It's always a bit disconcerting to recognize that a novel is good, but not actually like it that much...

This was my experience with The Time Regulation Insitute. Written by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and published in 1962, the year of the author's death, it is a rambunctious satire on "modernization" -- a send-up of "the entire 20th century, a century of systems if ever there was".

This edition comes with a foreword by Pankaj Mishra (mostly reproduced here), which gives some valuable context, and highlights the book's enduring relevance.

The modernization efforts that rulers around the world (not only in Turkey, but also in Russia, Japan, Thailand, Iran, China, India...) embarked upon in order to force their countries to "catch up with" the West inevitably had highly ambivalent consequences. There was "a tragic mismatch", says Mishra, "between the intentions of these hasty modernisers and the long historical experience of the societies they wanted to remake".

Dislocation, distortion, confusion, and alienation were the results of what Tanpinar described as "the awful thing we call belatedness". Mishra glosses this expression as "the experience of arriving late in the modern world, as naive pupils, to find one's future foreclosed and already defined by other people's past and present".

Many social and political commentators around the world still insist that what is not "modern" ought to become so, post-haste. Yet Tanpinar's work -- communicating "his sense of foreboding and loss, and his evocation, in particular, of the melancholy, or huzun, of those doomed to arrive late, and spirtually destitute, in history" -- ought to give pause for thought.

Tanpinar once hoped for "a synthesis of past and present", but The Time Regulation Institute is not a hopeful book. As Mishra puts it: "The onward-and-upward narrative of progres, dictated by the state and embraced by a gullible people, has contaminated everything. The spiritual resources of modernism seem meagre compared to the great and irreversible material changes -- industrialization, mechanization, demographic shifts, middle-class consumerism, and rapid communications -- introduced by Turkey's Kemalist elite."

Aptly, then, the most salient characteristic of Hayri Irdal, the narrator, is confusion. He is a drifter, always coming out of encounters second-best. He lives a life of considerable idleness, both by choice and by necessity. When he is taken up by Halit Ayarci, the founder of the Time Regulation Institute, he is relieved to have a job and the opportunities that go with it, but he mentally buys in and out of the endeavour on a regular basis. "I became," he says, "a man whose thoughts, decisions, and speech patterns were all in a jumble."

This sense of "jumble" accurately describes, says Mishra, "the fate of many human beings ... forced into alien ways and lifestyles -- the hundreds of millions of white-shirted workers with shakily grasped European languages and irretrievably impaired mother tongues... those who, uprooted from their old ways of being, must languish eternally in the waiting room of history".


The photos in this post are from Ankara, which became Ataturk's command centre during the War of Independence, and shortly afterwards, Turkey's capital. Ankara was "the laboratory of Turkish nation building and its exemplary showcase".





Everything about the project known as the Time Regulation Institute is false and corrupt. Its purpose is absurd (as some foreign sceptics point out, its function can be served by looking at a clock); most of its workers are relatives of Ayarci or Irdal.

Ayarci is a cynic of the first order. He knows very well how to talk the talk about the modernizing effects of time regulation: "Work requires a certain mentality and a certain conception of time. I'm astonished that you believe a genuine business life was even possible in our country before the establishment of our institute... Work is a matter of mastering one's time... We shall declare that man is first and foremost a creature who works, and that work itself is time... Civilization took its greatest leap forward when men began walking about with watches in their pockets, keeping time that was independent of the sun."

Does Ayarci, in any small corner of his being, genuinely believe in what he is doing? "I am in the process," he declaims, "of establishing an absolute institution -- a mechanism that defines its own function. What could be closer to perfection than that?"

But his relationship with reality is slippery: "Being a realist does not mean seeing the truth for what it is. It is a question of determining our relationship with the truth in the way that is most beneficial for us." Mistakes are irrelevant. They "only exist for those foolish enough to try to fix them".

He also happily purveys counterfeit tradition. Ahmet Efendi the Timely, "the patron saint of clock makers", who comes complete with an entire bogus life-story, exists largely because his creators need him to.

In one of Irdal's doubting phases, he recognizes: "This new job was unlike any other I had known. It seemed to have nothing to do with people or even life itself... It was an undertaking born of a few words. It had the logic of a fairy tale."

But he also takes on Ayarci's perspectives in the way he takes on the suit of clothes his mentor gifts him: "I began to perceive life as a single entity. 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 West."







Tanpinar does not hold back with his satirical depiction of the absurdities of this institute.

It spawns slogans ("the path to well-being springs from a sound understanding of time" is one such). It sets up "time regulation stations", where young women are trained to "speak about the institute and timepieces in a uniform way, relaying exactly the same information every time". The "completion department" is "where we'll transfer all the work we want to put on hold".

It lacks any kind of substance: "For visits and inspections ... you didn't need too much space at all, and neither did you need too many objects for inspection. The important thing was to make the decision to inspect something and then to do so."

And it has the classic bureaucratic trait of self-perpetuation: "An empty office or meeting room will find its own function, much in the way that a civil servant's function is guided by his title."

Even when the powers-that-be decide to abrogate the institute, Ayarci manages to have that decision amended, and forms "a committee for continuous liquidation" that will continue to employ all their friends.

Other elements of "modernization" are similarly pilloried. There is Irdal's talentless sister, for example, about whom Hayarci says: "When it's a matter of the new, there's no need for any other talent."

Acting in opposition to all this bland idiocy is a rococo cast of characters, including the mad, the lonely, and the quixotic. Fading aristocrats, hopeful alchemists, crazed treasure-hunters, indomitable family members (including one who comes back from the world beyond, and is transported home sitting up in her casket, and eating a savory bun), loquacious psychiatrists, deceitful spiritualists, and idly superficial coffeehouse patrons -- all "demonstrate the power and endurance of personality in an age that celebrates conformity".

The coffeehouse sounds to me a bit like the forerunner of social media:

Dr Ramiz, who treats Irdal when he is sent to the asylum, comments: "Where else could I find such an enlightened crowd? ... They're all immersed in national affairs and follow new developments closely. There's no newspaper that could cover as many stories as this one coffeehouse...". Irdal recognizes that "what the doctor meant by 'national affairs' and 'enlightened' conversation was in reality nothing more than ordinary gossip".

Hayit Ayarci is scathing: "When I listen to you talk about this coffeehouse, I imagine all its patrons ... living in some kind of limbo. You might see them as the ones who have been locked out. They lead indolent lives, half the time taking the world seriously, half the time dismissing it as a joke, simply because their failure to adjust to the modern age has so confused them!" But Irdal recognizes its role and value: "The coffeehouse offered something more along the lines of a sedative, something akin to opium."


Photos from Anitkabir, Ataturk's final resting place







Anyway, all this is excellent -- perceptive, sharp, visionary even -- but for me it wasn't an enjoyable read. The scenes were somehow so outlandish that I couldn't place myself in any of them. There was no-one I felt I could identify with, no-one I felt I liked. In fact, most of the time I found myself strongly convinced that the characters would all benefit from a box round the ears...

My loss, no doubt. But never mind. It was still an informative work to have read, like nothing I have ever encountered before.