Bilge Karasu in the Context of World Literature

Abstract

This article revisits the late Bilge Karasu’s (d. 1995) strikingly original novel Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi (1979) (translated into English as The Garden of Departed Cats) as frame story to assess its world literary relevance considering current debates about what defines world literature. In light of recent criteria attributed to the term—freedom from national alliances and the concept of period (Romanticism, modernism, etc.); mobility among literary, cultural, and social contexts; and critical endurance—The Garden of Departed Cats, a masterful blend of different literary traditions and experimental linguistic and stylistic forms and a deeply philosophical meditation on time, existence, life, loss, and death emerges as a work of world literary status. Its enduring relevance is paradoxically based on its incomprehensibility, which ensures continuing critical debate.