The Story of the Unfinished: Reading the Novel The Disenchanted in the Context of Literature and Cinema / Alişan Okumuş

29.09.2024
Günce Filoloji Çalışmaları II

INTRODUCTION

This study will identify the transformation, and the common ground, in the screen version of The Disenchanted, a work published by Mehmet Eroğlu in 2005 and brought to the screen by Selim Güneş in 2017. In this way, the common ground or the omissions concerning the novel’s characters, time, setting and narrator will be set out. The elements that emerge will be evaluated bearing in mind that cinema and literature are different branches of art, with different narrative techniques and freedoms.

Broadly speaking, the novel The Disenchanted revolves around Kuzey Erkil, a member of the ’68 generation, and his struggle between past and present, his pain and his sorrow. Ülkü Tamer says that The Disenchanted tells the “sorrowful story” 1 of the ’68ers. In the novel the voices of the ’68 generation and of their revolutionary adventure can be felt, and at times the novel can be read as a political reflection. Mehmet Eroğlu, too, belongs to the ’68 generation; like Kuzey, the hero he created, he was tried and convicted after 12 March. In an interview he expressed his thoughts on the matter as follows:

“Once there were young people who truly wanted to change the world, young people in love with the world. And these people were ready to offer their very existence to revolution, to change, to a utopian future, expecting nothing in return. It was a great force, both in numbers and in ideas. Now this force has ended in disappointment. The revolution did not happen. Beyond that, the world we had hoped to change changed in exactly the opposite direction. Their values imprisoned them in a place very different from the new world that took shape. That is why they became disenchanted.” 2 (Okutan, 2005)

In keeping with Mehmet Eroğlu’s words, the question of the ’68 generation appears in The Disenchanted as one of the things Kuzey Erkil failed at and left unfinished, and as a disappointment in his past.

The novel The Disenchanted consists of five parts. It is written as a metafictional work, with information about the process of writing the book placed at the beginning and the end of the novel. In addition, at the start of each part we find excerpts from Kuzey Erkil’s diary, titled ‘from the journal of a wandering drunk’. The novel is divided into three different time frames, and although its chronological narration is broken, these breaks are linked to one another and provide transitions. As for the narrator, in the present and the past we hear Kuzey Erkil’s voice, while in the flash-forwards we hear the words of the characters around Kuzey.

LITERATURE REFLECTED IN CINEMA

Literature’s long and deep-rooted history and cinema’s insatiable field of consumption have led these two art forms to come together and influence each other many times. A brief look at the history of cinema shows that the first narrative films were literary adaptations. “From 1908 until just before the First World War there was a fashion for filmed stage plays. These films, whose only significance was to awaken interest in cinema among literary circles and aristocrats, were adaptations of literary works for the screen, and almost the entire French theatre was filmed.” 3 The main reason for this is that the concept of the screenplay in this new and developing cinema, and the film industry itself, had not yet matured. Looking at the history of Turkish cinema, we see that here too the first narrative films were literary adaptations. “Under the direction of Sedat Simavî, one of Turkey’s well-known newspaper owners, then about twenty years old, our first narrative films, Pençe (1917) and Casus (1917), were made.” 4 Pençe is known as the first narrative film and, since it was adapted from a work by Mehmet Rauf, also as the first adaptation. In the years that followed, Turkish cinema went on producing its early works by turning once again to literary adaptations. “Fehim Efendi first brought to the screen Mürebbiye (1919), from Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s famous novel. This was followed at the end of the same year by Binnaz, a historical subject adapted from Yusuf Ziya Ortaç’s verse play.” 5 It was inevitable that Turkish cinema would take this approach. Indeed, literature too had brought an understanding of adaptation with the Tanzimat: “The understanding of literature brought by the Tanzimat becomes a Western literature built on ‘adaptation’; the beginnings of the theatre – including Şinasi’s boulevard-style ‘Şair Evlenmesi’ (1860) – rest on Western moulds; and finally the first narrative product of cinema, under the influence of the theatre, is bound to the method of adaptation” 6 With an understanding of adaptation of its own making, literature was the source turned to first, both in the development of cinema and in the years when cinema first appeared.

As a film term, adaptation is defined as follows: “Adaptation [Fr. adaptation] [Eng. adaptation]: Putting a text not prepared for cinema into a form suitable for cinema.” 7 Adaptation can also be practised as ‘appropriation’, where a film from another country is given the geographical and sociological features of one’s own, but “This pairing mostly takes the form of adapting literary works for cinema.” 8 There are some film adaptations that have surpassed the book, been consumed more widely and become much loved. The reason is that cinema, compared with literature, is more powerful in its capacity and technique for showing. Besides this, in today’s age of speed, cinema is preferred for its ease of consumption, which draws societies into the laziness of watching the film of a book. “Another interesting point about adaptation concerns the audience reached. A film can reach far larger audiences than a literary work. Its narration must therefore suit this. This is an especially important issue for countries such as Turkey, where the habit of reading books is weak.” 9 In a sense, from the point of view of literature and writers, this also serves to make the work more lasting.

