And then, just as our own minds begin to wander, there's a slap on the table, bringing the story, the chapter, the novel to a sudden and startling end, and all those random details fall neatly, and perfectly, into place.

How to capture these sublime feats in a language that has never suffered political interference of this order? How to convey the changes of register that are the source of so much of the comedy? For us the answer was to go beyond the usual (and in this novel, often insoluble) problems of diction and meaning, to listen instead to the music of the narration. For Tanpınar was one of the great stylists of his age. He was famed for his poetry as well as for his prose. Language was his instrument, and he brought to it all he knew of music, both Eastern and Western. Whatever games he played on the printed page, he played them first with sound.

We did things in the opposite order when shaping his sentences in English. First we put the words on the page. Then we listened for the voice, arranging, rearranging, and changing the words and clauses until we heard something of the Turkish music coming through.

Here we should point out that we are not alone in this: No one can translate Turkish into English without a great deal of
arranging and rearranging. Turkish is an agglutinative language. It routinely appends strings of eight, nine, or more suffixes to its root nouns. It has a single word for he, she, and it. It offers no independently standing definite or indefinite articles. It has a much more refined understanding of time than we do. Not only can it distinguish between hearsay and that which we have seen with our own eyes, but it can also change a verb from active to passive with the addition of a two-letter, midword syllable that is all too easily missed by Anglophone eyes. It takes an easygoing approach (in our eyes, at least) to singulars and plurals. It likes cascading clauses beginning with verbal nouns that are as likely as not to be in the passive voice—as in “the doing unto of,” or even “the having been done unto of.” It puts the verb at the end of the sentence, and when this sentence comes from a master stylist who feels unjustly constrained by the politics of language, finding solace in a grammar too flexible for bureaucrats to contain, that verb will often turn the entire sentence on its head.

All this leaves much room, and perhaps too much room, for interpretation. So much the better, then, that there were two of us. It was easier to take a risk knowing that someone was watching to catch us if we fell—or skipped a line, perhaps to escape yet another logic-defying sentence. It was fun having company, on the bad days and the good. Our most difficult day came right at the end, when we were trying to work out the shape and dimensions of the Institute itself. The solution came to Alex in a dream. And, oh, how we laughed when we worked through it the next day, and saw how perfectly this preposterous structure reflected the author's ideas about modernization-from-above. It was a thrill to bring this metaphor, and this book, into English. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

MAUREEN FREELY AND ALEXANDER DAWE