OCEAN VUONG’UN YERYÜZÜNDE BİR AN İÇİN MUHTEŞEMİZ ROMANINDA YENİ İÇTENLİK ETİĞİ

Abstract

Bu makale, Ocean Vuong’un Yeryüzünde Bir An İçin Muhteşemiz (2020) romanını yeni içtenlik perspektifiyle derinlemesine inceleyerek, Vuong’un poetikası ve anlatı etiğinin, kimlik, travma ve arzu üzerine geleneksel söylemleri aşan ve postmodern ironi ile sinizmi reddeden radikal bir incinebilirlik anlayışını nasıl dile getirdiğini açıklamaktadır. Beden ve dilin kesişiminde konumlanan Vuong’un dili, iğren(il)me, yaralanma ve yeniden doğuş mefhumlarını müzakere eden duygulanımsal, semiyotik bir söylem kullanarak, anlamın hem kaynağı hem de mekânı olarak bedeni ön plana çıkarır. David Foster Wallace tarafından geliştirilen yeni içtenlik etiğinin kuramsal çerçevesinden yararlanan bu çalışma, Vuong’un anlatısının, dokunma duyusuna dayanan bir dil aracılığıyla benmerkezciliğin ötesine geçme etik zorunluluğunu içeren, yüzü ötekine dönük bir ilişkisellik yönelimini hayata geçirdiğini savunmaktadır. Sessizlik ve söz, bedenler arası geçişkenlik ve kuir yakınlık arasındaki karmaşık etkileşim, yeni içtenlik etiğinin basmakalıp duygusallık ya da indirgemeci bir yaklaşım olmadığını; aksine, varlık ve yokluk, ölüm ve yeniden doğuş arasında eşikte oluş haline duyarlı öznelerarası bir edim olduğunu açığa çıkarır. Romanın plasenta dilini, yaşam ve ölümün birbirinin içine işlediğini ifade eden bir gösterge olarak kullanışını inceleyerek, makale Vuong’un anlatısını, yeni içtenliğin ironi ve mesafeye karşı direniş çizgisinin içine yerleştirmenin yanı sıra, kuir edebiyatında yazma, hafıza, temas ve aidiyet etiğini yeniden yapılandıran önemli bir müdahale olarak konumlandırmaktadır. Bu yeniden yönelim, incinebilirliği ve bedenlerarası yakınlığı etik yükümlülük biçimleri olarak ön plana çıkaran yeni içtenlik yazını akımıyla uyum içindedir. Bu nedenle Vuong’un romanı, anlatı pratiğini ilişkisel etik ve duygulanımsal tanıklık mekânına dönüştürerek okurdan aktif, bedensel bir alımlama talep eden yeni içtenlik etosunu somutlaştırmaktadır.

Keywords

• Ocean Vuong
• Yeryüzünde Bir An İçin Muhteşemiz
• Postmodern İroni
• Post-postmodernizm
• Yeni İçtenlik Etiği

THE NEW SINCERITY ETHIC IN OCEAN VUONG’S ON EARTH WE’RE BRIEFLY GORGEOUS

Abstract

This article advances a critical exegesis of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2020) through the prism of the new sincerity, elucidating how Vuong’s poetics and narrative ethics coalesce to articulate a radical understanding of vulnerability that transcends conventional discourses of identity, trauma, and desire, and that defies postmodern irony and cynicism. Situated at the interstices of corporeality and language, Vuong’s prose foregrounds the body as both a site and source of meaning, deploying an affective, semiotic register that negotiates the notions of abjection, wound, and regeneration. Engaging with the theoretical framework of new sincerity ethic advanced by David Foster Wallace, this study contends that Vuong’s narrative enacts an extrorse orientation toward relationality, an ethical imperative to move beyond solipsism through a language of touch. The novel’s complex interplay of silence and speech, trans-corporeality, and queer intimacy manifests that the ethic of new sincerity is neither sentimental nor reductive, but an intersubjective practice attuned to the liminality between presence and absence, death and rebirth. By exploring the novel’s deployment of the language of the placenta as the signifier of interpenetrating life and death, the article not only situates Vuong’s narrative within the lineage of new sincerity’s resistance to irony and detachment but also posits it as a seminal intervention that reconfigures the ethics of writing, memory, belonging and contact in queer literature. This reorientation resonates with the movement of new sincerity writing, which privileges vulnerability and inter-bodied kinship as modes of ethical engagement. Vuong’s novel thus exemplifies the new sincerity ethos by transforming narrative practice into a site of relational ethics and affective witness, demanding an active, embodied reception from its readership.

Keywords

• Ocean Vuong
• On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
• Postmodern Irony
• Post-postmodernism
• The Ethic of New Sincerity

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