First Thoughts
Zo,
Some very strange thoughts have congealed in my mind regarding the first 7 chapters. Please understand that I have been reading a lot of Freud. Thus, I see Kars as the site of male impotency. Read on at your own peril. I promise that my future posts will stick to the text much more. I'll try to respond to your post tomorrow. I really enjoyed your thoughts.
AJ
Forgive the long list of quotations:
"These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world." (11)
"...Ka came to feel as if they had entered a shadow world." (14)
"As he listened to them, shouting and cursing and skidding in the snow, and gazed at the white sky and the pale yellow glow of streetlights, the desolation and remoteness of the place hit him with such force that he felt God inside him." (20)
"Outside, the snow was falling thicker and faster than ever; just the sight of it made Ka feel lonely." (28)
" 'But now I lived in utter silence. I wasn't speaking with any Germans, and my relations with the Turks weren't good either--they dismissed me as a half-crazed, effete intellectual. I wasn't seeing anyone, I wasn't talking to anyone, and I wasn't writing poems.' " (36)
"They had both inured themselves to defeat and to the pitiless unfairness of life." (57)
If Kars is the forgotten city, to whom does the disbanded memory belong?
Are the men impotent in Kars? Both Ka and Muhtar appear defeatist and self-pitying; Ka himself no longer produces poems, Muhtar cannot produce a child. The latter blamed his wife; the former his environs. Does KA do himself a great injustice by seeking to reclaim his potency in KArs? Why are the girls so unhappy that they kill themselves (remember: one of them is to be wed to an older man, another is shunned by her lover)? Why is the murderer concerned with unclad women (if not to remind him he is no longer manly)?
[I've been reading a lot of Freud.]
Getting away from sexuality...
Memory is afoot. All around the city are ghosts and shadows. The buildings mark the traces of history. Yet the silence of the snow washes away this important connection with the past. Instead, Kars is desolate, lonely, isolated, etc. I would wager that the collective unconscious is ever-present and manifests its repression in suicide, murder, and zealousness. [Yikes, Freud again.] To be sure, the city is none of these things. The common perception of Kars, as attributed to the characters by the narrator, belies a deep, more troublesome, hidden truth. Again, the shallowness of the despair will, I imagine, be shattered by the memory and life it suppresses.
TRAUMA causes impotency.
Some very strange thoughts have congealed in my mind regarding the first 7 chapters. Please understand that I have been reading a lot of Freud. Thus, I see Kars as the site of male impotency. Read on at your own peril. I promise that my future posts will stick to the text much more. I'll try to respond to your post tomorrow. I really enjoyed your thoughts.
AJ
Forgive the long list of quotations:
"These sights spoke of a strange and powerful loneliness. It was as if he were in a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world." (11)
"...Ka came to feel as if they had entered a shadow world." (14)
"As he listened to them, shouting and cursing and skidding in the snow, and gazed at the white sky and the pale yellow glow of streetlights, the desolation and remoteness of the place hit him with such force that he felt God inside him." (20)
"Outside, the snow was falling thicker and faster than ever; just the sight of it made Ka feel lonely." (28)
" 'But now I lived in utter silence. I wasn't speaking with any Germans, and my relations with the Turks weren't good either--they dismissed me as a half-crazed, effete intellectual. I wasn't seeing anyone, I wasn't talking to anyone, and I wasn't writing poems.' " (36)
"They had both inured themselves to defeat and to the pitiless unfairness of life." (57)
If Kars is the forgotten city, to whom does the disbanded memory belong?
Are the men impotent in Kars? Both Ka and Muhtar appear defeatist and self-pitying; Ka himself no longer produces poems, Muhtar cannot produce a child. The latter blamed his wife; the former his environs. Does KA do himself a great injustice by seeking to reclaim his potency in KArs? Why are the girls so unhappy that they kill themselves (remember: one of them is to be wed to an older man, another is shunned by her lover)? Why is the murderer concerned with unclad women (if not to remind him he is no longer manly)?
[I've been reading a lot of Freud.]
Getting away from sexuality...
Memory is afoot. All around the city are ghosts and shadows. The buildings mark the traces of history. Yet the silence of the snow washes away this important connection with the past. Instead, Kars is desolate, lonely, isolated, etc. I would wager that the collective unconscious is ever-present and manifests its repression in suicide, murder, and zealousness. [Yikes, Freud again.] To be sure, the city is none of these things. The common perception of Kars, as attributed to the characters by the narrator, belies a deep, more troublesome, hidden truth. Again, the shallowness of the despair will, I imagine, be shattered by the memory and life it suppresses.
TRAUMA causes impotency.
posted by AJV at 6:32 PM
1 Comments:
Quick Response…
I agree that memory, the past, the collective unconscious hangs over everything in Kars. The past is traumatic and unsettling—shift from one empire to another, (dare I say it?) a genocide, mixed ethnic community that is not allowed to acknowledge its diversity, communist sentiments that were repressed or stamped out, nationalism, political Islam, etc. Actually. The last is more recent but it has its roots in the past.
I would add a third term to your final statement: trauma causes confusion which results in impotence. (Here I go re-reading things and adding as I interpret.) The trauma has lead to a confusion of who these people are—of what it means to be a Turk in general—which I think leads to the impotence. They have no identity and thus have no potency or conviction to act. It seems that many who have taken up religion have done it so that they can have an identity that gives them meaning and potency—gives them a cause and therefore a definition.
I would disagree that this is how things have to be: that trauma that leads to confusion must lead to impotence. In a post-modern (or hermeneutic) world the confusion can be liberating and open the way for creation of diverse and even multi-faced identities. However, most of the world, especially places with a rich (read complex) and strong history like Turkey, is caught in the modern world still and feel a need for a clear, strong and unified identity. (In this case it is related to the idea of the nation-state I mentioned in my post.) So the confusion instead of clearing the way for creation and complexity scares them off and drives them back to political Islam, to communism, to nationalism, or even away to a radically secular West.
It appears to me that they have been given a Nietzschean type dawn to be creative in but they are not Zarathustra nor Overman. They are heard men (moderns) and need strong structure and identity.
There is also a part that poverty plays in this… but I will have to think more about that.
Post a Comment
<< Home