Give a Middle Way a Chance

Eamon McGrath reviews Ralph Hubbell’s new translation of Oğuz Atay’s story collection, “Waiting for the Fear.”

By Eamon McGrathSeptember 10, 2024

• Fiction

IN THE TITLE tale of Waiting for the Fear, a collection of stories by Turkish author Oğuz Atay (1934–77) newly translated by Ralph Hubbell and published by NYRB Classics, the narrator considers burning his own house down. But he is preempted by a widening hole in the earth—an abandoned foundation pit in his neighbor’s yard—that destroys his house instead, crushing all his belongings beneath the rubble. Much like a fire or a sinkhole, Atay himself was an unforgiving force of nature. Rejecting both the nostalgic allure of the past and the vacuous imitation of the present, his writing sought to transform the literary conventions of his era.

The eight stories in Waiting for the Fear, first published in 1975, are psychological portraits of social misfits. Taking the form of erratic letters or narrative streams of consciousness, they uncover a tangle of neuroses, anxieties, and obsessions, the psychological outcomes of a modernity forged by isolation, alienation, and materialistic nihilism. The grip his characters have on reality is tenuous, and they find language itself unreliable (Hubbell deserves kudos for his artful translation of a fiendishly complex text). Like his characters, Atay was staging a lonely—and perhaps futile—revolt: against Türkiye’s bourgeois modernization, against the siren song of the West, and against Turkish language reforms. But he was not out to propose an alternative; instead, he aimed simply to force people out of the stultifying confines of their staid environments. In Atay’s stories, you can’t even trust the roof over your head.

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The first story in the collection, “Man in a White Overcoat,” follows a mysteriously silent man who stands outside a mosque. The narrator archly informs the reader: “Not only had he failed at life, he’d failed at begging too.” But the reader should be on alert when the narrator adds: “He didn’t even have a place to call home.” For Atay, this lack of a home suggests that he is no ordinary man. And indeed, he seems oddly disconnected, as if unsure of what he’s supposed to be doing: “[O]ther than leaning against the mosque wall he took no interest in any pursuit.”

What ensues is a picaresque tale of the adventures that befall him, including the odd jobs he chances into, such as a surreal stint as “a live manikin.” Again and again, the man shows himself to be a stranger in a world to which he can only react passively. Readers gets their sole glimpse into the man’s internal psyche when he spies a woman’s overcoat for sale: “Long, lustrous and clean, it looked like a ghost dressed in a wide collar, oversized buttons and a flared skirt.” The man must have it, and he walks off in the comically unsuitable coat under the blazing sun, as if to make his strangeness undeniable.

The man is closely observed by crowds of onlookers who don’t know what to make of him. Each asserts their own interpretation: he is a tourist, a drunk, a foreigner, a leper, a pervert, an escapee “from the loony bin.” But he’s not only misunderstood; he’s also threatened, abused, and dehumanized. Passersby pull at his clothes; children stick a tail on his backside. Finally, he walks out onto a beach, where bathers jeer at him, and continues walking out into the sea—where he eventually disappears beneath the waves.

Just like the man in the white overcoat, Atay’s stories are strange creatures passing through a world that responds hostilely because it does not understand. The characters in his stories exist in their own little bubbles; never quite blending into their surroundings, they defy explanation and remain resolutely apart. Others may cast their own interpretations, yet none grasp what is really happening. For Atay had big plans in mind.

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In the story “Letter to My Father,” the narrator, a published author, addresses his recently deceased father, a former parliamentary deputy. An avowedly modern writer, the narrator underlines the disconnect between his life and that of his father, proudly asserting that his is more expansive: “You lived indistinctly in a world whose boundaries you distinctly defined.” Moreover, he doubts that his father would understand his experimental style of writing, wondering, “[W]hat would you think if you could read my work? Would you say it’s all ‘crazy nonsense’?” In the narrator’s telling, his father is a foil to his own pioneering iconoclasm.

