An intertextual approach to tomris uyar’s tale entitled “Şahmeran hikâyesi”

Abstract

The aim of this article is to which purpose narratives of Şahmeran were used in a modern story and identify the modern transitions rather than how the image of Şahmeran takes place in traditional and modern narratives. Here the main point is to see how a traditional story was modernized through the acting agents and the meanings reached out as a result of this modernization. Tomris Uyar’s story, entitled “Şahmeran Hikâyesi” published in 1973, is a modern story including the references to traditional narratives. The “Kehf chapter of Holy Quran which tells the story of “Seven Sleepers”, Şahmeran narratives, whose variants are found in Anatolian stories, included by the Arabian Nights and the images of snake, woman, cave in Eastern cultures and the tale discourse take prominence among this kind of traditional texts. The main object of this study is to search the rich meaning created by all these intertextual references by means of the intertextual relation. However, “Şahmeran Hikâyesi” has reshaped these traditional texts according to the taste of modern reader. For example, Camsap, apparently the real character of the tale, took the responsibility of betrayal, behaved with new percipience of crime-punishment-conscience, which are nonexistent in the traditional stories, and made a choice. It appears that the progression of Camsap from a traditional character to a character of modern story is an important conversion. So this article is dwelt on the relations of a modern tale with traditional texts. © 2015, Milli Folklor Dergisi. All rights reserved.