Tale or New Life? A Reading of the Novel New Life According to the Morphology of Folktale

Abstract

Yilchz Ecevit describes the concept of intertextuality as a text referring to a preceding text in terms of structure or context, in postmodern novels. However researches on structural references in postmodern novels are scarce and the existing ones only emphasize on the recurrence of fictional structure in western novels. Yet in some of the postmodern novels written in Turkey, authors use the tale form to realize the structural referring of intertextuality and thus form a bond with the traditions of the society where these novels are born. After all, traditional and modern unite at the foundations of postmodernism to create anew whole. This article tries to inspect Orhan Pamuk's Yeni Hayat, the writer of which is considered a postmodernist novelist by literary critics, starting with its images of search and journey to see how tale becomes one of the reading possibilities created by these images and Pamuk's use of tale form in terms of intertextuality. It is seen that many elements of tale in Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale also exist in New Life. But it is also revealed that Pamuk has made a switch between the hero and the agressor by using the game element of postmodernist novel technique. The person who is described as the hero from the beginning of the novel to its end, finally morphs into a false hero which is one of Propp's character types. The revelation that the reader being the real hero at the end of the New Life's spiraling fiction calls for multi-directional possibilities of reading which is the dominant point of these novels under discussion. And this is the equivalent of postmodernism form which goes by the name re-production.