Читать книгу Staging the Ottoman Turk - Esin Akalın - Страница 5

To the eye of the initiated this curtain produces only images

But to him/her who knows the signs, symbols of truth.

Sheik Kusteri[1] has founded his curtain

Making it a likeness of the world;

To watch it amuses those who are looking for entertainment,

But those who behold the truth learn a lesson from it.

(An "Ode of the Screen" to a Turkish Shadow Play)

Although the Ottoman[2] culture, before the mid-nineteenth century, engendered neither formal tragedy nor comedy (Halman 17), Karagoz (Turkish Shadow theatre), one of the three principal norms of popular performance tradition in the Ottoman Empire, evolved as a comic genre[3]. The world of Karagoz, the illusionistic art of the shadow play, reflected the multi-faceted feature of the Ottoman culture and incorporated a total of three hundred and fifty characters, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and non-Turkish but Muslim minorities as subjects. This was an assemblage from various provinces of the Empire such as the "Rumelili" or "Arnavut" (Albanian) from the Balkans, "Laz" from the Black Sea Shore, "Kastamonulu" from Central Anatolia, "Kurd" from South East Region, and so on. All of these figures made up a delightful assortment of characters wearing their local costumes and speaking their local dialects. The non-Turkish minorities of the empire such as the Arab, Armenian (Ermeni), Greek (Rum), Jew (Yahudi), French (Frenk), Levantine and Persian (Acem) each speaking with their own accent as residents of the mahalle (quarter) or merely as passers-by, reflected the Ottoman's diverse world onto the Karagoz screen. The tradition in the House of Osman was not a national, but a dynastic and multiracial empire in which the Turkish language played a significant role in creating unity. Its varied populations whether Turkish, Muslim, Christian or Jewish were above all else Ottomans, members of a single body politic. Although Islam was a powerful element in the collective consciousness of the empire, the Ottoman system transcended "above all else conceptions of nationhood, religion and race. Alone in its time, it thus gave recognition to all three monotheistic faiths" (Kinross 614). In essence, the world of the Turkish shadow theatre with its individual puppets, each representing the typical characteristics of various groups, was a microcosm of the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul.[4] In its early period of existence, Islam, aspiring to fight idolatry, forbade the representation of living things, especially human faces. Because its worship centred exclusively on the act of silent prayer, drama and music had no place in its liturgy. Representation and animation of human figures were considered an intrusion upon the creativity of God; and imitation of His creatures was the equivalent to sin. Despite the austerity and rigidity of the Orthodox Islamic views of plastic arts and drama, through the ingenuity of the human mind, Shadow Theatre flourished during the Ottoman Empire. As Nicholas Martinovitch points out, "the creative genius of the human spirit" in an effort to overcome religious constraints produced figures which were distortions and parodies of human figures. Moreover, by perforating the puppets, the creators found a way of eliminating their "animate" nature, which would otherwise advocate idolatry (Martinovitch 35).

During his campaign to Egypt, Sultan Selim is said to have asked a puppeteer of a hayal-i-zil[5] performance to go with him to Istanbul, so that his son Suleyman I could see the shadow play. During the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent, Karagoz, reflecting the cultural vitality of the empire, constituted not only a prominent part of the imperial life, but in displaying a broad spectrum of socio-political, psychological and moral issues, it also fascinated the Ottoman populace. As the neighbourhood (mahalle) displayed on the Karagoz screen reflected the social pattern of a traditional quarter in the city, the audiences witnessed a parade of images of all typical Ottoman inhabitants, who were noticeable through their ethnic and regional attributes. This was significant because the residents of the mahalle were all subject to the decrees issued by the sultan. Their representation on the screen conveyed the reality that there was no distinct separation between the Turkish and non-Turkish/non Muslim populations, who freely mingled with each other. As Evliya Chelebi, the foremost Ottoman travel writer and cultural commentator reported, by the seventeenth century, although Hasanzade, a prominent master of the Turkish Shadow Theatre, incorporated three hundred skits in his repertoire, he had no authority to represent the Ottoman sovereign. The characters were all drawn from common people:

No player would have dared to present to the spectators the silhouettes of the Sultan, of the viziers or of any dignitaries of the Empire. All civil, military or religious authorities were banned from the Shadow Theatre screen either through fear or reverence. This of course did not prevent their being replaced by symbols, which were in harmony with the atmosphere of the 'mahalle' and which veiled their secret identity as well (Siyavusgil 25).

