Ayfer Tunç Öykülerinde Sevgisizlik Temasi/Lovelessness Theme in Ayfer Tunç's Stories

• Published in: Selçuk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü dergisi no. 23; p. 87
• Main Authors: Harmanci, Abdullah, Solak, Ömer
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Turkish
• Published: Adana Selcuk University 01-01-2010
• Subjects: Children; Connotation; Fiction; Ideology; Immigrants; Literary criticism; Literature; Love; Personal relationships; Short stories; Spouses; Story telling; Theme; Tunc, Ayfer; Turkish language; Women; Writers; Turkey
• ISSN: 1302-1796; 1304-8899

Ayfer Tunç, who is an outstanding figure of our storytelling with her books published after 1989, was born in 1964 in Adapazari. Her story books include: Sakli (1989), Magara Arkadaslari (1996), Aziz Bey Hadisesi (2000), Tas-Kagit-Makas (2003), Evvelotel (2006). Ayfer Tunç has published five story books, from her first book Sakli to Evvelotel (2006). Having won several awards with these books, Ayfer Tunç has made achieved an important place in Turkish storytelling. Adopting classical storytelling, the writer has benefited from rich connotations of Ottoman words in her stories that have strong fiction and has collected the vocabulary of her stories from a wide area, making use of old words of Turkish. The writer has stated that, there were periods when Turkish language was perceived as an ideological tool, a means of expression, and the subject and object of literature, she has pointed out that language should be approached with awareness, not authority, and that there will be no language where awareness does not exist. One of the factors underlying the fact that the writer has such a reasonable understanding of language and that she is a successful story writer is that, she was inspired by the works of the masters of our literature. Without imitating them, Tunç has managed to make use of the important names of our modern literature. One aspect of Ayfer Tunç's storytelling that is appreciated a lot by literary critics is the strong fiction in her stories. This fiction is a result of the fact that the writer has benefited well from the masters of our literature. The mastery and authenticity in her stories were mentioned beginning from her first book. It has been stated that Ayfer Tunç creates her stories without damaging the internal conditions of storytelling and that she reflects the burnout of the human being in the changing life conditions in integrality. Although she is not excluded from the contemporary search in terms of fiction and content, she is stated not to ignore the human factor for the sake of appearing original, in contrast, she is making an effort to make the human being an artistic being. The theme that is hidden in almost all of Ayfer Tunç's stories is the person's being deprived of love, the thirst for love, and not being able to reach love. Though it has been seen that other themes come forward in other stories, when read carefully, the main problems of the protagonists are being deprived of love and not being able to reach love. In this article, the search for love and the theme of being deprived of real love in Ayfer Tunç's stories have been demonstrated by summarizing the plots of the stories one by one. In the story that gave its name to the writer's first book "Sakli", "the second wife of the immigrant, the elegant lady" experiences bilateral lovelessness. She is deprived of love as she is left alone by the person she loves a lot, and she does not love her husband. Moreover, she is not liked by the society. In the story "Ses Tutsagi" in Magara Arkadaslari, our narrator is a lonely man and in order to get rid of his loneliness, he listens to the voices coming from the flat upstairs where a widower woman with children lives. He surrenders gradually to this game, and has an attachment for the woman, but doesn't get a response for his love (at first). There are two lonely and "loveless" people, one man and one woman, and the story ends in an interesting way. In the story that gives its name to the book in Aziz Bey Hadisesi, the life of Tamburi Aziz Bey is told through flashbacks. Aziz Bey, who is a handsome, confident and brilliant boy, will feel a "blind love" that will ruin his life, he will fall in love with Maryam, who doesn't even love him, follow her to Beirut, but will be disappointed and come back to Istanbul. He will not love Vuslat, who loves him in his adulthood. Like it is the case in all Ayfer Tunç stories, love is never revealed. In Aziz Bey's youth, the women that fall in love with him, are not loved back by Aziz Bey. We meet a lonely narrator in "Kaybetme Korkusu" in Tas-Kagit-Makas. He is lonely and she is a writer. The apartment building where she lives and the lives of people living there are told. The residents of these flats cheat their husbands by our narrator. One of the characters in the story, Safir, causes her wife to commit suicide, although not on purpose. The reason for that is the fact that he lets her wife alone although for short times. Bearing the strange childhood of Süsen in mind, the situation is rather logical. The characters in the story are deprived of love. They either don't love or are not loved by others. We hope that, our analysis will be useful in understanding Ayfer Tunç's works which are outstanding in terms of having a rich and associative language, a strong fiction, having her own style, and working on themes such as being deprived of love and the search for love and in a genuine way. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]