Yeniden Yazım/Biçimlendirme Olarak Tarihsel Roman: Kemal Tahir’in Yol Ayrımı’nda Geçmişin Yazınsal Temsili
Historical Novel as Rewriting/Refiguration: Literary Representation of the Past in Kemal Tahir’s Yol Ayrımı

Summary/Abstract: Retrospective narratives present the reader with a design of the past that has been shaped in the author’s consciousness. They revitalize the past in the reader’s consciousness, they make it into a narrative. By bringing the past back to life at the level of consciousness, they save it from being a dead time and create an understanding of the past in the reader. Especially the historical novel establishes a mimetic link between the past and the present. Because history is born from the imitation of human actions in the past, and the historical novel is born from their secondary imitation. The literary representation of the past is realized through two basic acts of writing: rewriting and reformatting. The novelist writes the history that the historian has first shaped by writing it, by reshaping it in a different genre, time, context and discourse. Thus, he represents the past in the present. Kemal Tahir’s historical novel Yol Ayrımı is an example of this. The historical reality of the novel is built on Ahmet Ağaoğlu’s Memories of The Free Party. The author offers a unique writing experience in which the genres of history, memoir, and novel intertwine and interact with one another. He creates a fictional reality based on memories. He presents the past in a new temporal form. He represents and updates the past by bringing it back to life within a fictional reality. This work discusses the historical novel not only in terms of the historical data or ideological orientations it contains, but also in terms of how it literaryizes this data, how it reproduces it with which narrative techniques, and what kind of narrative strategies it uses to represent the past on a literary plane. By addressing the historical novel not only in its historical context but also at the formal and narrative levels, it brings a new theoretical perspective to the relationship between literature and history.

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