One of the main reasons cinema turns to literary texts is that a ready-made text and plot already exist. Cinema tries to rise above this text using its own techniques. But this also brings certain difficulties, because: “The means and possibilities of expression of literary language and the means of expression, technique and codes of film language are different.” 10 Cafer Gariper explains this in one of his essays as follows:

“In texts based on narration, the way language expresses space differs from the way cinema expresses space. Language, by its very function, resorts to narration and description, as it does with the other elements. It proceeds by creating concepts and images in the mind. Cinema, on the other hand, takes the path of showing, of bringing things to life before our eyes. It relies on sound, image and action.” 11

These differences in the mode of expression also show in the characters, in the way the theme is brought out and in the use of time. Because a film is compressed into a fixed span of time, a novel cannot be transferred to film exactly, and omissions occur. “The most common shortcoming in adaptation arises from failing to fit the mass of material in the source work properly into the limited running time of the film.” 12

In adaptations from literature to cinema, texts are read, the written text turns into a visual reality, and the text is reinterpreted. This is done sometimes through direct reflection and sometimes through transformation by omission and restructuring. Adaptations from literature to cinema generally take three forms. The first is turning the work into a screenplay suited to the techniques of cinema. This method gives the director freedom and covers films that take a course different from the work. The second type is the adaptation that stays faithful to the work. Remaining true to the adapted text is what matters. The director conveys the work through the possibilities of cinema. Such adaptations are criticised on the grounds that they add nothing new to the work. The third type of adaptation transforms the work. These adaptations preserve the main outlines of the work, try to rise above it with the means of cinema, and reinterpret it. 13

Staying faithful to the work, or adding nothing to it, is the central debate of adaptation. What literature expects rests on the principle of remaining true to the text’s essential stance, even if changes are made to it: “In the relationship between cinema and literature there is the language of cinema here, and the language of literature, let us say of the novel, there; one will be translated into the other, but when it comes to this business of ‘translation’, the language of a shared sensibility, of a shared concern, must take the place of honour.” 14 What cinema expects, on the other hand, is to reflect carefully chosen parts of the work well, with the power of cinema, as far as its own language allows. Given these two basic attitudes, the researcher’s task is to build a bridge between the two art forms. “Those who have read the novel and watched the film of the same work have always felt the need to make a comparison.” 15 The aim of this study lies in that direction: without setting a criterion such as expecting either a one-to-one reflection or a complete break from the work, it will identify the similarities and differences in the transformation of The Disenchanted into film.

CHANGES OF CHARACTER AND ROLE

In works carried from literature to cinema, directors and screenwriters are free to change characters and roles, to change names, or to leave some of the novel’s characters out of their films. This stems from the fact that cinema tells a story with more limited means than literature. At the same time, in films adapted from shorter narratives such as short stories, it is normal to see additions as well. In this context, both omissions and additions can be seen in the transfer of The Disenchanted to the screen.

Kuzey Erkil

The first person to consider in terms of changes of character and role is, naturally, Kuzey, who stands at the centre of the novel. Typologically, the novel and the film are in harmony. In the film, a man in his fifties with glasses, a light, neatly kept beard, unkempt white hair and a vacant gaze fits the novel’s description of “a typical drunk’s face” 16.

One of Kuzey’s most dominant traits is his existential distress, which comes from his inability to escape the shadow of the past.

“He is stuck in the past; this prevents him from imagining or preparing for a future. Two misfortunes in his past have left him deeply disillusioned. The first is that, as a ’68er, he could not realise his ideals; the second is that his love affair with Şafak ended badly.” 17

Kuzey was defeated by life twice, by failing to make the revolution in 1971 and by falling in love with Şafak and losing her in 1998, and he never managed to free himself from these defeats for the rest of his life.

When Kuzey’s existential problems are compared in the novel and the film, the first thing that stands out is that all five parts of the novel open with Kuzey speaking as a man who is preparing for death and longing for it. Kuzey, who appears as an alcoholic type, never wakes up to a morning; he only sobers up, and wishes for death: “Will I die today? If I am to die, I am ready; my sentence is on my lips.” 18 Kuzey wakes not by thinking about how he will spend the day but by settling accounts with God. “Will I pass through the bright gate of death today? Perhaps, if God gives up his stubbornness and agrees to roll double ones.” 19 “Will I die today? When will God take pity on me and let me migrate to those golden shores where no ships pass and no birds fly?” 20 “Will I die today? Perhaps, if God remembers that I am lying in my coffin, waiting for his messenger.” 21 In the film, on the other hand, the director has created four parts – encounter, love and affection, separation, reunion – and in the opening sequences of these parts we see Kuzey’s wish for death only in the reunion part. In this part Kuzey drags himself towards suicide, towards the freedom he has been waiting for. The thought of suicide, a reflection of existentialism, and the desire to attain freedom through death appear more intensely in the book. In the film, what mostly reflects Kuzey’s existentialist stance is a sense of nothingness.

