Imitative Desire and Homoerotics in Tutunamayanlar

Oguz Atay’s 1972 novel Tutunamayanlar is a landmark in Turkish literature with its innovative technique and unprecedented experimentation in novel genre. It conveys the cultural climate of the 1960’s Turkey but it also engages in larger questions of cultural identity in Turkey facing an uprooting process of westernization/ modernization in the last two hundred years. While the novel promotes modernist subjectivity par excellence with its “disconnected”, dislocated, isolated and alienated characters Selim and Turgut, questions of national and cultural identity haunt the characters’ self narratives. Modern existence in the “non-Western” context is unable to avoid questions of cultural difference. While the characters engage with the world through major works of the West—such as Turgut’s quixotic search and Selim’s “nausea”, they constantly find themselves responding to the imitative nature of their desire. The state of “disconnectedness” Atay depicts is essentially related to the traumatic emergence of the non-Western subject as a response to that which overwhelms it, i.e. modernization. Reflecting on the characters’ involvements with the social world in Oguz Atay’s masterpiece Tutunamayanlar, this article tries to decode the anxiety of identity as a dynamics of loss and desire: the sexual anxieties generated by feelings of emasculation by the West and the homoerotic repercussions of the reactions against this imagined experience; the paradoxes of desire and guilt involved in consumption; and the erotics of desire for the “West”.