Faruk Duman’ın Pîrî (Kayıp Denizler Üzerine Bir Anımsama) Romanında Fantastik Kurgu
Fantastic Fiction in Faruk Duman’s Novel Pîrî (A Remembrance on the Lost Seas)

Summary/Abstract: Tzvetan Todorov, in his book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, he focuses on the fantastic as a literary genre. Here, the fantastic is not defined as an autonomous category with meaning contained within itself through the structuralist method but rather by its difference from other closely related categories in the context of the principle of falsifiability. According to him, the most important feature that makes texts fantastic is the experience of hesitation experienced by both the protagonist and the reader. Are the events described in the novel real or a mental illusion? The fantastic is built on the hesitation of the protagonist and the reader in answering this question. This mental confusion continues throughout the narrative and causes confusion in perception. According to Todorov, if we easily give the first answer to the question, the text we are reading belongs to the realm of the “uncanny,” which intersects with the fantastic. If we give the second answer, we transition to a different genre, the realm of the “marvelous.” The fantastic is precisely the transition zone of these two close genres and is determined by the difference of these two neighbouring genres. I analysed the novel Pîrî (A Remembrance on Lost Seas) by Faruk Duman, one of the most important writers of the recent period, in the context of Todorov’s theory of the fantastic as a structural approach to a literary genre. I focused on the performative, semantic and syntactic aspects of the novel, which I structurally classify as a pure uncanny narrative that keeps the fantastic instability alive, and focused on the projections of the literary genre of the fantastic in the narrative.

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