M. M. REPENKOVA

Doctor of Philological Sciences

ISAA of Lomonosov Moscow State University

Keywords: Turkish literary postmodernism, "second wave", narrative modification, Elif Shafak, discourse, travesty playing, novel "Iskender"

Elif Shafak (b. 1971) is a representative of the "second wave" of Turkish postmodernism (Ihsan Oktay Anar ¹, Hasan Ali Toptas, Kurshat Bashar, Perihan Magden, etc.) and one of the most popular Turkish novelists of the last decade. Her name is known not only at home, but also abroad, mainly in English-speaking countries*. The latter fact is explained by the fact that for ten years Elif Shafak has been writing his works first in English, and then through a translator and his own editorial editing in Turkish. The bilingualism of Elif Shafak's work is to some extent programmed by her own destiny.

The writer was born in Strasbourg, the son of a Turkish diplomat. Her childhood was spent in France, Spain, Jordan, and after the divorce of her parents, she finally found herself in her historical homeland-in Turkey. After graduating from the Middle Eastern Technical University (Ankara) and defending her dissertation, Elif Shafak lived in the United States for three and a half years, taught at the universities of Boston, Michigan and Arizona, and actively collaborated with American and European newspapers and magazines, which in many ways (undoubtedly, coupled with the artistic merits of the work of the Turkish postmodernist writer) determined her interest in her works were published by the leading Western publishers Penguin and Viking.

E. Shafak's works are full of various foreign-language borrowings (names of people, toponyms, etc.). In books written in Turkish, Elif Shafak systematically intersperses words, phrases, quotations in English, French, German, Armenian, Spanish, etc. languages, which gives her work the spirit of cosmopolitanism, a new globalizing worldview. It is normal for Elif Shafaq to use the poly-national character of character names. She often changes their names in different national ways during the course of the novel, depending on the national and cultural environment in which they live.

A young, successful writer who ranks at the top of the most published novelists in Turkey did not immediately start writing in two languages. The first experience in this field was the novel "Purgatory" (Araf, 2004). It was followed by her most famous novels -"Five to Five" (Besbese, 2004, co-authored with M. Mungan, P. Kur, F. Ulay, J. Oker), "Father and the Geek" (Baba Ve Pic, 2006), "Love" (Ask, 2009), "Iskender" (Iskender, 2011). At the same time, her earlier works were also popular-the novels Pinhan (1997), Mirrors of the City (Sehrin Aynalari, 1999), Forbidden (Mahrem, 2000), Lousy/Garbage Palace (Bit Palas, 2002), etc.

WORLD AS TEXT

Elif Shafak's novelistic work is developing in line with the postmodern style. This means that the writer presents a person and the world around him exclusively as an infinite text, in which any form turns into its opposite. In such a text, truth easily turns into non-truth, time stops ("the death of time") and condenses, acquiring the characteristics of space, and space begins to move, escapes from under the feet of a person, acquiring the parameters of time. The stability and inviolability of the human personality are collapsing. A person is replaced by a simulation of a person or an "empty sign" / simulacrum (M. Foucault's "death of the subject").

When creating a life text, the functional role of the word artist also changes radically. It is believed that he loses his creative potential ("death of the author"), because he can not create anything new, but can only play with other people's quotes. Often the postmodern author "enters" the text of the work, turning into a character and demonstrating the textualization of the human personality by his own example.

For E. Shafak, the modern world and human life in it seems artificial, simulation-textual, discursive. A person lives in the discourse of ² modern consumerism-

* In Russia, the work of E. Shafak is represented only by a translation from English of her novel "Love". See: Shafak E. Forty Rules of Love / translated from English by L. Volodarskaya, Moscow, 2012.

mass, non-personal culture. This discourse puts pressure on the individual, makes it a part of itself, erasing its individuality, leveling it to a primitive animal state and turning it into a thing (trademark), trash-trash, easily thrown into the trash can and replaced with similar others.

