Keya Anjaria: 'Multilingualism and the Ottoman Novel'

Keya Anjaria: 'Multilingualism and the Ottoman Novel'

In the second half of 19th century Ottoman Istanbul, multilingualism was an obvious and significant factor in administrative, social, religious, and informal experience. It shaped both written and colloquial modes of communication and, ever increasingly, had a profound impact on the publishing and literary scene. At the same time, within the ever growing multilingualism of print culture, the Ottoman (Turkish) novel made its first appearance. This paper will consider multilingualism and the first Ottoman novels together. With particular interest in Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s groundbreaking novel, Felâtun Bey and Rakım Efendi (1875), it will ask how the experience of multilingualism is communicated and in what ways it has influenced the emergent novel form. By way of a preliminary answer, this paper will argue that the novel draws upon a multilingual register and, at times, thematises it, transforming expectations of the genre, particularly those which see the novel and nation as correspondent. Furthermore, multilingual experiences are abstracted and pull focus away from characterization and towards language itself, thus creating a self-conscious and self-referential form. This paper will thus argue that multilingualism functions as an ambivalence within the novel that resists the central ambitions of the latter half of the 19th century: namely, modernization, westernization and nation-building.