Dried spring, blind mirror, lost east: Ophelia, water, and dreams*

Abstract

Studies of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, a leading Turkish modernist author, have largely focused on his ideas regarding the fate of Turkish culture, the lost Empire and the East-West divide, circumscribing the writer as a conservative man of ideas. This essay rather focuses on Tanpınar’s imagery, most fundamentally on the persistent image of water, which serves as an eye, a mirror and a reflecting gaze. The essay also focuses on Tanpınar’s preoccupation with the figure of Ophelia and the “Ophelia complex” (a concept he borrowed from Gaston Bachelard’s Water and Dreams) and the figure of the “dead mother” (the French psychoanalyst André Green’s concept), her eyes frozen, her mirror dulled yet still laying claim to the present. The essay tries to cover two Tanpınar’s at once: The Tanpınar of reflecting “silver waters,” and one of dark waters and rusty mirrors that have lost their capacity to serve as an eye. The pre-modernist Tanpınar, obsessed with plenitude, continuity and a “return to the true self,” and the modernist Tanpınar, who comes to terms with the fact that what we call the “self” is a place built of loss: The Tanpınar of the dried spring, the blind mirror, and the lost East–a writer of the esthetics of loss. © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.