Tragic thought in Oğuz Atay’s Tehlikeli Oyunlar:|Identity, culture, and histor

Abstract

This work discusses how Oğuz Atay’s Tehlikeli Oyunlar calls the notions of identity, culture, and history into question from the standpoint of tragic thought. The term “tragic thought” is derived from Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s main thesis that ancient Greek tragedy entails a form of critical (re)thinking in which human being and human action are interpreted as riddles and problems ridden with ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions evading definitive solutions. In ancient Greek tragedy, the notion of identity comes across as a pursuit of self-understanding while the concepts of history and culture are taken from a critical standpoint concerning one’s relation to his era in the prism of past, present, and future. To flesh out this critical core, I majorly concentrate upon the conflicts and double binds at play in Tehlikeli Oyunlar with respect to notions of identity, history, and culture understood as such. With an interdisciplinary approach, I examine how Atay’s tragic thought articulates the conundrums and paradoxes inherent in his own historical and cultural milieu and sheds light on the unmasterable contingencies and conflicts defining human condition. By demonstrating that pre-established structures and narratives do not provide satisfying answers to restless human search, I claim that Tehlikeli Oyunlar ultimately brings about the question of crisis. The concluding remarks illustrate that the crisis comes across as the experience of the vanishing of ground upon which one constructs his sense of identity in course of his pursuit of self-understanding and establishes his historical and cultural framework of relation to the self and the world.