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that when the church was constructed, two strong magnets were
embedded, one at the top of the vault and one beneath the floor, and
the iron bar is suspended between them. He concludes: This
humble one, full of fault, with my faulty intellect, observed it to be
so; God willing there is no error in my observation (II.325b).
(Dankoff 2004, 197)
Dankoff contrasts Evliyas rational approach here with his attitude toward the
palm-fiber ropes from the time of Solomon in the courtyard of the Aqsa Mosque
in Jerusalem (197-98). Evliyas being more readily persuaded when it comes to
miracles of Muslim saints, and his not questioning any miracle if its source is
the Koran, are consistent with his views in the text as a whole. That is why does
not include Solomons miracle under the category of marvels and wonders.
Thus, the borderlines of Evliyas world of the strange and wondrous are drawn
by the mentality represented in his work.
While Evliya remains true to his faith with regard to divine cause and
effect, there are no limits when it comes to appreciating human effort and
creativity. In Vienna, for example, he is enthusiastic in his admiration of alarm
clocks, mechanical carriages and mills, effigies of Turkish captives moving like
a wound clock, and other clockwork mechanisms (VII.57b-59a).
Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from
which all storytellers have drawn, says Walter Benjamin (1969, 84). As
mentioned above, if the narratives of marvels and wonders are not told as
events or situations that Evliya has himself experienced or witnessed, then they
come mainly from oral sources. These ear-witness sources may be narratives
transmitted by the oral memory of his own culture and kept in Evliyas mind, or
they may be storytellers from faraway places. Consider the legends about the
Rock of Ali in Mt. Subhan near Adilcevaz, told under the heading, Wonders of
Gods creation, marvelous to behold (Ve mine'l-garib sun- lh vcib'sseyr). Evliya relates different versions of how the dragon was turned to stone
and lets his readers choose which one they want to believe in (IV.243b-244a).
Presenting alternative narratives and not insisting on one point of view show that
Evliya is a storyteller who feeds and is fed by oral culture. In oral culture,
variations of a legend are as plentiful as repetitions, and there is no limit to
repetition. As Jack Goody remarks, in oral culture the genuine version is the
one produced by ones contemporaries not the oldest but the youngest
(1992, 17). Evliya puts into practice the way of generating new texts found in
oral tradition. Like every storyteller, his creativity lies in rearranging old
patterns and themes using new materials.
When his source for stories about marvels and wonders is other
storytellers, Evliya invariably informs us who told him the story and under what
conditions. As Benjamin remarks, The story teller takes what he tells from
experience his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the
experience of those who are listening to his tale (1969, 87). Evliya especially
questions old people when he is suspicious about a story that he has heard; if
they approve it, he too begins to believe it. The important point here is that he
consults with the oldest i.e. the most experienced ones, which
demonstrates the relation he establishes as a storyteller between experience and
knowledge.
Evliyas position as narrator also shifts according to the source. We
observe him as: both narrator and one of the characters affecting the plot;
narrator who observes the event experienced by another person; narrator who
observes a situation and also questions it; narrator who gives the stage to another
storyteller; narrator who allows the story to be told through dialogue. And his
point of view changes in parallel with these positions. When he exercises his
position as narrator, his viewpoint establishes the viewpoint of the text and he
channels the reader or the listener in that direction. On the other hand, when the
story is told through dialogue, the viewpoint is no longer guided by the narrator.
In narratives recounted by this method, which occur frequently in the
Seyahatnme, Evliya keeps his characters at arms length especially those
who are not from his own social-ideological context and allows them to exist
by themselves. Then we have [t]hese distinctive links and interrelationships
between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different
languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social
heteroglassia, its dialogization that Bakhtin specifies as the basic
distinguishing feature of the stylistic of the novel (Bakhtin 1981, 263). Even if
we limit our view of the Seyahatnme to narratives of marvels and wonders,
we see the structure of discourse of the work as heteroglot, polyphonic and
multi-stylistic.
While describing a very large geographical area, including his own social
ground of the Ottoman Empire and neighboring districts that are strange to him,
Evliya presents the human drama or the ethnology in fictional form, using all the
possibilities of language and narrative art. The narratives of marvels and
wonders, however much they accustom the reader or the listener to the
viewpoint of the work as a whole, primarily relate to Evliyas world of the
strange and wondrous. In other word, marvels and wonders do not
constitute a category independent of the narrator and the work as a whole. In
these narratives Evliya presents the extraordinary aspects of his travels. But in
doing so, he does not digress from the main text; rather he completes the work in
a manner suitable to the tradition of travel narrative. These narratives, that push
the limits of both the human and the divine, serve to awaken the amazement of
his contemporaries and to challenge their credulity. For us today they are a rich
treasure for both literary and cultural studies, as cultural products found worthy
to tell by a talented storyteller who pushed the limits of the art of description and
the art of narration.
Bibliography
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