Loneliness means confronting yourself,
talking to the other selves.
Looking at yourself, the other selves;
fighting.
Sometimes, , is killing
The one among them who resembles you the most,
just because he doesn't look like you.
Loneliness is killing.
…
Loneliness is your downfall to yourself.
…
(Hasan Ali Toptaş)
Innocent; What begins with grief ends with a vengeance that hangs on the ceiling. When I finished "The Last Days of Innocence", I remembered the following sentence that Shakespeare (2017) made Hamlet say: "This is what will happen, so it is."
Selahattin Yusuf's His last novel, "The Last Days of Innocence", can be discussed in the context of its relationship with loneliness, as well as the relationship between hate-pleasure and death, which we frequently refer to in psychoanalysis.
Let's start with the theme of "Loneliness". Loneliness in the novel stands out primarily as a longing for something "absolutely missing" rather than the feeling of "not being seen or noticed". We watch that the character Innocent, who gives the novel its main color and theme, tries to find shelter for himself from the deadlocks and hopelessness of his situation. At the end of the story, we witness scenes where Innocent's world and "emotional state" overflow in a shocking way. Innocent can only overcome his painful loneliness by "stopping seeing" it. Destruction thus turns from fantasy into reality. It calls something that cannot be overcome when abstracted into a manageable area, as if by concretizing it and changing the plane of reality.
Sigmund Freud, whose analyzes continue to maintain their importance in our time, made very important propositions in 1905. In a dated article, or rather in a memoir, loneliness is abstracted as follows: “I owe my knowledge of the origin of childhood anxiety to a three-year-old boy. When he was in a room without light, I heard him shout: 'Auntie, tell me something, I'm scared, because it's so dark in here!' His aunt answers him: 'What good will this do since you can't see me?' The boy says, 'Let it be,' 'When someone talks. it becomes bright…'” (p. 224). This kid This state of anxiety is a fact that we can never completely get rid of throughout our lives. The anxiety in question is basically an emotional state that emerges at a very early stage due to the possibility of the absence of the first object, that is, the mother.
One of the expressions in "The Last Days of Innocence" reveals loneliness in the most striking way. It was: "When a person is alone enough, only then can there be two people..." This brings to mind the concept of "the capacity to be alone" of D. W. Winnicott, the pioneer of object relations theory. According to Winnicot (1958), this situation is understood as the child's capacity to feel lonely around someone, rather than being alone next to someone. But thus, the basis of the capacity to exist on its own is based on a paradox. Because the nature of the relationship between the baby and the mother, which exists on its own, is paradoxical. Winnicott draws attention to this paradox. He says: “However, there is a deficiency in being able to exist on one's own in the presence of another person, which can occur at a very early stage, when the ego immaturity is naturally balanced by the ego support coming from the mother.” (p. 417). Over time, the baby introjects the mother who supports his ego, and in this way it becomes possible for him to exist on his own. Then it is through this relationship with the inner mother that makes it possible to exist on one's own and to enjoy being on one's own. Loneliness depends strongly on the nature, form and intensity of the relationship with this inner mother. We can say that the natural result of this approach also sheds light on the nature of coexistence with the other. For example; We have to take into account that the character's intolerance of existing alone, who cannot stand loneliness, may also stem from his inability to internalize co-existence with the other (the one who replaces the mother).
The loneliness that the character makes us feel in the novel is undoubtedly It brings to mind his relationship with his mother. “He hadn't had a relationship yet, he wasn't ruined yet.” When I read this sentence, a curiosity arose in my mind about the content of the relationship between the hero, who was left alone in the crowd, and on the other hand, could not feel loneliness internally and could not cope with his loneliness, with his mother. This is how to establish a relationship Was Dar really dangerous? Where was Innocent's inner object, his "mother", who was good and could keep him alive? Why was his mother never mentioned in the story when his conflicts with women and his chronic "incompetence" in his relationships were so intense and central?
