Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’ın Savaş Eleştirisi: Huzur’da Savaş, Istırap ve Birey

Abstract

This article aims to examine Tanpınar’s Huzur [A Mind at Peace] within the framework of the experience of war and its traumatic impact on society and the modern individual. It shows how Tanpınar, who witnessed the horrors of the great wars that resulted in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey, describes the altering influence of these wars on society and individuals in his literary work. In this regard, his novel entitled Huzur, originally published in 1949, occupies an important place in exhibiting Tanpınar’s outlook towards the war and its social, political, cultural, economic, and psychological consequences. Creating a protagonist whose personal identity has been formed by the Turkish War of Independence War and World War II, the novel problematizes how the war plays a key role in society across cultures. In order to analyze the decisive role of the experience of war in the formation of personality in the modern individual and to what degree, more specifically, this study critically discusses the characterization of the protagonist Mümtaz and explores the author’s motivation through which the problem of war is described in the novel. The article argues that in Huzur, Tanpınar constructs a narrative of critique by associating war with violence, disorder, horror, disaster, total massacre, ruthlessness, irrationality, chaos, alienation, and the complete extinction of modern civilization. It shows how the novel underlines the devastating impact the experience of war, which Tanpınar regards as a catastrophic hurricane, on society and individuals through the characterization of the protagonist whose existential crises and personal sufferings are closely associated with wars that he has experienced. In describing wars’ relentless horrors both on societies and individuals, the novel generates a narrative that challenges the established patriotic tones found in Turkish novel, thus asserting that war is never legitimate under any circumstances and making the publication of Huzur a turning point in the thematization of war in Turkish literature.