Kuzey is a man stuck in the past but living in the present. His struggle with the past is full of sorrow, and he cannot escape it. The two main reasons for his fight with the past are his unfinished love and his unfinished ’68 ideals. Love is explored in depth in both the film and the novel. However, the defeat of the ’68ers is not as visible in the film as it is in the novel. Although in one sequence of the film he speaks of their faith in revolution, of being a generation that said only ‘we’ and could never say ‘I’, and of the dream of revolution, it is not as dominant as in the novel. In the novel, by contrast, this appears as a fundamental idea. “That the ’68ers could not realise their ideals, that they lived out this disappointment in various areas of their lives and were ruined, emerges as the fundamental idea on which the novel rests.” 22 The settings that trigger his pain are similar in the novel and the film. On a trip with Çiğdem, when he sees the hill he once visited with Şafak, he goes out of his mind and talks as if Şafak were standing in front of him. “My sorrow was like snot; I just couldn’t stop it running.” 23 The forms of ‘I was going to…’ that recur in Kuzey’s monologues and dialogues reflect the regret with which he looks back on the past. Kuzey is someone tormented by what he remembers, who will not let his pain wear away, for whom neither the present nor the future means anything, and who sees “a person’s past as too rotten to be a bridge to their future” 24. Kuzey’s obsession with the past appears as a refusal, after all the things he has left unfinished in his life, to leave one single thing unfinished – his pain – and as a way of holding on to it; in the film this is reflected in his bohemian life, his silent relationships with people and, as in the novel, the sound of weeping that is heard again and again.

One of Kuzey’s most striking traits in the novel is his drinking. In 1998, the period when he was with Şafak, Kuzey had given up drinking. But when Şafak left, he abandoned himself to alcohol and tried to wash away his pain with it. Throughout the novel, alcoholism has a great effect on Kuzey. “He takes refuge in the endurance that drink gives him.” 25 In the film, the most notable point is that Kuzey drinks only once, in his scene with Çiğdem. In this scene he drinks very fast and tells Çiğdem that he drinks because it makes his pain bearable. The reason there is so little drinking in the film may be that the constructed time frame reflects the 1998 period spent with Şafak. Kuzey had been treated for alcoholism before he met Şafak. The film mentions that he has had this treatment, and during this period he does not drink. Şafak says she will leave, and months later he thinks of drink. From then on alcohol will be the only thing he shares his pain with.

That Kuzey is stuck in his past and sees alcohol as a purification and a way of escape, while the film gives this too little room and leaves his addiction unexplored, stands out as a major omission. For here is a man who tries to wash his soul with alcohol and put out the fire inside him that way; who says “I drank, and I drank a lot. What better proof that I haven’t wasted my life?” 26; whom everything except alcohol turns the stomach; who drinks “my shift at reception was two hours, but just in case, four hours’ worth.” 27; who never turns down a drink; who calls himself a drunk, saying “every drunk has a reason, valid or not.” 28; who opens the doors of his mind with alcohol: “I understood what he meant two glasses later. Gin definitely cleared my head.” 29; who says the only thing he wants to do is “To drink. That’s exactly what I want.” 30; who believes in nothing in life but drink; who knows “no other way than cooling it with beer” 31 for his anger. That such a man is not portrayed as a drunk in the film is a major omission and a shortcoming. A man who has lost his ideals, his friendships and his loves has a close relationship with alcohol. “Drink doesn’t make you forget the pain, it only makes it bearable.” 32 The reason Kuzey is so dependent on alcohol is that it makes the pain bearable. Through alcohol he loses himself and tries to cut himself off from his past. Sami forbidding Kuzey to drink, and the sign of friendship that would arise from this, and Çiğdem trying to pull Kuzey away from this path as a sign of love: because this theme is so little explored, these are missing from the film.

In the novel, Kuzey has left unfinished a novel called The Disenchanted. He does not go on writing it. He only keeps a journal. For him, drinking is more tempting than writing again. In the general course of the film, however, Kuzey is writing this novel, and in the film’s final scene, before he goes off to kill himself, we see the book called The Disenchanted lying finished on the table.

Another important trait of Kuzey’s is his revolutionary, political side. The starting point of the pain he suffers is his defeat in the revolution. In the film we know that Kuzey is a former revolutionary of the ’68 generation, but this is not examined, and a political avoidance is noticeable. The clearest example is the change to the story of how Kuzey and Sami met. The film says that Kuzey and Sami met at the faculty of letters. In the novel, however, we see that Kuzey and Sami met in Germany through party channels. In addition, the fact that Kuzey was tortured and bears scars on his back is one of the things left out when the novel was brought to the screen.

