Plato

Prowling the Borders of Tradition and Modernity:
Detective Fiction in the Late Ottoman Empire

…Since the detective novel not only closely followed the introduction of the novel format itself into Ottoman literature, but also came into being not long after the invention of the detective genre, the development of the Ottoman detective novel coincided with both development of the novel and thedetective genre in Turkey. The first novel was translated into Turkish in 1859 and the first detective novel was translated in 1881, both from the French. Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, which is universally accepted as the first detective novel, was published in 1841, but the Sherlock Holmes stories had not come out until 1887, four years after Tanzimat writer Ahmet Mithat Efendi(1844-1912) wrote Esrar-ı Cinayat [The Mysteries of Murder], the first original Ottoman detective novel.

CONTINUITIES IN OTTOMAN DETECTIVE FICTION (Boring working title)
Beginning with the first indigenous Ottoman detective novel, this chapter will examine how Turkish writers have borrowed from and added to the western genre while adapting it to shifting local conditions, literary traditions,and tastes. At each example, I will lay these adaptations and re-workings over historical influences to track the change as new developments arise.

Ahmad Mithat’s Esrar-ı Cinayat and Cultural Repertoire
In addition to writing the first Turkish detective novel, Ahmet Mithat Efendi pioneered the novel form in Turkish literary tradition, penning no less than forty works, among which are examplesstemming from romantic, naturalist and realist literary movements. Mithat’s all-inclusive opus is indicative of the attitudes of Ottoman intellectuals during the Tanzimat [Reforms] era. These reforms aimed to modernize the Ottoman Empire, which was a response to the empire’s perception that they were ill-equipped handle the demands of the nineteenth century. The Ottoman intelligentsia urgentlyfelt that the empire had to “catch up” to the hegemonic standard of civilization set by European colonial powers, which was threatening the empire with superior economic, military and cultural power. Author Elif Shafak notes that it was actually in this last realm that the struggle to catch up to European powers was most successful. Turkish intellectuals concluded that “it was essential toexpedite the flow of time,” which, in terms of literature, meant condensing two hundred some years of literary history into a generation or two of intensive output that covered all the major literary movements. While this project came from the top down, Shafak stresses that the main driving force was not the government and the military, but the cultural elite, who provided the “legitimate basis for thenew order” by remaking the cultural repertoire. Culture researcher Itamar Even-Zohar defines cultural repertoire as the “aggregate of options utilized by a group of people, and by the individual members of the group for the organization of life.” Writers of this era carried out the goals of the Tanzimat by inundating Ottoman society with new literary forms and aesthetics that attempted toteach modernity. Exerting this “soft power,” as Shafak dubs it, the intelligentsia effectively reinvented/invented Turkish culture and later paved the way for statehood.
Ahmet Mithat was instrumental in this process. He translated canonical European literature, published newspapers, and wrote original plays, short stories, and novels with the explicit intent to Westernize the Turkish public. Thissimultaneous production of imported and original material, according to Even-Zohar, builds cultural repertoire. But it must be stressed that the works of Mithat and his contemporaries were not mere imitations of Western culture. As we will see in Esrar-ı Cinayat, Mithat takes the genre of detective fiction and re-appropriates it to reflect his own epistemological disposition, as well as the...