The Inter-Narrativity of “Life”: An Analysis of Tezer Ozlu's A Journey to the Edge of Life

Introduction

Journey to the Edge of Life was written by Tezer Özlü in 1982. The author made trips to Berlin, Hamburg, Prague, Vienne, Rome, Zagreb, Belgrade, Niš, Treste, and Santo Stefano Belbo, where she took strolls in the parks, spend time in cafes, and chatted with strangers. The main purpose of her trips was to trace her favorite writers. In this respect, she visited Franz Kafka’s grave, found Svevo’s house and talked to her daughter, and found the hotel room where Cesare Pavese, an author she admired, committed suicide. Having learnt that she was born on the same day as Pavese, Tezer Özlü felt a connection with him and found herself reading his works time after time and identified herself with Pavese. Quoting from Pavese and following his footsteps, she created literary journeys with her own sentences. In a sense, during those journeys in which she was tracing Pavese’s suicide, she also made a journey to her inner world.

The present study evaluates the way how Tezer Özlü’s book “Journey to the Edge of Life” was constructed through narrative and aims to demonstrate how the narrative interactions in the book were employed. In this respect, narrative components and the concept of intertextuality were examined. The narrative of Tezer Özlü’s “Journey to the Edge of Life” was analyzed using the analysis method specified by Nedret Tanyolaç Öztokat in her book ‘‘Theoretical Approachess in the Analysis of Literary Texts’’¹. The results obtained in this study have revealed the interaction between Tezer Özlü’s narrative and the texts in Cesare Pavese’s, Kafka’s and Sivevo’s works and the interconnection between them.

Intertextuality, with a rough definition, refers to the interrelationship and exchange between texts and a polyphonic discourse. The term emerged in France thanks to Julia Kristeva and Tzvetan Todorov. It is the French equivalent of Mihail Mihailovic Bakhtin’s “dialogism”. Gerard Genette defines intertextuality as transtextuality. Michael Riffaterre, on the other hand, argues that intertextuality is the readers’ meaning creation and interpretation of a text by relating it to other texts. To Umberto Eco, intertextuality is a reflection of the previously written texts. The common point expressed in all these arguments is the “relationship that a text builds with other texts” (Azap, 2014, pp. 29-30).

Parallel with the view widely acknowledged among the scholars dealing with literature and narratology, Aktulum claims that each literary text today demonstrates its dynamism and specificity through intertextual references as well as other narrative elements. That’s the reason why contemporary text theoreticians consider intertextuality a fundamental criterion for literariness. However, Aktulum also points out that contemporary text theoreticians tend to maintain the structuralist approach while opposing it at the same time. Contemporary text theoreticians’ tendency to consider intertextuality a fundamental criterion for literariness and to embark on a quest to create meaning through making use of other texts distinguishes them from structuralists (Aktulum, 2018: 238). Ahmet Mithat Efendi stated that he was inspired by Cervantes’ Don Quixote while writing his novel “Çengi” (Dancer). Likewise, some expressions in Virginia Woolf’s Monday or Tuesday such as “white square of the marble” and “ivory depths” can be seen Sait Faik’s story “Çatışma” (Conflict) (Kolcu, 2008, p. 339 as cited in Azap, 2014, p. 30).

Also referred to as narratology, narrative theory – the roots of which date back to Plato and Aristoteles – has become a highly popular and comprehensive discipline in the past years. Narratology was accepted as a discipline with the publication of the special issue of the journal Communications with the title “Structural Analysis of Narratives”. The term “narratology” was coined in 1969 – three years after its publication – by Tzvetan Todorov, who was one of the contributors of the special issue (Jahn, 2015, p. 43). Narratology has developed considerably since then and has gained an interdisciplinary character that covers various disciplines including language, literature, history, theology, art history, psychology, philosophy, artificial intelligence, medicine, and communication (Jahn, 2015, p.7). To Jahn, narratology is the theory of narrative structures. In order to analyze a structure or to present “a structural description”, narratologists take the components of a narrative apart and then try to determine the functions and relations/connections. Narrative theories make a distinction between what is told (story) and how it’s told (discourse) (Jahn, 2015, p. 43).