Şafak and Çiğdem

Şafak and Çiğdem are the female characters who form the novel’s love triangle with Kuzey. In the film Çiğdem is treated superficially. The character of Çiğdem, who has great depth over the course of the novel, both in the past and in story time, remains faint in the film. Çiğdem is the daughter of Kuzey’s ex-wife. She grew up without a mother’s love, because her mother could never forget her former husband, Kuzey. 33 But Çiğdem read the letters Kuzey had written to her mother and fell in love with him. Years later she came to Karaburun and met Kuzey. She tried to remind this man, who had forgotten love and life, of what it is to live. In the film, however, neither this past of Çiğdem’s nor her love for Kuzey is mentioned. In the film we see that Çiğdem is interested in Kuzey, but this stems not from love for him but from his intriguing personality. She even appears as someone who works for Kuzey’s elder brother. In our interview with Selim Güneş, director of the film The Disenchanted, he explains this as follows:

“Çiğdem is also very different from the one in the novel. The only things they have in common are her name and the fact that she has come to save the hotel. For me that was enough. What makes Çiğdem meaningful in the film is that she reminds him of Şafak. Through what she wants to know about Şafak, we learn what Kuzey went through with Şafak, and through the answers he gives her and his reactions, we come to understand Kuzey’s world, his fragility and what he feels deep down.” 34

What is similar in the film is that Çiğdem becomes a partner in the hotel. In terms of typology, although we know that Çiğdem is blonde, in the film she is a red-haired woman. In the novel Çiğdem is a character who is in love with Kuzey and tries to remind him of love, whereas in the film she is portrayed, on a superficial level, as a friend.

Şafak is the woman in the circle of love in which Kuzey suffers his second and heaviest defeat. In the novel The Disenchanted, Şafak appears in flashbacks. In the film, besides appearing in flashbacks, the scenes with Şafak take precedence over story time. It can therefore be said that the film revolves around Şafak, and that much of what is missing comes from the large place given to her. In the novel Şafak comes to the peninsula to study the seals, and in the film to study the abandoned villages. She falls in love with Kuzey and, although she is engaged, can neither leave nor stay. Şafak is trapped between staying and leaving, between guilt and longing. When Kuzey talks her out of this love, she is driven to a mysterious suicide. Although Şafak is typologically similar in the film, the biggest change is that in the film she was born in Germany and speaks broken Turkish. In both the novel and the film, Şafak is the cause of Kuzey’s collapse.

Sami

In the novel The Disenchanted, Sami is the symbol of friendship for Kuzey: a friendship of thirty-one years that they cannot break off even if they want to. “That stubborn pig and I are like the front and back of the same head: even if we wanted to, we couldn’t break away from each other.” 35 Apart from the scene in which Sami and Kuzey meet, Sami is portrayed in the film much as he is in the novel. His paralysis from the waist down and his walking on crutches, his looking at Kuzey as both friend and enemy, and his attempts to keep Kuzey in check are similar in the film and the novel. Kuzey always tries to find Sami’s “voice, which hides his friendship, within the dimness” 36. A lasting friendship, but one that always looks in different directions. The difference between the novel and the film, as mentioned above, is that while the film says Kuzey and Sami met at the faculty of letters in 1976, in the novel they met in Germany, within a party.

Fındık İbram

Another important character in the novel The Disenchanted is Fındık İbram. In the film this character appears as Yunus Adam. He is “the most interesting man on the Peninsula” 37, a half-mad man who, like Kuzey, is caught in the net of the past. The killing of Fındık İbram’s father by the Greeks and his wish to attack Midilli one day are treated in the film as they are told in the novel. Besides this, he is an excellent swimmer, and Kuzey sees him as half fish, half man. His main function throughout the film is that Kuzey forces him to dive in search of Şafak’s body, and that in the end he finds it. The novel treats this in a similar way. In terms of typology, his accent, his being a little mad, and his putting one cigarette in his mouth and another behind his ear when offered are carried into the film. In the novel Fındık İbram is about 1.40 metres tall and very short, but in the film we are faced with a rather tall actor. In terms of name changes, the character who stands out in the film The Disenchanted is Fındık İbram, who is called Yunus Adam in the film.

Other Characters

In 1998, when Şafak meets Kuzey, a dog comes into the hotel garden. The two of them name the dog Benek. Benek holds an important place in both the novel and the film. Before she leaves, Şafak tells Kuzey to take good care of Benek. After Şafak’s death Kuzey fails to do so and searches for him every day. Benek, the most important thing Şafak left him, is treated in depth in both the film and the novel.

