ÜTOPYANIN SINIRLARI: SARAH HALL’UN THE CARHULLAN ARMY ADLI ESERİNDE ŞİFA VE ZEHİR

Öz

Bu çalışma, Sarah Hall tarafından kaleme alınan The Carhullan Army (2007) adlı eserde tasvir edilmiş kurgusal topluma özel bir vurgu yaparak ütopik ve distopik paradigmalar arasında bulunan akışkan sınırı eleştirel bir biçimde incelemektedir. Analiz, ilk olarak, Carhullan topluluğu ile antik ‘polis’ arasındaki benzerliği ortaya koymak amacıyla Jean-Pierre Vernant’ın The Origins of Greek Thought ve Plato’nun Phaedrus adlı eserlerine başvurmaktadır. Çalışma, sözü edilen odak noktasından hareketle, Jacques Derrida’nın (“Plato’s Pharmacy” başlıklı makalesinde yer alan önemli bir terim olan) ‘pharmakon’ kavramından temel yapıbozumcu çerçeve olarak faydalanmaktadır. Derrida’ya ait olan ve hem şifa hem de zehir anlamlarına gelen bu kavram, Batı’ya özgü logosentrik düşüncenin altında yatan ve yazı ile konuşma arasındaki ayrıma benzeyen hiyerarşi ve ikilik örneklerinin doğasındaki dengesizliği ortaya çıkarmak amacıyla onun tarafından yürütülen yapıbozumcu çabanın çok önemli bir parçasıdır. Bu bağlamda, bu çalışmanın temel amacı Hall’un romanında tasvir edilen tarım toplumunun ütopik vaatlerin altında bazı distopik unsurları saklamak için kullandığı mekanizmaları göz önüne sermek ve teknolojinin bu konudaki işlevini analiz etmektir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Distopya
• Pharmakon
• Sarah Hall
• The Carhullan Army
• Ütopya.

THE LIMITS OF UTOPIA: REMEDY AND POISON IN THE CARHULLAN ARMY BY SARAH HALL

Öz

This study offers a critical investigation into the fluid boundary between utopian and dystopian paradigms, with particular emphasis on the fictional society depicted in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007). The analysis initially employs The Origins of Greek Thought by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Phaedrus by Plato to delineate the affinity between the Carhullan community and the ancient ‘polis.’ Building on that focus, the study draws upon Jacques Derrida’s concept of the ‘pharmakon’ (a key term in his essay titled “Plato’s Pharmacy”) as the primary deconstructive framework. Derrida’s notion, signifying a dual nature as both remedy and poison, is pivotal to his deconstructionist endeavour, as he seeks to expose the inherent instability of hierarchies and dualities, such as those between writing and speech, that underlie the logocentric Western thought. Within this context, the primary objective of this study is to demonstrate the mechanisms by which the agrarian society depicted in Hall’s novel conceals some dystopian elements beneath the veneer of utopian promises, and to analyse the function of technology in this respect.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Dystopia
• Pharmakon
• Sarah Hall
• The Carhullan Army
• Utopia

Kaynakça

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2. Derrida, J. (1981). Plato’s pharmacy. In Dissemination (Trans. B. Johnson) (pp. 61-171). The Athlone Press. (originally published in Paris in 1972).
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4. Hall, E. (2019). “Remember summer”: Twenty-first century notions of memory and deep time in Louisa Hall’s Speak. South Atlantic Review, 84(1), 123-40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26745492
5. Hall, S. (2007). The Carhullan army (Kobo Edition). Faber and Faber.
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7. Lea, D. (2017). Sarah Hall. In Twenty-first-century fiction: Contemporary British voices (pp. 154-201). Manchester University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv18b5j8v.8
8. Nietzsche, F. (1999). The birth of tragedy. R. Geuss and R. Speirs (Ed.), in The birth of tragedy and other writings (Trans. R. Speirs, Eighth Printing) (pp. 1-116). Cambridge University Press.

9. Plato. (1956). Phaedrus (Trans. W. C. Helmbold and W. G. Rabinowitz, Fourteenth Printing). The Liberal Arts Press, Inc.
10. Smith, B. (2019). Imagined energy futures in contemporary speculative fictions. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 6(2-3), 136-54. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/resilience.6.2-3.0136
11. Vernant, J.-P. (1982). The origins of Greek thought (Translated from the French, Third Printing). Cornell University Press. (originally published in France in 1962).
12. Vice, S. (2017). Sarah Hall: A new kind of storytelling. J. Acheson (Ed.), in The contemporary British novel since 2000 (pp. 70-78). Edinburgh University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctv2f4vkr9.10