ORHAN KEMAL’S NOVELS

             By Dr.Mehmet N.Gültekin

             Aesthetics and literature provide us with information regarding changes and transformations which are evident by their effects on social life. Realist literature, in particular, conceals worlds of different meaning that the fiction of aesthetic dimensions of social facts show us. Along with modernization, the processes of mechanization, urbanization and migration have radically changed the social and economic life in Turkey. Orhan Kemal’s novels try to fictionalize the aesthetic dimensions of social transformation and disintegration which Turkish society experienced prior to the 1960s. In his novels, it is possible to see examples of social disintegration, the qualitative changes of class structure and the type of individuals that these produced. A society which is undergoing a modernization process, experiences concrete changes in the transformations in social class relations, the degeneration of traditional values, the fundamental differentiation in village and agricultural structure, and rises and falls of  social status. It is the hermeneutic readings of the writer’s novels that give us the aesthetic dimensions and the general characteristics of the modernization process. Orhan Kemal, as a member of the realist literature tradition, shows us types of characters which occur in the process of modernization. Generally speaking, in those of his novels that we have studied, periods of social continuity and disintegration follow each other.