Another of the characters carried from the novel The Disenchanted into the film is Şuayip; in the novel he is in his seventies, responsible for the hotel’s accounts and deeply loyal, but in the film he is seen a few times as a young employee. The hotel attendant Şükrü also finds a place in the film. Handan, who in the novel embodies a mother’s tenderness towards Kuzey, is seen a few times in the film, and this tenderness can be felt. The servants Şükrü and Mücella are also brought to the screen with their closeness and affection for Kuzey.

Omissions in the Cast of Characters

When we look at the cast of characters in the novel The Disenchanted, there are characters who appear in the novel but were given no place when it was brought to the screen. In our view, some of them are important characters. In fact, all the characters around Kuzey are important, because to understand Kuzey one must first analyse the people around him. Erica, who sleeps beside Kuzey although we know they have no relationship, appears as the meeting of tenderness and strength in Kuzey. Emin Bey, a former army captain, shares Kuzey’s fate and is one of the rare people with whom he can communicate in silence. İhsan Hoca, who helps us analyse Kuzey through his philosophical views and the comments he makes at the end of the novel’s parts, is also treated as an important type. Because the refugee theme was not taken up, Osman Çileci, a member of the gang of human smugglers who stays at the hotel and who kills Kuzey in the novel, did not find a place on the screen. Leaving these characters out of the film is a choice of omission that creates a gap; on the other hand, not including Çiğdem’s boyfriend Cenk, Çiğdem’s friends Rana and Sinem, Çiğdem’s mother Vildan, Çiğdem’s grandmother, Çiğdem’s friend Yücel, Captain Emin’s pregnant wife Türkan, Halit and Necati Bey, Mahler and the little children who work at the hotel was the right decision, since it avoids needlessly swelling the crowd of characters. In our interview, Selim Güneş said that the refugee woman and Captain Emin were in the first version of the film, but that they chose to cut them during editing:

“I wanted to tell the dilemma between romantic love and affection that is in the novel. I also loved the fragile side of a man living through this dilemma. That is what I tried to tell. And in doing so, I didn’t give much room to characters and events that fell outside the telling of this dilemma.” 38

Being in Love and Loving

Being in love and loving, which form the main theme of the novel The Disenchanted, unfold within the triangle of Kuzey, Şafak and Çiğdem, albeit in different time frames. As we see in the screen version, the focus is mostly on the love story of Kuzey and Şafak, while Çiğdem’s love remains superficial. Kuzey stands at the apex of the love triangle. The loves that are lived, and the definitions of romantic love and affection, are seen through his eyes. Kuzey married when he was young and ended the marriage for reasons that remain unknown. Later, when he moved to Karaburun, he came with a woman, but she left him. In both the novel and the film, Kuzey’s understanding of love and affection is seen through Şafak. One day Şafak comes to stay at the hotel; they are drawn to each other, and however hard they try to run from each other, they grow ever closer. Each time Şafak leaves saying this is the last time, but in the end she finds herself back at Kuzey’s side. What Kuzey and Şafak go through drives them both to suicide.

Kuzey describes himself with the words “we hadn’t managed to make the revolution, we hadn’t managed to be good lovers.” 39 These words are spoken in story time, after Şafak has gone. They are the words of a man who has lost, all of whose branches of belief have been broken. As soon as he saw Şafak, Kuzey knew he would love her. “Suddenly I understand. I will love her eyes, and looking at her.” 40 Yet in spite of this Kuzey was afraid of loving, and ran away. Although every time she left he waited for her as if standing watch, and found peace when she came back, he still ran away from love. It is similar in the film. We see scenes of Kuzey waiting for Şafak at the hotel and running out when he hears the horn of her car. The story of his parting from Şafak is also treated in the film much as it is in the novel. “I won’t be in your future… Not because I don’t want to, but because I can’t; nature won’t allow it.” 41 One of the main reasons Kuzey leaves Şafak is the age difference between them. Kuzey does not want to take her future from her. Şafak wants to change, and he does not accept it; she wants to stay, and he does not ask her to. For Kuzey, loving “is sometimes letting go.” 42 It is the story of an unusual lover who, after Şafak, feels he does not deserve to love, yet says “I loved yesterday, I love today, and tomorrow – if I am to have a tomorrow – I will love even more” 43, and who, through the decisions he makes, carries his love and himself into the depths of the blue.

Şafak’s story is that of a woman who, although very young compared with Kuzey, was moved by his way of life and his bearing; who, though she had a fiancé, left everything behind and took refuge in Kuzey but was not loved back; and who found in the arms of death the peace she would have found in Kuzey’s arms. In the film, too, this fate is treated without alteration. Şafak’s arrivals, her departures and her happiness are portrayed successfully and in keeping with the novel.