Atay’s own father, Cemil, was a deputy of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the torchbearers of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s modernizing program for the Turkish Republic (his mother was a schoolteacher). Born in 1934 in the Black Sea town of İnebolu, Atay was immersed in the ideals of the Kemalist old guard, who championed the adoption of all things Western and the disavowal of the Ottoman past. After moving to Ankara as a child, Atay would go on to study and later teach engineering at a university in Istanbul before publishing his magnum opus in 1972. Tutunamayanlar, translated as The Disconnected, is a kaleidoscopic novel detailing one man’s investigation into the life of a recently deceased friend and his disaffected circle of acquaintances. Taking aim at Türkiye’s myopic modernizers, Atay’s acclaimed yet controversial novel was nothing less than “an evisceration of this bourgeois modernist project.” With its experimental and abstruse prose, The Disconnected has often been likened to Ulysses (Atay cited Joyce, along with Gogol, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Nabokov, as one of his greatest influences).

Widely considered Türkiye’s first postmodern writer, Atay utilized many of the genre’s archetypal features, including metafiction, fragmentation, irony, collage, and unreliable narrators—as well as a manifest distrust of language and narrative. Unsurprisingly for the time, Atay had trouble getting some of his work published, his writing being considered turgid and unapproachable. But, ever rebellious, he rejected calls from what he labeled the “edebiyat çetesi” (“literary mafia”) to simplify his writing for a wider readership. Atay countered that critics simply had yet to find a new method to approach his “somewhat complex and unusual pages.” But Atay would be vindicated, and today he is considered among Türkiye’s greatest writers.

“Letter to My Father” is thus a manifesto of sorts, a tentative outline of the literature Atay aspired to write. Like Atay himself, the narrator of the story asserts that his narrow-minded critics have yet to “realize that words have many meanings.” Despite allegations of juvenile recalcitrance, he asserts that his goal is not to mock or repudiate the past. Rather, his aim is to create a new language in order to be “better able to express [himself], or to determine [his] relationship to things, or to place [himself] within the universe.” But this project is still a work in progress, and he admits that he can’t yet “express exactly what [he wants] to say.”

On one hand, the narrator rejects what he views as the simplifying escapism of the past. He toys with returning to his father’s native village, but he appreciates that this is naive. He asks, not insincerely,

[D]id you have a subconscious, Father? It seems to me that that sort of thing wasn’t invented until after your time, as if the Ottomans were completely incapable of such a notion. When I picture you in your fez and frockcoat I can’t quite square that image with the idea of “existential dread.”

But he knows such problems cannot simply be evaded.

And yet his present, shaped by disappointment, loneliness, resentment, and “a state of vague revolt,” hardly seems better. He derides the “surly intellectuals” who offer no viable alternatives to the problems of the present day: “I’m opposed to them and instead prefer to side with your sincerity. […] Still, I’m scared of ending up just like you, Father.” The past, embodied by his father, informs his present, but neither provides a clear path forward. He hopes instead to bridge the wisdom of the past with the knotty realities of the present.

Atay is puzzling out a new path, neither one thing nor the other. The narrator chides his father for neatly dividing everything into opposites, never giving “a middle way a chance”: for example, his father hated both classical Turkish music and Western music. The narrator thus comes “to love both genres as if it were a duty.” He speculates about the possibility of taking “a little of this and a little of that—from the works of foreign writers, of course.” He wants to build something new, from the ground up, even if he is still sketching out the exact plans.

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Atay’s vision is most nearly actualized in the collection’s title story. As the story opens, the narrator is returning to his eerily isolated house, where the only sign of life is a pack of menacing stray dogs. The story is emblematic of Atay’s stream-of-consciousness prose, as all the drama unfolds in the narrator’s head. The reader must piece together facts about him from the little he reveals.

And what can the reader ascertain about the narrator? He is a grown man of indeterminate age, a misanthrope who walks around “entertaining ill thoughts about someone [and] grinding [his] teeth as [he] plunged this person into all sorts of inextricable situations.” He lives entirely alone, and while he has a job, he never explains what it is, giving him the air of a superfluous man. He notes, cryptically, that he moved into his house “to conceal [his] fears.”

The narrator’s home, he assures the reader, is a neatly organized sanctum where “everything [i]s in its proper place.” And so he is shocked to find, one day in his living room, a mysterious letter, written in an unknown language, that threatens to derail the orderly life he has so painstakingly built: “Good God! And what if everything in the house goes crazy?” The letter, which was sent from a secret sect known as “Ubor-Metenga,” forbids him from leaving his home. He is initially astonished that such a thing could be possible. But then, inexplicably, he acquiesces: “I hardly leave the house anyway, it’ll be good.”