In an empire ruled by an absolute monarchy and a totalitarian regime, while the prohibition to portray the sultan or his vezir, did not prevent their representation by symbols, each Karagoz show, however, was "a risque-revue, as fearless as a militant newspaper" (And, Karagoz 67). By a curious irony, though, as Western weekly papers recorded events from the Ottoman court, sultans, vezirs, agas and muftis, all in their opulent costumes playing out all signifiers of Otherness, populated European stages. Thus, in addition to topical news and political history, a long dramatic tradition kept the Ottoman sultans and their affairs in the forefront of Western minds. Along with Renaissance travelers such as Sanderson, Sandys, Lithgow and so on, London dramatists like Peele, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Heywood and others produced the canonical version of Renaissance thought about Islam and/or the Ottoman Turk. Just like the travelogues, which were not simply a portrait of cities and landscapes in the Orient, but written with a conscious rhetorical effect, Renaissance drama presented a similar ideology displaying standard, received ideas about the Ottoman Empire. As the travelers drew their descriptions of the Ottomans (particularly the sultans and other dignitaries) from a distant and unreliable view of sights that were "forbidden" to the outsiders in the Ottoman Empire, the dramatists based their depictions on this collective store of "knowledge" about the Turks. The moral of Richard Knolles' massive edition of the General History of the Turkes (1603), for example, attested to the fact that an "armchair" historian without leaving England could give an account of the historical events of Ottoman/Islamic culture though a collection of erroneous interpretations, representations, attitudes, interests and stereotypes.

Representation of the Ottomans on the English stage can be traced back to the tradition of the English folk plays and the Mummers' Plays with the part of the Turkish knight opposing St. George, performed by an actor in "Herod's vein" and in all likelihood, with a blackened face (Tiddy 14). Despite references to Turkish knights in romances or folk plays prior to the sixteenth century, for the Englishman the Ottoman, as Wood notes, " if he existed at all, was but a shadowy figure inheriting the opprobrium formerly heaped upon the Saracens by generations of crusaders"[6] (Wood 1). The figure of the Turk[7] as a fixed type, loosely representing the "pagan" as such, or the idea of anti-Christian forces, was not simply restricted to allegorical treatments as in a Mummers' Play. Since the terms "Mohammedan", "Moslem", "Arab", "Turk" and "Saracen" were used almost interchangeably as mere theological abstractions within the universe of Western discourse, the distinction between Ottoman and Turk was also neutralized in eighteenth-century dramatic representations. Originally, the term Turk applied only to one of the nomadic peoples in Central Asia. As the millet (literally "nation") system of the multi-religious, multinational Ottoman Empire aimed to create one civilization, the Turk was regarded as only one of the representatives of the cultural mosaic of the diverse peoples of the Ottoman society. In the West, while the Turk was synonymous with Muslim, Islam was defined as Mohammedanism. Considering that even in the Age of Enlightenment the Dictionnaire universel and the Dictionnaire de l'académie française described the word "impostor" as synonymous with Mohammed, the discursive confinement of the Islamic prophet as a "type" led to the polemic use of the term Mohammedanism, as "an insulting European designation" (Said 66). Despite its pejorative connotation, the incorrect definition of Islam was based on the assumption that "Mohammed was to Islam as Christ was to Christianity" (Said 60). Referring to the stereotypical notions generated about the complex society of the Ottomans, who "established one of the longest-lived (ca. 1300-1922), yet least studied or understood, dynastic states in world history" (Kafadar, xi) Naff writes:

While the Islamic image has always been distorted[8] or misrepresented in the West, the Islamic world of the eighteenth century—particularly the Middle Eastern heartland of the Ottoman Empire, its Arab and North African provinces ... has been a prime victim (Naff 3).