According to the Turkish postmodernist writer, the life of a person in discourse and the transformation of his personality into a discourse, into a text sign-simulacrum is a natural result of the development of the entire human culture focused on rationalism and logocentrism. Therefore, the narrative strategies used by Elif Shafak in her novels are aimed at combating the usual way of thinking, which provides a logical justification for any regularity of reality. E. Shafak considers such thinking dogmatic and contrasts it with intuitive "poetic thinking" based on associativity, imagery, and metaphor. Such narrative strategies are mainly intended to" blur " and destroy the structure of a literary text.

THE POSTMODERN "MAN WITHOUT PROPERTIES"

In the novels of Elif Shafak, a hero appears - "a man without properties", without a fixed identity. He is a misfit, a kind of rogue, a slacker, a scoundrel-ha-trickster. Such feelings are inherent in the Turkish graduate student Omer from Boston University ("Purgatory"), the Turkish high school student Iskender from the London neighborhood of impoverished immigrants ("Iskender"), and others. He is a nomad-a wanderer, wandering in time and space in order to survive in the excessive symbolic reality of things-goods, to get out of the framework of total loneliness, to free himself from the split of his own consciousness.

The "Protean" * * type of hero used by E. Shafak involves constantly putting on different masks with reincarnation into the "other", characterized by conditional, "ritual", gestural behavior. In the novel Purgatory (2004), playing "the other" involves characters constantly changing their own names. For example, one of the young heroines, an American woman with a strange name Zarpandit, generally prefers to live only under other people's names. In the editorial office of the newspaper where she works, the girl calls herself Elena, at a therapist's appointment-Debra, and in everyday life with a friend - Gail.

According to E. Shafak, the characters of" without properties", withdrawn from the closed equality to themselves, are immersed in the element of carnal life of an excessively symbolic reality. They literally "drown" in the Rabelaisian abundance of the text, showing the most obscene, naturalistic sides of their characters.

Such heroes are doomed to loneliness. In Elif Shafak, it only involves the introduction of "one-dimensional people" to carnal unity with their own kind, that is, to joint meals with other simulacrum characters. In" The Father and the Geek "(2006), Assia participates in the Kazanji family's gala dinners, where everyone's favorite dish"ashure" is served***. She also involves an American relative, Armanouche,in the process of eating. In the novel "Love" (2009), Aziz Zahara gets used to the dishes that his mistress, a former American housewife Ella, prepares for him. In Pinhan (1997), residents of an Istanbul neighborhood are constantly chewing the sweet majnun**** with opium, forcing the young dervish Pinhan to do the same. But in the novel" Iskender "" lone wolf "Iskender, who does not want to obey the rules of the Western society in which he is forced to live, and makes his own "Eastern" court (according to the norms of Adat) over the" sinful " mother, can not refuse family meals that his mother prepares.

POSTMODERN WORD GAMES

One of the features of Elif Shafak's novelistics is the constant semantic experiments associated with the deprivation of words of their usual meanings. Most often, the novelist, skillfully juggling lexical meanings of words and word forms, connects the incongruent ("letter soup", "laughing magpie", etc.). E. Shafak likes to match any subject with a "food" definition. For example, colors become" food "("wine roses", "cherry nightgown"). The novel becomes "food". In the novel" The Father and the Geek", the titles of the chapters correspond to the names of the ingredients of the sweet dish "ashure", which involuntarily causes the reader to taste sensations, as from eating, i.e. turns reading into eating.

Games with lexical meanings of words that lead to the creation of the so-called "schizophrenic language" have very specific goals for Elif Shafak. It seeks to break down "the boundary line between physical bodies and words so that the tongue can fully sink into the yawning depths of the body, mixing sound elements with olfactory, gustatory, digestive ... so that "language becomes corporeal"³. Her characters play words, eat words ("bananas are made up of letters"), live in words, so that the words acquire the desired "physicality".

