Literature and Space

Before going on a trip, when you take books with you, do you take care to choose your books in accordance with the atmosphere of the place you are going? When you read the descriptions of a novel, when you learn a new word, doesn't the effort we make to digest the descriptions or understand the new word always create the need to visualize a picture or a place in our minds? For example, when reading a novel or a poem, the desire to visualize a place in your mind is an effort to go as far as your perception can go.

Sometimes, as the things that the works we read try to tell us become increasingly clear in the texts we read, we feel the need to erase the pictures that have formed in our brains and create a new picture. This is an effort to harmonize what is told in the work with our dreams. At the point where our perception can help us grasp what is told to us at the highest level, the entire picture has come to life in our brains. The imaginary picture, which is a projection of our perceptions, begins to include our feelings in the picture in the next step. At that moment, the imaginary visual space, feelings, smells, and colors begin to become symbols of the work we read. For this reason, the places that literary works force us to imagine are important. However, due to the differences in perception we all have, the places we imagine cause countless imaginary places to form in many people who read the same work. Over time, the unique but personal imaginary places, colors, smells, and sections of our lives that have a certain meaning for us of a literary work we read create a memory between us and the literary work. The emotional relationship between us and the work is embedded in the perceptions in our brains and in the memory of our sensory organs. Depending on where it is placed, it may give us pleasure, sadness, laughter or tears, or even pain.

When I read Feride Çiçekoğlu’s novel, The Other Side of the Water, in Assos and viewed the island of Lesbos, the content of the novel gained more meaning and my feelings deepened. Again, when I read Dido Sotiriyu’s novel, Benden Selam Söyle Anadolu’ya, in the same place, the Aegean or Archipelago of Homer and the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, which took on the color of wine in the evening sun, penetrated all the sensitivity in my perceptions. When I read the poems that Nazım wrote in Prague in Prague, when I read Emile Zola’s Germinal during a trip to France, the depth I caught in the relationship between the work and the setting was very different and enjoyable.

Description is a way to capture the reader's imagination, to hypnotize the reader. The better the description is and the more it helps us use our imagination, the longer and deeper the permanence of the work we read will be. The richness of the description also creates richness in our perceptions. It details the space. Therefore, the smells, colors, sounds, etc. make us feel as if we were in the place described. When you finish a work that uses the power of words well, the real space you return to has definitely been disappointing.

One of the most successful people in our literature who uses description is Yaşar Kemal. I have come across many readers who complain about the frequency of repetition and the length of descriptions in Yaşar Kemal, but Yaşar Kemal is one of the important examples who can effectively make you feel the power of words and expression. Look at the Euphrates Water Flowing Blood, Ant Drinking Water, Dawn Roosters and the island he describes in Çıplak Deniz Çıplak Island are extremely successful examples of Yaşar Kemal's publications in the recent past.

Literature and setting! The effect that works create on the reader is as important as the events, characters, knot, exposition and resolution sequence. A setting that is not described or imagined in accordance with a work spoils the pleasure while reading. If Victor Hugo had not described Jean Valjean’s walks in the sewage pits where rats were running wild, the sound of water coming from Jean Valjean’s feet walking in the sewage water would not be echoing in my ears right now. In other words, the richness of the narration and the author’s experiences nourish the setting. The reader finds the pleasure of reading in works that describe the richness of the setting well.