Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar'ın romanlarında ahlak sorunsalı

Abstract

Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s (1864-1944) first article titled “İstanbul’da Bir Frenk” (A European in Istanbul) was published in 1884 and from that time onwards his 41 novels, 9 story books, 4 plays, and 6 collection of essays composed of his articles and polemics have been published. In this study, Gürpınar’s ten novels, namely Bir Sevda Denklemi (An Equation of Love, 1899), Metres (The Mistress, 1899), Acı Gülüş (Bitter Laugh, 1923), Ben Deli miyim? (Am I Mad? 1925), Kokotlar Mektebi (The School of Cocottes, 1929), Gönül Bir Yeldeğirmenidir (The Heart is a Windmill, 1943), Dünyanın Mihveri Kadın mı, Para mı? (What Is the Axis of the World, Woman or Money? 1949), Kaderin Cilvesi (Turn of Fortune, 1964), Can Pazarı (A Matter of Life and Death, 1968), and Namuslu Kokotlar (The Virtuous Cocottes, 1973) have been analyzed within the framework of ethical criticism, especially with regard to the repeated themes, the interference of the author and the narrator, and the intellectual sources of Gürpınar’s thought. Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar had adopted a moral discourse in his writings and created his fictional world around the themes of struggle for existence, starvation, moral decline, and infidelity, which are among significant notions in the field of ethics. The intrusion of the author and the narrator in fictional worlds are other salient and constitutive features of Gürpınar’s fiction. Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and social Darwinist ideas, to which he had frequently referred, also played substantial roles in the formation of his fictional world. That is why it is vital to understand the system of values that lies beneath the author’s thought while analyzing his works. In this context, the criticisms regarding Gürpınar’s idea of the novel have been reconsidered; his works have been examined from the perspective of ethical criticism; and the system of values that shape his fictional world has been portrayed through a text-centered reading.