THE CONCEPT OF A POSTMODERN HOUSE

Elif Shafak's novelists are subjected to postmodern travesty playing out

* Trickster - a person who tries to inspire people with something through tricks and tricks (author's note).

** Proteus (ancient Greek mythology) - a sea deity with the gift of divination and the ability to change his appearance at will (author's note).

*** Ashureh-a sweet dish made from wheat grains, legumes, dried fruits and nuts, distributed to the poor on the tenth day of the month of Muharrem (during Ramadan).

**** Majnun-confectionery paste, a kind of viscous candy with aromatic substances, medicines, and sometimes opium (author's note).

transformations and many archetypal models of the original core of culture that connote the idea of the world as an ordered whole with a single plot and a Higher meaning-home, family, music, slowness, etc. * Home as the first world, as a universal structure of human existence, where a person acquires a certain density characteristic of the world, builds the boundaries of his "I", at the same time E. Shafak turns into a fiction, a simulation, a complete substitution, in its opposite-in trash-trash, in instability and fragility.

The writer speaks about the loss of reliable boundaries of the house in the novel "Lousy / Garbage Palace". Using the far from new metaphor of a secluded, quiet place ("paradise", "forest solitude", "island utopia"), she builds her postmodern" ideal " house away from the noisy city streets, creating a convincing picture of the progressive emptiness and homelessness of modern man. The novel demonstrates the impossibility of creating a utopian house, a dream house, a candy house (not for nothing do the residents call it "Bonbon Palace")./Candy Palace), an ideal secluded place in the modern soulless "world without borders", a world of chaos and garbage.

A romantic idyll in a quiet place is played out ironically by the fact that it turns out to be such a quiet place... an old cemetery where you can't live because everything is dead. Garbage that appears at the door of the house from no one knows where and for no one knows why, harasses residents with its stench and insects generated by it. The desired "paradise", "candy palace" becomes a place of loss of a person's self. Residents of the house lose their human face, suspect everyone and everyone of putting garbage under their door, and break off all relations between themselves. The utopian house itself acts as a kind of necropolis (cemetery, burial ground) for residents who become dependent on the constant struggle with garbage, insects and themselves.

Interestingly, to create the novel, Elif Shafak plays in a travesty key quotes from modern mass (trash-trash) culture and the Turkish political novel "March 12". The game of quotations becomes especially clear towards the end of the story, when the "real author" of the story with the house declares himself. It turns out to be a political prisoner who invented all this to distract himself during his two-month imprisonment in a cell from the bitter thoughts of prison torture and from the fear of insects that infested the cell space.

In the novel "Purgatory" E. Shafak works in an ironic way and another version of the house-utopia, the house of dreams, the house of spiritual transformation. The novel is a postmodern parody of a utopian communal hostel, whose residents must be cleansed of their sins and self-actualize in personal terms. Utopia House / Purgatory is designed to embody one of the apartments located in the house number 8 on Pearl Street in the American city of Boston. Three young people who have many things in common, including a passion for garlic-a Turk Omer, a Moroccan Abed (real name Abdul), a Spaniard Piyu (real name Joaquin) and a girl of Mexican origin Alegre - conduct an experiment to create an idyllic cohabitation of different people in the conditions of one apartment, the life and space of which they have thought out to the smallest detail. The permanent composition of apartment residents is selected based on questionnaires calculated to the smallest nuances-tests that reveal common character traits and common preferences in food, alcohol, music, movies, choosing friends, etc. among the "participants of the experiment".

But purification, as in Purgatory, and idyllic harmony does not work. The spiritual and physical gap between the residents of the apartment is growing day by day. Only the huge dog Eros, who lives with young people and embodies the idea of the dominant unconscious drives over the mind (he always wants to eat and be caressed by his owners, which is why he can never be left at home alone), feels satisfied with his own existence. The dog as a symbol of "eros" reigns in the postmodern house-utopia.

