“Free spirited clocks”: modernism, temporality and The Time Regulation Institute

This article reads Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s 1954 novel The Time Regulation Institute (TRI) as an inherently modernist text. It provides a nuanced reading of the novel against conventional Tanpınar scholarship, which predominantly interprets it as a straightforward satire, and inserts it into an overdetermined philosophy of civilization attributed to the author. The article shows that Tanpınar’s poetics in TRI presents a philosophical alternative to the principle of cultural dualities of East and West, and that it reveals the damaging effects of modernization in the first half of the twentieth century, articulated in the novel as resistance to calibrating forms of temporal order. TRI engages with problems of time and memory, experimenting with the plurality of temporal experience, flowing in different speeds and belonging to different systems of reference. This article shifts critical emphasis from traditionalism to his aesthetic explorations, turning from “social” questions of identity, authenticity and cultural theory to representational issues in his writing: novelistic imagery, narrative time, thematic features and stylistic preferences. By foregrounding its modernist elements, it argues that Tanpınar’s novel deemphasizes the idea of continuity with the Ottoman past, in favor of a more critical and modernist approach.