“This Is a World of Spectacles”: Cyclical Narratives and Circular Visionary Formations in Elif Shafak’s The Gaze

ABSTRACT

Published in 2000, the contemporary Turkish writer Elif Shafak’s The Gaze explores notions of looking and being looked at within a polyphonic circular narrative, made manifest through Shafak’s juxtaposition of various stories. With contemporary Istanbul at its center, the novel fluctuates between three subnarratives set in nineteenth-century Istanbul, seventeenth-century Siberia, and nineteenth-century France, all of which culminate in a circular carnivalesque whole. Within the frame of a critical exploration of the textual subtleties of the novel, this essay seeks to examine the ways in which the formal circular constructions employed in the novel offer a stylistically stimulating space to engage with the social and cultural implications of seeing and being seen. Through an exploration of multifarious meanings encompassing the concept of the gaze, this essay will examine the discursive functions of the circular form in Shafak’s work in the light of various folkloric and literary contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Elif Shafak
• cyclical narrative
• gaze
• chronotope
• self-reflexivity

Notes

1. For instance, Neşe Demirci’s article “Symbolism of Names in Elif Shafak’s Pinhan, Araf, and Mahrem,” in Turkish Studies 5.3 (2010): 997–1007, highlights the “symbolic powers of the names” in Shafak’s fiction and their effects on the meaning of her texts; Catherine Coussens’s “Spectacles of the Exotic and Feminist Re-Visions in Elif Shafak’s Mahrem/The Gaze” (unpublished conference paper presented at EXOTICISM/the EXOTIC International Conference on 21–22 April 2010 in Morocco) explores the “playful reversal of traditional power-relations,” appropriating the unnamed fat woman as a “consumer of the exotic.”

2. Translated into English by the author of this work.

3. The name of the apartment block has not been translated into English. The fact that the name of the apartment remaining untranslated could perhaps be viewed in relation to a possible textual desire to intensify the mystery of the narrative.

4. In the nineteenth-century Pera narrative, Keramet Mumî Keşke Mehmet Efendi’s physical condition is explained—according to his mother’s account, he was born with a uniquely waxen face, and his mother did her best to draw his eyes before the wax hardened, but there was not enough time so his eyes looked like “narrow slits” with a “curtain of wax remain[ing] over [them]” (The Gaze 118). By running a business that exploits the idea of seeing and making seen in relation to the socially constructed concepts of ugliness and beauty, the circus owner, arguably, tends to compensate for his disfigurement and, most importantly, continues the long-standing tradition of making profit out of unusual bodily appearances.

5. This interview appeared in the 2009 Turkish translation of Shafak’s novel The Forty Rules of Love.

6. A Turkish ritual that is believed to bring protection from envious gaze.

7. For instance, the sailor’s “blood” (59) in the snow in the seventeenth century, “the cherry-coloured tent” (The Gaze 27) of Keramet Mumi Keşke Memiş Efendi in the nineteenth-century narrative, and the “cherry colour” (182) paint on the apartment block—where the protagonist of the contemporary narrative lived. As can be inferred from these examples, the red imagery in the novel symbolically conveys the feelings of pain, passion, and rage experienced by the protagonists of the narratives in the novel.

8. In the novel this experience was re-enacted in the contemporary Istanbul narrative by the unnamed protagonist’s encounter with a young girl on the minibus counting “One. Two, three…” (24), a situation that takes the unnamed protagonist back to the day when she played hide and seek during which she was sexually harassed.

9. The unnamed protagonist seems to think of food as a means to rectify the memory of the childhood trauma triggered by her experience on the minibus. In line with this, she feels a sudden gush of hunger and takes refuge in the thoughts of food, saying to herself: “A nice sausage sandwich with ketchup and potato salad would be good for my nerves” (25).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Zeynep Z. Atayurt-Fenge

Zeynep Z. Atayurt-Fenge is currently working as an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Ankara in Turkey. Her research interests are focused on modern and contemporary Anglophone literature and cultures, with a specific focus on the representations of gender and embodiment.