Spaces and places of modernity and the modern artist in Oğuz Atay’s “Railroad storytellers – A dream”

This paper examines Atay’s “Railroad Storytellers - A Dream” in terms of Atay’s modernist experimentation in his depiction of space and spatiality, emphasising his contribution to Turkish literature as a pioneer modernist author. Oğuz Atay’s distinctive and innovative style, which forms his affinities with the early Western modernists, establishes his significant place as a pioneer modernist author in Turkish literature in the 1970s. The concept of ‘house/home’ by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1957, 2014) is instrumental for me as it pertains to the predicament of three storytellers as artists in the nameless and remote railroad station. The narrator of the story and his fellow storytellers gradually sink into disconnection, confusion, misery and poverty in an environment that represents the cold and unwelcoming face of technological modernisation symbolised by the space of the train station. The narrator’s quest for finding a ‘home’ to connect him to his readers and where he could exist as an artist comes to life in his attempt to write a letter to his readers, telling them he is still ‘here’ and asking them where they are. No matter how blighted that effort is since the narrator has no address to send the letters to, the endings for Atay’s story imply a need for connection with his readers expressed in the impossible meeting of the ‘here’ with the ‘where’ in spite or because of the estrangement and alienation of the artist/author in the modern world. Hence, the possibility of space as a ‘home’ for the author/narrator dwindles in the not forthcoming answer to the letter that will never reach its destination.