Ethical Antinomies: The Problem of Realism in Ottoman Literary Modernity

This article takes “novelism,” which Cliford Siskind defines as “the discourse of and about novels, ”7 as a starting point to look at the late Ottoman theories of the novel in the nineteenth century, an aspect that is not sufciently explored in relation to the novelization of Middle Eastern literatures.8 The Ottoman nineteenth century, familiar to many, is conventionally known as the Tanzimat (reorganization) period, when the empire imple- mented and experienced transformative reforms in domains as varied as the political process, legislation, communi- cation and transportation technologies, and social life.9 From a literary perspective, the reform period figures as the cultural context in which modern literature emerged at the intersection of print capitalism, educational reforms, and linguistic vernacularization.10 The novel sits at the center of this narrative because it enabled the pedagogical, ideological, and commercial aspirations of Ottoman reformists.11 It goes without saying that translation was central to the Ottoman discourse and practice of the novel, which is evident in the number of translated novels as well as the depth of discussions that transpired around the genre and literary writing in general across a wide variety of Ottoman translations.12 My interest in this history does not, however, involve textual translation—that is, specific novels that are translated between European and Ottoman languages or the modalities of translation that shape such interlingual interaction. Shifting the focus to theoretical translation, this article considers the novel, to follow Siskind’s argument here, as “a discursive site” and explores how Ottoman writers translated and theorized realist aesthetics, the central purpose of which was to present reality in an ethically acceptable manner.13 Informing both the historiography and the formal-ideological analysis of the genre by Ottoman intellectuals, this emergent aesthet- ics was articulated in terms of conceptual separations. This article focuses on these binaries not to endorse them as such, but to revisit the problem of realism in Ottoman literary modernity in light of the dialectics they built up.