Tanpınar’da Yaz Sıcağı

This chapter delves into Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s short story “Rüyalar” (“Dreams”), exploring the thematic and stylistic interplay of summer heat, dreams, and existential fragmentation. By focusing on an excerpt from the story, it examines how the oppressive summer heat functions as both a sensory and symbolic force, evoking a state of blurred realities where dreams and waking life intermingle. The narrative follows Cemil, a writer grappling with his inability to complete a romance novel amid the haunting presence of a young woman's tragic suicide. Through his fractured consciousness and recurring dreams, the story merges mythological references to Persephone, Ophelia, and Daphne with modernist concerns about memory, guilt, and artistic creation. Tanpınar’s summer heat, like that in works by Dostoevsky and Camus, becomes an existential motif linked to inner turmoil, disorientation, and creative paralysis. The story's fluid, dreamlike structure parallels the myths it invokes, emphasizing the tension between life and death, reality and illusion, and the spoken and unspoken. The chapter situates “Rüyalar” within Tanpınar's broader experimental oeuvre, illustrating how the confluence of myth, memory, and sensory experience in his work transcends narrative conventions to reflect the fragmented modern self.