Waiting for Fear by Oğuz Atay, translated by Fulya Peker
A collection of stories by an avant-garde Turkish writer
By Oğuz Atay, translated by Fulya Peker
300 pages. Contra Mundum Press. $20.00.
Edmund Caldwell thought that I read Krasznahorkai as almost a realist novelist writing about madness. His point, as an anti-realist, was that really Krasznahorkai was writing about language, about the slippage of words.
One of the stories in Waiting for Fear, a newly published collection of Oǧuz Atay’s short fiction translated by Fulya Peker, is set in a town that constructs a giant Wooden Horse, in imitation of the mythological wooden horse used to conquer Troy. The construction is a tourist trap, an ersatz harkening back to an imagined ancient past of Turkey. A series of comical disputes surrounding the Wooden Horse and other matters overtake the town; by the end of the story, one of the characters hides in the horse, and at during a ceremony held by the monument, jumps out in a surprise attack against his rivals. In the last sentence of the story, we see this man pointing “his rifle towards the ones responsible for the construction of the Wooden Horse.”
It says much about Atay’s inscrutability that the Wooden Horse is the clearest metaphor we receive in this collection, but even here the exact nature of the comparison takes some working out in the mind. An artificial harkening back to an imagined early past is, due to the contingencies of the present, repurposed, and used as a genuine object of war, not just a representation of an object of war. Yet the person responsible for turning the symbol into reality does so to attack the creator of the symbol.
What we are clearly meant to reflect upon is the relationship between the ancient or mythical and the present-day - the way in which the stories of old are both extremely influential upon our lives and forever out of reach. After all, even if you were to read the Iliad and Odyssey in their original Homeric Greek, you will never be able to experience what it felt like to hear it spoken aloud in its ancient performance culture - nor will you ever be able to read the 4 lost books of Homer. At the same time, none would deny that we can scarcely imagine literature without the reference points of these two great epics.
Throughout his stories, Atay contrasts seemingly primitive or naive methods of storytelling with the demands of modern fiction. The last story in this collection, “Railroad Storytellers - A Dream” features a group of three residents of a small railways station who make their living as “storysellers” - quickly producing short stories on typewriters to entertain train passengers who stop by. This is of course an absurd, almost child-like way of conceiving of the role of the writer, but this tale, told with fable-like delicacy, nevertheless manages to convey something almost universal about the marginality of a serious artist - working relentlessly in a hopelessly unprofitable industry, constantly subjected to privations, your work forgotten almost as quickly as it is produced.
Even better at blending the difference between naive and sophisticated literature is the story “Neither Yes Nor No,” in which a journalist introduces, and then reproduces in full, one of the most risible letters he ever received in his stint as an advice columnist. The letter came from an agitated man suffering from a long bout of unrequited love for a woman, and the letter he composed about his situation is, by most standards, atrociously written. When presenting the letter for the reader, the journalist adds in parentheses snarky comments, MST3K -style:
We had good memories with her (lie), I loved her much so much (Love is something that belongs to you, it isn’t a memory or something.) I was loving her much as much as the worlds madly like crazy (OK, got it)
But the key to the story comes after the letter writer makes a sudden transition in his narrative, to which the journalist feels forced to mention that in this letter “the concepts of time and space are indefinite.” Time and space becoming indefinite - what could better describe the ambitions of some of the 20th century’s most daring fiction?
Waiting for Fear has been published by Contra Mundum Press, which itself began with that most ancient of stories, The Epic of Gilgamesh; its titles since then have revolved around odd, avante-garde writers of the last century and a half. Atay certainly belongs to that latter lineage, though he is hard to pin down in terms of belonging to a certain movement or style. It would be difficult to gather a consistent philosophy of literature based on his work in this collection, which jumps around from naturalistic social realism to otherworldly, visionary tales.
The titular story “Waiting for Fear” is the strangest and most formidable work in this collection. A novella-length interior monologue of a man who upends his life after receiving a letter written in an alien language, the story’s obsessive protagonist pushes against the limits of language, meaning, storytelling, and much else in a narrative that is intensely frenetic without ever resolving into a plot.
Surprisingly, “Waiting for Fear” may be the story most familiar to readers of this collection. In its form and content, it tackles the instability of the self and of language that also animated many other European writers of Atay’s time - Calvino, Beckett, and especially Bernhard. This instability is reflected in the prose, which meanders, jumps from subject to subject:
I began to feel angry with my country and my people: Nobody was reading properly. They weren’t even able to feel properly. For this reason, one could never trust the culture of the people who say the things they heard. Maybe even this wretchedness, this sloppiness, this ridiculousness had an original, real form.
The conflict in “Waiting for Fear” is one of thinking - of how to think for yourself, to discover true knowledge, how not to fall in among “the people who say the things they heard.” Trying to decipher the illegible letter he receives leads the narrator into a kind of madness, as he shapes his life into a form that cannot be understood by the academic, social, or political circles around him. But his moments of greatest absurdity and illegibility comes when, looking for some kind of anchor of knowledge, he slips into the recitation of facts: “Balzac and Stendhal were the great novelists of France; these were the Romantic writers of a country where forty-two million people were living.” To interpret the world - even to interpret the world in an absurd, misguided manner – is better, “Waiting for Fear” suggests, than simply following given knowledge.