Mutfak Çıkmazı’nda Felsefi Bir Eylem Olarak Yemek Yapmak ve Yemek Yemek

Abstract

Cooking and eating are integral parts of daily life. Both vital and nurturing for human life and enriching life experience with mental and physical sense of satisfaction, these actions have also been a subject of works of art. Culinary preparations, dining tables and banquets are also often treated as literary themes. While world literature abounds with fictional works on these themes, Turkish literature rather focuses on non-fiction in addressing food as a theme. Turkish authors have created a voluminous corpus on Ramadan tables in particular, and foods and drinks available in each season and in particular venues in general. Beside non-fictional tables, Mutfak Çıkmazı (i.e. Kitchen Dead End, 1960) is one of the primary works about cooking and eating in Turkish literature. At first glance, this novel features cooking as the futile passion of a law student who isolates himself from everything due to his feelings of loneliness and sense of failure. As is evident in almost all contemporary literary works, existentialism and alienation were among the primary subjects of interest among Turkish intellectuals in the early 1960s, when Tahsin Yücel published Mutfak Çıkmazı as his first novel. In his work, Tahsin Yücel brought to life a character very similar to Mersault, the alienated non-conformist protagonist of The Stranger, i.e. one of the most prominent works of modern French literature. The author seems to have assigned a set of philosophical meanings to food as the main theme of this work. While many prominent works of fiction on the subject highlight the therapeutic, gratifying and uniting aspects of cooking and eating , Tahsin Yücel sees the subject in a rather different light. The novel's content mainly revolves around the theme of cooking, and its intellectual background focuses on the notion of alienation, which originates from one's feelings of apathy and repulsion for their environment. Emphasizing the fact that Tahsin Yücel treats cooking and eating, i.e. the main themes of his novel Mutfak Çıkmazı, as isolating and alienating philosophical acts, which is an original literary contribution , this paper discusses the accord between the existentialist philosophy and the contextual/ intellectual integrity of the novel.