Chronotope, Dialogue, and Simulation: A New Perspective on Memet Baydur’s 'Kamyon'

This article analyzes Kamyon, the two-act play by Memet Baydur in 1990, and interprets it within its basic structural features. Kamyon deals with the events that develop in the context of the relationships between the workers and the villagers after a cargo truck breaks down on a deserted road; the characters wait in an unresolved situation, and the cycles of waiting bear reflections of Türkiye’s political and social transformations. Within this framework, first, the chronotope structure of the play and the performative, discursive and imaginative elements on which this structure is built, are discussed. Secondly, the dialogical interactions that are the carriers of the discursive content of the play are presented. The sections where dialogical interactions are concentrated and can be called ‘play within the play’ are specifically interpreted in terms of the general socio-cultural context of the play and the political contradictions that the characters are holders of. Since the general structure of the play exhibits simulative features, the roles of structural and content-based features in shaping the simulacra order were examined and their composition in the play in terms of the world of meaning was attempted to be understood. The primary conclusion reached by the research is that the play was established as a critical simulation, in the final analysis, it was shaped around a socio-political background centered on Türkiye after the eighties, and a fin de siècle theme. As a result, in this article, Kamyon is subjected to a text-based analysis and interpretation, and in this manner, the meaning of the play is attempted to be reconstructed for the audience.