Turkish Dude Lit Has a “Dad Rock” Moment: Barış Bıçakçı’s The Mosquito Bite Author

[A] stream of academic writing still holds up these dudes and their self-pity as emblematic of national identity.

Turkish dude lit is much like dude lit elsewhere: it deals with the trials of privileged man-boys. Unlike some of the genre’s more vilified geographic variants, though, it has yet to be carefully examined. While grateful for the chance to indulge in it freely, former Asymptote contributor Matthew Chovanec has his qualms; in particular, he argues, pinning Turkey’s Volksgeist on its male antiheroes actually does them (and their readers) a disservice. Enter The Mosquito Bite Author, in Chovanec’s own recent translation: might acclaimed writer Barış Bıçakçı’s subtle parody of the vain male figure pave the way to its survival?

I really enjoy Turkish novels about men wasting away in their comfortable, petty-bourgeois lives. I can’t get enough of them. I love following along, a vicarious flaneur, as the protagonists stroll through my favorite Istanbul streets. I’m charmed by their ability to take just the right line of surrealist poetry from the Ikinci Yeni movement and make it fit as an oracular judgment on their own personal haplessness. I even like reading about them sitting at home, staring at their bookshelves and resenting their wives. Something about them has me consuming these titles with the faithfulness of a reader of policiers or harlequin novels, and Turkey keeps producing them with almost pulp-like regularity. Every decade, it seems, brings its own antihero, yawning at modernist art exhibits, slinking away from military coups, scorning the superficiality that comes with economic liberalization, or trying out the latest fashions in postmodern soliloquy.

While I myself am a voracious reader of highly literate accounts of sociopathy, I appreciate that they aren’t for everyone. As an American, I can also admit that I’ve basically taken a circuitous linguistic route to enjoying works that would face derision back home, reveling as I am in another country’s “Dude Lit.” Laura Fraser describes the genre as one whose “books generally propel a confused, often drug-addled or alcoholic, narcissistic, philandering male protagonist to, well, not self-discovery, but some semblance of adult behavior.” Her description could just as easily apply to the protagonists of Turkish novels like Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak Adam, Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar, Vedat Türkali’s Bir Gün Tek Basına, or Ayhan Gecgin’s Gençlik Düşü; they, in turn, make frequent reference to the Slacker International, inhabiting the same fictional universe as Seymour Glass or John Shade.

Despite teeming with such men, these novels have not yet been roped off as Dude Lit. The garish, totemic look of Tutunamayanlar on a bookshelf evokes that of Infinite Jest, but owning the former somehow doesn’t come with the same level of chauvinist insistence. Although the Turkish language already has a fantastic translation for the term “mansplaining,” and scholars like Çimen Günay-Erkol have begun to problematize overt forms of hegemonic masculinity in Turkish fiction, a stream of academic writing still holds up these dudes and their self-pity as emblematic of national identity. I, however, would love to have the pressure taken off of the Turkish male literary canon and the niche tastes of those who, like me, continue to canonize it. I have been eagerly waiting for the Turkish Dude Novel to have its “Dad Rock” moment:

One important thing that happened in the 2010s was that rock music (especially the kind made by white, dad-aged men) drifted to the edges of mainstream popular culture. And though this shift has not yet made up for decades of erasure of more diverse voices, streaming has widened the array of easily accessible artists and perspectives.

The catch is that this has not spelled its irrelevance—quite the contrary. Maybe the gently teasing term “dad rock” cut this music appropriately down to size, removed its albatross of “greatness” and rendered it ripe for rediscovery by the sort of people who might have initially balked at its patriarchal omnipresence.

With a similar recognition of the specificity of the male narcissist experience, perhaps I and others like me might enjoy Turkish petty-bourgeois narcissist novels in peace, without them having to speak for anything more than themselves.

That is why I was thrilled to first read (and now translate) The Mosquito Bite Author (UT Press) by the acclaimed Barış Bıçakçı. The novel follows the daily life of aspiring writer Cemil in the months after he submits his own novel manuscript to a publisher in Istanbul. Living in an anonymous apartment complex in the outskirts of Ankara, Cemil spends his days going on walks, cooking for his wife, repairing leaks in his neighbor’s bathroom, and having elaborate imaginary conversations with his potential editor about the meaning of life and art. Uncertain of whether his manuscript will be accepted or not, Cemil lets his mind wander: he shifts from thoughtful meditations on the origin of the universe and the trajectory of political literature in Turkey, for instance, to panic over his own worth as a writer or incredulity towards the objects that make up his quiet suburban world.

