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The Time Regulation Institute

The Time Regulation Institute

I began to use terms like “modification”, “coordination”, “work structure”, “mind-set shift”, “metathought”, and “scientific mentality”, […]. I even made imprudent comparisons between East and the West, and passed judgments whose gravity left me terrified.

Hayri İrdal in The Time Regulation Institute 
(translated by Alexander Dawe and Maureen Freely) 

In the last years of the Ottoman Empire, Hayri İrdal, who comes from a poor background, is the apprentice of the clock-maker Nuri Efendi, who will later be remembered as the famed “philosopher of time”. Years later, as a result of a chain of coincidences, the impoverished man falls into the clutches of the entrepreneur and swindler Halit Ayarcı, who promises him wealth, prestige and purpose as the acting director of an important institution. Based on the wisdom imparted by the esteemed teacher Nuri Efendi about clocks and time, which Hayri shares at their first meeting, Halit is able to conceptualise a modern Time Regulation Institute, which aims to “give our people a consciousness of time […] create a whole new collection of adages and ideas, and spread them all over the country”. The institute, which should ensure the synchronisation of all clocks nationwide and thus ensure productivity and advancement, becomes a constantly growing, internationally recognised official institution – until it is ultimately closed down due to its obvious excessiveness.

The novel, by writer and literary historian Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901-1962) is considered one of the most meaningful works of modern Turkish literature and offers a satirical glimpse into the processes of modernization during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey. 

It raises questions in a humorous way about the meaning of language, concepts and ideas during these social transformation processes. This can be seen, for example, in the depiction of how the Vienna-educated psychoanalyst and Halit’s friend, Doctor Ramiz, perceives Hayri as a suitable research object. Tanpınar ridicules the imposition of psychoanalytical theories on Hayri’s life and dreams as well as the characters’ alienated views of their own past: as Hayri mentions in passing the traditional dream interpretation books that he has grown up with, the fascinated psychoanalyst immediately sets to work writing a report about it for an international congress. Thus, the perspective is influenced by exoticization and (self-) orientalising, and leads to a grotesque distortion of Nuri Efendi’s teachings, which are on display all over the place as the institute’s slogans. Fictional characters of Ottoman history stylized as advocates of a modern understanding of time are presented in the form of supposedly scholarly publications and are received by European Orientalists, whom Tanpınar also mocks in their search for authentic knowledge about the ‘Orient’. 

The novel, which is unbelievably funny and infused with irony, offers an impressive glimpse into Hayri’s inner life, who as first-person narrator regains some autonomy through the transcription of his memories. Alongside this, the novel also offers a subtle, critical examination of aspects of modernity such as competing concepts of time – linear and rigid, represented by the Time Setting Institute, or cyclical and in harmony with nature, represented by Nuri Efendi. The overflowing, and yet equally humorous and not insignificant description of the complex relationships with family and acquaintances are difficult to grasp. However, Hayri’s development and the construction of the institute, which is riddled with absurdities, turn out to be their logical continuation. The book is also a worthwhile read because it shows that fiction, even that which becomes canon, is often a place in which questions about the power of language, ideas and representation are often raised much earlier than they are in scholarly debate.

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