In both the novel and the film of The Disenchanted, the dilemma of affection and romantic love becomes clearer as the scenes unfold. Together with Kuzey, Şafak searches for a definition of love. To the question of what love is, she answers: “Is it the most delicate shiver of our hearts?” 44 Had Kuzey made her shiver? By turning her life upside down, perhaps yes; it is clear that he drew Şafak towards such a definition of love. Although Şafak is ashamed of deceiving her fiancé, she cannot manage to run away from Kuzey. Still, she cannot escape regret. “If only we had met a year earlier.” 45 Şafak finds herself in a sea of if-onlys. Before she leaves, Şafak wants to stay, and when she gets no response she blames Kuzey for not returning her love, saying “I hope that one day you’ll learn what it means to be in love.” 46 Not only is Şafak’s love treated in the film much as it is in the novel, but her fate is treated in a similar way too. One day, as they are about to go down to the sea, Kuzey says to Şafak, “we’re late for the rehearsal.” 47 This is the rehearsal of Şafak’s death. The film’s opening sequence, set at the bottom of the sea, is likewise a pointer that foreshadows the ending to come.

Although Çiğdem’s love for Kuzey is not treated in the film, it is an important element of the novel. Çiğdem is the daughter of Kuzey’s former wife, and since childhood she has been in love with Kuzey through reading his letters. One day she finds Kuzey. Kuzey does not return her feelings, because he is someone who has taken blows from both life and love. The things that resemble his first meeting with Şafak only trigger his sorrow. Çiğdem’s expensive perfume is nothing beside Şafak’s scent, which smelled of flowers. “She looked like a woman waiting to be loved, not one who loves.” 48 Çiğdem waited to be loved, and although she got no response from Kuzey, she strove to help him and stayed by his side until his last moment.

Time

In the novel The Disenchanted, time moves in three ways. These are: the time frame of 1998, reached through flashbacks; the present time frame of 2003, in which story time unfolds; and the time frame of 2004, reached through flash-forwards, in which we see what the novel’s characters say about Kuzey after his suicide. The novel does not set up a chronological time line. Mehmet Eroğlu constructs his character’s floundering between past and present through transitions between past and present. “Instead of a chronological flow, various time frames are interwoven.” 49 This is a sign of the modernist approach.

In the film The Disenchanted, story time begins in 2003, but the events unfold through flashbacks, mostly in 1998. As in the novel, Kuzey’s meeting with Çiğdem leads him to tell of how he met Şafak, the flashback reveals this similarity, and similar events take place in the same places; these transitions have been carried onto the screen just as they are in the novel. In addition, one of the things the novel and the film share is that the season is summer.

Setting

In the novel The Disenchanted, the main setting is the Karayel hotel on the Karaburun peninsula in İzmir. In the film the hotel keeps the same name, while the peninsula is rendered in a similar way, but on İzmir’s Foça peninsula. Because Kuzey chose such a place as his refuge, and because the tragedy that follows his love ends in the blue waters of this peninsula, it was inevitable that the setting would be shared.

The descriptions of place in the novel The Disenchanted come to life in Selim Güneş’s hands and reach the screen as a visual feast. In addition, the ruins and the Turkuvaz Hotel that appear in the novel also feature in the film, with the same functions they have in the novel. Although Kuzey’s death is handled differently in the novel and the film, the place where it happens is similar: on the boat and at Domuz Burnu, right opposite the juniper tree.

Narrator

In the novel The Disenchanted, Mehmet Eroğlu gives the role of narrator to Kuzey, and the reader learns of events through his interior monologues. In the film, too, the narrative perspective lies with Kuzey. The narrating eye is present in both the novel and the film, and the narration is direct. However, the voices of the other characters that we hear in the novel in 2004 are not included in the film.

In the novel The Disenchanted, Mehmet Eroğlu uses intertextuality, through mythological narratives and through quotations from writers such as Joseph Conrad and Ruben Dario and from the film director Pierre Schoendoerffer. This joint use of the friendship between cinema and literature can be seen in the film as well. The film’s opening sequence begins with the words of Federico Garcia Lorca. Again near the beginning of the film, Kuzey watches Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and the Tolstoy quotations in that film pass from one film into The Disenchanted. Pablo Neruda’s poem The Dead Woman and quotations from writers and artists such as Arkadaş Zekai Özger, Tezer Özlü and Jim Morrison show that Selim Güneş, like Mehmet Eroğlu, sets out to bring the friendship between cinema and literature to the fore.

CONCLUSION

World cinema and Turkish cinema have been bound up with literature from the moment they first appeared. Turkish cinema had the support of literature when it was making its first films. Until the 1950s theatre held Turkish cinema under its influence, affecting it sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. In our country, especially with the adaptation of popular novels for the screen at the end of the 1950s, the partnership of cinema and literature managed to widen its influence year after year. This partnership has continued over the years, and adaptations from our literature have been brought to lovers of art.