In other words, no matter how much young people resist, but the unconscious wins over their minds, causes fears in them, activates nightmares, hallucinations. The diabolical, pre-personal, animal nature comes out in them, forcing them to be similar to each other (although they are all of different nationalities and religions), to see each other as witches, djinn and animals.

In Purgatory, the archetypal musical code also undergoes an interesting transformation. The music merges with the chronotope** of the novel. Omer measures time and space exclusively with music and thereby equalizes them. For example, his trip to the next store takes three songs of a famous American rock artist in the player, which corresponds to fifteen minutes and three hundred meters. Music, as a special type of communication, is designed to reconnect the inner world of the individual listener with its original soil, to return to the elements of the first experience.

But in Elif Shafaq's novel, the opposite is true. American music (music of the total consumption society), which constantly sounds in Omer's player, moves the hero away from his roots, appears in a different, dangerous hypostasis for him. Music in the system of ideological discourse of the American mass media dictates a new quality of life for a person by type

* "Travesty playing" here and further means a parodic reduction of a well-known "high" sample to a primitive-ordinary (profane), common-folk-everyday level, i.e. burlesque lowering of a high tone (author's note).

* * Chronotope - time-space (from Greek. "chronos" - time and "topos" - place).

"hit parade". In the life of the hero there is an "ideological capture" of his consciousness by music. Omer, who does not pull out a walkman from his ears, measures time and space exclusively with songs that occupy the top lines in the American "charts", completely without remembering songs in his native Turkish language.

THE FAMILY IN THE POSTMODERN PARADIGM

The postmodern transformation of the archetypal family motif is particularly noticeable in Elif Shafak's novel Iskender. The writer shows the simulation nature of both the traditional mono-national and non-traditional poly-national modern family. She believes that the modern family is an aggressive discourse that puts pressure on a person, destroys him as a person, turns him into an "empty sign"/simulacrum. Therefore, E. Shafak carries out a deconstruction of this discourse in his novels, which is largely connected with the debunking of traditional family values.

This debunking began in E. Shafak's novel "The Father and the Geek". As A. Suleymanova justly remarked, in this novel, "E. Suleymanova is a very good writer." Shafak brings the idea of a traditional family to the point of absurdity by hinting at the huge number of incestuous relationships in such a family. According to E. Shafak, the family as a pillar of traditional society is not viable. " ⁴

However, if in the novel "The Father and the Geek" Elif Shafak still insists on the possibility of preventing the collapse of the traditional family by re-creating it on other poly-national, heterogenically equal principles, then in the novels "Love" and "Iskender" the writer is disappointed in this. Now any family for her (be it Eastern or Western: traditional mono-national or non-traditional poly-national) erases human individuality, bringing a deadly void.

Not all Russian researchers-Turkologists are inclined to attribute Elif Shafak's novel "Iskender" to postmodernism. Thus, L. V. Sofronova, considering E. Shafak to be a representative of mass literature, insists that the novel Iskender contains only " an arrangement and copying of the characters of the characters of the novel White Teeth (2000) by the British writer Zadie Smith⁵. Meanwhile, in the novel "Iskender" there is a sense of quoting images and plot points not only from the novel by Z. Smith, but also from the story of the famous Turkish writer - "social realist" Yashar Kemal "To kill the snake "(Yilani Oldurmek, 1978), in which the son, performing a blood feud, kills his own my mother. L. V. Sofronova approaches the novel "Iskender" from the standpoint of traditional realistic aesthetics and notes with regret that in this work " ... the artistically recreated image breaks down into separate elements that do not make up a single whole ... the image of the main character of the novel Iskender, like the male images in the previous works of E. Shafak, is very sketchy, superficial and not viable, his actions, which form the main plot backbone of the work, are poorly motivated..."⁶ Everything the researcher said is absolutely true, because this is not an image, but a simulacrum. It refers not to the reality of the external world, but to the reality of other texts created before it (the phenomenon of recognition/deja vu).

