Monolingualizing the multilingual Ottoman novel: Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi

Abstract

In the introduction to his recent book, What is a World?, 1 Pheng Cheah argues: 'It should be evident that we should not take the presentation of the world for granted because, it, at the very least, is given to us by imagination'. 2 His intervention into the debates within the field of world literature draws our attention to a hitherto overlooked aspect of the field: the world.Whether it is by charting circulation, waves within the world-system, or mapping the meridian of the world of letters -to reference the most famous, but certainly not the only models -world literature has relied heavily on 'normative understandings of the world', 3where the world remains a conceptually stable and seemingly objective unit of analysis. As Cheah asserts 'world literature as a world-making activity', 4 he refocuses our attention on the field of world literature itself, highlighting that it is a critical activity, one which produces and reinforces not only definitions of literature but also of the world. Cheah, of course, is not the only scholar to draw attention to world literature as worldmaking. Francesca Orsini, for example, points to the biases and privileges that have not yet been fully accounted for in the revival of world literature at the turn of the 21 st century: '"World literature," a famously slippery, apparently expansive yet surprisingly narrow category, has been much theorized and re-theorized in recent years as comparative literature for the global age, with one foot in the US university curriculum and the other in theories of globalization'. 5 Orsini's work takes aim particularly at the monolingual conception of the world in 21 st century revival of 'world literature', where it cannot seem to, or does not want to, accommodate the fact that 'literary cultures have indeed been multilingual in most parts of the world since the second millennium '. 6 Building on the above interventions in world literature, this chapter will consider world literature and multilingualism with regard to the late-Ottoman novel. 7 Its starting point is to emphasize that multilingualism is the contextual reality, linguistic scaffold and thematic interest of the Ottoman novel, particularly in Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi (1875). It will argue that, for the Ottoman novel, the multilingual ecology of the form may be defined as cosmopolitanism, where, according to Cheah it is 'about viewing oneself as part of the