While dealing with loneliness, it is necessary to consider the sources of death and pleasure that the character resorts to. In his text titled "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" (2001), Freud wants to reveal the spiritual power of death. After the 1920s, when he focused heavily on the concept of "narcissism", Freud came to the point that libidinal forces alone would not be sufficient for spiritual development and that the death drive should also be added to it. According to him, everything should be considered together with its opposite. Libidinal energy and the destructive and powerful "death drive" that work as antagonists work together. Thus, these two drives, whose orientations are opposite to each other, function inseparably throughout life. In “Play and Reality” (1971), Winnicott mentions that the subject must destroy the object and give up the internal mother object in order to establish a relationship as a separate person from the object, which is a pile of reflections on object use. In addition to these ideas, Thomas H. Ogden (2017) states that it is critical for the object to survive as a “living”, “breathing”, “emotionally responsive real external mother object” in the process of “being destroyed because it is real, and becoming real because it is destroyed”. He mentioned that it is important and that it is inevitably destroyed during the development process that leads the baby to object use. According to René Roussillon (2013), nothing is created without destruction. In order for something new to form, its previous state must be destroyed. Both physical metabolism and the act of spiritual incorporation require the introduction of destructive processes. Therefore, at this point, it is necessary to focus not on the destructiveness itself, but on what is done with this destructiveness and where it is intended to be achieved. It is necessary to deal with the ways of expressing and showing. Destruction can support life and also serve creativity. However, if we return to the novel, the destructive and creative forces in Masum's psyche, that is, death and libido, are created in a way that supports vitality and predicts. It does not work within a plausible dialectic. Therefore, we can say that the death drive dominates the libidinal drive in the novel. It is interesting to observe this throughout the typical obsession landscapes exhibited throughout the novel.
While thinking about the sources of the character's death drive, it is necessary to focus on the subject of obsession, which is closely related to it. “He arranged the stones as if he could find the lost order of his life among them.” Before taking a closer look at Innocent, who developed an obsessive relationship with the okey pieces in the coffeehouse, I would like to focus on Freud's ideas on obsession. According to Freud (1920), obsessions, habits and rituals are linked to the death drive. Freud discovered the death drive through repetition compulsion. He evaluated the persistent repetition of obsessions as resulting from the death drive. What further opens and widens the gap between Innocent and his life is that the character's ongoing efforts to hold on to life fail each time. Innocent's addiction to his ideal, his dark determination to make the art film he wants to make, when combined with the obsession with emotions revolving around Handan, reveals the context of the death drive. In other words, we should talk about a deadly destructiveness rather than a libidinal vitality.
The familiar difficult core in male-female relations is revealed with detailed impressions, observations and analysis throughout the novel. Here, his "drunk of freedom"; I believe that it is necessary to focus on the character of Handan, who is in a state of ecstasy that Masum describes as "adolescent freedom". Handan's relationship with her father is displayed in a very pathetic way. “From the Khan who was not allowed to be born, who was given up on…” But he was born anyway. First of all, in the beginning, it seems that everyone was taken into the world with a natural right, with a special permission from the Khan. As a result of this and the terrible injury to her sexual pride at a very early age, Handan is a character who overflows from within herself, cannot be rinsed, flows, melts, evaporates, disintegrates, integrates and always glosses over. Therefore, Masum, who is not strong and cannot establish a bond other than obsession, has a relationship with Handan. It's no wonder he can't take part in her life. The letter that Handan wrote to her psychiatrist friend, who will one day want to treat Innocent too, and which frequently contains "emptiness", points to this unhealed wound, "the place that finished Innocent too". The author takes the floor here: “The gap could not be closed. The emptiness that opened inside the woman was eating people, eating love, eating men, eating life. This was the well that swallowed Masum..." Innocent persistently tries to connect with the things he cannot understand and is always surprised by. In fact, this points to the unbridgeable distance between everything and the Innocent; to the distance that never closes between his life and his despair. Therefore, it is of no use that their mutual friend, the psychiatrist (Sander), "breaks despair into pieces and fills it with suggestion medicine..." in order for Innocent to survive. “Psychoanalysis” is not and cannot be enough to close Innocent's “distances”.
There is one more thing. This "art film", which seems to be the only "connection" between Masum and life, must have a special meaning. The film obsession here seems to symbolize Masum's own life, which he cannot tell a story or create a "game" in. A game of life that ends in despair. For example, the author says, "To make one lose one's mark, to pretend one's not living in this world where everyone wants to leave a trace, good or bad..." This seems more like a desire to be "seen for the last time" than a desire to be seen or to overcome loneliness. In other words, it is an image oriented towards death, not vitality.
So, according to the novel, why is death such an intense feeling for Innocent? Maybe he wanted to escape the spell of death by reflecting his resentments on Handan, making her a kind of carrier of his brokenness. Perhaps Handan herself was a magical game and a solid trap of death for Masum.
Aside from everything else, Masum's passion or obsession to exist entirely in Handan's mind. open. What makes this interesting in the novel is, of course, that it is imagined as a feeling of "revenge". It may not heal Innocent's wound, but it is still useful to listen to Hamlet by William Shakespeare (2017):
“To exist or not to exist is the question. this!
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