مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - PARODYING AND DISSOLVING THE SEMANTIC SYSTEMS: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO İHSAN OKTAY ANAR’S ENIGMATIC FOLKLORIC SATIRE VIA MIKHAIL BAKHTIN’S RECEPTION OF FRANÇOIS RABELAIS’S WORKS

Abstract :

The aim of this study is to scrutinize how François Rabelais’s Gargantua (1534) and İhsan Oktay Anar’s Amat (2005), which belong to different historical contexts and literary traditions, disrupt the semantic systems and the related social/metaphysical ierarchies by using similar strategies via elements of satire, as reflected in the world pictures of the two works. In this respect, the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s exegetic readings concerning the historically unique form of literary satire and the function of specific narrative structures in Rabelais’s works are going to stand as the methodological sources for this critical reading of Anar’s novel. Grotesque humour form of the Middle Ages that Rabelais, as a Renaissance writer, employs to create a critical framework, indeed, foregrounds the earthly and the corporeal contrary to the spiritual and the sacred. Rabelais’s writing style, which is mainly shaped by the use of exaggeration, the supernatural and the almost infinite sequences of folkloric elements, aims to dissolve the systemic inflexibility that produces rigid semantic models. Likewise, in addition to the elements of folkloric humour, Anar’s postmodern narrative both emphasizes the profane and subverts the substantial patterns of signification and order in the 17th century Ottoman period through the use of variations like enigma sequences, charts and dubious genealogies. This study is going to borrow its critical terminology from the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s texts on the novelistic discourse, carnivalesque narratives and public humour in order to explicate that these two works share similar narrative politics and ideological structures, though specifically originating in different contexts.