The characterization of such a hero - a person without properties, a person with a blurred identity-is determined not by his personal, individual and psychological parameters, but by putting on various masks (social and cultural). For example, Iskender "masquerades" simultaneously as a "tough guy" - the leader of a street gang, and as a successful boxer, and as the head of an oriental family, etc. He identifies himself only by means of mask marking, remaining, in fact, a "one-dimensional person", devoid of any psychological depth and personal meaning. His behavior is "ritualistic", gestural. It shows different types of game consciousness.

One of the features of Elif Shafak's postmodern style is that by the end of the 2000s, her prose is no longer full of funny jokes, and the travesty parody is filled with tragic content. The seriousness of her narrative*, which uses many elements of realistic poetics, misleads researchers, forcing them to classify her work as either modernized realism, "magical realism", or mass literature.

The non-viability and disintegration of any family in the modern textualized world is expressed in the novel" Iskender " with the help of various plot moves: only girls are born in families (a hint at the impossibility of procreation), and parents do not want to give names to the children born for a long time; fathers of families either drink and beat their wives, or play cards and go to mothers fall in love with strange men; older children, playing the role of fathers who have left the family, try in their own way to preserve the traditional way of life at home (Iskender takes up the resolution of the family conflict and kills the mother, thus realizing the tradition of blood feud).

The artistic space of the novel is textualized (there is no reality other than the text itself), decentered by superimposing different cultural codes on top of each other (the principle of double coding). A new rhizomatic model of reality appears, unstable, devoid of solid foundations. Textualization of the novel space is carried out due to the feeling that the reader participates in the writing of a work, the plot of which is being built before his eyes. The novel is written by Esma,

* Narrative - narration, short story. E. Shafak's works belong to the narrative modification of Turkish postmodernism, which has become dominant in Turkish literature since the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Narration in "narrative" postmodernism, as a rule, is conducted on behalf of the"narrator "-the narrator, the" character mask " (approx. author's note).

telling about the tragic fate of Pembe's mother, who had to die twice in her life: once not really, only playing with death, posing as her dead sister Cemile, and the second time for real, having contracted an infectious disease in her native village. At the beginning and end of the story, the story is told on behalf of Esma herself. It's 1992, when she goes to meet her older brother Iskender, who has served time for murdering his mother, from prison.

The novel breaks the linear sequence of tenses. The flow of linear historical time ("death of time") stops. Artistic time is presented in a new integrity, in three dimensions at once (past-present-future). The main plot action is described in the third person with a constant "knocking down" of time layers, which gives the chronotope of the work mosaic, and the narrative is fragmented. The narrator "jumps" to the distant past (1950s-1960s), then suddenly returns to the present (early 1990s), then is transferred to the tragic events of 1977 - 1978 related to the murder of Pembe/Jamila.

That is, all three layers of time are served to Elif Shafaq simultaneously, so at first it is very difficult to restore the sequence of events and relate the participants of the tragedy to each other. Only later, due to the fact that each chapter is strictly dated (date, month and year), the time chain is built in a certain sequence: 1946-the birth of twins Pembe and Cemile; the beginning of the 1950s-arrival in the Kurdish village of Adem Toprak (he came to visit his older brother Taryk Toprak, who was serving in the army in those parts) and his marriage to Pemba, whom he took as a forced wife, instead of his beloved Cemile; 1960-early 1970-life of the Adem and Pembe Toprak family in Istanbul (poverty, damp basement, Adem's addiction to cards, birth in 1963 Iskender); 1977-1978. - family life in London (Pembe's work at the Crystal Scissors barber shop, Adem's sluggish job search and constant card losses, Adem's relationship with the Bulgarian prostitute Roxana and leaving home, Pembe's acquaintance with Ilias, their secret trips to the cinema together, quarterly rumors about Pembe's infidelity to her husband, Iskender's instigation by his uncle Taryk and his uncle's appeals to his teenage nephew to avenge the violated honor of his father, finally, Iskender's stab in the heart of Jemila instead of his mother); 1990-1991 - Esma's family life with her biologist husband and two twin girls in London and Iskender's life in prison, described in his diary and letters to freedom.