The narrator then embarks on what seems to be a largely self-imposed lockdown, engendering a sense of time-warping surrealism that may ring familiar to readers who experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. He passes through several manic stages, stopping and starting projects to stay sane: “I’ve been hungry for thirty-six hours. I’m waiting for death. Meanwhile, I make use of my time by reading and studying foreign languages; I don’t understand a thing.” His most enduring project is a thorough cataloging of the files and photographs that clog his house—which, contrary to his description, seems to resemble the disorganized dwelling of a hoarder. He hopes he can at least create some semblance of order, as if sorting through the past itself.

Even as the narrator strives to convince the reader of his mental soundness, it rapidly becomes clear that his mind is neurotic, obsessive, and unmoored, desperate for meaning. The letter forces an existential crisis over his sense of identity and place, rendering his own home unfamiliar. As his memory begins to fail him, his narration devolves into a cantankerous web of contradictions and dead ends. Atay’s prose emphasizes the narrator’s growing alienation from himself through a proliferation of parenthetical asides, as if he needs to annotate his own thoughts.

What emerges is a portrait of one man’s profound disconnection, both from himself and from the society that he strenuously avoids. “My country and its people infuriated me: No one read anymore. No one even knew how to properly feel,” he observes. This country, of course, is Türkiye in the 1970s—an era of profound political and economic turmoil. Bookended by coups in 1971 and 1980, the decade was shaped by unending political instability, constant labor unrest, spiraling political violence, and the rise of nationalist and Islamist forces—all of which cast significant doubt on the viability of Atatürk’s republic.

The narrator of “Waiting for the Fear,” like the one in “Letter to My Father,” resents Türkiye’s bourgeois modernization path as well as the character’s failure to successfully adapt. He worries that he is being punished for his deviant lifestyle, pleading,

I’ll love nature and people, I’ll work to benefit the homeland, I will oppose no system. I’ll treat everyone kindly, get married, have children, change their diapers and patiently tell them fables at night so they’ll go to sleep, and I’ll listen to their tattling and take an interest in them, an actual interest!

In a society increasingly devoid of meaning, he frets that his life is a cheap replica, lacking “a true and original version.” This feeling is exacerbated by his sense of inferiority vis-à-vis Türkiye’s place in the world, especially given that the Turkish Republic was envisioned as an imitation of Western models. Even while the narrator is deeply suspicious of foreigners, he craves their approval and is ashamed of his ignorance of foreign languages. Simultaneously seeking emancipation and belonging, he feels a call to act. “I need to speak, to shout, to learn. […] But most of all, I should speak.” To do so, he must first find a suitable language.

Atay openly criticized the artificial confines of Kemalist language reforms, which oversaw a purification and standardization of Turkish as well as a wholesale adoption of the Latin alphabet. As a result, the narrator is continuously unable to say what he really wants to say. “If only I could have had some words of my own,” he laments, “my own sentences and thoughts.” This, in short, is Atay’s project—to find a third way for a new and authentic Turkish literature, neither beholden to the Ottoman past—still evident in the works of the great early modernist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar—nor uncritically imitating Western modernity.

Toward the end of the story, the narrator observes the arrival of a construction team with plans to demolish his neighbor’s house and build a multistory apartment building. But, having leveled the house and excavated a large foundation pit, they must halt their work due to a lack of required permits. And so the narrator is left to watch the abutting pit grow ever wider. He considers burning down his house to force the secret sect’s hand, but before he can do so, he discovers that the sect’s leaders have been arrested. He’s free.

Atay’s writing resembles that pit threatening the narrator’s house—a permit-less project that disassembles literary artifice without any certainty about what comes next. (Atay never had the chance to realize his own ambitions; two years after the publication of Waiting for the Fear, at the age of 43, he died from a brain tumor.) After his house finally collapses, leaving him homeless, the narrator embarks on his own letter-writing campaign. Perhaps his letters can force others to introspect. “At least the time I’d spent at home waiting in fear, or waiting for the fear, mattered, it had a future.” And if more houses fall, all the better.