The novel The Disenchanted also joined this caravan: written by Mehmet Eroğlu in 2005 and, after the years that followed, brought to the screen by Selim Güneş in 2017, it has become one of the works in which our literature and our cinema meet on common ground. This study has identified the literary and cinematic elements of this work, which tells of a former revolutionary, embittered with life, who cannot make peace with his past and tries to live in two time frames at once; which tells of his regret and his sorrow; and which tells the story of losers, of those who cannot hold on, of people left unfinished.

This work, which tells the story of a man who sees the life he lives as holding him captive, who lies crushed beneath his defeats with no strength left to climb out, whose only branch to cling to is alcohol, and who waits for death and longs for it, is an example of the transformative power of literature and cinema. The novel The Disenchanted has been brought to the screen through the complementary friendship and the transformative power of cinema and literature. This study, for its part, has followed the traces of both the novel and the film step by step and set out an analysis of the transformation and change that resulted. Bearing in mind that, while the world of the novel offers the writer a freer space, cinema’s captivity to time forces the director into omissions, this study has taken the path of identification rather than critical evaluation.

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APPENDIX 1: Interview with Selim Güneş, Director of The Disenchanted

In the film’s credits on some websites, Sevtap Özaltun is listed in the cast as ‘refugee woman’. But we don’t see a refugee woman in the film. Were these scenes cut later, or were they never there? After all, this character holds an important place. In the novel, after the chain of events around this refugee problem, Kuzey has himself killed by Osman, who is in charge of that business. Because he had promised not to commit suicide. In the film, Sami asks him to promise, Kuzey doesn’t, and he kills himself. I think this holds an important place in the film’s connection with the novel.

The refugee scene was in the final version of the script and it was also shot. But we cut it at the editing stage. Sevtap Özaltun’s name stayed in the credits, as did Gürsan Piri Onurlu’s.

In adaptations, omissions are an unavoidable choice because of cinema’s time constraints. But I’m curious about your thoughts on some of them. In the novel Kuzey is caught in a dilemma between romantic love and affection with both Şafak and Çiğdem. In the film, however, we see this only through Şafak. Çiğdem is also interested in Kuzey, but this seems to come more from Kuzey being an unusual person than from a feeling of love. Çiğdem’s past, which is prominent in the novel, and what she does after she comes to Kuzey are not explored much in the film. So, as you can tell, my question really centres on Çiğdem.

Çiğdem is also very different from the one in the novel. The only things they have in common are her name and the fact that she has come to save the hotel. For me that was enough. What makes Çiğdem meaningful in the film is that she reminds him of Şafak. Through what she wants to know about Şafak, we learn what Kuzey went through with Şafak, and through the answers he gives her and his reactions, we come to understand Kuzey’s world, his fragility and what he feels deep down.

The novel The Disenchanted has a large cast of characters, major and minor. It isn’t possible to put them all in the film. But I’m curious about two characters: İhsan and Captain Emin. In the novel these two also come across as dominant characters, through their conversations and their thoughts. So is the reason for leaving these characters out to keep the film focused on one thing? On love, for example.

Gürsan Piri Onurlu, for his part, played the character of Captain Emin (we saw him as another character alone in the hotel, settling accounts with his past like Kuzey). The cinematic equivalent of the novel’s İhsan Hoca could have been a “narrator” or a “voice-over”. It was right not to have one.

I’m also curious about the reasons for your choices regarding two dominant subjects that are prominent in the novel but absent from the film. The first is Kuzey’s political past. There is a scene in which he speaks of his dreams of revolution through interior monologue. That is how we learn in the film that Kuzey belongs to ’68. In the novel, however, there is a great deal more of it. In fact, it is what forms the novel’s axis: the disenchantments of love and of a defeated dream of revolution.

What made me give up the relationship between Kuzey and Çiğdem as told in the novel was that I approached Kuzey as a man of the ’78 generation. I have no objection to the ’68 generation. My objection is to the novel’s ’68-generation Kuzey. When I say this, the question comes: then why did you film this novel? My answer is very simple. I wanted to tell the dilemma between romantic love and affection that is in the novel. I also loved the fragile side of a man living through this dilemma. That is what I tried to tell. And in doing so, I didn’t give much room to characters and events that fell outside the telling of this dilemma. The characters who were part of the flow of events were in the film: Yunus, Şükrü, Şuayip, Mücella and Handan. Looking back in 2024, though, I can say I wish I had left out the character of “Sami” as well. Kuzey’s past and his disenchantment are conveyed as an undercurrent throughout the whole film.

At the end of the novel The Disenchanted, we see that Kuzey has himself killed because he had promised his friends that he would not commit suicide. In the film this is changed, and he kills himself, following Şafak’s path. What are the reasons for this choice?