In the course of the analysis of varies dramatic texts, this study aims to shed light on the politics of representation by contextualizing and analyzing the practices of representation of the Muslim/Ottoman Turk on the English stage. The opening chapter analyzes the problems of historiography of the Ottoman Empire in order to reach a historicized understanding of the complexity of Western values and attitudes towards the Muslim/Ottoman Turk. It sets out the foundations of the ideological positions articulated by cultural, religious and historiographical strands in the plays. The following chapters will explore how the Ottoman milieu as a dramatic setting provided for the European audience s a common experience of fascination and fear of Other. With an awareness of how the dramatists operated within the discursive limits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, each chapter offers a detailed consideration of the vital role that European drama played in the formation of Western assumptions and conclusions about the meaning of East/Ottoman/Muslim.

The first chapter, which offers a theoretical, discursive and historical basis for the analysis of specific representations of the Ottoman Turks, lays the foundations of successive chapters, categorized according to the reigns of the sultans depicted in the plays. Essentially, the relevance of the texts in the sphere of the ideological, forms an historical and analytical basis for the representations of Ottomans which have evolved across a range of generic forms.

The most important contextualizing factors which need to be acknowledged in addressing the politics of representation are (a) the relationship between dramatic representations of the Turks and their material world (b) discursive practices that produced knowledge about the Ottomans and their power (c) a cluster of issues revolving around matters of identity and difference. In this context, it must be emphasized that the endlessly repetitive, highly intertextual denial of Ottoman realities in these plays determines in advance the dramatization of the characters. In other words, it is the whole repertoire of imagery and visual effects that organizes the representation of the Ottoman Turks by channeling difference into dichotomies such as Self and Other, West and East, Christian and Muslim. Ultimately, in arguing not only how dialectics shape the representation of the Ottomans and constitute a force in the plots and the stagecraft, but also how they establish the "truth of the matter" (Hall 46), this study draws upon different methodologies by offering a selective overview of a range of theories and arguing for the importance of gleaning certain features from each.

In the representation of Ottoman Turks in English drama (1656-1792), the "Orient" is crucial in the ideological construction of the West. Yet, ironically, the decline of the Ottoman Empire from the eighteenth century onwards also seems to serve the ideological construction of a somewhat abstract, ageographical and ahistorical "Orient" by scholars of the twentieth century who have vigorously allied themselves with studies that explore the relationships among knowledge, power and politics. To offer a specific example, Edward Said's renowned book, to which this thesis owes a great deal, has its own cultural distortion and bias as it refers to the Ottomans only in passing. Said's amply documented scholarship which not only discusses the unified character of the Western discourse about the "Orient" from antiquity to the present, but which specifically deals with Islamic Orientalism, tells us nothing about the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922). Since there are already difficulties in overcoming the pervasive negative assumptions about the Ottomans embedded in Western understanding, the overgeneralization of the historical interactions of systems and cultures and an unwillingness to confront concrete realities of the past, make the Ottoman case particularly complex. Consequently, in analyzing the representation of Turks in English drama, the aim of this study is not only to seek a solution to the failings of a Eurocentric orientalist history, but also to overcome the historigraphical and methodological problems arising from the current counter-hegemonic "regime(s) of truth" (Foucault 1980, 131) which claim to give voice to the unvoiced. Orientalism as Said asserts, is a "corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it". And, this study interrogates the relations of knowledge and power, culture and politics by anchoring its arguments in the empirical depths of the seven hundred years of the imperial experience of the Ottoman Empire, historiographically documented as "the Orient".