Over the course of the past decade or so, scholars of modern Middle Eastern literatures have begun making inroads into the discipline of comparative literature by comparing Arabic, Persian, and Turkish literatures not to Western literature but rather to each other. By redrawing the comparative map, these studies allow us to rethink the concept of world literature and especially to resist a default to the Anglophone, whether in the original or in translation. C. Ceyhun Arslan’s The Ottoman Canon and the Construction of Arabic and Turkish Literatures “studies how the concepts of ‘Arabic literature’ and ‘Turkish literature’ emerged within a transnational context” (p. 23), sidestepping the problem of defining them in a framework of world literature and instead describing them in relation to each other in the late Ottoman context. Situating itself within the “burgeoning field of ‘Ottoman Arabic literature’” (p. 8) the book offers a corrective to an “earlier neglect of the Ottoman period in Arabic studies, which has examined the Ottoman era as an age of decadence” (p. 7). The central framing device Arslan deploys is that of a “reservoir”: the book “depict[s] the Ottoman canon as a ‘reservoir’ in order to emphasize that texts can have multiple affiliations which are not solely circumscribed by the time and place of their production” (p. 6). From this compelling starting point, Arslan takes late Ottoman works on their own terms, exploring cross-fertilization between the Turkish Tanzimat and the Arabic Nahda of the 19th century and the processes of “classic” canon formation that began then and continued into the 20th century. Although The Ottoman Canon recognizes the illusory nature of literary canons, it likewise highlights the “tangible impact” they can have, as “the canon shapes the discussions and literary biographies (tezkire) of the early modern Ottoman period” and Ottoman “authors ‘imagined’ the canon as they discussed and quoted the authors and texts they deemed of high value” (p. 7). Through their engagements with pre-Ottoman Arabic (and Persian, though the book deals only tangentially with Persian), these authors established competing literary historical models that “relegate the texts that they deem classical to a distant past” (p. 73). Such categorization “helped [late Ottoman] authors envision Arabic texts as the predecessors of Ottoman Turkish writings rather than as streams feeding the Ottoman reservoir” (p. 72).
Arslan sets out upon this Ottoman reservoir across an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, with the majority of chapters putting an author writing in Arabic in conversation with one writing in Turkish. Of the two that focus primarily on Turkish authors we find Chapter 1 taking up Ottoman translator and statesman Ziya Pasha (1829–80) with Harabat, a poetry anthology from the 1870s, and Chapter 5 the criticism of Ahmet Rasim (1864–1932) and Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem (1847–1914). Harabat provides Arslan with the sources of the Ottoman reservoir: his “argument draws on Ziya Pasha’s characterization of the Ottoman language as an ‘ocean’ that encompasses Arabic, Persian, and Turkish ‘streams’” (p. 31). In contrast, the critics in Chapter 5 work to define “literature as something new and ‘modern’” (p. 145), often glossing over Nahda-era Arabic works and favoring instead so-called classics of Arabic heritage, from the jāhiliyya pre-Islamic era to the Abbasid period. Some late Ottoman literary critics accepted a decline narrative of Ottoman literary decadence found in the work of European Orientalists, such as Gustave Le Bon (d. 1931). For instance, Rasim described the Abbasid zenith as a golden age of Arabic civilization and culture, and from there concluded that “the Tanzimat then could be envisioned, not as a complete rupture from tradition, but instead as a re-enactment of the Abbasid period” (p. 161). Ottoman intellectuals grappled with the formation of “an autonomous national subject and viewed literature as a possession to which this subject could lay a claim” (pp. 161–62). Moves to distinguish Turkish literature from Arabic (and Persian) and to reenvision the Tanzimat as a return to the past generated new anxieties concomitant with the emergence of supposedly “authentic” national subjects who were still “haunted” by “visions from the past” (p. 164).
Arslan addresses this part of his argument most thoroughly in the final chapter of the book, on the shared Oedipal energies that drive the narratives of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (d. 1962) in The Time Regulation Institute (Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü; 1961) and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s (d. 1987) Return of the Spirit (ʿAwdat al-Ruh; 1933). Both of these novels, traditionally read as evoking the birth pangs of the modern national subject, also demonstrate how the Ottoman past continues to haunt the present by their inclusion of parent figures who represent this past and function as “a source of anxiety for the main characters” (p. 171), Muhsin—an Egyptian with an Ottoman Turkish mother in al-Hakim’s novel, and Hayri İrdal—to whom the Tunisian Abdülsselam Bey serves as a father figure—in Tanpınar’s. Arslan productively reads these novels together alongside Oedipus Rex and explains that “neither Muhsin nor Hayri İrdal can fully sublimate ethnically heterogenous families who carry traces of the Ottoman past” (p. 190). He explains that “these writers did not view modernization as a complete rupture from tradition; rather, they believed that their society should not discard tradition and instead achieve through modernization and Westernisation the ideal social order that also characterized the ‘golden age’—that is, the early Ottoman period” (p. 190). A crisis plays out within the psyches of Tanpınar’s and al-Hakim’s characters as they struggle to come to terms with themselves as modern subjects.
At times, Arslan veers from such fresh readings of late Ottoman works in Arabic and Turkish in deference to other scholars’ work. Although I consider Ottoman Canon’s use of contemporary scholarship well-curated—for instance, the author cites necessary critical works from Stephen Sheehi, Karim Mattar, Shaden M. Tageldin, Nergis Ertürk, and Özen Nergis Dolcerocca, to name only a few—some chapters begin with long digressions into these and other scholars’ contributions rather than centering the book’s own unique perspective and overall argument. Nevertheless, Arslan’s use of secondary material is thorough and enlightening for specialists, which makes Ottoman Canon both an indispensable reference for scholars in Middle Eastern literatures and a path to a Middle Eastern comparative literature. Arslan’s study also highlights his impressive knowledge of late Ottoman fiction, literary historical writing, and journalism. I find the book’s argument that “classical works ‘haunt’ modern texts” (p. 200) an auspicious starting point for further investigation. If I had my druthers, Arslan would have aimed this portion of the study directly at the discipline of comparative literature by engaging with Derrida’s notion of hauntology, but Derrida goes unmentioned, for better or worse. Similarly, I would have appreciated a more thorough explication of the theoretical apparatus behind Arslan’s invocation of deterritorialization at various points throughout the analysis. The book currently cites Sheehi’s and Ertürk’s uses of the concept and moves on, rather than situating its application in relation to the work of Deleuze and Guattari. These absences, in the end, leave room for future work in such directions, subtracting nothing from how deftly Arslan plumbs the depths of the Ottoman reservoir.