In the novel, the characters of Elif Shafaq represent a variety of nationalities (Kurds, Turks, Arabs, English, Greeks, etc.). None of them can create a real strong family. Any family story ends in tragedy, no matter how hard they try to play out happiness in public. In their families, they feel lonely and unloved.

Unlike her sister, Cemile lived in a desolate area, right on the border with Syria, where life was dangerous and very hectic because of the gangs of smugglers and Kurdish fighters who ruled here. But no one dared to offend the woman there, because she was a healer and treated everyone who came to her for help with herbs. A rich gentleman, in gratitude for the fact that Jemile cured his terminally ill son, gave her a large diamond, saying that the stone has one feature - it can neither be sold nor taken away by force from the owner, the owner can only give it of his own free will. Jemile loved this stone for its mysterious beauty. When the stone was stolen from her by one of the smugglers whom she had saved from death, there was no end to Jamila's grief and sorrow. However, after some time, the stone was returned to the mistress by other smugglers, who brought her the jewel along with the severed ears of the thief they killed and thus restored justice.

According to the concept of Elif Shafak, a person in the modern world is free and happy only outside the family, which can destroy him. As soon as Jamila gets into the Pembe family in London and changes into her sister's dress, she is immediately killed by mistake.

Postmodern stylistics permeate all levels of E. Shafak's novelistics. With the help of specific poetics, the writer seeks to convey to readers the aesthetics of the text-life, filled with simulation signs-people. Such an understanding of the modern world and the place of a person in it is not accepted by everyone, but, of course, it does not leave anyone indifferent. The postmodern works of Elif Shafak do not lend themselves to unambiguous interpretation.

Here was presented one of the options for possible reading of her latest novels, which does not pretend to be final and indisputable.

¹ See: Kareva O. V. Mir istorii Ihsan Oktay Anar [The World of Stories of Ihsan Oktay Anar]. 2012. N 2, pp. 64-66. (Kareva O. V. 2012. Mir istoriy Ikhsana Oktaya Anara // Aziya i Afrika segodnya. N 2) (in Russian)

² Discourse (pozdnelat. discursus - reasoning, argument, argument) - any text read in a non-classical way that goes beyond the formal logic. A discourse can be, for example, the text of a single novel or the entire novel work of a particular writer. A wider range of texts can also be considered discursive (religious discourse, the discourse of ancient Greek tragedies, etc.).

^{Deleuze J., Guattari F.} 3 Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. and afterword by D. Kralechkin / Edited by V. Kuznetsov). Yekaterinburg, 2008, p. 414.

^{Suleymanova A. S.} 4 Turkish postmodern prose // Postmodernism in Asian and African Literatures. Essays. СПб, 2010, с. 258. (Suleymanova A.S. Turetskaya postmodernistskaya proza // Postmodernizm v literaturakh Azii i Afriki. SPb, 2010) (in Russian)

^{Sofronova L. V.} 5 Mass literature as a product of globalization (reflections on the genre diversity of modern prose in Turkey) / / Vestnik RUDN, seriya Literaturovedenie. Journalism, 2012, No. 2, p. 54.

^{Sofronova L. V.} 6 O otnoshenii massovogo i elitarnogo v tvorchestve turk'skoy pisatelitsy Elif Shafak [On the correlation between mass and elite in the creative work of the Turkish writer Elif Shafak]. Oriental studies. Abstracts of scientific conference reports (Moscow, April 16, 2012). Moscow, 2012, p. 87 (Sofronova L. V. O soothnoshenii massovogo i elitarnogo v tvorchestve turetsky pisatelnitsy Elif Shafak / / Lomonosovskie chteniya. Vostokovedenie (M., 16.04.2012). M., 2012) (in Russian)

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