I think one of the novel’s weakest points is Kuzey having himself killed. The Kuzey in the film would never do such a thing. He would go and shoot himself. And that is what he did. Once the writer decided to squeeze the refugee trade in as well, he tied up the ending this way.

In light of these choices, I’m curious about your approach to the question of ‘adaptation’. What do you think adaptation is? How should adaptation be done? What are the problems of adaptation?

For me, adaptation is conveying the feeling that the adapted work – the novel, the story, the poem – leaves in the director. Adaptation should be free. That is, once the novelist, the short-story writer or the poet has agreed to the adaptation of their work, they should not interfere in anything. The adapted work is one thing; a film is an entirely different means of expression. The difficulty of adaptation is the process of deciding how much to cut and how much to add. This process doesn’t happen in one go. And where will you stop? That isn’t easy to decide either. (Which characters, events and feelings you cut, and what kinds of additions you make, are the things that tell us about the director’s world.) In the end, you have to trust your instincts. Working very hard until the moment you can trust your instincts is a necessity. You have to take things out of the structure built in the novel, or tear that structure down completely. The work is a finished structure. It has an idea and a feeling. Because of that, people think adaptation is easy. But it isn’t. In terms of structure, too, I think the short story and the poem are closer to cinema than the novel. As with everything, adaptation takes a lot of hard work.

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NOTES

Alişan Okumuş, Master’s Student, Muğla Sıtkı Koçman University, Institute of Social Sciences, Department of Turkish Language and Literature,
[email protected], Orcid: 0009-0008-8901-9301

1 Ülkü Tamer, “Ne Devrim Yapabildiler Ne de Âşık Olabildiler, p.4
2 Esra Okutan, “Üzerimize İri Bir Karanlık Damladı”
3 Gerard Betton, Sinema Tarihi, p.8
4 Nijat Özön, Türk Sineması Kronolojisi (1895-1966), p.14
5 Nijat Özön, Sinema El Kitabı, p.115
6 Giovanni Scognamillo, Türk Sinema Tarihi Birinci Cilt, p.25
7 Nijat Özön, Sinema Terimler Sözlüğü, p.123
8 Özlem Kale, “Edebiyat ve Sinema İlişkisi”, p.274
9 Zeynep Çetin Erus, “Türkiye Sinemasında Uyarlamalara Genel Bir Bakış”, p.584
10 Cafer Gariper, “Cengiz Aytmatov’un Al Yazmalım Selvi Boylum Hikayesi ve Göstergelerarasılık”, p.76
11 Ibid., p.79
12 Nijat Özön, Sinema El Kitabı, p.261
13 Cevahir Kayım, “Uyarlama Biçimleri”, p.1-3
14 Adalet Ağaoğlu, “Sinema Edebiyatın Kapısını Çalacaksa” p.316
15 Reyhan Tutumlu, “Anlatı Bilimi Açısından Roman-Sinema Etkileşimi ve Bir Uygulama: Anayurt Oteli”, p.2
16 Mehmet Eroğlu, Düş Kırgınları, p.13
17 Hasan Yürek, “Mehmet Eroğlu’nun Düş Kırgınları Üzerine Genel Bir Değerlendirme”, p.19
18 Mehmet Eroğlu, Düş Kırgınları, p.9
19 Ibid., p.69
20 Ibid., p.119
21 Ibid., p.165
22 Hasan Yürek, İnsan Manzaralarının Ressamı: Mehmet Eroğlu’nun Romancılığı, p.222
23 Mehmet Eroğlu, Düş Kırgınları, p.43
24 Ibid., p.140
25 Hasan Yürek, İnsan Manzaralarının Ressamı: Mehmet Eroğlu’nun Romancılığı, p.222
26 Mehmet Eroğlu, Düş Kırgınları, p.10
27 Ibid., p.31
28 Ibid., p.108
29 Ibid., p.140
30 Ibid., p.174
31 Ibid., p.210
32 Ibid., p.58
33 Hasan Yürek, İnsan Manzaralarının Ressamı: Mehmet Eroğlu’nun Romancılığı, p.232
34 Appendix 1: Interview with Selim Güneş, Director of The Disenchanted
35 Mehmet Eroğlu, Düş Kırgınları, p.138
36 Ibid., p.11
37 Ibid., p.23
38 Appendix 1: Interview with Selim Güneş, Director of The Disenchanted
39 Mehmet Eroğlu, Düş Kırgınları, p.21
40 Ibid., p.35
41 Ibid., p.221
42 Ibid., p.197
43 Ibid., p.117
44 Ibid., p.97
45 Ibid., p.147
46 Ibid., p.225
47 Ibid., p.194
48 Ibid., p.146
49 Hasan Yürek, İnsan Manzaralarının Ressamı: Mehmet Eroğlu’nun Romancılığı, p.235

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