The Mosquito Bite Author follows in the great tradition of the “Turkish Oblomov” by focusing on someone who initially seems to be an undeserving protagonist—much like the titular character in Ivan Goncharov’s work. Borrowing from the narcissistic, petty-bourgeois male novels before it, it relishes in the mundane and the self-absorbed. Cemil stares wistfully at jars of jam, yells at soccer matches, and mopes around the apartment until his wife Nazlı gets home. He has written a manuscript, yes, but as we wait along with him to hear back from the publisher, we aren’t sure whether or not it will end up justifying the attention we’ve given him. If it’s a work of genius, then all of Cemil’s aphorisms and insights will prove to have been profound and poetic. If it is rejected, then we will have spent 150 pages following another one of those failed writer characters we so often get from authors who “don’t have the emotional depth needed to write normal characters,” as Cemil himself notes.

This self-aware literary framing is not lost on Bıçakçı, who gives so many knowing winks to his own writing that we lose track of how many levels of irony we’ve read through. A particularly important strand targets the vain male artist. Bıçakçı’s male characters are subtle parodies, apprehensive idealists whose inane romanticism gets called out by the very women they thought would idolize them in silence. Throughout the novel, Cemil’s artistic project isn’t undermined by deep existential questions, but by the sexist entitlement lying at its core. It becomes increasingly clear that his pretention towards becoming a writer is being wholly underwritten by Nazlı, who supports him financially. He himself admits as much when, at the beginning of the novel, he tells a manager at the publishing house: “‘To tell the truth, my wife is taking care of me now . . . and she’s a doctor so she’s pretty good at it too.’” This caretaking extends to emotional labor as well. In a critical moment towards the end of the novel,  as Cemil deals with disappointing news, Nazlı tells him to go read his favorite J.D. Salinger story (“‘I think if you listen to Seymour’s story about Bananafish you’ll feel better’”). Her comment is unintentionally infantilizing—she offers her husband a great book to calm him down, as one might a baby pacifier—and it tears Cemil out “by the roots.” It also lays bare the cultural diminutiveness of the literary canon that he holds in such high regards. But it is precisely this kind of irony which ultimately assures a future for protagonists like him. Rather than pinning the fate of the Turkish soul on the male antihero, The Mosquito Bite Author takes the pressure off him by revealing his idiosyncracies as just one particular lived experience.

Paradoxically, once Cemil’s stream of consciousness and intertextual psychodrama cease to be read as allegories of national identity, they offer a vivid portrait of contemporary life in Turkey. A few chapters of the novel, for example, relate the construction of his nondescript apartment bloc back in the 1980s, treating us to a fascinating, understated account of urbanization and the overwhelming influence of the construction sector on Turkish politics. Remembering his college days, Cemil unwittingly dramatizes the awkward process of student depoliticization in the years after Turkey’s harsh post-coup crackdown. When he takes the bus to do errands, we get to sit in traffic and look at the absurdly built landscape which defines the real lived experience of most Turks. Bıçakçı uses the breathing room provided by his bumbling, introspective protagonist to create just enough distance for the political and the historical to come into focus.

Decentering the male petty-bourgeois narcissist not only comes as a relief for niche readers like me; in addition, it can free other social groups in Turkey from the burden of providing anthropological insight to foreign readers. Books that center on the experience of the country’s marginalized often perpetuate an exoticized vision of a foreign land in well-meaning liberal audiences. The Turkish author Ayfer Tunç says she resents the international publishing market for this “new orientalist” perspective, expecting “exotic novels full of elements below their standards.” Token subalternity, I can only imagine, must feel like an albatross too. That is why I hope that Turkish Dude Lit can channel the power of universally recognizable slackers, helping readers from other countries have both less titillating expectations and higher standards regarding Turkish culture at large. Ironically, a novel about a typical, boring, self-centered Turkish dude might end up providing just such a widely shared experience, offering literature that rather than exotic is simply niche.

Image credit: Teymur Ağalıoğlu

Matthew Chovanec recently received his PhD in Arabic and Turkish literature from the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the translator of The Mosquito Bite Author by Barış Bıçakçı and Gavur Mahalessi by Mıgırdiç Margosyan. He currently teaches Arabic at the Virginia Military Institute. 

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