Ecodystopia and Climate Temporality: Oya Baydar’s Köpekli Çocuklar Gecesi

Abstract

Contemporary debates on climate change increasingly revolve around the question of time. The sense of urgency instilled by extreme weather events engenders a distinct fear of belatedness, namely the anxiety of running out of time to curb global warming. This essay examines the significance of temporality in contemporary Turkish climate fiction, placing particular emphasis on the anxiety of belatedness. It focuses on Oya Baydar’s novel Köpekli Çocuklar Gecesi (2019) (The Night of Children with Dogs)1 to investigate the centrality of time to her portrayal of the climate crisis. Baydar pays close attention to the temporal irregularity of climate change and human systems’ failure to adapt to climate fluctuations to elucidate the tension between taking timely versus belated action. Prior to delving into this discussion, a brief detour is in order to point out that the term “belatedness” has historical baggage in Turkish culture. It concerns Turkey’s complex relationship to Western modernity. The Turkish modernist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s novel Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü (1961) best captures the significance of this term for Turkish history (The Time Regulation Institute 2013). The novel is a satirical take on the failure to adjust to the modernizing reforms carried out during the period that spans from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the foundation of the Turkish Republic. It portrays the loss of historical and cultural continuity through the allegory of unregulated timepieces. Central to the story is the eccentric “Time Regulation Institute,” whose goal is to synchronize all the timepieces of a nation trying to catch up with Western modernity. As Özen Nergis Dolcerocca writes, “The Institute is a parody of accelerating modernization in a nation plagued by its belatedness: it regulates the citizens’ timepieces, synchronizing all cultural clocks with the world historical time” (179). The Institute ensures synchronization via a fine system that demands “the collection of five kuruş for every clock or watch not synchronized with any other clock in view” (Tanpınar 11). To punish belatedness, they enforce a two-kuruş increase on the fine collected from people with slow timepieces. In İrdal’s words, “there is undeniably a difference between fast and slow timepieces, and this difference is an extremely important one” (15).